Porn Revisited

In this paper I will revisit the debate over pornography by doing three things: (a) I will suggest a more sophisticated, two-dimensional set of distinctions between positons in the debate; (b) I will then go on to attack both libertarians and the group I call "repressive feminists"; and (c) I will conclude by suggesting that by means of Hume's theory of sympathy we could support a limited form of censorship to bring women more fully into our moral and political community. I turn first to the labors of definition.     

Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome in Prader-Willi Syndrome: An Unrecognized and Untreated Cause of Cognitive and Behavioral Deficits?

Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS) is a rare genetic disorder characterized by a range of physical, psychological, and physiological abnormalities. It is also distinguished by the high prevalence of obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS), i.e., repetitive upper airway collapse during sleep resulting in hypoxia and sleep fragmentation. In non-PWS populations, OSAS is associated with a range of neurocognitive and psychosocial deficits. Importantly, these deficits are at least partly reversible following treatment. Given the findings in non-PWS populations, it is possible that OSAS may contribute to neurocognitive and psychosocial deficits in PWS. The present review examines this possibility. While acknowledging a primary contribution from the primary genetic abnormality to central neural dysfunction in PWS, we conclude that OSAS may be an important secondary contributing factor to reduced neurocognitive and psychosocial performance. Treatment of OSAS may have potential benefits in improving neurocognitive performance and behavior in PWS, but this awaits confirmatory investigation.     

Sociotropy-autonomy and situation-specific anxiety

Sociotropy and autonomy are conceptualized as two personality dimensions that relate to individuals' vulnerability to anxiety and depression. Sociotropy is characterized as an excessive investment in interpersonal relationships, and autonomy is characterized as an excessive concern with independence as well as a lack of concern for others. The present study investigated the relationships between sociotropy-autonomy and trait anxiety associated with four types of situations, i.e., Social Evaluation, Physical Danger, Ambiguous Situation, and Daily Routine. 255 undergraduate students completed the Sociotropy-Autonomy Scale, the Endler Multidimensional Anxiety Scale, and the Beck Depression Inventory. Analyses indicated that scores on Sociotropy were positively correlated with rated trait anxiety in situations of Social Evaluation, Physical Danger, and Ambiguous Situations, whereas scores on Autonomy were positively correlated with rated trait anxiety in Daily Routines. These findings are discussed in the context of the diathesis-stress model of anxiety and depression.     

The natural appearance of unnatural incline speed

In three experiments, college students provided judgments about a marble's speed along a nonlinear incline. Each experiment revealed widespread support for the slope-speed belief, a mistaken belief holding that an object's speed at any point depends on the slope at that point. In truth, an object's incline speed varies with its elevation. In Experiment 1, participants relied solely on a diagram. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants observed computer animations depicting the descent of a marble at speeds conforming to either the slope-speed belief or Newtonian theory, and they rated the slope-speed version as more "natural" than the correct version. The task in Experiment 1 gauged participants' consciously available knowledge, but the perceptual realism of the slope-speed animations suggests that the slope-speed belief is also held outside awareness. By contrast, virtually all previously identified false beliefs about motion appear unnatural once animated.     

Concurrent task effects on memory retrieval

Previous studies combining continuous free recall with a concurrent task have generally shown that concurrent tasks impose fairly negligible effects on memory retrieval. By contrast, dual-task studies employing either cued recall or semantic retrieval reveal gross memory impairment and suggest that retrieval is delayed by the centrally demanding phase of the concurrent tasks (i.e., response selection). To explore this conflict, subjects performed continuous free recall while carrying out a serial-choice#x2014; response time (RT) task, as in the previous free recall studies. Unlike these previous studies, however, the choice#x2014;RT task utilized arbitrary stimulus#x2014;response mappings in order to increase the proportion of time devoted to the centrally demanding response selection phase. Recall total was reduced significantly, and recall latency was slowed substantially.     

Long-term positive and negative identity priming: Evidence for episodic retrieval

An episodic retrieval account of negative priming (Neill, 1997; Neill & Valdes, 1992) was evaluated in three experiments. Duringpractice, regular word pairs were presented to subjects differing numbers of times. The subjects named specific target words while they ignored specific distractor words. Following a 5-min retention interval, memory for practice was revealed:Test responses for target words exhibited positive priming that increased with increases in the number of times that the words had been attended. Test responses for distractor words exhibited either positive priming (Experiment 1) or negative priming (Experiments 2–3) that also increased with increases in the number of times that the words had been ignored. The type of priming that abstractors exhibited was determined by several contextual similarities between the practice environment, in which distractors were ignored initially, and the test environments, in which they were processed subsequently. Negative priming that spanned a 5-min interval, increased with increases in the number of times that a distractor was ignored, and was sensitive to contextual changes indicated that the direction of the effect was temporally backward because the test probe cued memory for earlier processing of the priming stimulus when the distractor had been ignored.     

When two memories can and cannot be retrieved concurrently

We examined whether two memories can be retrieved concurrently from long-term memory. In Experiment 1, the subjects recalled words, either from two categories—alternating between the two—or from just one category. In Experiment 2, the subjects recalled two words belonging to either the same category or different categories, and the category prompts for these two responses appeared either simultaneously or successively. The results of both studies are consistent with the view that two items from different categories must be retrieved serially, whereas two items from the same category can be retrieved in parallel.     

Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis

The authors performed a meta-analysis of the distributed practice effect to illuminate the effects of temporal variables that have been neglected in previous reviews. This review found 839 assessments of distributed practice in 317 experiments located in 184 articles. Effects of spacing (consecutive massed presentations vs. spaced learning episodes) and lag (less spaced vs. more spaced learning episodes) were examined, as were expanding interstudy interval (ISI) effects. Analyses suggest that ISI and retention interval operate jointly to affect final-test retention; specifically, the ISI producing maximal retention increased as retention interval increased. Areas needing future research and theoretical implications are discussed.     

The breadth of memory search

The recall of previously studied items is widely believed to incorporate a search of a markedly constrained set of possibilities, and the present study examines whether this set of items typically includes unstudied semantic associates of the study items. In an episodic task, participants recalled a previously studied list of eight exemplars drawn from a small or large category, and, in a semantic task, participants generated exemplars from these categories. Category size affected the time course of recall in the semantic task but not in the episodic task. This empirical dissociation between episodic and semantic memory is consistent with the view that episodic memory search efficiently excludes unstudied semantic associates of the study items and is instead constrained to those items sharing the temporal and spatial attributes of the episode.