Is reasoning from counterfactual antecedents evidence for counterfactual reasoning?

In most developmental studies the only error children could make on counterfactual tasks was to answer with the current state of affairs. It was concluded that children who did not show this error are able to reason counterfactually. However, children might have avoided this error by using basic conditional reasoning (Rafetseder, Cristi-Vargas, & Perner, 2010). Basic conditional reasoning takes an antecedent, which like in counterfactual reasoning can be counter to fact, and combines it with a conditional (or set of conditionals reflecting knowledge of how the world works) to draw a likely conclusion. A critical feature of counterfactual reasoning then is that these additional assumptions be modelled after the actual events to which the counterfactual is taken to be counterfactual. In contrast in basic conditional reasoning one enriches the given antecedent with any plausible assumptions. In our tasks basic conditional reasoning leads to different answers than counterfactual reasoning. For instance, a doctor, sitting in the park with the intention to read a paper, is called to an emergency at the swimming pool. The question, "if there had been no emergency, where would the doctor be?" should counterfactually be answered "in the park". But ignoring the doctor's intentions and just reasoning on plausible grounds one might answer: "in the hospital". Only by 6 years, did children give mostly correct answers.     

Perspective taking and cognitive flexibility in the Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) task

In a study with 79 3-year-olds, we confirm earlier findings that separating the sorting dimensions improve children's performance on the Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) task. We also demonstrate that the central reason for this facilitation is that the two sorting dimensions are not integral features of a single object. Spatial separation of the sorting dimensions has no additional significant influence. This finding highlights the important role of objects with respect to children's attentional flexibility. Implications for current theories on the DCCS task and for the development of perspective taking and cognitive flexibility are discussed.     

Reappraising faces: effects on accountability appraisals,self-reported valence,and pupil diameter

Many of our emotions arise in social contexts, as we interact with and learn about others. What is not yet clear, however, is how such emotions unfold when we either react to others or attempt to regulate our emotions. To address this issue, 30 healthy volunteers reacted to or reappraised positive or negative information that was paired with neutral faces. While they were doing this task, we assessed pupillary responses. We also asked participants to provide ratings of accountability and experienced emotion. Findings indicated that appraised accountability increased in response to emotional information, and changes in accountability were associated with commensurate changes in valence reports and increased pupil diameter. During reappraisal, accountability and emotion decreased, but pupil diameter increased. The findings highlight the importance of accountability appraisals during the generation and regulation of emotional reactions to others, while also documenting pupillary increases during emotional reactivity and regulation.     

Social representations of organ donors and non‐donors

This paper illustrates the empirical investigation of social representations by means of photographs as stimulus material and the technique of correspondence analysis to study the resulting data. The research was part of a campaign carried out to promote organ donation in Malta. The study tries to find out whether a public communication campaign could change perceptions. Five focus groups were held before the campaign and another five, two months after the campaign. Part of the data collected through these focus groups was analysed using correspondence analysis. The results showed that before the campaign, donors were generally perceived to be either young or important people or public personalities. After the campaign, donors were perceived more to be ordinary family people, educated, generous and religious. On the other hand, before the campaign, non‐donors were seen as conservative, uncouth and uncaring, whereas after the campaign non‐donors were generally perceived to be older, uninformed and uneducated people. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Working memory capacity and the antisaccade task: individual differences in voluntary saccade control

Performance on antisaccade trials requires the inhibition of a prepotent response (i.e., don't look at the flashing cue) and the generation and execution of a correct saccade in the opposite direction. The authors attempted to further specify the role of working memory (WM) span differences in the antisaccade task. They tested high- and low-span individuals on variants of prosaccade and antisaccade trials in which an eye movement is the sole requirement. In 3 experiments, they demonstrated the importance of WM span differences in both suppression of a reflexive saccade and generation of a volitional eye movement. The results support the contention that individual differences in WM span are not exclusively due to differences in inhibition but also reflect differences in directing the focus of attention.     

Dissociating size representation for action and for conscious judgment: Grasping visual illusions without apparent obstacles

Visual illusions provide important evidence for the co-existence of unconscious and conscious representations. Objects surrounded by other figures (e.g., a disc surrounded by smaller or larger rings, Ebbinghaus/Titchener illusion) are consciously perceived as different in size, while the visuo-motor system supposedly uses an unconscious representation of the discs' true size for grip size scaling. Recent evidence suggests other factors than represented size, e.g., surrounding rings conceived as obstacles, affect grip size. Use of the diagonal illusion avoids visual obstacles in the path of the reaching hand. Results support the dual representation theory. Grip size scaling follows actual size independent of illusory effects, which clearly bias conscious perception in direct comparisons of lengths (Experiment 1) and in finger-thumb span indications of perceived length (Experiment 2).     

Early pavlovian studies on the effects of starvation

This communication is based on the pioneering studies performed by I. P. Pavlov’s associates, Yu. P. Frolov (in 1918) and I. S. Rozental’ (in 1918/1919) at the Institute of Experimental Medicine, in Petrograd. The changes in the “independent variable”—the dogs’ diet—were not planned but were the consequences of severe shortages of food for man and beast. The principal generalization concerns the order in which different forms of “complex nervous activity” were impaired: the order is opposite to the order in which they emerge in the process of ontogenesis. First to suffer was “internal inhibition,” as documented by the failure of stimulus differentiation. This was followed by the decrease in the magnitude of well-established conditional responses (CRs). As a result of a more severe impairment of the excitatory processes, it became difficult or impossible to establish new CRs. In time, previously established CRs to artificial stimuli, visual and acoustic, disappeared totally. The CRs to natural conditional stimuli (CSs) were maintained fairly well but, eventually, they too decreased markedly. In the terminal phase of starvation, the unconditional salivary reflexes continued to function, although their magnitude was depressed.     

Misinformation and unexpected change: Testing the development of epistemic-state attribution

Summary Children's ability to infer a person's ignorance and false belief was tested in two stories which differed as to the relative ease for making these inferences. In the Unexpected Change story ignorance could be directly inferred from the emphasized fact that the target character had not witnessed the change, while false belief required the additional inference that the character would assume that things would stay as they had been initially. In the Misinformation Story false belief was made directly accessible by the content of a false message, while ignorance was not directly indicated by absence of information. It needed to be inferred from the fact that the available information was misleading. Results from 3- and 4-year-old Austrian and English children showed that manipulation of inferential difficulty did not affect their ability to make epistemic state attribution. In both stories children found it easier to attribute ignorance than false belief. To integrate this finding in the larger developmental context we suggest that children younger than 4 years find it difficult to distinguish between knowledge and ignorance because they do not understand the role of informational access in the formation of knowledge and they fail in false-belief attribution because they do not understand that incompatible truth values can be assigned to propositions.     

Syntely: Paradigm for an inductive psychology of memory,perception, and thinking

Two experiments investigated the effects of stimulus structure and human memory on human expectancy and concept formation. Sequences of binary events, Xs and Os, were given for inductive prediction and continuation under conditions of discrete (Experiment 1) and continuous (Experiment 2) presentation. The results of both experiments supported an interpretation that people base their predictions on a specific kind of structure found in binary sequences calledsyntely: the proportion of all earlier subsequences that match the end subsequences and also support the continuation of the terminal run of a binary sequence. An analysis of the concept formation process in terms of inductive cues and evidence is provided