The validity of a persistence test

In order to raise the predictive efficiency of its college entrance test battery, the Educational Testing Service is working on the development of non-academic measures to supplement the standard aptitude and achievement examinations. A test of difficult number series problems was set up to measure persistence by tempting the students to give up early; the students were informed that some of the problems had no solution, and that full credit would be received by so marking them. This test was tried out and found to have some correlation with grades, while having no correlation with the other tests. Adding this test to the battery showed an appreciable rise in the battery's multiple correlation with grades.     

Field and observer viewpoint in remember-know memories of personal childhood events

This experiment examined the viewpoint and other phenomenal characteristics of childhood memories based on both personal recollections and self-knowledge. Participants were asked to provide examples of remember, know, and uncertain memories, and to rate each memory on a number of dimensions. Remembered events were generally viewed from a field perspective, while known-about events were generally viewed from an observer perspective. In line with earlier research, remembered events received the highest ratings for sensory and contextual detail, emotional content, and memory accuracy, while known-about events were given the lowest ratings. The results are discussed with reference to their possible implications for memory recovery or enhancement techniques that ask people to adopt a different viewpoint. Consideration is given as to whether a switch to a field perspective might encourage the acceptance of suggested details or events.     

Belief in Conspiracy Theories and Susceptibility to the Conjunction Fallacy

People who believe in the paranormal have been found to be particularly susceptible to the conjunction fallacy. The present research examines whether the same is true of people who endorse conspiracy theories. Two studies examined the association between conspiracist ideation and the number of conjunction violations made in a variety of contexts (neutral, paranormal and conspiracy). Study 1 found that participants who endorsed a range of popular conspiracy theories more strongly also made more conjunction errors than participants with weaker conspiracism, regardless of the contextual framing of the conjunction. Study 2, using an independent sample and a generic measure of conspiracist ideation, replicated the finding that conspiracy belief is associated with domain‐general susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy. The findings are discussed in relation to the association between conspiracism and other anomalous beliefs, the representativeness heuristic and the tendency to infer underlying causal relationships connecting ostensibly unrelated events. © 2014 The Authors. Applied Cognitive Psychology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

Valuations: Bi,Tri, and Tetra

Studia Logica - This paper considers some issues to do with valuational presentations of consequence relations, and the Galois connections between spaces of valuations and spaces of consequence...     

Portraits of Well-Being: Photography as a Mental Health Support for Women With HIV

Many women living with HIV/AIDS (WL-HIV/AIDS) experience significant mental distress. Although creative arts strategies are well positioned to help support women by inspiring creativity and meaning-making, few arts programs have been implemented and evaluated with this population. The authors conducted a photography project with 30 WL-HIV/AIDS from three United States cities. Participants took pictures to capture their lives with HIV/AIDS and described their photos and stories in group and individual sessions. Using thematic analysis, the authors identified that the project supported women’s mental health in four ways by facilitating empowerment and helping women to express themselves, address their mental health with new tools like photography, and process past traumas. Photography projects may help WL-HIV/AIDS understand and manage their mental health.     

Cognitive load and semantic analogies: Searching semantic space

The aim of the present study is to investigate the performance of children of different ages on an analogymaking task involving semantic analogies in which there are competing semantic matches. We suggest that this can best be studied in terms of developmental changes in executive functioning. We hypothesize that the selection of common relational structure requires the inhibition of other salient features, in particular semantically related matches. Our results show that children's performance in classic A ∶ B ∶∶ C ∶ D analogy-making tasks seems to depend crucially on the nature of the distractors and the association strength between both the A and B terms and the C and D terms. These results agree with an analogy-making account (Richland, Morrison, & Holyoak, 2006) based on different limitations in executive functioning at different ages.