Tatsachen und Theorien der Formbildung als Weg zum Lebensproblem

Ohne Zusammenfassung Die folgende Abhandlung ist die bedeutend erweiterte Ausarbeitung eines Vortrages, welcher am 9. Januar 1929 in einer Allgemeinen Versammlung der Zoologisch-Botanischen Gesellschaft in Wien, am 15. Oktober 1929 vor der Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie in Berlin und am 30. Oktober 1929 in der Kantgesellschaft Karlsruhe gehalten wurde. Bei der Ausarbeitung wurde vor allem Bedacht genommen, Tatsachen und Theorien, die sich bereits in des Verf.s „Kritischer Theorie der Formbildung” (Schaxels Abh. z. th. B. 27, Berlin 1928) dargestellt finden, nur kurz zu behandeln, andererseits aber das genannte Werk hier durch die Verarbeitung der dort noch nicht behandelten Ergebnisse zu erg?nzen. Auch in die Literaturangabe wurden im allgemeinen nur an jenem Orte nicht angegebene Werke aufgenommen. Auf das erw?hnte Buch, das eine umfassende, kritische Darstellung der Theorien der Formbildung zum Ziele hat, sei hier ein für allemal hingewiesen.     

2017: The Quincentennial Celebration of the Reformation in an Age of Secularization and Religious Pluralism

In the last days of October 1517 Martin Luther finished a series of theological theses in which he argued that selling indulgences was theologically wrong; in fact, untenable. Protestants consider Luther's initiative the beginning of the Reformation. But how should we celebrate the memory of these events that took place 500 years ago? What is the lasting value of Luther's message in our time, in an age of secularization and religious pluralism?     

Memory distortion and attitude change—Two routes to cognitive balance

We report novel research investigating memory distortion as an alternative route to cognitive balance, comparing it with attitude change as a well‐known balancing mechanism. Participants received statements from multiple communicators about a controversial topic (national pride in Study 1 and climate protection in Study 2) and remembered these statements immediately or 1 week later. This resulted in initially balanced or unbalanced combinations of the liking for individual communicators and the communicators' statements and in subsequent balance increases due to liking change or misremembering of statements. The contribution of memory distortion to balance was significant but weaker and less efficient than that of liking change, and the contributions were empirically independent (i.e., uncorrelated and differentially related to third variables—specifically, memory strength and individual cognitive consistency motivation). They also had a different temporal trajectory (liking change fast and memory distortion slow). We discuss theoretical and practical implications.     

Strategy and Misdirection in Forced Choice Memory Performance Testing in Deception Detection

We examined forced choice memory performance testing in deception detection from a theoretical perspective. Evidence suggests that participants form different strategies to defeat this test. We attempted to describe these strategies within the framework of Cognitive Hierarchy Theory, a theory that distinguishes strategies based on their degree of anticipation of opponents' strategies. Additionally, we explored whether the strategy selection process is malleable. Truth tellers and liars were subjected to a forced choice memory test about a mock crime. Additionally, half of the sample was subjected to a misdirection changing the appearance of the test to that of a polygraph examination. We found detection accuracies and strategies similar to previous experiments and our misdirection manipulation elicited new strategies and behaviour. Theoretical and practical applications are discussed.Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Big brains are not enough: performance of three parrot species in the trap-tube paradigm

The trap-tube task has become a benchmark test for investigating physical causality in vertebrates. In this task, subjects have to retrieve food out of a horizontal tube using a tool and avoiding a trap hole in the tube. Great apes and corvids succeeded in this task. Parrots with relative brain volumes comparable to those of corvids and primates also demonstrate high cognitive abilities. We therefore tested macaws, a cockatoo, and keas on the trap-tube paradigm. All nine parrots failed to solve the task. In a simplified task, trap tubes with a slot inserted along the top were offered. The slot allowed the birds to move the reward directly with their bills. All but one individual solved this task by lifting the food over the trap. However, the parrots failed again when they were prevented from lifting the reward, although they anticipated that food will be lost when moved into the trap. We do not think that the demanding use of an external object is the main reason for the parrots’ failure. Moreover, we suppose these parrots fail to consider the trap’s position in the beginning of a trial and were not able to stop their behaviour and move the reward in the trap’s opposite direction.     

Religion in a private igloo? A critical dialogue with Richard Rorty

It is still a popular philosophical position to call for a strict “separationism” concerning the private and the public sphere when it comes to religious convictions. Richard Rorty is one prominent supporter of this claim. The traditional critique against this division is mostly built on a particular characterization of religion that is at odds with Rortian assumptions. In this article, however, Rorty is criticized on his own terms turning pragmatically the objection to a fully internal one. What Rorty values most, namely a tolerant and ironic liberalism as the capacity to describe oneself in new and interesting ways is precisely the role, I argue, that religious faith could play under “neo-liberal” conditions.     

Bayesian and maximum likelihood estimation of hierarchical response time models

Hierarchical (or multilevel) statistical models have become increasingly popular in psychology in the last few years. In this article, we consider the application of multilevel modeling to the ex-Gaussian, a popular model of response times. We compare single-level and hierarchical methods for estimation of the parameters of ex-Gaussian distributions. In addition, for each approach, we compare maximum likelihood estimation with Bayesian estimation. A set of simulations and analyses of parameter recovery show that although all methods perform adequately well, hierarchical methods are better able to recover the parameters of the ex-Gaussian, by reducing variability in the recovered parameters. At each level, little overall difference was observed between the maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods.     

Visual categorization of natural stimuli by domestic dogs

One of the fundamental issues in the study of animal cognition concerns categorization. Although domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) are on the brink to become one of the model animals in animal psychology, their categorization abilities are unknown. This is probably largely due to the absence of an adequate method for testing dogs’ ability to discriminate between large sets of pictures in the absence of human cueing. Here we present a computer-automated touch-screen testing procedure, which enabled us to test visual discrimination in dogs while social cueing was ruled out. Using a simultaneous discrimination procedure, we first trained dogs (N = 4) to differentiate between a set of dog pictures (N = 40) and an equally large set of landscape pictures. All subjects learned to discriminate between the two sets and showed successful transfer to novel pictures. Interestingly, presentation of pictures providing contradictive information (novel dog pictures mounted on familiar landscape pictures) did not disrupt performance, which suggests that the dogs made use of a category-based response rule with classification being coupled to category-relevant features (of the dog) rather than to item-specific features (of the background). We conclude that dogs are able to classify photographs of natural stimuli by means of a perceptual response rule using a newly established touch-screen procedure. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.