Die Frage nach der Endlichkeit des Weltraums, als astronomisches Problem behandelt

Ohne ZusammenfassungVortrag, gehalten in der Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie, Berlin, am 27. Mai 1930.     

Single-Stage Prediction Models Do Not Explain the Magnitude of Syntactic Disambiguation Difficulty

The disambiguation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence in favor of a less preferred parse can lead to slower reading at the disambiguation point. This phenomenon, referred to as a garden-path effect, has motivated models in which readers initially maintain only a subset of the possible parses of the sentence, and subsequently require time-consuming reanalysis to reconstruct a discarded parse. A more recent proposal argues that the garden-path effect can be reduced to surprisal arising in a fully parallel parser: words consistent with the initially dispreferred but ultimately correct parse are simply less predictable than those consistent with the incorrect parse. Since predictability has pervasive effects in reading far beyond garden-path sentences, this account, which dispenses with reanalysis mechanisms, is more parsimonious. Crucially, it predicts a linear effect of surprisal: the garden-path effect is expected to be proportional to the difference in word surprisal between the ultimately correct and ultimately incorrect interpretations. To test this prediction, we used recurrent neural network language models to estimate word-by-word surprisal for three temporarily ambiguous constructions. We then estimated the slowdown attributed to each bit of surprisal from human self-paced reading times, and used that quantity to predict syntactic disambiguation difficulty. Surprisal successfully predicted the existence of garden-path effects, but drastically underpredicted their magnitude, and failed to predict their relative severity across constructions. We conclude that a full explanation of syntactic disambiguation difficulty may require recovery mechanisms beyond predictability.     

Compassionate Love among Catholic Priests: its Antecedents and its Influence on Affect toward Pastoral Ministry in Indonesia

Pastoral Psychology - What drives Catholic priests to continue to serve people? That is the main question behind this psychological study. Based on a working model of compassionate love (Underwood...     

Neuropsychological testing: evolution and emerging trends

Neuropsychological (NP) test batteries have evolved as an amalgam of intelligence tests, various individual measures of "biological" cognition, and sensory and motor testing. The early emphasis of NP testing was to identify "organicity" and central nervous system lesion localization. More recent approaches have emphasized the profiling of performance across individual neurocognitive domains (eg, attention, memory, and language) to facilitate diagnosis and treatment planning. However, the field is still hampered by the use of many tests that are antiquated, excessively long, or of dubious psychometric quality. Some of these problems may have contributed to the current under-utilization of NP testing in diagnostic workups of neuropsychiatric disorders. This paper reviews some of the recent changes in the field that hold promise for substantially shortening assessments, improving diagnostic reliability, and making NP testing more cost-effective and practical.     

Integrated versus segregated accounting and the magnitude effect in temporal discounting

Temporal discounting rates in humans generally decrease as the amount of reward increases, a phenomenon known as themagnitude effect. In the present study, we examined whether temporal discounting and the magnitude effect are related to segregation of choices in terms of gains or losses for waiting for or expediting receipt of a reward. Subjects (N = 24) responded to a series of hypothetical choices about amounts of money available either immediately or after a delay. The immediate and delayed amounts either were presented as integrated amounts in the baseline condition or were segregated as differential gains or losses for choosing delayed or expedited consumption (delay and speedup conditions, respectively). Temporal discounting rates decreased in the segregated conditions, in accord with the standard discounted utility model but contrary to the hypothesis that the subjects were choosing on the basis of reward differentials in the baseline condition. The size of the magnitude effect was comparable in the baseline and the delay conditions but decreased in the speed-up condition. These results challenge explanations of the magnitude effect in terms of an increasing proportional sensitivity property of the utility function (Loewenstein & Prelec, 1992) and the hypothesis that subjects choose on the basis of differentials even when the rewards are presented as integrated amounts.     

A replication of the MMPI-A PSY-5 scales and development of facet subscales

McNulty, Harkness, Ben-Porath and Williams recently developed Personality Psychopathology Five (PSY-5) scales for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-A (MMPI-A). This study examined these new scales in a sample of 545 adolescents receiving inpatient psychiatric treatment. Item-level principal components analyses were employed to determine the internal structure of each PSY-5 scale and to aid in the creation of facet subscales for each PSY-5 scale. Results suggest that the MMPI-A PSY-5 scales display adequate internal consistency and our findings generally replicate the original work of McNulty et al. but also extend this work by showing that several of the PSY-5 scales may also be subdivided into meaningful lower level dimensions. These facet subscales for each of the MMPI-A PSY-5 scales are offered for further study.     

An examination and replication of the psychometric properties of the Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument--second edition (MAYSI-2) among adolescents in detention settings

There is a high prevalence of psychological disorders among adolescents in detention facilities. The need for a simple, effective screening tool led to the development of the Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument (MAYSI) and its successor, the MAYSI-2. This study evaluated the MAYSI-2 psychometric properties based on the records of 704 youths evaluated at intake to detention facilities. In addition to factor structure, the study evaluated test-retest reliability and concurrent external validity. Results were generally encouraging in terms of the use of MAYSI-2 in detention facilities, and directions for future research are discussed.     

Task characteristics and performance in interpersonal cognitive problem solving

The authors examined the extent to which performance on interpersonal cognitive problem-solving (ICPS) tasks is affected by whether the goals within the dilemmas to be addressed are sex typed. Fifty children, aged 7-8 years old, were tested for the core ICPS skills of Alternative Solutions Thinking (AST) and Consequential Thinking (CT) on a series of 8 social problem-solving tasks, 4 having goals characteristically more attractive to boys and 4 with goals more attractive to girls. A 2 x 2 MANOVA was used to compare the performances of boys and girls on each set of sex-typed tasks with the 3 dependent variables of liking for the tasks, number of alternative solutions suggested, and the number of consequences anticipated. As expected, liking for the tasks was higher if the activities were characteristically associated with the participant's own gender (p < .001), although the different tasks did not produce any significant gender differences in the numbers of AST or CT suggestions they prompted. Gender differences in children's peer relationships were considered, and the implications of these results for the format of ICPS interventions are noted.     

Neural synergy between kinetic vision and touch

Ambiguous visual information often produces unstable visual perception. In four psychophysical experiments, we found that unambiguous tactile information about the direction of rotation of a globe whose three-dimensional structure is ambiguous significantly influences visual perception of the globe. This disambiguation of vision by touch occurs only when the two modalities are stimulated concurrently, however. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we discovered that touching the rotating globe, even when not looking at it, reliably activates the middle temporal visual area (MT+), a brain region commonly thought to be crucially involved in registering structure from motion. Considered together, our results show that the brain draws on somatosensory information to resolve visual conflict.