Can the Dead be Brought into Disrepute?

Queen Christina of Sweden was unconventional in her time, leading to hypotheses on her gender and possible hermaphroditic nature. If genetic analysis can substantiate the latter claim, could this bring the queen into disrepute 300 years after her death? Joan C. Callahan has argued that if a reputation changes, this constitutes a change only in the group of people changing their views and not in the person whose reputation it is. Is this so? This paper analyses what constitutes change and draws out the implications to the reputation of the dead. It is argued that a reputation is a relational property which can go through changes. The change is “real” for the group changing their views on Queen Christina and of a Cambridge kind for the long dead queen herself. Cambridge changes result in new properties being acquired, some of which can be of significance. Although the dead cannot go through any non-relational changes, it is possible for the dead to change properties through Cambridge changes. In this sense changes in reputation do affect the dead, and thus Queen Christina can acquire a new property, in this case possibly a worse reputation.     

OXlearn: A new MATLAB-based simulation tool for connectionist models

OXlearn is a free, platform-independent MATLAB toolbox in which standard connectionist neural network models can be set up, run, and analyzed by means of a user-friendly graphical interface. Due to its seamless integration with the MATLAB programming environment, the inner workings of the simulation tool can be easily inspected and/or extended using native MATLAB commands or components. This combination of usability, transparency, and extendability makes OXlearn an efficient tool for the implementation of basic research projects or the prototyping of more complex research endeavors, as well as for teaching. Both the MATLAB toolbox and a compiled version that does not require access to MATLAB can be downloaded from http://psych.brookes.ac.uk/oxlearn/.     

Two‐year‐old children preferentially transmit simple actions but not pedagogically demonstrated actions

Children are sensitive to both social and non‐social aspects of the learning environment. Among social cues, pedagogical communication has been shown to not only play a role in children's learning, but also in their own active transmission of knowledge. Vredenburgh, Kushnir and Casasola, Developmental Science, 2015, 18, 645 showed that 2‐year‐olds are more likely to demonstrate an action to a naive adult after learning it in a pedagogical than in a non‐pedagogical context. This finding was interpreted as evidence that pedagogically transmitted information has a special status as culturally relevant. Here we test the limits of this claim by setting it in contrast with an explanation in which the relevance of information is the outcome of multiple interacting social (e.g., pedagogical demonstration) and non‐social properties (e.g., action complexity). To test these competing hypotheses, we varied both pedagogical cues and action complexity in an information transmission paradigm with 2‐year‐old children. In Experiment 1, children preferentially transmitted simple non‐pedagogically demonstrated actions over pedagogically demonstrated more complex actions. In Experiment 2, when both actions were matched for complexity, we found no evidence of preferential transmission of pedagogically demonstrated actions. We discuss possible reasons for the discrepancy between our results and previous literature showing an effect of pedagogical cues on cultural transmission, and conclude that our results are compatible with the view that pedagogical and other cues interact, but incompatible with the theory of a privileged role for pedagogical cues.     

Comparative visual search: a difference that makes a difference

In this article we present a new experimental paradigm: comparative visual search. Each half of a display contains simple geometrical objects of three different colors and forms. The two display halves are identical except for one object mismatched in either color or form. The subject's task is to find this mismatch. We illustrate the potential of this paradigm for investigating the underlying complex processes of perception and cognition by means of an eye-tracking study. Three possible search strategies are outlined, discussed, and reexamined on the basis of experimental results. Each strategy is characterized by the way it partitions the field of objects into "chunks." These strategies are: (i) Stimulus-wise scanning with minimization of total scan path length (a "traveling salesman" strategy), (ii) scanning of the objects in fixed-size areas (a "searchlight" strategy), and (iii) scanning of object sets based on variably sized clusters defined by object density and heterogeneity (a "clustering" strategy). To elucidate the processes underlying comparative visual search, we introduce besides object density a new entropy-based measure for object heterogeneity. The effects of local density and entropy on several basic and derived eye-movement variables clearly rule out the traveling salesman strategy, but are most compatible with the clustering strategy.