Precise Worlds for Certain Minds: An Ecological Perspective on the Relational Self in Autism

Topoi - Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many...     

PIGEONS ARE SENSITIVE TO THE SPATIAL ORGANIZATION OF COMPLEX VISUAL STIMULI

Abstract— Two experiments investigated the role of spatial organisation in the discrimination and generalization of complex visual stimuli by pigeons. In Experiment 1, after pigeons had been trained to discriminate line drawings of four objects, they were tested with novel pictures in which the same component parts of the objects were spatially rearranged. The spatially scrambled pictures led to a dramatic drop in recognition accuracy, hut responding remained above chance. In Experiment 2, pigeons reached a high level of discriminative performance when required to choose among four different spatial arrangements of the same object parts. These results confirm Cerella's (1980) conclusion that pigeons discriminate the component parts of complex visual stimuli, but. unless it is assumed that the scrambling deleted or created emergent features, the results disconfirm his conclusion that spatial organization plays no role in pigeons' picture perception.     

ELI: An Interactive Elicitation Technique for Subjective Probability Distributions

Uncertain knowledge about continuous quantities is usually formalized through subjective probability distributions (SPD′s). However, results from past experimental research have often pointed to the rather poor quality of SPD′s. Moreover, previous attempts to improve SPD quality frequently appeared to be only partly successful; overconfidence especially proved to be an exceptionally persistent phenomenon. In the present study, method-induced biases in particular are considered to be responsible for the poor quality of SPD′s, and an alternative means for eliciting uncertain knowledge was designed to meet fundamental quality criteria to a more satisfactory degree. The direct realization of a proper scoring rule in a graphically oriented interactive computer program is one of the central features of this new elicitation technique, ELI. An experiment with 48 subjects was carried out to evaluate ELI performance and to compare it with the performance of (a) an existing elicitation technique and (b) a simple technique that only asks for a best guess and a lower and upper bound. The three techniques were evaluated and compared with respect to their contribution to reliable and valid SPD′s and with respect to their practical usefulness. The results indicated that for ELI the fundamental requirements were realized to a great extent. Furthermore, compared with the two other techniques, ELI performance appeared to be superior. In particular, only with the support of ELI did overconfidence appear to be almost absent.     

Conditional Control of Fluid Consumption in an Occasion Setting Paradigm Is Independent of Pavlovian Associations

Drug states, flavors, and contextual cues were each trained as conditional discriminative stimuli to control a saccharin-LiCl association. In transfer tests, drug states transferred control over consumption to other flavored solutions and to food. Contexts and flavors transferred control only to other flavored solutions. Pavlovian control groups given direct pairings of context-LiCl or flavor-LiCl did not show reliable transfer. However, these control groups did show greater or the same aversion to the specific context or flavor predicting LiCl compared to the context or flavor discrimination groups. The dissociation of the discrimination and Pavlovian groups on transfer versus preference tests suggests that performance on the occasion setting task cannot be due to simple excitation or learning about a unique compound cue. Data from extinction procedures provide further support for the dissociation between simple excitation and occasion setting.     

Time course of word identification and semantic integration in spoken language

The minimum duration signal necessary to identify a set of spoken words was established by the gating technique; most words could be identified before their acoustic offset. Gated words were used as congruous and incongruous sentence completions, and isolation points established in the gating experiment were compared with the time course of semantic integration evident in event-related brain potentials. Differential N400 responses to contextually appropriate and inappropriate words were observed about 200 ms before the isolation point. Semantic processing was evident before the acoustic signal was sufficient to identify the words uniquely. Results indicate that semantic integration can begin to operate with only partial, incomplete information about word identity. Influences of semantic constraint, word frequency, and rate of presentation are described.     

Milestones in the development of infant numeracy

This article deals with the development of numeracy among young children of the four to seven year age group. The research investigation described had two aims: to see how early numeracy develops in children of different ages; and to see whether there are fixed points which might serve as milestones in the development of infant numeracy. The results of this investigation involving 96 children indicate a strong development of numeracy skills during this period. With reference to the literature, it is also shown that certain items of a test previously developed for this purpose may be taken as core items that do indeed represent milestones in the development of infant numeracy.