Comparison of ability tests administered online and in the laboratory

As the Internet, the global medium of the future, expands exponentially, it has become increasingly relevant to scientific research. So far, there is but little evidence that online testing is suitable for collecting ability-test data. The present article aims to shed light on some aspects of the issue by comparing the performance in a computer-administered ability test of one lab sample and two online samples using a quasi-experimental design. Mean score differences appeared, but can be explained by differences in age and education, and were not due to the test setting (online vs. laboratory). Also, there were no structural differences between the achievement scores of both samples. Some limitations on generalizability are discussed.     

Seeing How It Sounds: Observation,Imitation, and Improved Learning in Piano Playing

This study centers upon a piano learning and teaching environment in which beginners and intermediate piano students (N = 48) learning to perform a specific type of staccato were submitted to three different (group-exclusive) teaching conditions: audio-only demonstration of the musical task; observation of the teacher's action demonstration followed by student imitation (blocked observation); and observation of the teacher's action demonstration while alternating imitation of the task with the teacher's performance (interleaved observation). Students submitted to interleaved observation were more proficient at the learned task with no significant differences for students of different proficiency levels.     

To believe or not to believe? The joint impact of faultlines and pro-diversity beliefs on diplomats’ performance

Diversity faultlines can have a detrimental impact on team performance. To test whether this impact depends on leaders’ and members’ pro-diversity beliefs, we examined 41 leaders and 219 members of teams working for the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Findings indicated that the negative impact of diversity faultlines on team performance was weakest when leaders and members held strong pro-diversity beliefs. However, we did not find support for the assumed two-way interactions between faultline strength and leaders’ or members’ pro-diversity beliefs or the mediating effect of Leader-Member Exchange. Our results highlight the joint impact of leaders’ and members’ pro-diversity beliefs for attenuating the negative consequences of diversity faultlines on team performance.     

The Developmental Lexicon Project: A behavioral database to investigate visual word recognition across the lifespan

With the Developmental Lexicon Project (DeveL), we present a large-scale study that was conducted to collect data on visual word recognition in German across the lifespan. A total of 800 children from Grades 1 to 6, as well as two groups of younger and older adults, participated in the study and completed a lexical decision and a naming task. We provide a database for 1,152 German words, comprising behavioral data from seven different stages of reading development, along with sublexical and lexical characteristics for all stimuli. The present article describes our motivation for this project, explains the methods we used to collect the data, and reports analyses on the reliability of our results. In addition, we explored developmental changes in three marker effects in psycholinguistic research: word length, word frequency, and orthographic similarity. The database is available online.     

Recognition of facial affect in Borderline Personality Disorder

Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have been described as emotionally hyperresponsive, especially to anger and fear in social contexts. The aim was to investigate whether BPD patients are more sensitive but less accurate in terms of basic emotion recognition, and show a bias towards perceiving anger and fear when evaluating ambiguous facial expressions. Twenty-five women with BPD were compared with healthy controls on two different facial emotion recognition tasks. The first task allowed the assessment of the subjective detection threshold as well as the number of evaluation errors on six basic emotions. The second task assessed a response bias to blends of basic emotions. BPD patients showed no general deficit on the affect recognition task, but did show enhanced learning over the course of the experiment. For ambiguous emotional stimuli, we found a bias towards the perception of anger in the BPD patients but not towards fear. BPD patients are accurate in perceiving facial emotions, and are probably more sensitive to familiar facial expressions. They show a bias towards perceiving anger, when socio-affective cues are ambiguous. Interpersonal training should focus on the differentiation of ambiguous emotion in order to reduce a biased appraisal of others.     

Having reasons

What is it to have a reason? According to one common idea, the Factoring Account, you have a reason to do A when there is a reason for you to do A which you have—which is somehow in your possession or grasp. In this paper, I argue that this common idea is false. But though my arguments are based on the practical case, the implications of this are likely to be greatest in epistemology: for the pitfalls we fall into when trying to defend the Factoring Account reflect very well the major developments in empiricist epistemology during the 20th century. I conjecture that this is because epistemologists have been—wrongly—wedded to the Factoring Account about evidence, which I conjecture is a certain kind of reason to believe.     

Reasons and Agent-neutrality

This paper considers the connection between the three-place relation, R is a reason for X to do A and the two-place relation, R is a reason to do A. I consider three views on which the former is to be analyzed in terms of the latter. I argue that these views are widely held, and explain the role that they play in motivating interesting substantive ethical theories. But I reject them in favor of a more obvious analysis, which goes the other way around.