INTENTIONALISM AND THE IMAGINABILITY OF THE INVERTED SPECTRUM

Various thought-experiments have been offered as independent support for the possibility of intentionalism-defeating spectrum inversion, but they do not succeed. I refute what I take to be the four best arguments for holding that the thought-experiments do in fact provide such support: the implausible error argument, the symmetry argument, the no-inference argument and the best theory of representation argument. I thus offer a defence of intentionalism against a long-standing objection.     

Using a virtual reality system to study balance and walking in a virtual outdoor environment: a pilot study.

Falls and fall-related injuries are a major problem for elderly persons. Most falls occur during walking and turning, and the risk of falling increases when attention is diverted to something besides walking. It is often difficult to standardize methods for testing balance and fall tendency in a clinically relevant setting. We describe the development of a system using a virtual environment (VE) to assess how attention demanding and unexpected events influence a person's capacity to control balance and movement. The hardware in the system consists of a head-mounted display (HMD), a magnetic tracker system, and two SGI computers. The software consists of the image generation of the VE and the management and visualization of motion tracking data. In a preliminary pilot study eight subjects (age 23-80) participated. Each subject walked on a normal floor and was visually presented a familiar outdoor environment in the HMD. They were exposed to different unexpected events, such as a virtual snowfall and tilting of the VE. Disturbances of balance and walking patterns such as changes in speed, stride length and balance reactions like slipping were observed. Two subjects experienced symptoms of cyber sickness with a SSQ score above 25 points. Walking with sensors only did not affect walking time, but in VE the subjects generally walked more slowly. Virtual tilting of the environment had an impact on balance performance during walking. This effect was not observed while the test subjects were walking in a virtual snowfall. The model needs further development but may hold a potential for clinical use.     

“For a New World”: On the practical impulse of Husserlian theory

The thesis of this article is that in Husserlian phenomenology there is no opposition between theory and praxis. On the contrary, he understands the former to serve the latter, so as to usher in a new world. The means for doing is the phenomenological reduction or epoché. It gives the phenomenologist access to the starting point, the “first things,” and orients his/her striving towards reason and the renewal of humanity. Careful attention to the significance of the epoché also sheds light on Husserl’s understanding of the relationship of phenomenology not only to philosophy but also to the other sciences. Though an exposition of the “phenomenology of the philosophical vocation” which Husserl sketched in the 1920s, e.g., in his Kaizo articles and lectures on first philosophy, the author seeks to shore up his thesis. For Walter Biemel     

German lexical personality factors: relations with the HEXACO model

We correlated the scales of the HEXACO Personality Inventory (HEXACO‐PI) with adjective scale markers of factors previously obtained in indigenous lexical studies of personality structure in the German language. Self‐ratings obtained from a sample of 323 German participants showed a pattern of strong convergent and weak discriminant correlations, supporting the content‐based interpretation of the German lexical factors in terms of the HEXACO dimensions. Notably, convergent correlations were strong for both the broader and the narrower variants of the Honesty‐Humility factor as observed in German lexical studies. Also, convergent correlations for HEXACO Openness to Experience were, as expected, stronger for German adjectives describing a creative and intellectual orientation than for German adjectives describing intellectual ability. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Self-report measures of child and adolescent psychopathy as predictors of offending in four samples of justice-involved youth

The authors examined the relation between self-report psychopathy measures and official records of offending in four samples of justice-involved youth (total N = 447). Psychopathy measures included the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD) and a modified version of the Childhood Psychopathy Scale (mCPS). Measures of offending included the total number of preadmission arrest charges for three samples (n = 392) and the total number of offenses in the year following release for two samples (n = 138). Neither measure was a strong correlate of preadmission offenses. Although mCPS scores were associated with postrelease offending in one sample, effects for the APSD were observed only when reoffending was conceptualized as a dichotomous variable, indicating a lack of robustness in this association. The findings suggest caution in the use of self-report measures of psychopathic features for decision making with respect to issues of delinquency risk among justice-involved youth.     

Is the loss of diagnosticity of the eye region of the face a common aspect of acquired prosopagnosia?

A recent study published in this journal has shown an abnormal performance at discriminating differences with respect to the eyes of unfamiliar faces in two acquired prosopagnosic patients, but preserved processing of the mouth region. Here we extend these findings by showing a similar lack of sensitivity to the eyes in the very same face matching experiment for the prosopagnosic patient PS, who also showed normal performance for detecting differences in the mouth region. These results complement previously published evidence that the patient PS presents a lack of sensitivity to diagnostic information located on the eyes of familiar faces during individual face recognition tasks. More generally, they indicate that the impaired processing of the eyes of faces is a fundamental aspect of acquired prosopagnosia that can arise following damage to different brain localizations.     

Errors, efficiency, and the interplay between attention and category learning

Learning to identify objects as members of categories is an essential cognitive skill and learning to deploy attention effectively is a core component of that process. The present study investigated an assumption imbedded in formal models of categorization: error is necessary for attentional learning. Eye-trackers were used to record participants’ allocation of attention to task relevant and irrelevant features while learning a complex categorization task. It was found that participants optimized their fixation patterns in the absence of both performance errors and corrective external feedback. Optimization began immediately after each category was mastered and continued for many trials. These results demonstrate that error is neither necessary nor sufficient for all forms of attentional learning.