The Different Ways in which Logic is (said to be) Formal

I argue that, in the Prior Analytics, higher and above the well-known ‘reduction through impossibility’ of figures, Aristotle is resorting to a general procedure of demonstrating through impossibility in various contexts. This is shown from the analysis of the role of adunaton in conversions of premises and other demonstrations where modal or truth-value consistency is indirectly shown to be valid through impossibility. Following the meaning of impossible as ‘non-existent’, the system is also completed by rejecting any invalid combinations of terms in deductions or conversions. The notion of impossibility reaches the core of Aristotle's system in the Prior Analytics. On the one hand, the use of adunaton shows that he is following one of the two requisites for demonstrative science formulated in the Posterior Analytics, i.e. to demonstrate that it is impossible for things to be otherwise than stated. On the other hand, that demonstrations through impossibility are rooted in the notion of contradiction supports the claim that Aristotle might have been trained to use this specific procedure in the context of dialectical exercises in the academy. This need not rule out other influences on Aristotle's preferred procedures of proving or counter-proving, but it paves a way to a better understanding of Aristotle's logic under the light of Plato's dialectic.     

The Buridanian Account of Inferential Relations between Doubly Quantified Propositions: a Proof of Soundness

On the basis of passages from John Buridan's Summula Suppositionibus and Sophismata, E. Karger has reconstructed what could be called the ‘Buridanian theory of inferential relations between doubly quantified propositions’, presented in her 1993 article ‘A theory of immediate inference contained in Buridan's logic’. In the reconstruction, she focused on the syntactical elements of Buridan's theory of modes of personal supposition to extract patterns of formally valid inferences between members of a certain class of basic categorical propositions. The present study aims at offering semantic corroboration—a proof of soundness—to the inferential relations syntactically identified by E. Karger, by means of the analysis of Buridan's semantic definitions of the modes of personal supposition. The semantic analysis is done with the help of some modern logical concepts, in particular that of the model. In effect, the relations of inference syntactically established are shown to hold also from a semantic point of view, which means thus that this fragment of Buridan's logic can be said to be sound.     

Prospective remembering: Perceptually driven or conceptually driven processes?

Converging experimental operations and several prospective memory tasks were used across three experiments to determine the extent to which prospective remembering is supported by datadriven versus conceptually driven processes. In all experiments, subjects were asked to perform an action when a target item later occurred. When the semantic context changed from encoding to test, prospective memory significantly declined (Experiment 1). When the target event (the item, which in its subsequent appearance in the experiment was the signal to perform the action) was presented as a word (relative to picture presentation, Experiment 2) or was encoded nonsemantically (relative to semantic encoding, Experiment 3), there was a decline in prospective memory performance. Dividing attention during prospective memory retrieval substantially reduced prospective memory performance (Experiment 3). The results of this research indicated that prospective memory is largely conceptually driven, and it behaves more similarly to direct rather than indirect conceptual tests. We suggest that prospective remembering of the type studied here is mediated by a reflexive episodic associative memory system as proposed by Moscovitch (1994).     

The value of reflective journaling with advanced piano students

Benefits to using a reflective journal include developing critical awareness and new perspective, problem-solving skills, and independent learning skills. The training of advanced piano students could be enhanced by the addition of journals to assist with their piano practice, specifically when learning new repertoire. Using the model by Plack and colleagues for developing and assessing reflection in reflective journal entries, we examined the journal entries of 18 advanced piano students to explore the development of reflection over a period of four weeks. Results suggest that reflectively trained piano students develop more critical reflection compared to a control group. Reflectively trained students perceive the same benefits to journaling as their counterparts in other disciplines. The most frequently referenced reflective elements include listing practice strategies and expressing feelings about the learning process. The reflective training model used in this study can be implemented by piano teachers and piano students.     

The fate of completed intentions

The goal of this research was to determine whether and how people deactivate prospective memory (PM) intentions after they have been completed. One view proposes that PM intentions can be deactivated after completion, such that they no longer come to mind and interfere with current tasks. Another view is that now irrelevant completed PM intentions exhibit persisting activation, and continue to be retrieved. In Experiment 1, participants were given a PM intention embedded within the ongoing task during Phase 1, after which participants were told either that the PM task had been completed or suspended until later. During Phase 2, participants were instructed to perform only the ongoing task and were periodically prompted to report their thoughts. Critically, the PM targets from Phase 1 reappeared in Phase 2. All of our measures, including thoughts reported about the PM task, supported the existence of persisting activation. In Experiment 2, we varied conditions that were expected to mitigate persisting activation. Despite our best attempts to promote deactivation, we found evidence for the persistence of spontaneous retrieval in all groups after intentions were completed. The theoretical and practical implications of this potential dark side to spontaneous retrieval are discussed.     

Prospective Memory

ABSTRACT— An interesting challenge for researchers who study prospective memory is to explain how people recognize environmental events as cues for actions. Whereas some theorists propose that a capacity-consuming monitoring process is the only means by which intentions can be retrieved, we argue that the cognitive system relies on multiple processes, including spontaneous processes that reflexively respond to the presence of target events. We present evidence for the existence of spontaneous retrieval processes and apply the idea of multiple processes to mixed findings on age-related decline in prospective memory.     

A phase transition model for the speed-accuracy trade-off in response time experiments

Most models of response time (RT) in elementary cognitive tasks implicitly assume that the speed-accuracy trade-off is continuous: When payoffs or instructions gradually increase the level of speed stress, people are assumed to gradually sacrifice response accuracy in exchange for gradual increases in response speed. This trade-off presumably operates over the entire range from accurate but slow responding to fast but chance-level responding (i.e., guessing). In this article, we challenge the assumption of continuity and propose a phase transition model for RTs and accuracy. Analogous to the fast guess model (Ollman, 1966), our model postulates two modes of processing: a guess mode and a stimulus-controlled mode. From catastrophe theory, we derive two important predictions that allow us to test our model against the fast guess model and against the popular class of sequential sampling models. The first prediction--hysteresis in the transitions between guessing and stimulus-controlled behavior--was confirmed in an experiment that gradually changed the reward for speed versus accuracy. The second prediction--bimodal RT distributions--was confirmed in an experiment that required participants to respond in a way that is intermediate between guessing and accurate responding.     

Temporal precedence of emotion over attention modulations in the lateral amygdala: Intracranial ERP evidence from a patient with temporal lobe epilepsy

Previous fMRI studies have reported mixed evidence for the influence of selective attention on amygdala responses to emotional stimuli, with some studies showing “automatic” emotional effects to threat-related stimuli without attention (or even without awareness), but other studies showing a gating of amygdala activity by selective attention with no response to unattended stimuli. We recorded intracranial local field potentials from the intact left lateral amygdala in a human patient prior to surgery for epilepsy and tested, with a millisecond time resolution, for neural responses to fearful faces appearing at either task-relevant or task-irrelevant locations. Our results revealed an early emotional effect in the amygdala arising prior to, and independently of, attentional modulation. However, at a later latency, we found a significant modulation of the differential emotional response when attention was directed toward or away from fearful faces. These results suggest separate influences of emotion and attention on amygdala activation and may help reconcile previous discrepancies concerning the relative responsiveness of the human amygdala to emotional and attentional factors.