Attention support in digital environments. Nine questions to be addressed

Research in attention aware systems, i.e. systems that support users in their attentional choices, promises to address many of the problems related to information overload, cyber collaboration, and mobility, by providing features helping users in coping with attentional limitations. However, the design of attention aware systems necessitates a deep understanding of human attentional processes, of the knowledge a system needs to support those processes, and of the manner in which such knowledge may be acquired. Because the conceptualization of such systems requires understanding users' cognitive states in terms of their past interactions with the environment, the interactivist framework may provide a strong basis for analyzing attention aware systems.This paper briefly introduces the services that attention aware systems may provide, suggests how attention may be modeled within the interactivist framework, and proposes nine questions that may be answered within such framework to gain the knowledge necessary for the creation of attention aware systems.     

Strategies in visuospatial working memory for learning virtual shapes

This study investigated visuospatial working memory (WM) strategies people use to remember unfamiliar randomly generated shapes in the context of an interactive computer‐based visuospatial WM task. In a three‐phase experiment with random shapes, participants (n = 94) first interactively determined if two equivalent shapes were rotated or reflected; second, memorized the shape; and third, determined if an imprint in a profile view of the ground was a rotated, reflected imprint of the shape, or an imprint not matching the original shape. Participants self‐reported these strategies: Key feature, shape interaction, association/elaboration, holistic/perspective, divide and conquer, mental rotation/reflection and others. Participants reporting key features strategy were significantly more accurate on the computer‐based visuospatial WM task. These results highlight the importance of strategy in visuospatial WM. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Argumentative Bluff in Eristic Discussion: An Analysis and Evaluation

How does the analysis and evaluation of argumentation depend on the dialogue type in which the argumentation has been put forward? This paper focuses on argumentative bluff in eristic discussion. Argumentation cannot be presented without conveying the pretence that it is dialectically reasonable, as well as, at least to some degree, rhetorically effective. Within eristic discussion it can be profitable to engage in bluff with respect to such claims. However, it will be argued that such bluffing is dialectically inadmissible, even within an eristic discussion.     

Self-deception as pseudo-rational regulation of belief

Self-deception is a special kind of motivational dominance in belief-formation. We develop criteria which set paradigmatic self-deception apart from related phenomena of auto-manipulation such as pretense and motivational bias. In self-deception rational subjects defend or develop beliefs of high subjective importance in response to strong counter-evidence. Self-deceivers make or keep these beliefs tenable by putting prima-facie rational defense-strategies to work against their established standards of rational evaluation. In paradigmatic self-deception, target-beliefs are made tenable via reorganizations of those belief-sets that relate relevant data to target-beliefs. This manipulation of the evidential value of relevant data goes beyond phenomena of motivated perception of data. In self-deception belief-defense is pseudo-rational. Self-deceivers will typically apply a dual standard of evaluation that remains intransparent to the subject. The developed model of self-deception as pseudo-rational belief-defense is empirically anchored. So, we hope to put forward a promising candidate.     

Word category conversion causes processing costs: Evidence from adjectival passives

Constructing syntactic representations in language comprehension begins with the identification of word categories. Whether the category information is stored in the mental lexicon is a matter of debate in current linguistic theorizing. The standard view assumes that the syntactic category of a word is lexically specified (lexicalist approach). More recently, it has been proposed within the paradigm of distributed morphology that lexical elements (roots) are stored without any syntactic category information: The syntactic category of a lexical element is determined only by the syntactic context in which it appears (syntactic approach). For processing categoryambiguous words, different hypotheses can be derived from these two accounts. The lexicalist approach predicts that there are productive grammatical processes, such as nominalization and adjectivization, that convert a word of Category A into one of Category B. Such a conversion might be assumed to create additional processing costs. Within the syntactic approach, on the other hand, no additional processing step is expected, because there is no need for any category shift. In a self-paced reading study on so-called adjectival passives, we found evidence of costs predicted under the lexicalist approach (i.e., for a grammatical process that changes the category of a word). More specifically, the present study provides evidence for category conversion from a verbal participle into an adjectival one. We also discuss an alternative explanation for this finding in terms of frequency.     

Do we map remembrances to the left/back and expectations to the right/front of a mental timeline? Space–time congruency effects with retrospective and prospective verbs

Recent experimental studies have shown that people code time in terms of a mental timeline which typically runs from left to right or from back to front. Determining the cognitive function of this mental timeline for language processing, however, is still an unsettled issue. Whereas the studies of Ulrich and Maienborn (2010) and Ulrich et al. (2012) argue against an automatic activation of the mental timeline for the interpretation of tense and temporal adverbials at sentence level, Sell and Kaschak (2011) observe an automatic activation for the processing of past- and future-related sentences in small stories. The present paper reports the results of three experiments which examine the processing of sentences with retrospective and prospective verbs (e.g., to remember, to regret vs. to expect, to announce) in present tense, which locate a second, embedded event in the past or the future. When temporal information was task-relevant, a space–time congruency effect emerged (Experiment 1). This suggests that the mental timeline is not only linked to overtly deictic linguistic material but may also be construed in a more intricate way through the compositional construction of sentence meaning. The congruency effect disappeared, however, when temporal information was task-irrelevant (Experiments 2 and 3), suggesting that the mental timeline is not functionally involved in the cognitive processing of these especially demanding two-event sentences. The results of the present study support the conclusion that the relevant factor driving an automatic activation of the mental timeline is not the number of linguistically expressed events, but might rather be the number of sentential units.     

Evangelism in Evangelii Gaudium,The Cape Town Commitment,and Together towards Life

The term “evangelization” has a very broad meaning in Evangelii Gaudium, encompassing everything that is subsumed under “mission” in The Cape Town Commitment and Together towards Life. For those two documents, “evangelism” is just one aspect of mission, namely the verbal communication of the gospel message. In their underlying theological propositions, the three documents are very similar. There is one fundamental difference, though: Evangelii Gaudium focuses on affective transformation, while the other two stress ethical renewal.