Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.     

Inductive inference in the limit of empirically adequate theories

Most standard results on structure identification in first order theories depend upon the correctness and completeness (in the limit) of the data, which are provided to the learner. These assumption are essential for the reliability of inductive methods and for their limiting success (convergence to the truth).The paper investigates inductive inference from (possibly) incorrect and incomplete data. It is shown that such methods can be reliable not in the sense of truth approximation, but in the sense that the methods converge to empirically adequate theories, i.e. theories, which are consistent with all data (past and future) and complete with respect to a given complexity class of L-sentences. Adequate theories of bounded complexity can be inferred uniformly and effectively by polynomial-time learning algorithms. Adequate theories of unbounded complexity can be inferred pointwise by less efficient methods.     

Spontaneous decay of response-code activation

Summary Two experiments investigated whether theTwo experiments investigated whether the Simon effect (i. e.., faster responses to spatially corresponding than to noncorresponding stimuli, with stimulus location being irrelevant) is affected by the frequency of noncorrespondence trials. Stimulus discriminability (Experiment 1) and immediate or delayed stimulus formation (Experiment 2) was varied in order to manipulate the temporal relationship between coding of the relevant stimulus information and of stimulus location. As was expected, the Simon effect decreased from high to low discriminability and from immediate- to delayed-stimulus formation. This is consistent with the notion of a gradual decay of location-induced response-code activation. Moreover, the Simon effect decreased with increasing frequency of noncorrespondence trials and was even reversed with higher frequency. This demonstrates strategic preparation of stimulus processing and/or response selection based on irrelevant location information. However, frequency did not modify the interaction between S-R correspondence and stimulus discriminability or stimulus formation, this suggesting that code decay is not a result of a strategy, but an automatic process.     

Die Bindungstheorie und ihre Relevanz für die Psychotherapie

Zusammenfassung Die ursprünglich von John Bowlby entwickelte Bindungstheorie gewinnt zunehmend an Relevanz im Bereich der Psychotherapie(forschung). Diese übersicht beginnt mit einer Kl?rung der zentralen Begriffe und Annahmen dieser Theorie und fa?t einige Befunde zur Entwicklung und den Korrelaten von Bindung zusammen, die vornehmlich aus entwicklungspsychologischen Untersuchungen stammen. übertragen auf Erwachsene, bedürfen die Konzepte der Bindungstheorie einer Revision, die in dieser Arbeit skizziert wird. Schlie?lich werden auf dieser Basis einige heute übliche Methoden zur Erfassung von Bindungsstilen und Bindungsverhalten im Erwachsenenalter dargestellt, die bei Untersuchungen im klinischen Feld (Inhalt des 2. Teils der übersichtsarbeit) eine wichtige Rolle spielen.      

Scaling occupational prestige by magnitude estimation and category rating methods: A comparison with the sensory domain

In a field study, models for magnitude estimation and for category ratings are applied to the scaling of occupational prestige. The two respective models provide sufficient conditions for magnitude estimates to yield logarithmic interval scales and for category ratings to lead to interval scales. Both models are found to hold reasonably well for the majority of respondents. As implied by a third model, the relation between magnitude estimation and category rating scales can well be described by a generalized power function. Although overall results do not favour one method over the other individual data analyses reveal substantial interindividual differences with respect to the capability of performing magnitude estimates and category ratings, respectively. The findings are compared to results recently found in psychophysical laboratory experiments, and it is concluded that the individual scale properties the two methods provide do not differ across the attitudinal and the sensory domains.