是联合世界还是分裂世界？——科学和宗教：哪种观点具有真正普遍意义，哪种观点又是狭隘之极？

关于科学调查研究成果和宗教叙述之间所谓的冲突已经有很多的论述。我更愿意把精力集中在科学与宗教的方法论和观点的对比上。一、科学的普遍性或许科学最显著的特性就在于它的普遍性。科学是一项最基础和最首要的社会任务。除非一个科学家的成果能够被其他科学家理解和接受(无论是去检验它,批评它,驳倒它,还是以它为研究的基础),否则他的成果就没有任何意义。最独特的是在这项公共事业之中没有国籍、种族、宗教或者意识形态的障碍。这种以经验为依据的衡量标准为所     

Cognitive Progression in Epilepsy

The issue of cognitive progression in people with epilepsy is of considerable interest and has important clinical and theoretical implications. In this paper, we review recent studies in both the adult and childhood epilepsy literature which have included a longitudinal test–retest design to examine this question. Several important methodological issues of this literature are highlighted and areas which require more investigation are identified.     

The contrasting impact of global and local object attributes on Kanizsa figure detection

Studies on the involvement of object completions in search for illusory figures have so far reported equivocal results. We have addressed this issue by investigating at which level object attributes in Kanizsa figures influence search. Employing a paradigm that investigated global and local attributes in the composition of distractors with relation to target composition, we report a selective involvement of multilevel processing upon detection. Four experiments demonstrate that global surface information, but not the surrounding global contour, determines the speed of Kanizsa figure detection. By contrast, local inducer information is encoded far less efficiently in search than processes computing the global object. Our conclusions are that surface filling-in acts as a major determinant of search, but depends on the relevance of the particular hierarchical level (local or global) coding the target.     

From Speculative Nanoethics to Explorative Philosophy of Nanotechnology

In the wake of the emergence and rapid development of nanoethics there swiftly followed fundamental criticism: nanoethics was said to have become much too involved with speculative developments and was concerning itself too little with actually pending questions of nanotechnology design and applications. If this diagnosis is true, then large parts of nanoethics are misguided. Such fundamental criticism must surely either result in a radical reorientation of nanoethics or be refuted for good reasons. In this paper, I will examine the critics’ central arguments and, building on this scrutiny, formulate an answer to these alternatives. The results lead to conclusions which allow explaining and unfolding the thesis of this paper that instead of speculative nanoethics we should better speak of and develop explorative philosophy of nanotechnology.     

Interaction of attention and temporal object priming

Within a 3 × 3 matrix of 90° corner junctions, detection of a Kanizsa-type square is facilitated when the target display is preceded by a 40-Hz flickering premask of 3 × 3 crosses, with four crosses synchronously oscillating at the subsequent target location. To examine whether this ‘synchrony-priming’ effect is influenced by, or dependent on, visuo-spatial attention, a spatial-cueing manipulation was introduced. Observers were presented with a visual or acoustic cue which indicated the likely target quadrant. The main finding was that synchrony priming was larger for invalidly, compared with validly, cued locations, and that the priming effect was figural, rather than spatial, in nature (i.e., confined to points associated with the completed boundary, rather than extending to the inner region, defined by the synchronous premask elements). This pattern of effects argues that target processing is expedited not by attracting spatial attention to the primed location, but by the prime expediting (figure-specific) target encoding, as a result of which the target position gains a processing and selection advantage relative to non-primed locations.     

Distinct,but top-down modulable color and positional priming mechanisms in visual pop-out search

Three experiments examined reaction time (RT) performance in visual pop-out search. Search displays comprised of one color target and two distractors which were presented at 24 possible locations on a circular ellipse. Experiment 1 showed that re-presentation of the target at a previous target location led to expedited RTs, whereas presentation of the target at a distractor location led to slowed RTs (relative to target presentation at a previous empty location). RTs were also faster when the color of the target was the same across consecutive trials, relative to a change of the target’s color. This color priming was independent of the positional priming. Experiment 2 revealed larger positional facilitation, relative to Experiment 1, when position repetitions occurred more likely than chance level; analogously, Experiment 3 revealed stronger color priming effects when target color repetitions were more likely. These position and color manipulations did not change the pattern of color (Experiment 2) and positional priming effects (Experiment 3). While these results support the independency of color and positional priming effects (e.g., Maljkovic and Nakayama in Percept Psychophys 58:977–991, 1996), they also show that these (largely ‘automatic’) effects are top-down modulable when target position and color are predictable (e.g., Müller et al. in Vis Cogn 11:577–602, 2004).     

The “beam of darkness”: Spreading of the attentional blink within and between objects

When two targets (T1 and T2) are inserted into a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream of nontargets, observers are impaired at identifying T2 when it is presented within half a second after T1. This transient drop in performance, or attentional blink (AB), has been attributed to a temporary unavailability of task-critical processing resources. In the present study, we investigated how object-based attention modulates the AB, by presenting four synchronized RSVP streams in the corners of two rectangular bars (e.g., one above and one below fixation). The results from four experiments revealed that the AB increased within short temporal lags (of up to ～400 msec) when T2 was presented on the same, rather than a different, bar as T1 (with T1–T2 spatial distance controlled for). Thus, the AB is seen to spread across entire object groupings, suggesting that the spatiotemporal resolution of attention is modulated by global-object information.