Phonological recoding and lexical access

Four experiments are reported that examine the effects of homophony (e.g., SAIL/SALE) on response latency in a lexical decision task. The results indicated that an effect of homophony was evident only if the nonword distractors consisted of legal, pronounceable strings (e.g., SLINT), but that this effect disappeared if the nonwords sounded like English words (e.g., BRANE). An optional encoding strategy is proposed to account for this differential effect. It is suggested that while both graphemic and phonemic encoding occurred simultaneously, naive subjects tended to rely on the outcome of the phonological route. However, when such reliance produced a high error rate (i.e., when the nonwords sounded like English words),. these subjects were able to abandon a phonological strategy and rely on the graphemic encoding procedure instead. Two further aspects of the results are of interest. First, the less frequent member of a homophone pair was slower when compared with a control item if the nonword distractors were of the SLINT type, but not different if they were of the BRANE type. The high-frequency members did not differ from their controls in either nonword environment. Second, in a homophone “repetition” experiment, the frequency order of presentation within pairs of homophones (i.e., the high-frequency member followed by the low-frequency member, or vice versa) had a substantial effect. A spelling recheck procedure and a response-inhibitory mechanism are postulated to incorporate these effects into a dual-encoding direct-access model of word recognition.     

EYEMOVEMENT AND PERCEPTUAL ADAPTATION TO CURVATURE

It is proposed that perceptual adaptation is basically an immediate localized consequence of stimulation but can become generalized through a process of conditioning by temporal contiguity. Experimental conditions were designed to assess the aftereffect of adaptation to curvature under various combinations of eye position and eye movement activity for adapting vs. test periods. In general, the results support the hypothesis that perceptual adaptation to a visual stimulus can be associated with the nonvisual factors present at the time the adaptation occurs.     

A further study of stimulus generalization following three-stimulus discrimination training

A group of pigeons was trained in a Skinner box to peck for VI reinforcement when the key was illuminated by a monochromatic light of 540 or 580 mμ but were non-reinforced for responding to 560 mμ. Two control groups, differing in amount of training, received only the two positive stimuli. At the completion of training all Ss received generalization tests under extinction. Both control groups produced bi-modal generalization gradients with the peaks of responding at the S+ values. The post-discrimination gradient revealed peaks displaced from the S+ values in the direction away from the S−, low responding and increased steepness in the region of S− and a general elevation of the gradient.     

Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: The Use and Abuse of Examples

The philosophical debate over the compatibility between causaldeterminism and moral responsibility relies heavily on ourreactions to examples. Although we believe that there is noalternative to this methodology in this area of philosophy, someexamples that feature prominently in the literature are positivelymisleading. In this vein, we criticize the use that incompatibilistsmake of the phenomenon of ``brainwashing,' as well as the Frankfurt-styleexamples favored by compatibilists. We provide an instance of thekind of thought experiment that is needed to genuinely test thehypothesis that moral accountability and causal determinism arecompatible.     

Philosophy as Anti-Religion in the Work of Alain Badiou

The Heideggerian rupture in the history of philosophy in the name of a phenomenological and poetic ontology has provided an opening which many of the key figures in twentieth century continental thought have exploited. However, this opening was marked by Heidegger himself as an ambiguous one, insofar as metaphysics was perhaps integrally ‘onto-theology,’ that is, ultimately continuous with the world-historical capture of the thought of being. This piece argues that the philosophy of Alain Badiou, which departs from the recognition that Heidegger is the ‘last universally recognised philosopher’, provides the means for a radical reconsideration of the philosophy-theology relationship in its specifically Heideggerian form, involving as it does further questions of science and technology, the status of the poem, and the nature of ontological thought as such. We argue that, through the deployment of mathematics as ontology, the Gordian knot of onto-theology and its legion of consequences can be cut, and a new assemblage of many of the key Heideggerian motifs can be put into play: the poem, history, and philosophy itself.

R34D1NG W0RD5 W1TH NUMB3R5

Letter identities and number identities are usually thought to imply different cortical mechanisms. Specifically, the left fusiform gyrus responds more to letters than to digits (T. A. Polk et al., 2002). However, a widely circulated statement on the internet illustrates that it is possible to use numbers (leet digits) as parts of words, 4ND TH3 R35ULT1NG S3NT3NC3 C4N B3 R34D W1TH0UT GR34T 3FF0RT. Two masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to determine whether leet digits produce (automatic) lexical activation. Results showed that words are identified substantially faster when they are preceded by a masked leet word (M4T3R14L-MATERIAL) than when they are preceded by a control condition with other letters or digits. In addition, there was only a negligible advantage of the identity condition over the related leet condition. This leet-priming effect is not specific to numbers: A prime in which leet digits are replaced by letter-like symbols (M(Delta symbol)T(euro symbol)R!(Delta symbol)L - MATERIAL) facilitates word processing to the same degree as an identity prime. Therefore, the cognitive system regularizes the shape of the leet digits and letter-like symbols embedded in words with very little cost.     

A principal components analysis of dynamic spatial memory biases

Research has shown that spatial memory for moving targets is often biased in the direction of implied momentum and implied gravity, suggesting that representations of the subjective experiences of these physical principles contribute to such biases. The present study examined the association between these spatial memory biases. Observers viewed targets that moved horizontally from left to right before disappearing or viewed briefly shown stationary targets. After a target disappeared, observers indicated the vanishing position of the target. Principal components analysis revealed that biases along the horizontal axis of motion loaded on separate components from biases along the vertical axis orthogonal to motion. The findings support the hypothesis that implied momentum and implied gravity biases have unique influences on spatial memory.     

Using FMRI to test models of complex cognition

This article investigates the potential of fMRI to test assumptions about different components in models of complex cognitive tasks. If the components of a model can be associated with specific brain regions, one can make predictions for the temporal course of the BOLD response in these regions. An event-locked procedure is described for dealing with temporal variability and bringing model runs and individual data trials into alignment. Statistical methods for testing the model are described that deal with the scan-to-scan correlations in the errors of measurement of the BOLD signal. This approach is illustrated using a "sacrificial" ACT-R model that involves mapping 6 modules onto 6 brain regions in an experiment from Ravizza, Anderson, and Carter (in press) concerned with equation solving. The model's visual encoding predicted the BOLD response in the fusiform gyrus, its controlled retrieval predicted the BOLD response in the lateral inferior prefrontal cortex, and its subgoal setting predicted the BOLD response in the anterior cingulate cortex. On the other hand, its motor programming failed to predict anticipatory activation in the motor cortex, its representational changes failed to predicted the pattern of activity in the posterior parietal cortex, and its procedural component failed to predict an initial spike in caudate. The results illustrate the power of such data to direct the development of a theory of complex problem solving, both at the level of a specific task model as well as at the level of the cognitive architecture.     

In the footsteps of biological motion and multisensory perception: judgments of audiovisual temporal relations are enhanced for upright walkers

Observers judged whether a periodically moving visual display (point-light walker) had the same temporal frequency as a series of auditory beeps that in some cases coincided with the apparent footsteps of the walker. Performance in this multisensory judgment was consistently better for upright point-light walkers than for inverted point-light walkers or scrambled control stimuli, even though the temporal information was the same in the three types of stimuli. The advantage with upright walkers disappeared when the visual "footsteps" were not phase-locked with the auditory events (and instead offset by 50% of the gait cycle). This finding indicates there was some specificity to the naturally experienced multisensory relation, and that temporal perception was not simply better for upright walkers per se. These experiments indicate that the gestalt of visual stimuli can substantially affect multisensory judgments, even in the context of a temporal task (for which audition is often considered dominant). This effect appears to be constrained by the ecological validity of the particular pairings.