An optimal viewing position effect in the Stroop task when only one letter is the color carrier

Coloring only a single letter in the Stroop task can result in a reduction or elimination of Stroop interference. The present experiments were designed to test whether this modulation of Stroop interference occurs at all letter positions. Specifically, we investigated whether Stroop interference was reduced when the colored letter occupied the optimal viewing position (OVP). The experiments show that Stroop interference is not reduced at the OVP (Experiment 1) and that Stroop interference at the OVP is significantly greater than at other letter positions (Experiments 1 and 2). This finding has important theoretical and methodological consequences for studies of automatic processing in visual word recognition.     

A New Defence of the Modal Existence Requirement

In this paper, I defend the claim that an object can have a property only if it exists from two arguments, both of which turn on how to understand Plantinga’s notion of the α-transform of a property. For comments and discussion, thanks to David Sanson and three anonymous referees. For funding in the form of a Standard Research Grant (410-2004-0702), thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).     

Disadvantage,Autonomy, and the Continuity Test

The Continuity Test is the principle that a proposed distribution of resources is wrong if it treats someone as disadvantaged when they don't see it that way themselves, for example by offering compensation for features that they do not themselves regard as handicaps. This principle — which is most prominently developed in Ronald Dworkin's defence of his theory of distributive justice — is an attractive one for a liberal to endorse as part of her theory of distributive justice and disadvantage. In this article, I play out some of its implications, and show that in its basic form the Continuity Test is inconsistent. It relies on a tacit commitment to the protection of autonomy, understood to consist in an agent deciding for herself what is valuable and living her life in accordance with that decision. A contradiction arises when we consider factors which are putatively disadvantaging by dint of threatening individual autonomy construed in this way. I argue that the problem can be resolved by embracing a more explicit commitment to the protection (and perhaps promotion) of individual autonomy. This implies a constrained version of the Continuity Test, thereby salvaging most of the intuitions which lead people to endorse the Test. It also gives us the wherewithal to sketch an interesting and novel theory of distributive justice, with individual autonomy at its core.     

Review Essay: The History of Israel Contested and Revised

Books reviewed in this article: Philip R. Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’ Philip R. Davies, Scribes and Scrolls: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures Lester L. Grabbe (ed.), Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written? Niels Peter Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition V. Philips Long (ed.), Israel's Past in Present Research: Essays on Ancient Israelite Historiography Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel     

Verbal working memory and on-line syntactic processing: Evidence from self-paced listening

Two experiments investigated the relationship between performance on standard tests of verbal working-memory and the on-line construction of syntactic form. In Experiment 1, working-memory was measured in 100 college students on a version of the Daneman and Carpenter (1980) reading-span task, and online syntactic processing was assessed using a self-paced listening task with four sentence types. In Experiment 2, working-memory was measured in 48 college students on two versions of the reading-span task and two other tests of verbal working-memory, and on-line syntactic processing was assessed using the self-paced listening task with an additional sentence type. In both experiments, there was no relationship between working-memory capacity and the increase in processing time seen for the on-line construction of syntactic form for either syntactically more complex or syntactically simpler sentences. The results indicate that the capacity of the working-memory system that is measured by standard working-memory tests does not determine the efficiency of on-line syntactic processing. They are consistent with the view that the working-memory system used for parsing is at least partially separate from that measured by traditional measures of working-memory capacity.