Philosophy and its children: logic,computation, and the emergence of natural and social science

Philosophical Studies - The middle chapters of Soames’s The World Philosophy Made (comprising his accounts of developments in logic, computation, linguistics, probability and decision theory,...     

Neural representations in human spatial memory

Ekstrom et al. report the responses of single neurons recorded from the brains of human subjects performing a spatial navigation task in virtual reality. They found cells encoding the subject's current location, view and destination. These data, and related findings in animals, directly reveal some of the representations underlying spatial cognition. They highlight the potential for cognitive psychology and systems neuroscience to combine to provide a neuronal-level understanding of human behaviour.     

Keeping ‘True’: A Case Study in Conceptual Ethics

Suppose our ordinary notion of truth is ‘inconsistent’ in the sense that its meaning is partly given by principles that classically entail a logical contradiction. Should we replace the notion with a consistent surrogate? This paper begins by defusing various arguments in favor of this revisionary proposal, including Kevin Scharp’s contention that we need to replace truth for the purposes of semantic theorizing (and thus, in particular, to formulate the inconsistency theory of truth itself). Borrowing a certain conservative metasemantic principle from Matti Eklund, the article goes on to build a positive case for the opposite policy: retaining truth as-is. The thought is basically that bivalence for the bulk of what we say in the course of ordinary, scientific, and philosophical inquiry should suffice to justify keeping ‘true’. Two versions of the story are told: one more philosophical, drawing on an analogy to Lewis’ response to Putnam’s paradox; the other more technical, invoking a deviant strand of mathematical work on the semantic paradoxes.     

The effects of context in item-based directed forgetting: Evidence for “one-shot” context storage

The effects of context on item-based directed forgetting were assessed. Study words were presented against different background pictures and were followed by a cue to remember (R) or forget (F) the target item. The effects of incidental and intentional encoding of context on recognition of the study words were examined in Experiments 1 and 2. Recognition memory for the picture contexts was assessed in Experiments 3a and 3b. Recognition was greater for R-cued compared to F-cued targets, demonstrating an effect of directed forgetting. In contrast, no directed forgetting effect was seen for the background pictures. An effect of context-dependent recognition was seen in Experiments 1 and 2, such that the hit rate and the false-alarm rate were greater for items tested in an old compared to a novel context. An effect of context-dependent discrimination was also observed in Experiment 2 as the hit rate was greater for targets shown in their same old study context compared to a different old context. The effects of context and directed forgetting did not interact. The results are consistent with Malmberg and Shiffrin’s (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 322–336, 2005) “one-shot” context storage hypothesis that assumes that a fixed amount of context is stored in the first 1 to 2 s of the presentation of the study item. The effects of context are independent of item-based directed forgetting because context is encoded prior to the R or F cue, and the differential processing of target information that gives rise to the directed forgetting effect occurs after the cue.     

The role of landmarks and boundaries in the development of spatial memory

It has been suggested that learning an object's location relative to (1) intramaze landmarks and (2) local boundaries is supported by parallel striatal and hippocampal systems, both of which rely upon input from a third system for orientation. However, little is known about the developmental trajectories of these systems' contributions to spatial learning. The present study tested 5- and 7-year-old children and adults on a water maze-like task in which all three types of cue were available. Participants had to remember the location of an object hidden in a circular bounded environment containing a moveable intramaze landmark and surrounded by distal cues. Children performed less accurately than adults, and showed a different pattern of error. While adults relied most on the stable cue provided by the boundary, children relied on both landmark and boundary cues similarly, suggesting a developmental increase in the weighting given to boundary cues. Further, adults were most accurate in coding angular information (dependent on distal cues), whereas children were most accurate in coding distance, suggesting a developing ability to use distal cues to orient. These results indicate that children as young as 5 years use boundary, intramaze landmark, and distal visual cues in parallel, but that the basic accuracy and relative weighting of these cues changes during subsequent development.     

Family Interaction Patterns as Predictors of Vocational Identity and Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy

The present study explored the relations of perceived family-of-origin interaction patterns (e.g., quality of family relationships, family-supported goal orientations, and degree of control and organization in the family) to vocational identity and career decision-making self-efficacy. A sample of 210 college students completed family-of-origin and vocational self-report measures. Using standard multiple regression analyses, significant variance was accounted for in vocational identity scores by achievement orientation in the family. Significant variance in career decision-making self-efficacy scores was accounted for by a number of family variables including achievement, intellectual-cultural, and moral-religious emphasis orientations and degree of family conflict and expressiveness. The findings suggest that family-of-origin interaction patterns may play small, yet significant roles in the formulation of clear and stable career goals and the promotion of self-confidence in regard to completing career planning activities. These findings warrant further empirical examination of the family systems approach to young adult career development.     

Cerebral hemispheric mechanisms linking ambiguous word meaning retrieval and creativity

The deferral of ambiguity resolution has been thought to be an important component of creativity. The time course of priming of dominant and subordinate meanings of ambiguous words was investigated using a divided visual field priming paradigm with subjects that varied on a measure of creativity. The Wallach-Kogan similarities subtest was used to group 72 subjects into three levels of verbal creativity to compare their performance on the ambiguity resolution task (Burgess & Simpson, 1988a). Results suggest that both the left and right hemispheres contribute to the maintenance of multiple word meanings in highly creative subjects, while less creative subjects show sustained subordinate priming only in the right hemisphere or no sustained subordinate priming. These results support an interactive, collaborative theory of verbal creativity (Bogen & Bogen, 1969) and suggest that there are important individual differences that expand on the basic time course model of hemispheric processing (Burgess & Simpson, 1988a).