Temporalizing ontology: a case for pragmatic emergence

Synthese - Despite an attempt to break with the hierarchical picture in traditional emergentist thought, non-standard accounts of emergence are often still committed to a premise that ontology is...     

Single-Stage Prediction Models Do Not Explain the Magnitude of Syntactic Disambiguation Difficulty

The disambiguation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence in favor of a less preferred parse can lead to slower reading at the disambiguation point. This phenomenon, referred to as a garden-path effect, has motivated models in which readers initially maintain only a subset of the possible parses of the sentence, and subsequently require time-consuming reanalysis to reconstruct a discarded parse. A more recent proposal argues that the garden-path effect can be reduced to surprisal arising in a fully parallel parser: words consistent with the initially dispreferred but ultimately correct parse are simply less predictable than those consistent with the incorrect parse. Since predictability has pervasive effects in reading far beyond garden-path sentences, this account, which dispenses with reanalysis mechanisms, is more parsimonious. Crucially, it predicts a linear effect of surprisal: the garden-path effect is expected to be proportional to the difference in word surprisal between the ultimately correct and ultimately incorrect interpretations. To test this prediction, we used recurrent neural network language models to estimate word-by-word surprisal for three temporarily ambiguous constructions. We then estimated the slowdown attributed to each bit of surprisal from human self-paced reading times, and used that quantity to predict syntactic disambiguation difficulty. Surprisal successfully predicted the existence of garden-path effects, but drastically underpredicted their magnitude, and failed to predict their relative severity across constructions. We conclude that a full explanation of syntactic disambiguation difficulty may require recovery mechanisms beyond predictability.     

The Greta Thunberg Effect: Familiarity with Greta Thunberg predicts intentions to engage in climate activism in the United States

Despite Greta Thunberg's popularity, research has yet to investigate her impact on the public's willingness to take collective action on climate change. Using cross-sectional data from a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults (N = 1,303), we investigate the “Greta Thunberg Effect,” or whether exposure to Greta Thunberg predicts collective efficacy and intentions to engage in collective action. We find that those who are more familiar with Greta Thunberg have higher intentions of taking collective actions to reduce global warming and that stronger collective efficacy beliefs mediate this relationship. This association between familiarity with Greta Thunberg, collective efficacy beliefs, and collective action intentions is present even after accounting for respondents’ overall support for climate activism. Moderated mediation models testing age and political ideology as moderators of the “Greta Thunberg Effect” indicate that although the indirect effect of familiarity with Greta Thunberg via collective efficacy is present across all age-groups, and across the political spectrum, it may be stronger among those who identify as more liberal (than conservative). Our findings suggest that young public figures like Greta Thunberg may motivate collective action across the U.S. public, but their effect may be stronger among those with a shared political ideology. Implications for future research and for broadening climate activists’ appeals across the political spectrum are discussed.     

Some recommendations for doing high‐impact research in social psychological science

In this article, I reflect upon my own career to distil some general recommendations for doing high‐impact social psychological research in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. My suggestions include (a) testing and deriving theories that can help explain real‐world human judgment and behaviour (answering questions that people care about), (b) preaching beyond the choir (communicating your research to audiences outside of social psychology), and (c) birds of a feather are stronger together (maximizing impact through strategic collaborations).     

Action representation deficits in adolescents with developmental dyslexia

Developmental dyslexia (DD), a severe and frequent disorder of reading acquisition, is characterized by a diversity of cognitive and motor deficits whose interactions still remain under debate. Although deficits in the automatization of sensorimotor control have been highlighted, internal action representation allowing prediction has never before been investigated. In this study, we considered action representation of 18 adolescents with pure DD and 18 age-matched typical readers. Participants actually and mentally performed a visually guided pointing task involving strong spatiotemporal constraints (speed/accuracy trade-off paradigm). While actual and mental movement times of typical readers were isochronous and both conformed to Fitts’ law, the movement times of dyslexics differed between conditions, and only the actual movement times conformed to Fitts’ law. Furthermore, the quality of motor imagery correlated with word reading abilities. This suggests that the process of action representation is impaired in pure DD and supports the sensorimotor perspective of DD. Theoretical implications are discussed.     

Effects of midbrain central gray lesions on spontaneous and electrically induced aggression in the rat

Large electrolytic lesions were placed in the midbrain central gray of male rats. Their effects on hypothalamically induced aggression, switch-off behaviour, and locomotion were investigated. A number of these animals were also tested for territorial intermale aggression in order to compare electrically induced and spontaneous aggression. Large lesions resulted in an increase of the current threshold to induce aggression by hypo-thalamic stimulation. Smaller, but still quite large, lesions decreased the threshold current for hypothalamic aggression. After the operation a decrease in the threshold for switch-off was present, both in the experimental and the control group. Current thresholds for locomotion were decreased after the lesions only in the experimental group. Spontaneous aggression was temporarily decreased after the lesion. No indication was found that other behavioural elements of the animal were distorted by the lesion. The parallel between the effects on spontaneous and electrically induced aggression makes it attractive to ascribe a role to the neural circuit of hypothalamus and central gray in territorial aggression. However, even with large lesions the animals were still capable of fighting, hence the central gray is not indispensable. An attempt was made to explain the differential effects that differently sized central gray lesions have on hypothalamic aggression.     

Temperamental Factors in the Execution of Interrupted Editing Tasks

The question investigated in this study is how the temperament traits of strength of excitation (SE), strength of inhibition (SI), and mobility (MO) affect behaviour during the execution of computer tasks and tasks interrupting them. Several hypotheses, partly derived from the regulative theory of temperament, were tested in an experiment in which the natural environment and the types of task commonly performed by secretaries were simulated. The sample consisted of 39 female secretaries (21–64 years old). It was found that individuals high on SE and MO needed less time to resume tasks after an interruption than individuals low on these temperament traits. Interruptions similar to the main task resulted in longer resumption times for low-SE individuals. MO was negatively related to the time needed to perform the main task. A model describing the relationship between the frequency of switches between tasks and the speed of task performance in low-MO and high-MO individuals is presented.