Duration and numerical estimation in right brain‐damaged patients with and without neglect: Lack of support for a mental time line

Previous studies have shown that left neglect patients are impaired when they have to orient their attention leftward relative to a standard in numerical comparison tasks. This finding has been accounted for by the idea that numerical magnitudes are represented along a spatial continuum oriented from left to right with small magnitudes on the left and large magnitudes on the right. Similarly, it has been proposed that duration could be represented along a mental time line that shares the properties of the number continuum. By comparing directly duration and numerosity processing, this study investigates whether or not the performance of neglect patients supports the hypothesis of a mental time line. Twenty‐two right brain‐damaged patients (11 with and 11 without left neglect), as well as 11 age‐matched healthy controls, had to judge whether a single dot presented visually lasted shorter or longer than 500 ms and whether a sequence of flashed dots was smaller or larger than 5. Digit spans were also assessed to measure verbal working memory capacities. In duration comparison, no spatial‐duration bias was found in neglect patients. Moreover, a significant correlation between verbal working memory and duration performance was observed in right brain‐damaged patients, irrespective of the presence or absence of neglect. In numerical comparison, only neglect patients showed an enhanced distance effect for numerical magnitude smaller than the standard. These results do not support the hypothesis of the existence of a mental continuum oriented from left to right for duration. We discuss an alternative account to explain the duration impairment observed in right brain‐damaged patients.     

The effect of the two feet-in-the-door technique on tobacco deprivation

The ‘Foot-in-the-door’ (FITD) is a well-known compliance technique that increases compliance with a request. Many investigations on this paradigm have generally used prosocial requests to test the effect of the technique. A new evaluation of the effect of the FITD technique was carried out on tobacco deprivation. A two feet-in-the-door technique in which the target request was preceded by two small target requests was used to encourage students to stop smoking for 24 h. The results were compared with two single foot-in-the- door procedures in which the final request was only preceded by one small request, as well as with a control condition using only a 24 h stop-smoking request. Results showed that the single FITD and the two feet-in-the-door procedures were effective to increase verbal compliance (accepting to stop smoking) but only the two feet-in-the-door technique significantly increased behavioural compliance (not smoking for 24 h) with the request.     

Algorithmic complexity for short binary strings applied to psychology: a primer

As human randomness production has come to be more closely studied and used to assess executive functions (especially inhibition), many normative measures for assessing the degree to which a sequence is randomlike have been suggested. However, each of these measures focuses on one feature of randomness, leading researchers to have to use multiple measures. Although algorithmic complexity has been suggested as a means for overcoming this inconvenience, it has never been used, because standard Kolmogorov complexity is inapplicable to short strings (e.g., of length l?≤?50), due to both computational and theoretical limitations. Here, we describe a novel technique (the coding theorem method) based on the calculation of a universal distribution, which yields an objective and universal measure of algorithmic complexity for short strings that approximates Kolmogorov–Chaitin complexity.     

Assessing Specific Discipline Techniques: A Mixed-Methods Approach

This study explored, in a community sample of mothers of toddlers, parenting beliefs and values, to gain insight into the parent–child relationship. Acceptance of specific discipline techniques (DTs), and their actual use in daily life were examined. A mixed-methods approach comprising three different methods was used: (1) parenting beliefs and values were explored with Q-methodology; (2) acceptance of the DTs was assessed with the questionnaire Dimensions of Discipline Inventory; and (3) actual use of those DTs in daily-life incidents of discipline was documented using ecological momentary assessment for ten consecutive days. The results showed the mothers’ parenting beliefs and values reflected a warm parent–child relationship. The mothers rated explaining rules, timeout, removal of privileges, and social reinforcement as moderately to highly acceptable. However, planned ignoring received a low acceptance rating. Mothers’ high acceptability ratings of the DTs contrasted with moderate use when they were faced with their misbehaving child, with the exception of explaining rules, which was always manifested. Yelling and spanking received the lowest acceptance ratings. Nonetheless, in daily life, yelling was employed as often as timeout. These findings suggest the need for more attention to be paid to both acceptance and daily use of specific DTs in order to highlight DTs which parents may have difficulty implementing.     

The Delay Before Recall Changes the Remembered Duration of 15‐minute Video Sequences

The aim of this study was to determine if the passage of time changes the memory of the duration of joyful or sad events. Participants were asked to look at a series of brief videos lasting 15 minutes and to estimate retrospectively and verbally (with chronometric units) the duration of this 15‐minute period. There were two independent variables: the emotion conditions (joy, sadness and neutral) and the recall conditions (immediately after the presentation of videos, 1 week later or 1 month later). The results show that the estimated time is largely overestimated in the 1‐week and 1‐month condition but not when the recall is immediate. This effect applies to each emotional condition, but there was no significant difference between the emotion conditions. The effect of emotion on the estimation of long intervals judged retrospectively seems minimal in comparison with the cognitive effect associated with the passage of time. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“That is just what they want you to believe”: A modest defence of Marxist paranoia

This essay defends a rational reconstruction of a genealogical debunking argument that begins with the premise “that's just what the economic elite want you to believe” and ends in the conclusion “you should lower your confidence in your belief.” The argument is genealogical because it includes a causal explanation of your beliefs; it is debunking because it claims that the contingencies uncovered by the genealogy undermine your beliefs. The essay begins by defending a plausible causal explanation of your belief in terms of the wants of the elite. Then a number of recent objections to genealogical debunking arguments are considered. It is argued that the genealogy offered in the first part constitutes evidence that a testimony‐based belief is not safe and therefore does not constitute knowledge if the economic elite wants you to believe it.     

Physical and perceptual accuracy of upright and inverted face drawings

This study considers the conception that drawing or copying a face that is vertically inverted will improve the accuracy of the drawing by preventing holistic interference. We used a novel parameterized face space both for generating face stimuli and for measuring the physical accuracy of drawings. One group of participants (the artists) were asked to draw 16 parameterized faces (eight upright and eight inverted). We computed two physical measures of accuracy by comparing the face-space representation of each drawing to the original face. A second and third group of participants (the raters) compared the similarity between each original face and each pair of drawings of that face (one upright and one inverted per artist). For the second group, all faces were presented upright; for the third group, all faces were presented inverted. Our results showed that upright drawings were more accurate than inverted drawings, both in terms of the physical face-space measure and in terms of the perceptual judgments for both orientations. Our data suggest that holistic processing may aid rather than hinder face drawing accuracy.     

From prioritizing objects to prioritizing cues: a developmental shift for cognitive control

Emerging cognitive control supports increasingly adaptive behaviors and predicts life success, while low cognitive control is a major risk factor during childhood. It is therefore essential to understand how it develops. The present study provides evidence for an age‐related shift in the type of information that children prioritize in their environment, from objects that can be directly acted upon to cues signaling how to act. Specifically, gaze patterns recorded while 3‐ to 12‐year‐olds and adults engaged in a cognitive control task showed that whereas younger children fixated on targets that they needed to respond to before gazing at task cues signaling how to respond, older children and adults showed the opposite pattern (which yielded better performance). This shift in information prioritization has important conceptual implications, suggesting that a major force behind cognitive control development may be non‐executive in nature, as well as opening new directions for interventions.     

The Role of Workers’ Motivational Profiles in Affective and Organizational Factors

We used latent profile analyses to understand how the different forms of motivation proposed by self-determination theory combine with each other and how they relate to some organizational factors (i.e., perceived organizational support and procedural justice) and well-and ill-being indicators (i.e., work engagement, quality of working life, work satisfaction, job anxiety, and burnout). The research draws upon quantitative data collected by means of a questionnaire that was administered to 328 employees (Study 1) and 521 employees (Study 2) from various French companies. Results revealed that workers characterized by the two most autonomous motivational profiles displayed higher levels of work engagement, quality of working life, and work satisfaction, and lower levels of burnout and job anxiety than those with low levels of autonomous motivation, and introjected and external regulations (Low AU/INR/EXR profile), and those with moderate levels of autonomous motivation, moderate to high levels of introjected regulation, and moderate levels of external regulation (Mod AU/INR/EXR profile in Study 1 and Mod AU–High INR–Mod EXR profile in Study 2). Of interest is that the High AU–Low INR/EXR and High AU/INR–Low EXR profiles did not differ on well- and ill-being. In addition, perceived organizational support and procedural justice were associated with a greater probability of belonging to the High AU–Low INR/EXR and High AU/INR–Low EXR profiles, taking the Low AU/INR/EXR profile as a referent. The present research contributes towards a better understanding of the links between workers’ motivational profiles and affective and organizational factors.     

Meaning in the lives of humans and other animals

This paper argues that contemporary philosophical literature on meaning in life has important implications for the debate about our obligations to non-human animals. If animal lives can be meaningful, then practices including factory farming and animal research might be morally worse than ethicists have thought. We argue for two theses about meaning in life: (1) that the best account of meaningful lives must take intentional action to be necessary for meaning—an individual’s life has meaning if and only if the individual acts intentionally in ways that contribute to finally valuable states of affairs; and (2) that this first thesis does not entail that only human lives are meaningful. Because non-human animals can be intentional agents of a certain sort, our account yields the verdict that many animals’ lives can be meaningful. We conclude by considering the moral implications of these theses for common practices involving animals.