Direct and indirect effects of parenting practices on socio‐moral approval of aggression in Polish young adults. Do all practices matter?

The purpose of this article was to determine the socialisation antecedents of socio‐moral approval of aggression (SMAA). In Study 1, we assessed factorial structure and reliability of the SMAA with a sample of 355 students who reported on the extent to which they approved of six forms of aggressive behaviour and six justifications of aggression. Two‐factor solutions were obtained with regard to forms and justifications of aggressive acts. Thus, approval of extreme and minor aggression was distinguished as well as legitimate and illegitimate justifications of aggression. In Study 2, we tested the path models of the socialisation antecedents that contributed to the high approval of minor and extreme aggressive acts as well as legitimate and illegitimate justifications of aggression. Data were collected from 173 undergraduate students. Path analyses showed that high levels of approval of extremely aggressive acts and of illegitimate justifications of aggression were preceded by a sequence of negative life events, beginning with frequent misbehaviour in childhood, corporal punishment used by parents and ending with delinquency in adolescence. The approval of minor aggression had little relation to socialisation factors apart from a detrimental effect of psychological aggression while approval of legitimate justifications of aggression had no socialisation antecedents.     

Activating Basic Category Exemplars in Sentence Contexts: A Dynamical Account

This paper examines the influence of context on the processing of category names embedded in sentences. The investigation focuses on the nature of information available immediately after such a word is heard as well as on the dynamics of adaptation to context. An on-line method (Cross Modal Lexical Priming) was used to trace how this process unfolds in time. We found that the information available immediately after a category word is presented is not altered by the sentence context in which the word is immersed. Rather, the structure of availability of particular exemplars of the category resembles the typicality structure of a conceptual representation. The adaptation to context occurs later (between 300 and 450 ms after the category word) and takes the form of a rapid reorganization of the structure rather than a gradual activation of a contextually relevant exemplar. We claim that such data is best accounted for in a dynamical framework, where a coherent global structure emerges through locally guided self-organization.     

Google and the mind: predicting fluency with PageRank

Human memory and Internet search engines face a shared computational problem, needing to retrieve stored pieces of information in response to a query. We explored whether they employ similar solutions, testing whether we could predict human performance on a fluency task using PageRank, a component of the Google search engine. In this task, people were shown a letter of the alphabet and asked to name the first word beginning with that letter that came to mind. We show that PageRank, computed on a semantic network constructed from word-association data, outperformed word frequency and the number of words for which a word is named as an associate as a predictor of the words that people produced in this task. We identify two simple process models that could support this apparent correspondence between human memory and Internet search, and relate our results to previous rational models of memory.     

Psychophysiological evidence for the genuineness of swimming-style colour synaesthesia

Recently, swimming-style colour synaesthesia was introduced as a new form of synaesthesia. A synaesthetic Stroop test was used to establish its genuineness. Since Stroop interference can occur for any type of overlearned association, in the present study we used a modified Stroop test and psychophysiological synaesthetic conditioning to further establish the genuineness of this form of synaesthesia. We compared the performance of a swimming-style colour synaesthete and a control who was trained on swimming-style colour associations. Our results showed that behavioural aspects of swimming-style colour synaesthesia can be mimicked in a trained control. Importantly, however, our results showed a psychophysiological conditioning effect for the synaesthete only. We discuss the theoretical relevance of swimming-style colour synaesthesia according to different models of synaesthesia. We conclude that swimming-style colour synaesthesia is a genuine form of synaesthesia, can be mimicked behaviourally in non-synaesthetes, and is best explained by a re-entrant feedback model.     

Is God His Essence? The Logical Structure of Aquinas’ Proofs for this Claim

In this article I consider whether Aquinas’ arguments for the claim that God is His essence are conclusive, and what was his purpose of upholding this thesis. I show his proofs from Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra Gentiles to be problematic and argue that the defense of Aquinas’ views on that matter suggested by certain remarks of P. T. Geach is flawed.     

Beyond Single-Mindedness: A Figure-Ground Reversal for the Cognitive Sciences

A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition. Here, we explore the more radical stance that interaction co-constitutes cognition: that we benefit from looking beyond single minds toward cognition as a process involving interacting minds. All around the cognitive sciences, there are approaches that put interaction center stage. Their diverse and pluralistic origins may obscure the fact that collectively, they harbor insights and methods that can respecify foundational assumptions and fuel novel interdisciplinary work. What might the cognitive sciences gain from stronger interactional foundations? This represents, we believe, one of the key questions for the future. Writing as a transdisciplinary collective assembled from across the classic cognitive science hexagon and beyond, we highlight the opportunity for a figure-ground reversal that puts interaction at the heart of cognition. The interactive stance is a way of seeing that deserves to be a key part of the conceptual toolkit of cognitive scientists.