Humour as the Playful Sidekick to Language in the Zhuangzi

Humour in the Zhuangzi is used to question the priority that human beings bestow upon language and thought, revealing both its limitations and its possibilities. Hierarchies and conventions are overturned and both the sense and senselessness of language are celebrated. Humour also opens up a world in which a plethora of perspectives is acknowledged and the purpose of purposelessness is underscored. Encouraging us to take laughter seriously also allows us to view the seeming gravity of the human condition with increased levity.     

The Twisted Relationship Between School Spending and Academic Outputs: in Search of a New Metaphor

In this commentary we explore both putative and potential relationships between school funding and educational outcomes, for which numerous indices and variables have been examined during the past two decades. We conclude that despite large increases in real dollars, there is no readily discernable link between inputs and outputs, although when statistical control is exerted over prior ability, school mix, and teacher turn-over, certain causal inferences appear warranted. However, it can be argued that the dominant analogy should be reconsidered, and schools serving large numbers of needy children may require higher inputs to keep from further declines, much like certain departments of a hospital require disproportionately more resources than others in order to be successful because they deal with problems that are more severe.     

The assessment of subjective probability distributions: A training experiment

For this experiment 22 Ss were especially trained to assess subjective probability distributions for proportions concerning student characteristics. Two different assessment techniques were used. There were four experimental sessions. From the second session on, Ss received feedback about their performance in the previous session(s). While Ss' associated by far too much confidence with their assessments at the beginning, they learned to assess more realistic distributions. Furthermore, discrepancies between techniques were reduced.Some considerations for a more effective training procedure are made and the concept of giving feedback only according to the tightness of the assessed distribution is critically discussed.     

Response coding in the Simon task

Recent findings indicate that two distinct mechanisms can contribute to a Simon effect: a visuomotor information transmission on the one hand and a cognitive code interference on the other hand (see for e.g., Wiegand & Wascher, in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 2005a). Furthermore, it was proposed that the occurrence of one or the other mechanism strongly depends on the way responses are coded. Visuomotor information transmission seems to depend on a correspondence between stimulus position and spatial anatomical status of the effector, whereas cognitive code interference is thought to be based on relative response location codes. To further test the spatial anatomic coding hypothesis, three experiments were conducted, in which the Simon effect with unimanual responses was investigated for horizontal (Experiment 1 and 2) and vertical (Experiment 3) stimulus-response (S-R) relations. Based on the finding of a decreasing effect function (indicating the presence of visuomotor information transmission) for horizontal and vertical S-R relations, it was concluded that visuomotor information transmission occurs whenever there is an overlap between the spatial stimulus feature and parameters of the motor representation of the response. Furthermore, the specific motor representation seems to be task dependent, that is, it entails those response parameters that clearly differentiate between the two response alternatives in a given task situation.     

Storage and non-storage components of working memory predicting reasoning: A simultaneous examination of a wide range of ability factors

The current study examined basic cognitive abilities that are related to or included in the concept of working memory (WM): different WM components, three executive functions, simple short-term storage (STM), and sustained attention. Tasks were selected from well-established models and balanced in terms of content. The predictive power of storage and non-storage components of WM was examined. The same analyses were conducted with mental speed as an additional predictor of reasoning. Finally, we investigated whether the identified predictors of reasoning remain relevant when a general factor is considered in the analysis. The analyses revealed that short-term memory accounted for the relationship between complex span measures of WM and reasoning but not for the relationship between coordination and reasoning. These findings remained stable in the context of a mental speed and a general factor. The mental speed factor did not add an incremental contribution to the prediction of reasoning above and beyond short-term memory and coordination. The general factor was mainly built by mental speed tasks and acted as an additional predictor of reasoning besides STM and coordination. Thus, we concluded that reasoning ability can be explained by coordination, STM, and mental speed.     

Language‐specific stress perception by 9‐month‐old French and Spanish infants

During the first year of life, infants begin to have difficulties perceiving non‐native vowel and consonant contrasts, thus adapting their perception to the phonetic categories of the target language. In this paper, we examine the perception of a non‐segmental feature, i.e. stress. Previous research with adults has shown that speakers of French (a language with fixed stress) have great difficulties in perceiving stress contrasts ( Dupoux, Pallier, Sebastián & Mehler, 1997 ), whereas speakers of Spanish (a language with lexically contrastive stress) perceive these contrasts as accurately as segmental contrasts. We show that language‐specific differences in the perception of stress likewise arise during the first year of life. Specifically, 9‐month‐old Spanish infants successfully distinguish between stress‐initial and stress‐final pseudo‐words, while French infants of this age show no sign of discrimination. In a second experiment using multiple tokens of a single pseudo‐word, French infants of the same age successfully discriminate between the two stress patterns, showing that they are able to perceive the acoustic correlates of stress. Their failure to discriminate stress patterns in the first experiment thus reflects an inability to process stress at an abstract, phonological level.     

On the assessment of genetic technology: Reaching ethical judgments in the light of modern technology

The “Model for Reaching Ethical Judgments in the context of Modern Technologies — the Case of Genetic Technology”, which is presented here, has arisen from the project “Ethical Criteria bearing upon Decisions taken in the field of Biotechnology”. This project has been pursued since 1991 in the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Technikforschung (ZIT) of the Technical University of Darmstadt, with the purpose of examining decision-making in selected activities involving the production of transgenic plants that have a useful application. The model is the basis of an outline for interviews to investigate how far decisions concerning the development of such plants with genetic techniques take ethical criteria into account. It was necessary to design this new model because other models for reaching judgments of this kind were not conceptually suited for concrete application. This model represents a problem related approach and combines methodological with substantive typology. In this it differs from comparable models for reaching ethical judgments.