Limitations of gaze transfer: Without visual context,eye movements do not to help to coordinate joint action,whereas mouse movements do

Remote cooperation can be improved by transferring the gaze of one participant to the other. However, based on a partner's gaze, an interpretation of his communicative intention can be difficult. Thus, gaze transfer has been inferior to mouse transfer in remote spatial referencing tasks where locations had to be pointed out explicitly. Given that eye movements serve as an indicator of visual attention, it remains to be investigated whether gaze and mouse transfer differentially affect the coordination of joint action when the situation demands an understanding of the partner's search strategies. In the present study, a gaze or mouse cursor was transferred from a searcher to an assistant in a hierarchical decision task. The assistant could use this cursor to guide his movement of a window which continuously opened up the display parts the searcher needed to find the right solution. In this context, we investigated how the ease of using gaze transfer depended on whether a link could be established between the partner's eye movements and the objects he was looking at. Therefore, in addition to the searcher's cursor, the assistant either saw the positions of these objects or only a grey background. When the objects were visible, performance and the number of spoken words were similar for gaze and mouse transfer. However, without them, gaze transfer resulted in longer solution times and more verbal effort as participants relied more strongly on speech to coordinate the window movement. Moreover, an analysis of the spatio-temporal coupling of the transmitted cursor and the window indicated that when no visual object information was available, assistants confidently followed the searcher's mouse but not his gaze cursor. Once again, the results highlight the importance of carefully considering task characteristics when applying gaze transfer in remote cooperation.     

On counterpossibles

The traditional Lewis–Stalnaker semantics treats all counterfactuals with an impossible antecedent as trivially or vacuously true. Many have regarded this as a serious defect of the semantics. For intuitively, it seems, counterfactuals with impossible antecedents—counterpossibles—can be non-trivially true and non-trivially false. Whereas the counterpossible "If Hobbes had squared the circle, then the mathematical community at the time would have been surprised" seems true, "If Hobbes had squared the circle, then sick children in the mountains of Afghanistan at the time would have been thrilled" seems false. Many have proposed to extend the Lewis–Stalnaker semantics with impossible worlds to make room for a non-trivial or non-vacuous treatment of counterpossibles. Roughly, on the extended Lewis–Stalnaker semantics, we evaluate a counterfactual of the form "If A had been true, then C would have been true" by going to closest world—whether possible or impossible—in which A is true and check whether C is also true in that world. If the answer is "yes", the counterfactual is true; otherwise it is false. Since there are impossible worlds in which the mathematically impossible happens, there are impossible worlds in which Hobbes manages to square the circle. And intuitively, in the closest such impossible worlds, sick children in the mountains of Afghanistan are not thrilled—they remain sick and unmoved by the mathematical developments in Europe. If so, the counterpossible "If Hobbes had squared the circle, then sick children in the mountains of Afghanistan at the time would have been thrilled" comes out false, as desired. In this paper, I will critically investigate the extended Lewis–Stalnaker semantics for counterpossibles. I will argue that the standard version of the extended semantics, in which impossible worlds correspond to maximal, logically inconsistent entities, fails to give the correct semantic verdicts for many counterpossibles. In light of the negative arguments, I will then outline a new version of the extended Lewis–Stalnaker semantics that can avoid these problems.     

Epistemic expressivism and the argument from motivation

This paper explores in detail an argument for epistemic expressivism, what we call the Argument from Motivation. While the Argument from Motivation has sometimes been anticipated, it has never been set out in detail. The argument has three premises, roughly, that certain judgments expressed in attributions of knowledge are intrinsically motivating in a distinct way (P1); that motivation for action requires desire-like states or conative attitudes (HTM); and that the semantic content of knowledge attributions cannot be specified without reference to the intrinsically motivating judgments that such attributions express (P2). We argue that these premises entail a version of ecumenical expressivism. Since the argument from motivation has not been explicitly stated before, there is no current discussion of the argument. In this paper we therefore consider and reject various objections that one might propose to the argument, including some that stem from the idea that knowledge is factive, or that knowledge involves evidence that rules out relevant alternatives. Other objections to (P1) specifically might be derived from cases of apparent lack of epistemic motivation considered in in Kvanvig (The value of knowledge and the pursuit of understanding, 2003) and Brown (Nous 42(2):167–189, 2008), as well as from general forms of externalism about epistemic motivation. We consider these and find them wanting. Finally, the paper offers some critical remarks about the prospect of denying (P2).     

Auditory distractor processing in sequential selection tasks

In this review, we analyze the cognitive processes contributing to selection in audition. In particular, we focus on the processing of auditory distractors in sequential selection paradigms in which target stimuli are accompanied by distractors. We review the evidence from two established tasks, namely the auditory negative priming and the auditory distractor–response binding task, and discuss the cognitive mechanisms contributing to the results typically observed in these tasks. In fact, several processes have been suggested as to explain how distractors are processed and handled in audition; that is, auditory distractors can be inhibited, encoded with a do-not-respond-tag, integrated into a stimulus–response episode containing the response to the target, or upheld in working memory and matched/mismatched with the following distractor. In addition, variables possibly modulating these cognitive processes are discussed. Finally, auditory distractor processing is compared with distractor processing in vision.     

Actual and Counterfactual Attitudes: Reply to Brueckner and Fischer

In a recent article, I criticized Anthony L. Brueckner and John Martin Fischer’s influential argument—appealing to the rationality of our asymmetric attitudes towards past and future pleasures—against the Lucretian claim that death and prenatal non-existence are relevantly similar. Brueckner and Fischer have replied, however, that my critique involves an unjustified shift in temporal perspectives. In this paper, I respond to this charge and also argue that even if it were correct, it would fail to defend Brueckner and Fischer’s proposal against my critique.     

ALL THE (MANY,MANY) THINGS WE KNOW: EXTENDED KNOWLEDGE*

In this paper we explore the potential bearing of the extended mind thesis—the thesis that the mind extends into the world—on epistemology. We do three things. First, we argue that the combination of the extended mind thesis and reliabilism about knowledge entails that ordinary subjects can easily come to enjoy various forms of restricted omniscience. Second, we discuss the conceptual foundations of the extended mind and knowledge debate. We suggest that the theses of extended mind and extended knowledge lead to a bifurcation with respect to the concepts of belief and knowledge. We suggest that this conceptual bifurcation supports a form of pluralism about these concepts. Third, we discuss whether something similar can be said at the metaphysical level.     

Genetic Counseling Graduate Student Debt: Impact on Program,Career and Life Choices

The cost of education is rising, increasing student financial aid and debt for students pursuing higher education. A few studies have assessed the impact of student debt in medicine, physical therapy and social work, but little is known about the impact of student debt on genetic counseling students and graduates. To address this gap in knowledge, a web-based study of 408 recent alumni of genetic counseling programs in North America was conducted to assess the impact of student debt on program, career and life choices. Over half (63 %; n?=?256/408) of the participants reported that loans were extremely important in their ability to attend their training program, with most using subsidized loans no longer available to current graduate students. While participants were generally satisfied with their genetic counseling education, 83 % (n?=?282/342) of participants with student debt reported feeling burdened by their debt, which had a median of $40,000–$50,000. This debt is relatively close to the median starting salary reported by survey participants ($45,000–$50,000), breaching the “20-10 rule” that states student debt should not exceed 20 % of annual net income. In response to this critical issue, we propose recommendations for the genetic counseling field that may help alleviate student debt impact and burden.     

Attention meets binding: Only attended distractors are used for the retrieval of event files

Response-irrelevant stimuli can be encoded with, and later on retrieve, a response given to a relevant stimulus, an effect that is called distractor–response binding. In three experiments using a prime–probe design, we investigated whether the allocation of attention modulates the processes contributing to distractor–response binding. Participants identified letters via keypresses while attending to one of two sets of simultaneously presented but response-irrelevant number stimuli. In different experiments, both spatial attention and feature-based attention were allocated to the response-irrelevant stimuli. The results showed that only attended response-irrelevant stimuli elicited effects of distractor–response binding. In particular, while the encoding of response-irrelevant stimuli and responses was not particularly affected by attention during prime processing, only attended response-irrelevant stimuli in the probe retrieved previous responses. Hence, we show that attention affects action regulation due to modulating the influence of stimulus–response binding on behavior.     

The generalization of shared reality: When communication about one target shapes evaluations of other targets

Communicators often tune their message about a target to the audience's attitude toward that target. This tuning can shape a communicator's own evaluation of the target, which reflects the creation of a shared reality with the audience. So far, evidence for shared‐reality creation has been confined to one specific target. In two experiments, we examined whether and when a shared reality would generalize to other targets. In Experiment 1, shared‐reality creation about an ambiguous sexist target generalized to the evaluation of a new ambiguous sexist target for which no audience attitude was provided. However, this happened only when there was high (vs. low) commonality with the audience regarding previous judgments. In Experiment 2, we investigated conditions for the temporal persistence of generalization. One week after message tuning to a high‐commonality audience, a shared reality generalized to a new ambiguous sexist target when participants recalled the shared‐reality creation about the initial target, but it did not generalize in conditions without such recall. Also, no generalization occurred for non‐ambiguous or non‐sexist targets. Results suggest that shared reality generalization depends on perceived commonality with the audience, recollection of shared reality at time of judgment, and similarity between new and initial targets.