The logical form of negative action sentences

It is typically assumed that actions are events, but there is a growing consensus that negative actions, like omissions and refrainments, are not events, but absences thereof. If so, then we must either deny the obvious, that we can exercise our agency by omitting and refrainment, or give up on event-based theories of agency. I trace the consensus to the assumption that negative action sentences are negative-existentials, and argue that this is false. The best analysis of negative action sentences treats them as quantifying over omissions and refrainments, conceived of as events.     

The psychometric function: I. Fitting, sampling, and goodness of fit

The psychometric function relates an observer’s performance to an independent variable, usually some physical quantity of a stimulus in a psychophysical task. This paper, together with its companion paper (Wichmann & Hill, 2001), describes an integrated approach to (1) fitting psychometric functions, (2) assessing the goodness of fit, and (3) providing confidence intervals for the function’s parameters and other estimates derived from them, for the purposes of hypothesis testing. The present paper deals with the first two topics, describing a constrained maximum-likelihood method of parameter estimation and developing several goodness-of-fit tests. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we deal with two specific difficulties that arise when fitting functions to psychophysical data. First, we note that human observers are prone to stimulus-independent errors (orlapses). We show that failure to account for this can lead to serious biases in estimates of the psychometric function’s parameters and illustrate how the problem may be overcome. Second, we note that psychophysical data sets are usually rather small by the standards required by most of the commonly applied statistical tests. We demonstrate the potential errors of applying traditionalX ² methods to psychophysical data and advocate use of Monte Carlo resampling techniques that do not rely on asymptotic theory. We have made available the software to implement our methods.     

Appearance and reality

There is tension between the appealing idea that visual experience puts us in touch with objective reality and the doctrine of perceptual relativity, the claim that experience varies with such factors as distance, lighting, and angle of view. In this paper I present arguments for relativity, and then go on to propose that in view of relativity, we should believe that the properties presented to us in perception are relational and viewpoint‐dependent. I conclude by sketching a theory of how we nonetheless manage to achieve contact with objective properties. According to the theory, such contact is best explained in terms of perceptual representations acting in concert with cognitive and motoric representations, not in terms of perceptual representations alone.     

Examining the effects of frustration on working memory capacity

The present study attempts to expand our understanding of frustration, clinical symptoms, and working memory by examining the unique contribution of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms and frustration to working memory capacity (WMC). A factor-analytic framework was utilized to isolate and examine WMC based on results from three working memory tasks that were administered in counterbalanced order to control for individual differences in baseline WMC. All participants provided subjective ratings of frustration both prior to and after administration of a frustration induction. Results suggest that although we were able to systematically induce subjective frustration for participants in the experimental group relative to the control group, WMC was not associated with induced frustration in the present study. Results also indicated that inattention symptoms predicted baseline frustration levels. This work highlights the need to examine the extent to which storage/rehearsal WMC and additional process-oriented working memory-related performance variables are related to frustration. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.