SCEPTICISM AND THE IMAGINATION MODEL OF DREAMING

As a solution to dream scepticism, Ernest Sosa has argued that when we dream, we do not believe the contents of our dreams, but rather imagine them. Thus dreams do not cause false beliefs; so my beliefs cannot be false as a result of being caused by dreams. I argue that even assuming that Sosa is correct about the nature of dream experience, belief in wakefulness on these grounds is epistemically irresponsible. The proper upshot of the imagination model is to recharacterize the way we think about dream scepticism: the sceptical threat is not that we have false beliefs. So even though dreams do not involve false beliefs, they still pose a sceptical threat, which I elaborate.     

Cooperative strain accommodation over grains in martensitic transformation from Fe-Ni nanocrystalline austenite

This paper reports an investigation of martensitic transformation behaviour from austenite with various grain sizes ranging from 290 nm to 34 μm in an Fe–Ni alloy fabricated by electrodeposition and subsequent heat treatment. We confirmed that martensite morphology changed from lath to thin plate with decreasing the austenite grain size. Crystallographic orientation analysis revealed that the variants of thin plate martensite formed in the austenite with relatively coarse grains achieved self-accommodation of the transformation strain inside one austenite grain. In contrast, the transformation strain accompanying martensitic transformation from the ultrafine-grained or nanocrystalline austenite was not accommodated by the martensite variants formed in one austenite grain but accommodated cooperatively by those formed in the several adjacent austenite grains.     

Quantifiers and epistemic contextualism

I defend a neo-Lewisean form of contextualism about knowledge attributions. Understanding the context-sensitivity of knowledge attributions in terms of the context-sensitivity of universal quantifiers provides an appealing approach to knowledge. Among the virtues of this approach are solutions to the skeptical paradox and the Gettier problem. I respond to influential objections to Lewis’s account.     

Eyeblink activity as an index of cognitive processing: temporal distribution of eyeblinks as an indicator of expectancy in semantic priming

Eyeblink activity was examined as a psychophysiological index of cognitive processing during a typical semantic priming task. To examine the expectancy-induced effects, the proportion of semantically related pairs was controlled. 8 undergraduates engaged in a lexical decision task for target words. Each condition differed in target type (Semantically Related with prime vs Unrelated vs Nonword) and proporion of Semantically Related pairs (High vs Low). As a result, the temporal distribution of blinks was clearly influenced by the semantic priming effect. The peak of blink bursts, which is correlated with the end of cognitive processing, occurred the fastest in the semantically Related and High proportion condition. While blink latency showed larger individual differences, the temporal distribution of blinks was suggested as a more efficient index of cognitive processing.     

Knowing the intuition and knowing the counterfactual

I criticize Timothy Williamson’s characterization of thought experiments on which the central judgments are judgments of contingent counterfactuals. The fragility of these counterfactuals makes them too easily false, and too difficult to know.

Cross-cultural Protective Effects of Neighborhood Collective Efficacy on Antisocial Behaviors: Mediating Role of Social Information Processing

Studies on the prevention of antisocial behavior in neighborhoods through efficacious social control have focused on collective efficacy as the theoretical mechanism by which children at the community level can be successfully socialized to develop an aversion to antisocial behaviors. We hypothesized that the effect of collective efficacy within communities on antisocial behaviors could be mediated by social-information-processing biases and tested the generality of these mediation effects for undergraduates (N = 929) in Japan, China, South Korea, and the United States, countries with widely varying cultures and political systems. Structural equation modeling revealed that the effects of collective efficacy on antisocial behaviors were perfectly mediated by social-information-processing biases. Findings also confirmed the generality of these mediational effects in all four countries investigated.     

The Effect of Informative and Uninformative Cueing of Attention on Feature Integration

In the present study, the authors observed the effect of informative and uninformative attentional cueing on visual search for targets that were defined by a simple feature or by conjunctions of features. Three different types of attentional cueing were tested in three experiments: peripheral informative cueing, peripheral uninformative cueing, and central informative cueing. Participants showed a greater effect of cueing in detecting a conjunction of features than in detecting unique features only when attention was oriented by either peripheral or central informative cueing. This differential cueing effect was not observed when attention was oriented by peripheral uninformative cueing. The results suggest that voluntarily oriented attention plays a more important role in feature integration than automatically oriented attention does. The results also pose limits on the generalizability of K. A. Briand's (1998) proposal regarding the role of automatically oriented attention in feature integration.     

Infants recognize identity in a dynamic facial animation that simultaneously changes its identity and expression

Recognition of facial identity and facial expression have been reported to be correlated. Previous studies using static facial photographs reported that identity recognition was not interfered by task-irrelevant change of facial expression but that expression recognition was interfered by task-irrelevant change of facial identity. In this study, we created dynamic morphing animations that simultaneously changes facial identity and expression to investigate the interaction between identity and expression recognition. We tested 7 –8-month-old infants who were around the age at which the recognition of facial expression develops. Using the familiarization–novelty preference procedure, we examined whether infants could learn identity and facial expression from morphing animation. We found that infants learned identity but not expression from the morphing animation. Our results demonstrate that the interaction between identity and expression occurs differently in infancy than in adults when both the dimension of facial identity and the expression vary simultaneously.     

Dislocation core structures in GaN grown on Si(111) substrate

The Ga-N bond extension and compression at the cores of different types of dislocation in hexagonal GaN films grown on Si(111) substrates have been studied by high-resolution transmission electron microscopy. The relative bond extension and compression are about 6 4 and 7 4% respectively around the cores of mixed dislocations and about 9 6 and 12 7% respectively around the cores of pure edge dislocations. The core structure of a pure edge dislocation is an eightfold atom-column ring.