Molyneux’s question and the individuation of perceptual concepts

Molyneux's Question, that is, “Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere... and the blind man made to see: Quaere, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the globe, which the cube”, was discussed by many theorists in the 17th and 18th centuries, and has recently been addressed by contemporary philosophers interested in the nature, and identity conditions, of perceptual concepts. My main concern in this paper is to argue – against Evans, Campbell, and a number of other contemporary philosophers – that a test of the sort Molyneux envisioned, at least if carefully designed and administered, can indeed be a crucial experiment for the claim that we deploy the same perceptual concepts when identifying shapes by sight and by touch. I will explore some implications of this argument for a theory of recognitional concepts. And I’ll try to trace out some unhappy consequences of various alternative views.     

Bodies at Menarche: Stories of Shame, Concealment, and Sexual Maturation

This study examines the embodied nature of menarche through a focus on themes of shame, concealment, and sexual maturation. Using a narrative analysis, it examines menarche stories of 155 undergraduates in the Pacific Northwest, USA, aged 21 years and younger, who started their periods between 1999 and 2003 and who grew up in a culture with changing attitudes and practices about women and the body. Unlike findings from past studies and those with older participants, women reported more positive experiences of menarche. While these data provide evidence for changing attitudes and practices associated with menarche, they may also reflect cultural changes that increasingly commodify the female body and encourage girls to identify the maturing female body as an asset.     

The developmental origins of cognitive vulnerability to depression: temperament, parenting, and negative life events in childhood as contributors to negative cognitive style

Cognitive models of depression have been well supported with adults, but the developmental origins of cognitive vulnerability are not well understood. The authors hypothesized that temperament, parenting, and negative life events in childhood would contribute to the development of cognitive style, with withdrawal negativity and negative parental feedback moderating the effects of negative life events to predict more depressogenic cognitive styles. These constructs were assessed in 289 children and their parents followed longitudinally from infancy to 5th grade; a subsample (n = 120) also participated in a behavioral task in which maternal feedback to child failure was observed. Results indicated that greater withdrawal negativity in interaction with negative life events was associated with more negative cognitive styles. Self-reported maternal anger expression and observed negative maternal feedback to child's failure significantly interacted with child's negative events to predict greater cognitive vulnerability. There was little evidence of paternal parenting predicting child negative cognitive style.     

Moving Beyond the Illness: Factors Contributing to Gaining and Maintaining Employment

The work presented here, exploratory in nature, uses a comparative and qualitative approach to understand the factors associated with the ability of individuals with severe and persistent mental illness to successfully gain and maintain employment. Based on open-ended interviews with individuals in an Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) program, we compare the experiences of those who have been successful gaining and maintaining employment, with those who have been successful gaining but not maintaining work, and those who have been unsuccessful gaining employment. The three groups seemed to differ in three significant ways: (1) in the ways the individuals talked about their illness, (2) in the ways the individuals talked about work, and (3) in the strategies they described for coping with bad days. In each of these areas individuals' awareness of and attitude toward their illness was significant. The findings have clear implications for agencies working to help people with severe and persistent mental illness obtain and maintain employment.     

Effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance by United States Air Force pilots

This study examined the effects of 35 h of continuous sleep deprivation on performance in a variety of cognitive tasks as well as simulated flight. Ten United States Air Force pilots completed the Multi-Attribute Task Battery (MATB), Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT), and Operation Span Task (OSPAN), as well as simulated flight at 3 h intervals over a 35 h sleep deprivation period. Performance declined on all tests after about 18–20 h of continuous sleep deprivation, although the degree to which performance degraded varied. During the second half of the sleep deprivation period, performance on the simulated flight was predicted by PVT and OSPAN reasonably well but much less so by the MATB. Variance from optimal flight performance was predicted by both PVT and OSPAN but each measure added incremental validity to the prediction. The two measures together accounted for 58% of the variance in flight performance in the second half of the sleep deprivation period.     

Graduate Pre-Selection: Some Findings and their Guidance Implications

The application forms of graduate applicants to six organisations were analysed in two investigations. In the first, those features of the forms which predicted whether they were rejected or passed on for interview were discovered. These differed across organisational type, and included aspects of the way in which the form was completed and personal background factors, as well as experience and achievement. In the second investigation, the think-aloud protocols of recruiters as they read the application forms were analysed. Inferences from information rather than the information itself predicted decisions. It is concluded that careers advisers should offer instruction on a variety of matters relating to completion of application forms; and that graduate recruiters should continue to undertake the task of pre selection rather than seeking to 'farm it out'.     

Temperament and sleep–wake behaviour from infancy to toddlerhood

Sleep–wake behaviours and temperament were examined longitudinally for trait stability and relationship to behavioural state regulation from infancy to early childhood. Subjects were 120 low‐risk, full‐term infants from a middle class sample. At 6 weeks, parents completed three consecutive days of the Baby's Day Diary which measures sleep, wake, fuss, feed and cry states and the Infant Characteristics Questionnaire. At 16 months, parents assessed sleep behaviours with the Sleep Habits Inventory and temperament with the Toddler Symptom Checklist. At 24 months, parents repeated 3 days of the Baby's Day Diary. Structural Equation Modelling was used to examine the cross‐age hypotheses for sleep–wake and temperament associations. From early infancy to toddlerhood, sleep–wake behaviours and irritable temperament were notably stable but independent in this cohort. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Grammaticality is inferred from global similarity: A reply to Kinder (2010)

Jamieson and Mewhort (2009b) proposed an account of performance in the artificial-grammar judgement-of-grammaticality task based on Hintzman's (1986) model of retrieval, Minerva 2. In the account, each letter is represented by a unique vector of random elements, and each exemplar is represented by concatenating its constituent letter vectors. Although successful in simulating several experiments, Kinder (2010) showed that the model fails for three selected experiments. We track the model's failure to a constraint introduced by concatenating letter vectors to construct the exemplar representation. To fix the problem, we use a holographic representation. Holographic representation not only provides the flexibility missing with the concatenation scheme but also acknowledges variability in what subjects notice when they inspect training exemplars. Armed with holographic representations, we show that the model successfully captures the three problematic data sets. We argue for retrospective accounts, like the present one, that acknowledge subjects' skill in drawing unexpected inferences based on memory of studied items against prospective accounts that require subjects to learn statistical regularities in the training set in anticipation of an undefined classification test.     

Word recognition in child second language learners: Evidence from cognates and false friends

We studied how Dutch children learned English as a second language (L2) in the classroom. Learners at different levels of L2 proficiency recognized words under different task conditions. Beginning learners in primary school (fifth and sixth grades) and more advanced learners in secondary school (seventh and ninth grades) made lexical decisions on words that are similar for English and Dutch in both meaning and form (“cognates”) or only in form (“false friends”). Cognates were processed faster than matched control words by all participant groups in an English lexical decision task (Experiment 1) but not in a Dutch lexical decision task (Experiment 2). An English lexical decision task that mixed cognates and false friends (Experiment 3) led to consistently longer reaction times for both item types relative to controls. Thus, children in the early stages of learning an L2 already activate word candidates in both of their languages (language-nonselective access) and respond differently to cognates in the presence or absence of false friends in the stimulus list.     

Working memory capacity and go/no-go task performance: selective effects of updating, maintenance, and inhibition

The ability to temporarily maintain information in order to successfully perform a task is important in many daily activities. However, the ability to quickly and accurately update existing mental representations in distracting situations is also imperative in many of these same circumstances. In the current studies, individuals varying in working memory capacity (WMC) performed different varieties of go/no-go tasks that have been hypothesized to measure inhibitory ability. The results indicated that low-WMC individuals relative to high-WMC individuals showed worse performance specifically in certain conditions of the conditional go/no-go task. Further analyses showed that increasing the temporal lag/number of intervening items between the previous target and the current lure had a deleterious effect on the performance of the low-WMC group only. The results indicate a relationship between WMC and the ability to selectively update, maintain, and retrieve information, especially in interference-rich conditions.