Realism in confidence judgements of performance based on implicit learning

In two experiments we employed calibration methods to investigate the realism of participants' confidence ratings of their own classification performance based on knowledge acquired after training on an artificial grammar. In Experiment 1 participants showed good realism (but overconfidence) for grammatical strings but very poor realism for non-grammatical strings. Method of training (string repetition in writing or mere exposure) did not affect the realism. Furthermore, the participants underestimated their overall performance. In Experiment 2, using a more complex grammar and controlling for two types of associative chunk-strength, participants showed good realism (but still overconfidence) for both letter and symbol strings, irrespective of grammaticality. Together, these experiments show that implicit learning can give rise to knowledge products that are associated with fairly realistic meta-knowledge. It is argued that both the zero-correlation criterion and the guessing criterion are misplaced when used to define implicit knowledge; two reasons being that confidence judgements may be affected both by implicit knowledge and by inferences.     

Mind,Soul and Spirit: Conceptions of Immaterial Identity in Different Cultures

The cognitive science of religion has recently focused attention on whether concepts of mind, soul, and spirit derive from the same or different intuitive foundations of immaterial identity. The present research is the first to look at intuitions about these three concepts simultaneously in different cultures. Methodologically, hypothetical transplants or transfers of minds or brains have been commonly used to examine the development of inferences about the continuity of mental identity despite bodily displacement. The present research extends the transfer paradigm to compare inferences about transfers of “soul” and “spirit” as well as the “mind.” American, Brazilian, and Indonesian undergraduate participants were presented with a series of scenarios in which a character's soul, mind, or spirit is transferred to another character's body. Participants made judgments about the consequences of such transfers on behaviors selected to potentially differentiate underlying intuitive categories. Results indicate that intuitions of soul, spirit, and mind do appear to draw from different but overlapping intuitions, which are recruited in different ways depending on religion and country. For American and Indonesian participants, the mind transfer was judged more often to result in a displacement of cognitive attributes compared to bodily, social, and moral attributes. Across the three countries, the transfer of spirit led more frequently to judgments about displacement of passion than of ability; religiosity was associated with giving more weight to the transfer of the soul, thus resulting in a greater displacement of all types of attributes. The results emphasize the importance of considering how different intuitive foundations, such as essentialism, intuitive psychology, and vitalism, might be recruited by culture to highlight different aspects of immaterial identity.     

Stability of the MCMI Among Depressed Psychiatric Outpatients

The Milton Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI) is a promising, yet somewhat unproven psychometric inventory developed to identify clinical syndromes and personality traits consonant with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed. [DSM-III]; American Psychiatric Association, 1980). The stability of its measures for both the theoretically more stable personality characteristics and the clinical syndromes was investigated in a group of depressed psychiatric outpatients. In this test-retest design with a 3-month interval between tests, clinical syndrome scales of relevance changed significantly as expected. However, many of the personality scales also changed significantly. Only four of the personality scales met a two-fold test of stability. Findings are discussed in terms of characteristics of self-report inventories such as the MCMI, the uniqueness of the depressed population, and characteristics of personality disorders.