Encoding strategies in self-initiated visual working memory

During a typical day, visual working memory (VWM) is recruited to temporarily maintain visual information. Although individuals often memorize external visual information provided to them, on many other occasions they memorize information they have constructed themselves. The latter aspect of memory, which we term self-initiated WM, is prevalent in everyday behavior but has largely been overlooked in the research literature. In the present study we employed a modified change detection task in which participants constructed the displays they memorized, by selecting three or four abstract shapes or real-world objects and placing them at three or four locations in a circular display of eight locations. Half of the trials included identical targets that participants could select. The results demonstrated consistent strategies across participants. To enhance memory performance, participants reported selecting abstract shapes they could verbalize, but they preferred real-world objects with distinct visual features. Furthermore, participants constructed structured memory displays, most frequently based on the Gestalt organization cue of symmetry, and to a lesser extent on cues of proximity and similarity. When identical items were selected, participants mostly placed them in close proximity, demonstrating the construction of configurations based on the interaction between several Gestalt cues. The present results are consistent with recent findings in VWM, showing that memory for visual displays based on Gestalt organization cues can benefit VWM, suggesting that individuals have access to metacognitive knowledge on the benefit of structure in VWM. More generally, this study demonstrates how individuals interact with the world by actively structuring their surroundings to enhance performance.     

On the Asymmetry between Twin Earth and Inverted Earth

A crucial disanalogy between Twin Earth and Inverted Earth undermines qualia‐internalism. A recent transplant to Inverted Earth has been equipped with color‐inverting contact lenses, so that she is unable to see the colors of objects whereas a recent transplant to Twin Earth can see twater. It is implausible to think that time alone could rectify this perceptual shortcoming – that the passage of time could alter the contents of her visual perceptions or the meaning of her color terms. Thus, the thought experiment does not refute the close tie between phenomenology and representation in the case of color.     

Morphological Processing in Adult Dyslexia

This study employed the masked-priming paradigm [Forster and Davis (J Exp Psychol bearn Mem Cogn 10: 680–698, 1984).], along with traditional methods of evaluation of morphological awareness and phonological processing, to obtain a finer-grained picture of the relationship between morphological abilities and reading in adult dyslexic readers. Participants were 21 dyslexic and 21 normally reading native Hebrew-speaking male college students. The results with masked priming demonstrated almost normal status of morphological knowledge in adult dyslexic readers with the presence of characteristic processing slowness. Phonological processing and morphological awareness were also shown to contribute primarily to word decoding in the regular and dyslexic group alike. At the same time, the contribution of different phonological skills to morphological priming effects (for pattern and root) dropped to zero. The findings demonstrated that weakness of dyslexic readers in morphological awareness tasks cannot be explained either by hypotheses on the structural deficit of morphological knowledge in dyslexia or by phonological deficit hypotheses. The explanation for this phenomenon seems to lie in the specific deficit of morphological processing, or even, more generally, in metalinguistic processing deficiency in dyslexia.     

Is Thomas Reid a Direct Realist about Perception?

The controversy over the interpretative issue—is Thomas Reid a perceptual direct realist?—has recently had channelled into it a host of imaginative ideas about what direct perception truly means. Paradoxically enough, it is the apparent contradiction at the heart of his view of perception which keeps teasing us to review our concepts: time and again, Reid stresses that the very idea of any mental intermediaries implies scepticism, yet, nevertheless insists that sensations are signs of objects. But if sensory signs are not mental intermediaries, what are they? Hasn't Reid merely swapped the common ‘sensation’ for the notorious ‘idea’, ending up with indirect realism? ^{1 1}This view is attributed to Reid by Hamilton (1865) and Mill (1877) , as well as Duggan 1960, Immerwahr 1978 , Chappell 1989 , Putnam 1994 , and Wolterstorff 2001 . Madden 1986 refuses to assign sensations any cognitive role. Others think that sensations are compatible with direct realism: See Cummins 1974, Daniels 1974, DeRose 1989, Pappas 1989, Haldane 1989, Copenhaver 2000 , and Van Cleve 2004 .
Current imaginative strategies answer negatively: Reid's sensory sign does not contradict direct perception, and those who think otherwise merely fail to understand what it means.     

Individual differences in students' retention of knowledge and conceptual structures learned in university and high school courses: the case of test anxiety

The purpose of this research was to assess individual differences in students' retention of knowledge several years after studying the material. Assessment of retention of materials as a function of students' test anxiety can allow one to evaluate whether high test-anxious students' original deficient academic performance and organization of the materials are due to a retrieval deficit or a deficit in learning and knowledge organization. In two studies, students with different test-anxiety levels completed tasks that enabled us to evaluate both students' levels of knowledge and their cognitive organization of the materials. The tasks were administered either at the end of the course, or at different retention intervals up to 7 years after the end of learning. Results indicated that whereas high test-anxious students tested at the end of the courses performed worse than other students on tests of knowledge and cognitive organization, high test-anxious students tested at various retention intervals after the courses performed as well as other students. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Estimation in self-initiated working memory for spatial locations

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - The short-term maintenance of precise location information is fundamental in many daily activities. Often, individuals memorize spatial information provided to...     

Public Lab: Community-Based Approaches to Urban and Environmental Health and Justice

This paper explores three cases of Do-It-Yourself, open-source technologies developed within the diverse array of topics and themes in the communities around the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Public Lab). These cases focus on aerial mapping, water quality monitoring and civic science practices. The techniques discussed have in common the use of accessible, community-built technologies for acquiring data. They are also concerned with embedding collaborative and open source principles into the objects, tools, social formations and data sharing practices that emerge from these inquiries. The focus is on developing processes of collaborative design and experimentation through material engagement with technology and issues of concern. Problem-solving, here, is a tactic, while the strategy is an ongoing engagement with the problem of participation in its technological, social and political dimensions especially considering the increasing centralization and specialization of scientific and technological expertise. The authors also discuss and reflect on the Public Lab’s approach to civic science in light of ideas and practices of citizen/civic veillance, or “sousveillance”, by emphasizing people before data, and by investigating the new ways of seeing and doing that this shift in perspective might provide.     

Material Objects,Constitution, and Mysterianism

It is sometimes claimed that ordinary objects, such as mountains and chairs, are not material in their own right, but only in virtue of the fact that they are constituted by matter. As Fine puts it, they are “only derivatively material” (2003, 211). In this paper I argue that invoking “constitution” to account for the materiality of things that are not material in their own right explains nothing and renders the admission that these objects are indeed material completely mysterious. Although there may be metaphysical contexts in which mysterianism can be accepted with equanimity, I further argue, the question of the materiality of quotidian objects is not one of them.