Sequence Encoders Enable Large-Scale Lexical Modeling: Reply to Bowers and Davis (2009)

Sibley, Kello, Plaut, and Elman (2008) proposed the sequence encoder as a model that learns fixed-width distributed representations of variable-length sequences. In doing so, the sequence encoder overcomes problems that have restricted models of word reading and recognition to processing only monosyllabic words. Bowers and Davis (2009) recently claimed that the sequence encoder does not actually overcome the relevant problems, and hence it is not a useful component of large-scale word-reading models. In this reply, it is noted that the sequence encoder has facilitated the creation of large-scale word-reading models. The reasons for this success are explained and stand as counterarguments to claims made by Bowers and Davis.     

Conceptualization and measurement of temporal focus: The subjective experience of the past,present, and future

Temporal focus is the attention individuals devote to thinking about the past, present, and future, and the concept is important because it affects how people incorporate perceptions about past experiences, current situations, and future expectations into their attitudes, cognitions, and behavior. However, temporal focus has not been clearly defined nor situated in a nomological network of constructs. In addition, existing measures of temporal focus suffer from various shortcomings. In this paper, we advance the concept of temporal focus by critically examining its conceptualization, developing a new measure of temporal focus (Temporal Focus Scale; TFS), and evaluating the validity (i.e., construct, convergent, discriminant, nomological, and predictive validity) of the TFS across four studies. We conclude that understanding how individuals focus their attention toward the past, present, and future clarifies their responses to explicit and implicit temporal information, which suggests that a variety of research streams would benefit from incorporating the concept of temporal focus.     

Anesthesiological ethics: can informed consent be implied?

Surgical ethics is a well-recognized field in clinical ethics, distinct from medical ethics. It includes at least a dozen important issues common to surgery that do not exist in internal medicine simply because of the differences in their practices. But until now there has been a tendency to include ethical issues of anesthesiology as a part of surgical ethics. This may mask the importance of ethical issues in anesthesiology, and even help perpetuate an unfortunate view that surgeons are "captain of the ship" in the operating theater (leaving anesthesiologists in a subservient role). We will have a better ethical understanding if we see surgery and anesthesia as two equal partners, ethically as well as in terms of patient care. Informed consent is one such issue, but it is not limited to that. Even on the topic of what type of anesthesia to use, anesthesiologists have often felt subsumed to the surgeon's preferences. This commentary takes the case study and uses it as a exemplar for this very claim: it is time to give due recognition for a new field in clinical ethics, ethics in anesthesia.     

(Implicitly) judging a book by its cover: the power of pride and shame expressions in shaping judgments of social status

How do we decide who merits social status? According to functionalist theories of emotion, the nonverbal expressions of pride and shame play a key role, functioning as automatically perceived status signals. In this view, observers automatically make status inferences about expressers on the basis of these expressions, even when contradictory contextual information about the expressers' status is available. In four studies, the authors tested whether implicit and explicit status perceptions are influenced by pride and shame expressions even when these expressions' status-related messages are contradicted by contextual information. Results indicate that emotion expressions powerfully influence implicit and explicit status inferences, at times neutralizing or even overriding situational knowledge. These findings demonstrate the irrepressible communicative power of emotion displays and indicate that status judgments can be informed as much (and often more) by automatic responses to nonverbal expressions of emotion as by rational, contextually bound knowledge.     

When family considerations influence work decisions: Decision-making processes

The work–family literature has provided an abundance of evidence that various family factors are linked to various work decisions, suggesting that the “family-relatedness” of work decisions is a prevalent phenomenon (Greenhaus & Powell, 2012). However, the cognitive processes by which such linkages occur have received little attention. We offer a framework by which to examine individuals' decision-making processes when they take family considerations into account in their work decisions. The framework suggests stages through which individuals proceed when making a work decision that takes family considerations into account and cognitive processes that influence how they proceed through each stage.     

Cultural Diversity and Patients with Reduced Capacity: The Use of Ethics Consultation to Advocate for Mentally Handicapped Persons in Living Organ Donation

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - Living organ donation will soon become the source of the majority of organs donations for transplant. Should mentally handicapped people be allowed to donate,...     

A New View of Meditation

After years of meditating, are you still saddled with many of the same personal conflicts and interpersonal inhibitions that plagued you before you began? Rubin explores the hidden flaws in the meditative method itself. He explores Buddhism's ambivalent relationship to emotional life, and the negative consequences of letting go of experience. Detaching from experience may result in renouncing vital aspects of ourselves, such as constructive passion. The author argues that real meditation is transformative not tranquilizing, fostering a dynamic way of living.     

Auditory spatial attention capture,disengagement, and response selection in normal aging

Attention control is a core element of cognitive aging, but the specific mechanisms that differ with age are unclear. Here we used a novel auditory spatial attention task to evaluate stimulus processing at the level of early attention capture, later response selection, and the lingering effects of attention capture across trials in young and older adults. We found that the shapes of spatial attention capture gradients were remarkably similar in young and older adults, but only the older group had lingering effects of attention capture on the next trial. Response selection for stimulus-response incompatibilities took longer in older subjects, but primarily when attending to the midline location. The results suggest that the likelihood and spatial tuning of attention capture is comparable among groups, but once attention is captured, older subjects take longer to disengage. Age differences in response selection were supported, but may not be a general feature of cognitive aging.     

An association between the DAT1 polymorphism and smoking behavior in young adults from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

Associations between smoking behavior and polymorphisms in the dopaminergic genes (DAT1 and DRD2) were tested by using within- and between-family measures of allelic transmission in 2,448 young adults from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The 9-repeat allele of the dopamine transporter gene polymorphism (DAT1) was inversely associated with smoking in samples that included all subjects and only those who had initiated smoking, accounting for approximately 1% of the variance. Never smokers and current nonsmokers had an excess transmission of the 9-repeat allele compared with regular smokers, suggesting a protective effect of the 9-repeat allele, which is hypothesized to alter synaptic dopamine levels.     

Effect of anxiety reduction on children's school performance and social adjustment

This study tested the effect of reductions in children's anxiety over time on improvements in school performance and social functioning in the context of participation in a cognitive-behavioral intervention program. Participants included 40 children with high anxiety (6-13 years of age). Independent evaluators, children, and parents rated child anxiety; parents rated school performance; and children and parents rated social functioning. Measures were completed at preintervention, midintervention, and postintervention. Fixed-effects regression analyses and random-effects regression analyses indicated that decreased anxiety was predictive of improved school performance and social functioning over the course of the intervention. These findings suggest that changes in anxiety influence trajectories of children's scholastic and social functioning.