Black Athena: Two views

Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985, by Martin Bemal, Free Association Books, 1987, 576 pages, hb £30, pb £15     

The organization of information retrieved from situation models

The organization of information when it is retrieved from situation models was explored using recognition and recall tests. A fan effect paradigm was used to assess organization in recognition and a clustering measure was used in recall. People memorized either object-location facts (e.g., “The pay phone is in the city hall”) or person/small location facts (e.g., “The banker is on the witness stand”). For object-location facts, a location-based organization was observed in both recall and recognition. However, for person/small location facts, a location-based organization was observed for recall, and a person-based organization was observed for recognition. Thus, the observed organization was flexible depending on the retrieval task.     

Joint action and group action made precise

The paper argues that there are two main kinds of joint action, direct joint bringing about (or performing) something (expressed in terms of a DO-operator) and jointly seeing to it that something is the case (expressed in terms of a Stit-operator). The former kind of joint action contains conjunctive, disjunctive and sequential action and its central subkinds. While joint seeing to it that something is the case is argued to be necessarily intentional, direct joint performance can also be nonintentional. Actions performed by social groups are analyzed in terms of the notions of joint action (basically DO and Stit).A precise semantical analysis of the aforementioned kinds of joint action is given in terms of time-trees. With each participant a tree is connected, and the trees are joined defining joint possible worlds in terms of state-expressing nodes from the trees. Sentences containing DO and Stit are semantically evaluated with respect to such joint possible worlds. Intentional joint actions are characterized in terms of the notion of we-intention (joint intention), characterized formally by means of a special operator.     

Narcissistic Illusions in Self-Evaluations of Intelligence and Attractiveness

In this study we compared the ability of narcissism and self-esteem to predict positive illusions in self-evaluations of intelligence and physical attractiveness in a sample of 146 college students. Narcissism predicted both types of illusion for males and females; self-esteem predicted intelligence self-illusion for males. Both males and females overestimated their own intelligence, with males, but not females, also overestimating their attractiveness. Positive illusions for intelligence and attractiveness were correlated. Males showed greater positive illusions than females, with this effect at least partly attributable to observed gender differences in narcissism.     

What’s good for me depends on what I see in you: Intimacy avoidance and resources derived from close others

Past research has demonstrated that comfort with intimacy differentially affects the extent to which a person assimilates/contrasts to a close other. Specifically, individuals comfortable with intimacy benefit most from assimilating to those who embody positive aspects, whereas individuals uncomfortable with intimacy benefit most from contrasting to those who embody a mix of positive and negative aspects. Using a multi-method approach, the current research provides evidence suggesting that both those who are positively regarded and those who engender mixed feelings have the potential to benefit the perceiver differentially as a function of the types of traits that are most salient at the time. In Study 1, consistent with predictions, high-avoidant individuals contrasted to the salient traits of a romantic partner and performed better on an intelligence test after thinking about their partner’s unintelligent compared to intelligent traits, whereas low-avoidant individuals assimilated. In Study 2, high-avoidant individuals contrasted to friends’ traits and exhibited more positive cardiovascular responses (i.e., greater challenge) while talking about friends’ negative traits and more negative responses (i.e., greater threat) while talking about friends’ positive traits. Together, these findings suggest that there are situations during which low- and high-avoidant individuals differentially benefit from highly regarded close others.     

Posttraining handling facilitates memory for auditory-cue fear conditioning in rats

A large number of studies have indicated that stress exposure or the administration of stress hormones and other neuroactive drugs immediately after a learning experience modulates the consolidation of long-term memory. However, there has been little investigation into how arousal induced by handling of the animals in order to administer these drugs affects memory. Therefore, the present study examined whether the posttraining injection or handling procedure per se affects memory of auditory-cue classical fear conditioning. Male Sprague-Dawley rats, which had been pre-handled on three days for 1 min each prior to conditioning, received three pairings of a single-frequency auditory stimulus and footshock, followed immediately by either a subcutaneous injection of a vehicle solution or brief handling without injection. A control group was placed back into their home cages without receiving any posttraining treatment. Retention was tested 24 h later in a novel chamber and suppression of ongoing motor behavior during a 10-s presentation of the auditory-cue served as the measure of conditioned fear. Animals that received posttraining injection or handling did not differ from each other but showed significantly less stimulus-induced movement compared to the non-handled control group. These findings thus indicate that the posttraining injection or handling procedure is sufficiently arousing or stressful to facilitate memory consolidation of auditory-cue classical fear conditioning.     

The accuracy of spatial information from temporally and spatially organized mental maps

The way a space is learned can result in a mental mapthat is either temporally or spatially organized (Curiel & Radvansky, 1998). The present study examined the availability of spatial information under maplearning conditions where either temporal or spatial organization has been previously observed. The finding was that people were fairly accurate in tasks that explicitly required the use of spatial information. However, there was a particular advantage for having a spatially organized mental mapin a direction judgment task, especially for short distances where fine-grained knowledge was required. In contrast, there was no clear advantage for either group in a distance estimation task. These data are interpreted in the context of Huttenlocher’s category adjustment model.     

Partially Interpreted Relations and Partially Interpreted Quantifiers

Logics in which a relation R is semantically incomplete in a particular universe E, i.e. the union of the extension of R with its anti-extension does not exhaust the whole universe E, have been studied quite extensively in the last years. (Cf. van Benthem (1985), Blamey (1986), and Langholm (1988), for partial predicate logic; Muskens (1996), for the applications of partial predicates to formal semantics, and Doherty (1996) for applications to modal logic.) This is not so with semantically incomplete generalized quantifiers which constitute the subject of the present paper. The only systematic study of these quantifiers from a purely logical point of view, is, to the best of my knowledge, that by van Eijck (1995). We shall take here a different approach than that of van Eijck and mention some of the abstract properties of the resulting logic. Finally we shall prove that the two approaches are interdefinable.