Andrzej de Lazari et al. (eds.), Idei v Rossii/Idee w Rosji/Ideas in Russia; Leksykon rosyjsko-polsko-angielski

Studies in East European Thought -     

Adding Types,But Not Tokens,Affects Property Induction

The extent to which we generalize a novel property from a sample of familiar instances to novel instances depends on the sample composition. Previous property induction experiments have only used samples consisting of novel types (unique entities). Because real-world evidence samples often contain redundant tokens (repetitions of the same entity), we studied the effects on property induction of adding types and tokens to an observed sample. In Experiments 1–3, we presented participants with a sample of birds or flowers known to have a novel property and probed whether this property generalized to novel items varying in similarity to the initial sample. Increasing the number of novel types (e.g., new birds with the target property) in a sample produced tightening, promoting property generalization to highly similar stimuli but decreasing generalization to less similar stimuli. On the other hand, increasing the number of tokens (e.g., repeated presentations of the same bird with the target property) had little effect on generalization. Experiment 4 showed that repeated tokens are encoded and can benefit recognition, but appear to be given little weight when inferring property generalization. We modified an existing Bayesian model of induction (Navarro, Dry, & Lee, 2012) to account for both the information added by new types and the discounting of information conveyed by tokens.     

A conceptual replication examining the risk of overtly listing eligibility criteria on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Recent scholarship indicates that explicitly listing eligibility requirements on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk can lead to eligibility falsification. Offering a conceptual replication of prior studies, we assessed the prevalence of eligibility falsification and its impact on data integrity. A screener survey collected the summer before the 2016 presidential election assessed political affiliation. Participants were then randomly assigned to be exposed to a second survey link for which they were eligible or ineligible. There was a significant interaction such that the differences between self‐reported Republicans and Democrats on outcome measures (e.g., attitudes toward Hillary Clinton), were smaller among participants that were falsifying eligibility (i.e., imposters) than those that were not (i.e., genuine participants). Moreover, for most outcomes, imposters put forth responses that were significantly different from the responses put forth by those in the political party with which imposters were pretending to be affiliated. Imposters’ responses were also significantly different from participants in the political party with which imposters initially claimed to genuinely belong. For example, those who self‐reported themselves as Democrats on the screener survey but responded to a survey for “only Republicans” (i.e., imposter Republicans), reported more favorable attitudes toward Donald Trump than genuine Democrats, but indicated less favorable attitudes toward Donald Trump than genuine Republicans. These results highlight the potential harms of explicitly listing eligibility requirements and emphasize the importance of minimizing imposter participation.     

SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN NINETEENTH‐CENTURY EUROPE: NON‐ANGLO‐AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

This is an introduction to the thematic section on “The Historiography of Science and Religion in Europe,” which resulted from a symposium held at the eighth Conference of the European Society for the History of Science, University College London, UK, from September 14–17, 2018. The introduction provides a brief argument for the decentering of science and religion from the Anglo‐American discourse. It concludes by previewing the contributions of the section's essays.     

Learning the association between a context and a target location in infancy

Extracting the statistical regularities present in the environment is a central learning mechanism in infancy. For instance, infants are able to learn the associations between simultaneously or successively presented visual objects (Fiser & Aslin, 2002 ; Kirkham, Slemmer & Johnson, 2002 ). The present study extends these results by investigating whether infants can learn the association between a target location and the context in which it is presented. With this aim, we used a visual associative learning procedure inspired by the contextual cuing paradigm, with infants from 8 to 12 months of age. In two experiments, in which we varied the complexity of the stimuli, we first habituated infants to several scenes where the location of a target (a cartoon character) was consistently associated with a context, namely a specific configuration of geometrical shapes. Second, we examined whether infants learned the covariation between the target location and the context by measuring looking times at scenes that either respected or violated the association. In both experiments, results showed that infants learned the target–context associations, as they looked longer at the familiar scenes than at the novel ones. In particular, infants selected clusters of co‐occurring contextual shapes and learned the covariation between the target location and this subset. These results support the existence of a powerful and versatile statistical learning mechanism that may influence the orientation of infants’ visual attention toward areas of interest in their environment during early developmental stages. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hm1unyLBn0     

Age slowing down in detection and visual discrimination under varying presentation times

The reaction time has been described as a measure of perception, decision making, and other cognitive processes. The aim of this work is to examine age‐related changes in executive functions in terms of demand load under varying presentation times. Two tasks were employed where a signal detection and a discrimination task were performed by young and older university students. Furthermore, a characterization of the response time distribution by an ex‐Gaussian fit was carried out. The results indicated that the older participants were slower than the younger ones in signal detection and discrimination. Moreover, the differences between both processes for the older participants were higher, and they also showed a higher distribution average except for the lower and higher presentation time. The results suggest a general slowdown in both tasks for age under different presentation times, except for the cases where presentation times were lower and higher. Moreover, if these parameters are understood to be a reflection of executive functions, these findings are consistent with the common view that age‐related cognitive deficits show a decline in this function.     

Book Reviews : Galin Tihanov,The Master and the Slave: Lukács,Bakhtin, and the Ideas of their Time,Oxford University Press,New York, 2000, 327 pp.

Studies in East European Thought -     

Behavioral profile of L‐655,708, a selective ligand for the benzodiazepine site of GABA‐A receptors which contain the α5 subunit,in social encounters between male mice

GABA‐A receptor is a transmembrane hetero‐oligomeric protein which consists of five subunits, the combination of which confers unique pharmacological properties to the receptor. It is well‐known that the GABAergic system is involved in the modulation of aggression. However, the role of α5/GABA‐A receptors has not been explored. In this study, we examined the effect of L‐655,708 (0.625‐5 mg/kg), a selective ligand for the benzodiazepine site of GABA‐A receptors which contain the α5 subunit, on agonistic behavior elicited by isolation in male mice. Individually housed mice were exposed to an anosmic “standard opponent” 30 min after drug administration, and the encounters were videotaped and evaluated using an ethologically based analysis. L‐655,708 (5 mg/kg) exhibited an ethopharmacological profile characterized by a marked reduction of the time spent in offensive behavior (threat and attack) without affecting immobility, accompanied by a significant increase of avoidance/flee and nonsocial exploration behaviors, suggesting that the antiaggressive effect of the drug is unselective. Overall, this behavioral profile might indicate the existence of an anxiogenic‐like activity of L‐655,708 in mice. Aggr. Behav. 30:319–325, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Familial risk of early suicide: variations by age and sex of children and parents

To determine familial risk of early suicide, data on cause of death of all Dutch residents aged 20-55 years who died between 1995 and 2001 were linked to data of their parents. Men whose father died by suicide had a higher odds of suicide themselves, relative to men whose father died of other causes (Odds Ratio (OR): 2.5; 95% confidence interval: 1.8-3.6). This effect was slightly stronger in the case of mother's suicide (OR: 3.4; 2.3-5.0). The same effect was observed for women, for suicide by father (OR: 2.2; 1.3-3.7) and mother (OR: 4.6; 2.6-8.0). The odds of suicide increased with decreasing age at death of parent. Parental suicide is predictive for offspring suicide. Our data suggest that the predictive value is higher in case the mother died by suicide, particularly if the mother died by suicide at a young age.