Participant and Word Gender in Age of Acquisition Effects: The Role of Gender Socialization

The age of acquisition (AoA) effect represents the processing advantage for developmentally earlier-acquired words. An initial norming study identified early and late AoA words having either a strong female-oriented (e.g., flute) or male-oriented (e.g., cigar) semantic bias. Forty-seven female and 45 male Scottish university students participated in a lexical decision task using 100 early and late AoA female- and male-oriented words. Reaction time data showed significant AoA effects for both females and males across both female- and male-oriented words, with faster responses to earlier than later acquired words. Females, however, took longer to respond to male-oriented words, particularly late AoA ones. Males demonstrated no effect of semantic gender. The pattern of effects is consistent with differential gender role socialization.     

When is your head at? An exploration of the factors associated with the temporal focus of the wandering mind

Two experiments employed experience sampling to examine the factors associated with a prospective and retrospective focus during mind wandering. Experiment One explored the contribution of working memory and indicated that participants generally prospect when the task does not require continuous monitoring. Experiment Two demonstrated that in the context of reading, interest in what was read suppressed both past and future-related task-unrelated-thought. Moreover, in disinterested individuals the temporal focus during mind wandering depended on the amount of experience with the topic matter—less experienced individuals tended to prospect, while more experienced individuals tended to retrospect. Together these results suggest that during mind wandering participants’ are inclined to prospect as long as the task does not require their undivided attention and raise the intriguing possibility that autobiographical associations with the current task environment have the potential to cue the disinterested mind.     

Early morphological processing is morphosemantic and not simply morpho-orthographic: A violation of form-then-meaning accounts of word recognition

Many studies have suggested that a word’s orthographic form must be processed before its meaning becomes available. Some interpret the (null) finding of equal facilitation after semantically transparent and opaque morphologically related primes in early stages of morphological processing as consistent with this view. Recent literature suggests that morphological facilitation tends to be greater after transparent than after opaque primes, however. To determine whether the degree of semantic transparency influences parsing into a stem and a suffix (morphological decomposition) in the forward masked priming variant of the lexical decision paradigm, we compared patterns of facilitation between semantically transparent (e.g., coolant—cool) and opaque (e.g., rampant—ramp) prime—target pairs. Form properties of the stem (frequency, neighborhood size, and prime—target letter overlap), as well as related—unrelated and transparent—opaque affixes, were matched. Morphological facilitation was significantly greater for semantically transparent pairs than for opaque pairs. Ratings of prime—target relatedness predicted the magnitude of facilitation. The results limit the scope of form-then-meaning models of word recognition and demonstrate that semantic similarity can influence even early stages of morphological processing. The research reported here was supported by National Institute of Child Health and Development Grant HD-01994 to Haskins Laboratories.     

Likelihood ratio decisions in memory: Three implied regularities

We analyze four general signal detection models for recognition memory that differ in their distributional assumptions. Our analyses show that a basic assumption of signal detection theory, the likelihood ratio decision axis, implies three regularities in recognition memory: (1) the mirror effect, (2) the variance effect, and (3) the z-ROC length effect. For each model, we present the equations that produce the three regularities and show, in computed examples, how they do so. We then show that the regularities appear in data from a range of recognition studies. The analyses and data in our study support the following generalization: Individuals make efficient recognition decisions on the basis of likelihood ratios.     

Contributive Justice and Meaningful Work

The dominant focus of thinking about economic justice is overwhelmingly distributive, that is, concerned with what people get in terms of resources and opportunities. It views work mainly negatively, as a burden or cost, or else is neutral about it, rather than seeing it as a source of meaning and fulfilment—a good in its own right. However, what we do in life has at least as much, if not more, influence on whom we become, as does what we get. Thus we have good reason also to be concerned with what Paul Gomberg has termed contributive justice, that is, justice as regards what people are expected and able to contribute in terms of work. Complex, interesting work allows workers not only to develop and exercise their capacities, and gain the satisfaction from achieving the internal goods of a practice, but to gain the external goods of recognition and esteem. As Gomberg’s analysis of the concept of contributive justice in relation to equality of opportunity shows, as long as the more satisfying kinds of work are concentrated into a subset of jobs, rather than shared out among all jobs, then many workers will be denied the chance to have meaningful work and the recognition that goes with it. In this paper I examine the contributive justice argument, suggest how it can be further strengthened, arguing, inter alia, that ignoring contributive injustice tends to support legitimations of distributive inequality.

Skill transfer through goal-driven representation mapping

In this paper, we present an approach to transfer that involves analogical mapping of symbols across different domains. We relate this mechanism to Icarus, a theory of the human cognitive architecture. Our system can transfer skills across domains hypothesizing maps between representations, improving performance in novel domains. Unlike previous approaches to analogical transfer, our method uses an explanatory analysis that compares how well a new domain theory explains previous solutions under different mapping hypotheses. We present experimental evidence that the new mechanism improves transfer over Icarus’ basic learning processes. Moreover, we argue that the same features which distinguish Icarus from other architectures support representation mapping in a natural way and operate synergistically with it. These features enable our analogy system to translate a map among concepts into a map between skills, and to support transfer even if two domains are only partially analogous. We also discuss our system’s relation to other work on analogy and outline directions for future research.