Wholistic and analytic stimulus processing: The development of selective perceptual strategies

This experiment reports an investigation of the development of selective processing strategies as subjects become increasingly more practised at a serial self-paced RT task. It demonstrates the effect a preceding stimulus can have on the analysis of a current signal and the development of active analytic strategies in favour of passive wholistic processing, with practice. The stimuli used were letters with irrelevant visual noise dot patterns superimposed on them. The letter, or the dot pattern, or both, could be repeated on successive trials. Early in practice repetition of both stimulus components simultaneously produced short reponse latencies relative to repetition of the letter alone. The number of noise dots markedly affected RT. Late in practice, however, letter repetition RTs were small, irrespective of whether or not the noise dot pattern was repeated. Furthermore, the number of noise dots no longer had an effect on the RT to these stimulus transitions. The results suggest that subjects appear to be able to select relevant information to process as they become progressively more practised, even though there is evidence that they compare the current stimulus with an iconic representation of the immediately preceding one.     

The Stochastic Goal Programming Model: Theory and Applications

Supported by a network of researchers and practitioners, the goal programming (GP) model is alive today more than ever and is continually fed with theoretical developments and new applications with resounding success. The standard formulation of the GP model was introduced in the earliest of 1960s, and since then, important extensions and numerous applications have been proposed. One of these variants is the stochastic GP model that deals with the uncertainty of some decision‐making situations by using stochastic calculus. In such a situation, the decision maker is not able to assess with certainty the different parameters. However, he or she can provide some information regarding the likelihood of occurrence of the decision‐making parameter values. The aim of this paper is to highlight the main methodological developments of the stochastic GP model and to present an overview of its applications in several domains. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Political Activism and Research Ethics

Those who care about and engage in politics frequently fall victim to cognitive bias. Concerns that such bias impacts scholarship recently have prompted debates – notably, in philosophy and psychology – on the proper relationship between research and politics. One proposal emerging from these debates is that researchers studying politics have a professional duty to avoid political activism because it risks biasing their work. While sympathetic to the motivations behind this proposal, I suggest several reasons to reject a blanket duty to avoid activism: (1) even if it reduced bias, this duty would make unreasonable demands on researchers; (2) this duty could hinder research by limiting viewpoint diversity; (3) this duty wrongly implies that academia offers a relative haven from bias compared to politics; and (4) not all forms of political activism pose an equal risk of bias. None of these points suggest that researchers should ignore the risk of bias. Rather, researchers should focus on stronger evidence-based strategies for reducing bias than a blanket recommendation to avoid politics.     

Intellectual Perfectionism about Schooling

In education, character education is a burgeoning field; however, it is also the target of considerable criticism. Amongst criticisms of character education, the political criticism that character education is a form of indoctrination stands out. In particular, the charge is made against character education that it breaches the principle of liberal neutrality about the good. In this article I discuss liberal approaches to character education. I outline the two most prominent liberal approaches to character education in school, liberal neutralism and liberal perfectionism, as we find it in the work of Clayton (neutralism) and Levinson (liberal perfectionism). I hold that the two standard liberal approaches do not distinguish carefully enough between two possible forms of character education – moral character education and intellectual character education. Drawing on recent work in virtue epistemology, I hold that the liberal position tacitly demands intellectual character education. Regarding moral character education, however, I hold that the picture appears different. In the final analysis, I advocate a new form of perfectionism regarding character education that I call ‘intellectual perfectionism’. According to intellectual perfectionism, schools should be perfectionist regarding children's intellects, but neutralist regarding their morals.     

Bare Quantifiers?

In a series of publications I have claimed that by contrast to standard formal languages, quantifiers in natural language combine with a general term to form a quantified argument, in which the general term's role is to determine the domain or plurality over which the quantifier ranges. In a recent paper Zoltán Gendler Szabó tried to provide a counterexample to this analysis and derived from it various conclusions concerning quantification in natural language, claiming it is often ‘bare’. I show that Szabó's example fails, and that even if it were successful his conclusions would not be supported by it.     

Depression impairs the ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions: Evidence from the Garner task

We assessed dysphoric and clinically distressed individuals' ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions using the Garner speeded‐classification task. Garner's paradigm tests the ability to selectively focus on a single relevant dimension while ignoring variations on other, irrelevant, ones. In the present task, the stimuli were faces of men and women expressing happy, angry, and neutral emotions. In Experiments 1 and 2, dysphoric and nondysphoric participants performed the Garner task, focusing on gender and ignoring emotion (Experiment 1) and focusing on emotion and ignoring gender (Experiment 2). Results suggest that dysphoric individuals exhibited more difficulty ignoring the emotional dimension of social stimuli even under specific instructions to do so than nondysphoric individuals. In Experiments 3 and 4, we replicated these results in clinically distressed and nondistressed individuals. The results of Experiment 3 further suggested that depression was more closely associated with the inability to selectively ignore emotion than was social anxiety. Experiment 4 confirmed that this failure of selective attention was specific to processing emotional, and not gender features. The implications of these findings for cognitive and interpersonal theories of depression are discussed.