Self-regulation and the hypothesis of experience-based selection: Investigating indirect conscious control

The assumption that the contents of our conscious visual experience directly control our fine-tuned, real-time motor activity has been challenged by neurological and psychophysical evidence that suggest the two processes work semi-independently of each other. Clark [Clark, A. (2001). Visual experience and motor action: Are the bonds too tight? The Philosophical Review, 110, 495–519; Clark, A. (2002). Is seeing all it seems? Action, reason and the grand illusion. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9, 181–202; Clark, A. (2006). Vision as dance? Three challenges for sensori-motor contingency theory. PSYCHE, 12 (1). Available from http://www.psyche.cs.monash.edu.au] argues that such evidence implies a more indirect relationship between conscious visual experience and motor-control where the function of visual consciousness is not to control action but to select what actions are to be controlled. In this paper, I argue that this type of dynamic also exists at the wider level of self-regulation where conscious intent appears to indirectly control the enactment of the intended behaviour. I argue that by drawing parallels between Clark’s proposed dynamic and self-regulation, the former is not only bolstered by a previously unrecognised source of support but our understanding of the latter can help to further elucidate Clark’s proposed mechanism of indirect conscious control.     

Reading aloud: when the effect of stimulus quality distinguishes between cascaded and thresholded components

A central feature of many formal accounts of reading aloud, and of Coltheart and colleagues dual-route cascaded model in particular, is that activation across various modules is cascaded. Evidence is reviewed that this assumption is problematic in a particular context, along with a solution that involves thresholding the output of the letter level to the nonlexical routine. Consideration of the known effects of repetition leads to the prediction of a three-way interaction between stimulus quality, repetition, and lexicality in which repetition and stimulus quality interact when reading aloud exception words, but produce additive effects when reading aloud nonwords. The result of such an experiment confirms this prediction, and appears consistent with the localized dual-route model. Implications for other accounts are briefly noted.     

Attitude Certainty: A Review of Past Findings and Emerging Perspectives

Attitude certainty, or the sense of conviction with which one holds one's attitude, has been the subject of considerable research attention. This article provides an overview of past, present, and future research on this topic. First, we review past work on attitude certainty, focusing on what has been learned about the antecedents and consequences of feeling certain or uncertain of one's attitude. Following this review, we examine emerging perspectives on attitude certainty. In particular, we describe recent work exploring the metacognitive appraisals that shape attitude certainty, the different meanings attitude certainty can have, and the dynamic effects of attitude certainty on attitude strength. Along the way, we also highlight important questions that have yet be answered about the certainty construct.     

Self-esteem moderates the response to forgiveness instructions among women with a history of victimization

The present study examined whether self-esteem would moderate women’s affect after being exposed to brief instructional interventions tapping into two dimensions of forgiveness: an interpersonal dimension focusing on forgiving the offender, and an intrapersonal dimension focusing on letting go of one’s negative affect toward the offender. The positive and negative affect of 79 women with a history of victimization was assessed after they listened to instructions for either granting forgiveness, letting go of their negative affect, or relaxation (control). Results indicated differential effects of the instructions on emotions directed toward themselves versus toward the offender. Women had more negative emotions about themselves when they received the granting forgiveness instructions, but they had greater positive emotions toward their offenders. Women’s responses were moderated by self-esteem in that there was no differential effect of the instructions among women low in self-esteem, but women high in self-esteem had a relatively positive response to the letting-go instructions and a generally negative reaction to the traditional forgiveness instructions.     

Diversity-Based Reasoning in Children

One of the hallmarks of inductive reasoning by adults is the diversity effect, namely that people draw stronger inferences from a diverse set of evidence than from a more homogenous set of evidence. However, past developmental work has not found consistent diversity effects with children age 9 and younger. We report robust sensitivity to diversity in children as young as 5, using everyday stimuli such as pictures of objects with people. Experiment 1 showed the basic diversity effect in 5- to 9-year-olds. Experiment 2 showed that, like adults, children restrict their use of diversity information when making inferences about remote categories. Experiment 3 used other stimulus sets to overcome an alternate explanation in terms of sample size rather than diversity effects. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that children more readily draw on diversity when reasoning about objects and their relations with people than when reasoning about objects' internal, hidden properties, thus partially explaining the negative findings of previous work. Relations to cross-cultural work and models of induction are discussed.     

Herbert Blumer's critique of The Polish Peasant: A post mortem on the life history approach in sociology

Herbert Blumer's appraisal of William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's Polish Peasant study and the panel discussion of Blumer's critique, sponsored by the Social Science Research Council in 1938, occasioned a discussion of the value of personal documents in social research which is indicative of the controversy surrounding their use in the interwar period. It is suggested that most sociologists writing in the 1930s were skeptical of the value of personal document research, because such research could not be conducted along the lines of experimental procedure in physical science. Personal document research was in decline by 1938. The critique and conference constituted a post mortem examination of this approach to social analysis.     

II—Jerrold Levinson

ABSTRACT Being an aesthetic realist is hard work. Derek Matravers has raised a number of concerns for the brand of aesthetic realism that I have defended in the past, and that I continue to defend, albeit with modification. Much turns on the nature of aesthetic properties, and on the reasons for acknowledging their existence. I here try to provide further illumination on both scores, suggesting in particular that many aesthetic properties can be viewed as manifest higher-order ways of appearing. Toward the end of my discussion the question of whether or not aesthetic properties are response-dependent is addressed, and I offer the tentative conclusion that some are, and some are not.     

Outcome additivity, elemental processing and blocking in human causality judgements

Informing participants in a causal judgement task that outcomes are additive can increase blocking effects (Experiment 1). Outcome additivity information emphasizes the fact that the outcome following a compound is the sum of the effects of its elements. We suggest that the effect of providing outcome additivity information is to encourage elemental processing and thereby enhance blocking. Experiment 2 showed that blocking could be enhanced by factors encouraging elemental processing, and Experiment 3 demonstrated that blocking was reduced by manipulating the visual presentation of cues to encourage configural processing. While these experiments do not rule out the role of inference in causal judgement tasks, the results are most parsimoniously explained by associative accounts that allow flexibility in the encoding of compound cues.     

Dual and non-dual ontology in Satre and Mahāyāna Buddhism

Continental Philosophy Review - This paper examines Sartre's dualistic ontology in the light of the non-duality asserted by Mahāyāna Buddhism. In the first section, I show, against...