The effect of word length in short-term memory: Is rehearsal necessary?

Three experiments investigated the effect of word length on a serial recognition task when rehearsal was prevented by a high presentation rate with no delay between study and test lists. Results showed that lists of short four-phoneme words were better recognized than lists of long six-phoneme words. Moreover, this effect was equivalent to that observed in conditions in which there was a delay between lists, thereby making rehearsal possible in the interval. These findings imply that rehearsal does not play a central role in the origin of the word length effect. An alternative explanation based on differences in the degree of retroactive interference generated by long and short words is proposed.     

Paraconsistent Metatheory: New Proofs with Old Tools

Journal of Philosophical Logic - This paper is a step toward showing what is achievable using non-classical metatheory—particularly, a substructural paraconsistent framework. What standard...     

The role of domain-specific practice, handedness, and starting age in chess

The respective roles of the environment and innate talent have been a recurrent question for research into expertise. The authors investigated markers of talent, environment, and critical period for the acquisition of expert performance in chess. Argentinian chess players (N = 104), ranging from weak amateurs to grandmasters, completed a questionnaire measuring variables including individual and group practice, starting age, and handedness. The study reaffirms the importance of practice for reaching high levels of performance, but it also indicates a large variability: The slower player needed 8 times as much practice to reach master level than the faster player. Additional results show a correlation between skill and starting age and indicate that players are more likely to be mixed-handed than individuals in the general population; however, there was no correlation between handedness and skill within the sample of chess players. Together, these results suggest that practice is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the acquisition of expertise, that some additional factors may differentiate chessplayers and nonchessplayers, and that starting age of practice is important.     

Two Dimensions of the Ethical Problems Related to Nanotechnology

The current literature on nanoethics focuses on a wide array of topics such as equity, privacy, military, environment, human enhancement, intellectual property, and security. The identification of those topics leads to the adoption of an ethical stance, which we call the in itself dimension. In this article we argue that even though it is correct to identify the areas where ethical problems are imperative to deal with (in itself dimension), it is a partial approach. This is because the in itself dimension pays no attention to another ethical stance; one that does not have anything to do with individual or collective responsibilities, but rather with the socio-economic system into which those responsibilities are embedded. We call this second issue the contextual dimension.     

Couple interaction: A study of the punctuation process

This study examined couples' punctuation of their own interactions. The association between causal explanations for the interactions on issues involving differences and the nature of relatedness (i.e., degree of distress) was the major purpose of the study. Punctuation was defined as a way of grouping sequences of interactions. Punctuational differneces were operationalized by measuring couples' causal explanations and attributions of responsibility concerning their own interactions. Twenty distressed and non-distressed couples, matched on age, income, education, and length of relationship, participated in an intensive 3-hour interview conducted at their homes. Two relationship measures to determine the degree of distress were administered. The interview involved: generating issues of important differences, improvisational role plays of interactions, responses to open-ended questions about self and other perspectives, and rankings of causal explanations and attributions of responsibility about the interactions. The results suggested that the nature of relatedness, as defined by degree of distress, was associated with the punctuation of interactions by the communicators, tentatively supporting the Watzlawicket al. (1967) metacommunicational axiom. The main finding was that distressed couples attributed responsibility to the mate rather than self, whereas in nondistressed douples responsibility was shared.This article is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The senior author is affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco     

On Sahlqvist Formulas in Relevant Logic

This paper defines a Sahlqvist fragment for relevant logic and establishes that each class of frames in the Routley-Meyer semantics which is definable by a Sahlqvist formula is also elementary, that is, it coincides with the class of structures satisfying a given first order property calculable by a Sahlqvist-van Benthem algorithm. Furthermore, we show that some classes of Routley-Meyer frames definable by a relevant formula are not elementary.     

Nanotechnology Policies in Latin America: Risksto Health and Environment

The presence of nanotechnologies grew and spread throughout Latin America during the first decade of the 21st century. Science and Technology policies have played an important role in the performance of these new technologies. Various international institutions, such as the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the Organization of American States promoted similar Science and Technology policies, and included nanotechnology as a priority area. This article shows the role of these Science and Technology policies in the promotion of specific objectives and the gap that was left due to the failure to incorporate an examination of the potential risks to health and environment, not to mention other labor-related effects. The omission of matters relevant to workers and consumers by these institutions led to a distancing from organized civil society.     

Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics: its origin and relevance

This paper offers an exposition of Husserl's mature philosophy of mathematics, expounded for the first time in Logische Untersuchungen and maintained without any essential change throughout the rest of his life. It is shown that Husserl's views on mathematics were strongly influenced by Riemann, and had clear affinities with the much later Bourbaki school.

Multivariate repeated measures designs

In the social, behavioral, and health researches it is a common strategy to collect data along time on more than one group of participants on multiple dependent variables. To analyse this kind of data is very complicated due to the correlations between the measures taken in different points of the time, and between the answers. Usually to analyse these data the multivariate mixed model, or the doubly multivariate model, are the most frequent approaches. Both of them require combined multivariate normality, equal covariance matrices, independence between the observations of different participants, complete measurements on all subjects, and time-independent covariates. When one ore more of these assumptions are not accomplished these approaches do not control in the correct way the Type I error, and this affects the validity and the accuracy of the inferences. In this paper some solutions that solve the problems with the error Type I will be shown. Several programs for a correct realization of the analyses through the SAS Proc Mixed procedure are presented.