Sitting on the word “chair”: Behavioral support, contextual cues, and the literal use of symbols

Recent work from an embodied-cognition perspective suggests that symbolic understanding involves bodily actions. Indeed, laboratory evidence and cultural phenomena such as magic rituals and symbolic aggression show that the behaviors evoked by a word and its referent can be quite similar to each other. In other circumstances, however, words and objects fail to display the expected degree of functional equivalence: Although we regularly sit on chairs, for example, we normally do not sit on the word “chair.” In two experiments we evaluated whether functional equivalence between word and object depended on behavioral support and contextual stimuli, as suggested by some Pavlovian views of symbolic performance. Children spent more or less time seated on a token of the word “chair,” depending on supports for sitting and background stimuli. This study may help to understand the determinants of response frequency in symbolic understanding.     

Cause by Omission and Norm: Not Watering Plants

People generally accept that there is causation by omission—that the omission of some events cause some related events. But this acceptance elicits the selection problem, or the difficulty of explaining the selection of a particular omissive cause or class of causes from the causal conditions. Some theorists contend that dependence theories of causation cannot resolve this problem. In this paper, we argue that the appeal to norms adequately resolves the selection problem for dependence theories, and we provide novel experimental evidence for it.     

Memory bias for threatening information related to anxiety: an updated meta-analytic review

The evidence for an anxiety-related memory bias is contradictory. We compiled 171 articles published until October 2016 including a group with clinical or subclinical anxiety and a control group in tasks involving implicit or explicit memory using threatening stimuli. There was an anxiety-related memory bias in free recall tasks, but it was not observed in another memory task. The between-groups differences showed that the anxious group recalled more threatening stimuli than the control group (d?=?0.321). When we compared the group differences (anxious vs. control participants) in the within-groups effect (threatening vs. neutral stimuli), a moderate effect size emerged (d_bw?=?0.714). This anxiety-related memory bias was observed with shallow processing, that is consistent with attentional biases related to anxiety. There was also evidence that high-anxious persons recall fewer positive stimuli. Future research is needed to investigate whether this result is a memory or encoding bias and explore other moderator variables.     

Involvement of the insular cortex in retention of conditioned taste aversion is not time dependent

In fear-associated learning paradigms, hippocampal lesions induce memory deficits of recent but not remote memories, while amygdala lesions produce retention deficits irrespective of the age of the memory. In conditioned taste aversion (CTA), non-hippocampal mediated learning paradigm, the insular vortex (IC) has shown to have a crucial role in consolidation and storage of CTA memory. Due to the functional and anatomical similarities to the hippocampus, a time dependent role of the IC in CTA retention cannot be ruled out. To test whether the IC shows a time dependent role in CTA memory retention, male Wistar rats were CTA trained on saccharin 0.1% (LiCl 0.15M, 2% b/w, 40 min after drinking) and lesioned with ibotenic acid (200-300 nL, 5mg/mL) unilaterally into the IC 1 week or bilaterally 1 or 6 weeks after CTA. CTA memory was completely disrupted in both bilateral lesion groups but unaffected in the unilateral lesioned group. The resulting preference was comparable to that of the bilaterally IC lesioned animals exposed to the taste for the first time, proving that in these animals a complete amnesic state was achieved. Bilaterally IC lesioned rats showed normal discrimination between preferred (sucrose 5%) and non-preferred (quinone) tastes. Our data indicates that the involvement of the IC in CTA is not time dependent and that CTA memories are stored in each hemisphere separately.     

A Critical Analysis of Approaches to the Development of Preventive Interventions for Subcultural Groups

The ultimate success of preventive interventions relies on their ability to engage and influence the growing presence of subcultural groups. To encourage and guide the development of effective preventive intervention for subcultural groups, four approaches are described, illustrated, and critiqued with respect to their considerations of cultural fit, reach, efficacy and adoption. Those approaches are (a) the prevention research cycle, (b) cultural adaptations of evidence-based interventions, (c) investigator-initiated culturally-grounded approaches, and (d) community-initiated indigenous approaches. Special attention is given to recent advances in the specification of stages in the cultural adaptation of interventions. The paper closes with some conclusions and topics in need of greater attention.     

General cognitive functioning and psycholinguistic abilities in children with Smith-Magenis Syndrome

This study is a neuropsycholinguistic research of a rare genetic syndrome with microdeletion that co-occurs with intellectual disabilities and relatively good language abilities, the Smith-Magenis Syndrome (SMS). Nevertheless, there are no cognitive and psycholinguistic profile analyses performed with Spanish population. In this sense, we characterized the cognitive and psycholinguistic profile of a sample with 9 participants with SMS (7 to 11 years of age). The cognitive and psychological profile was assessed with diverse standardized tests: Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - IV version, Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities and Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Results suggest a specific cognitive and psychological profile characterized by a low IQ and relative good abilities in integrating information, whereas attention problems and hyperactive behaviors were displayed when interacting with the child during the assessment. This work is the first evidence of the cognitive and psycholinguistic profile characterization in patients with SMS in Spain, and will help to guide a more accurate diagnosis and differential intervention in rare genetic diseases with similar cognitive and psycholinguistic profiles.     

Responsibility for forgetting

Philosophical Studies - In this paper, we focus on whether and to what extent we judge that people are responsible for the consequences of their forgetfulness. We ran a series of behavioral studies...     

Indeterminate Interests: Comments on Justin Remhof’s Nietzsche’s Constructivism

Philosophia - In his book Nietzsche’s Constructivism: A Metaphysics of Material Objects Justin Remhof defends, using resources from Nietzsche’s thought, the constructivist view that all...     

Consistent Belief in a Good True Self in Misanthropes and Three Interdependent Cultures

People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true self is morally virtuous; that is deep inside, every person is motivated to behave in morally good ways. Is this belief particular to individuals with optimistic beliefs or people from Western cultures, or does it reflect a widely held cognitive bias in how people understand the self? To address this question, we tested the good true self theory against two potential boundary conditions that are known to elicit different beliefs about the self as a whole. Study 1 tested whether individual differences in misanthropy—the tendency to view humans negatively—predict beliefs about the good true self in an American sample. The results indicate a consistent belief in a good true self, even among individuals who have an explicitly pessimistic view of others. Study 2 compared true self‐attributions across cultural groups, by comparing samples from an independent country (USA) and a diverse set of interdependent countries (Russia, Singapore, and Colombia). Results indicated that the direction and magnitude of the effect are comparable across all groups we tested. The belief in a good true self appears robust across groups varying in cultural orientation or misanthropy, suggesting a consistent psychological tendency to view the true self as morally good.