On agreed actions without agreed notions

In his plea for consensual democracy in Africa, Kwasi Wiredu recommends unanimity about what is to be done, not what ought to be done, or unanimity on action rather than unanimity of values, beliefs and opinion. I caution the use of this procedural instrument by showing that some issues are so value-laden that a group decision cannot be value-neutral. It may sometimes be more productive to entertain value differences to keep them from going underground and becoming dangerous. However, the ability to locate some common interest or ground seems to be crucial for such value confrontation.     

Stability in ordered and icosahedral aluminium–transition metal alloys

Abstract

We present calculated electron state densities for A1T (T is a transition metal) compounds and icosahedral Al₈₆T₁₄ alloys which suggest that the relative stability of different short-range atomic arrangements varies inversely with the electron state density at the Fermi level. Using this argument, we show that the absence ofstable highly coordinated configurations is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the existence of icosahedral Al₈₆T₁₄ alloys.     

What lies behind postnatal depression: is it only a mood disorder?

Postnatal depression (PND) is a common condition that has been extensively researched specifically because of its negative impact on the mother-infant relationship. Psychiatric research has looked at comorbidity of major depressive disorder and found it to be strongly associated with Axis II disorders. This study's principal aim was to investigate whether there is a greater incidence of personality disorder (PD) among a PND population than among a non-PND population at 3 months postpartum. A secondary aim was to define the different types of PD. Depression was assessed with the Montgomery and Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), and PD was assessed with the Structured Interview for DSM-IV Personality Disorders (SIDP-IV) in 109 women with their 12-week-old infants. Twice as many depressed mothers had PD. The PND group presented a greater number of severe clinical symptoms than the nondepressed group (p < .002). Further research is necessary to reexamine the heterogeneity of PND and reassess its impact on infant development.     

Adding part-of-speech information to the SUBTLEX-US word frequencies

The SUBTLEX-US corpus has been parsed with the CLAWS tagger, so that researchers have information about the possible word classes (parts?\of?\speech, or PoSs) of the entries. Five new columns have been added to the SUBTLEX-US word frequency list: the dominant (most frequent) PoS for the entry, the frequency of the dominant PoS, the frequency of the dominant PoS relative to the entry??s total frequency, all PoSs observed for the entry, and the respective frequencies of these PoSs. Because the current definition of lemma frequency does not seem to provide word recognition researchers with useful information (as illustrated by a comparison of the lemma frequencies and the word form frequencies from the Corpus of Contemporary American English), we have not provided a column with this variable. Instead, we hope that the full list of PoS frequencies will help researchers to collectively determine which combination of frequencies is the most informative.     

The perception of foreground and background as derived from structural information theory

Subjects were instructed to order stimuli, consisting of a white and a black part, in accordance with the perceived foreground-strength of the white (or black) part. It appeared that this task can be carried out consistently. The order is explained on the basis of Structural Information Theory. It is argued that this task involves central processes, and that the strength depends on the preference for an interpretation, in which the white (black) part is a foreground on a black (white) background, with respect to the opposed interpretation in which the white (black) part is the background and the black (white) part is foreground.     

Proper Name Hypermnesia in an Autistic Subject

The case study of an autistic “savant” subject with person names hypermnesia is presented. NM's performance in memorizing person names is compared to that of normal controls, IQ-matched controls, and one overtrained control. The data show a selective hypermnesia for both the free recall of person names and the recognition of faces. Recall of common names and of biographical informations linked to faces is unremarkable. NM's hypermnesia is restricted to list learning as low performance is observed in face-name learning tasks. A comparison of the data with that of the overtrained control indicates that training is not responsible for NM's pattern of results. These findings, when combined with previous results involving proper names, demonstrate a double dissociation between proper names and other types of semantic and referential information. However, aspects of NM's performance pattern are more compatible with a network model of proper names than with a sequential model. We propose that the contextual regularity of proper names in ecological situations can be responsible for their high memorization by NM.     

Perceiving musical tension in long chord sequences

We attempted to predict perceived musical tension in longer chord sequences by hierarchic and sequential models based on Lerdahl and Jackendoff's and Lerdahl's cognitive theories and on Parncutt's sensory-psychoacoustical theory. Musicians and nonmusicians were asked to rate the perceived tension of chords which were drawn either from a piece composed for the study (Exp. 1) or from a Chopin Prelude (Exps. 2–4). In Exps. 3 and 4, several experimental manipulations were made to emphasize either the global or the local structure of the piece and to verify how these manipultions would affect the respective contribution of the models in the ratings. In all experiments, musical tension was only weakly influenced by global harmonic structure. Instead, it mainly seemed to be determined locally, by harmonic cadences. The hierarchic model of Lerdahl and Jackendoff provided the best fit to tension ratings, not because it accounted for global hierarchic effects, but because it captured the local effect of cadences. By reacting to these local structures, tension ratings fit quite well with a hierarchic model, even though the participants were relatively insensitive to the global structure of the pieces. As a main outcome, it is argued that musical events were perceived through a short perceptual window sliding from cadence to cadence along a sequence. Received: 24 March 1997 / Accepted: 10 May 1998     

The emergence of explicit knowledge during the early phase of learning in sequential reaction time tasks

Five experiments investigated the formation of explicit knowledge of a repeating sequence in a sequential reaction time task. Reliable explicit knowledge was obtained even though various conditions prevented the selective improvement of RTs (Exps. 1–4). This knowledge emerged early during training. Participants were able to recognize segments of the sequence (Exps. 3 and 4) or correctly assess the probabilities of transition of the target between successive locations (Exp. 5) after only two blocks of training trials. These findings rule out an interpretation of sequence learning that posits that explicit knowledge emerges from implicit knowledge during the course of training. Although these findings are compatible with a framework centered around the notion of dissociation between implicit and explicit knowledge, they are also consonant with a questioning of the usefulness of the concept of implicit knowledge.