Normativity and Interpersonal Reasons

What is one who takes normativity seriously to do if normativity can neither be discovered lurking out there in the world independently of us nor can it be sufficiently grasped from a merely explanatory perspective? One option is to accept that the normative challenge cannot be met and to retreat to some form of moral skepticism. Another possibility has recently been proposed by Christine Korsgaard in The Sources of Normativity where she aims to develop an account of normativity which is grounded in autonomy. Furthermore, she argues that on her account reasons are "essentially public" and that this captures how it is that we can obligate one another. In this paper I argue that there is a serious tension between her account of normativity and the publicity of reasons-namely, that if reasons are essentially public, then it is not possible for individuals to legislate laws for themselves. However, I then argue that if we revise her conception of normativity such that it is understood to involve collective rather than individual legislation that it may then be possible to account for interpersonal reasons.     

Psychosocial functioning in families of Australian adolescent schoolchildren involved in bully/victim problems

The paper examines the relationship between family functioning and the involvement of adolescent schoolchildren in bully/victim problems at school. Australian high school students between the ages of 13 and 16 years completed a Family Functioning in Adolescence Questionnaire (FFAQ) as a measure of the psychosocial well-being of their families. Students were also categorized on the basis of self-reports as bullies (9%), victims (11%), bully/victims (2%) and others (78%). The families of adolescent bullies were found to be functioning less well than others on the FFAQ, as also were the families of female but not male victims. Results for sub-groups of schoolchildren are examined with respect to specific dimensions of family functioning, and the implications of differences for family therapy are discussed.     

Vagueness as a Modality

I present a modal conception of vagueness and vague objects, according to which a vague object is a transworld object which coincides with one precise object in one world and with another precise object in another world. Such worlds are called precisifications; they are modal, worldly counterparts of the precisifications postulated in supervaluationism. I criticize Evans' argument against vague objects, admitting the validity of the argument, but rejecting its basic assumption that if there are vague objects, certain identity statements must be indefinite in truth value. I distinguish identity from coincidence, and claim that if there are vague objects, some statements of coincidence will be indefinite in truth-value, not statements of identity. To establish this point, I compare vagueness with temporal modality.     

Rethinking student participation in the college classroom: Can commitment and self-affirmation enhance oral participation?

The literature suggests that in-class oral participation is associated with various positive outcomes that directly contribute to academic success. The goal of the current study was to investigate the role played by psychological barriers to oral participation, focusing on commitment and self-affirmation as methods to bypass barriers to participation. The results of the semester-long experiment (N = 157) demonstrate that committed individuals who had an opportunity to self-affirm outperformed both committed students and affirmed students, as well as members of the control group. Interestingly, the interplay between self-affirmation and commitment increased oral participation, irrespective of whether students had high or low self-esteem and high or low self-efficacy. The current results offer some room for cautious optimism, as they highlight the importance of self-affirmation and commitment as a route to academic success.     

The role of priming in conjunctive visual search

To assess the role of priming in conjunctive visual search tasks, we systematically varied the consistency of the target and distractor identity between different conditions. Search was fastest in the standard conjunctive search paradigm where identities remained constant. Search was slowest when potential target identity varied predictably for each successive trial (the 'switch' condition). The role of priming was also demonstrated on a trial-by-trial basis in a 'streak' condition where target and distractor identity was unpredictable yet was consistent within streaks. When the target to be found was the same for a few trials in a row, search performance became similar to that when the potential target was the same on all trials. A similar pattern was found for the target absent trials, suggesting that priming is based on the whole search array rather than just the target in each case. Further analysis indicated that the effects of priming are sufficiently strong to account for the advantage seen for the conjunctive search task. We conclude that the role of priming in visual search is underestimated in current theories of visual search and that differences in search times often attributed to top-down guidance may instead reflect the benefits of priming.     

Association between serotonin transporter gene polymorphism and family history of attempted and completed suicide

The purpose of this study was to examine the association of the serotonin transporter gene to family history of suicidality. Forty-seven volunteers responded to questionnaires about family history of suicide, and provided buccal swabs for analysis of the polymorphism. Allelic homozygocity (the short variant) was associated with family history of suicidality. These data, to be interpreted with the study's limitations in mind, suggest a link between the serotonin transporter gene polymorphism and suicide-related variables, which should be the focus of future research.     

Self-control in honeybees

Self-control means choosing a large delayed reward over a small immediate reward; impulsiveness is its opposite. The metabolic hypothesis states that the amount of self-control across species correlates negatively with metabolic rate (Tobin & Logue, 1994). Foraging honeybees have high metabolic rates; the metabolic hypothesis would predict little self-control in bees. But foraging bees work for the longterm good of their hive, conditions that seem to require self-control. In three experiments, we gave bees the choice between (1) a sweeter delayed reward and a less sweet immediate reward and (2) a large delayed reward and a small immediate reward. Bees showed much self-control, inconsistent with the metabolic hypothesis.     

Irrelevance: Strengthening the Bayesian requirements

Bayesians standardly identify irrelevance with probabilistic irrelevance. However, there are cases where e is probabilistically irrelevant to h but intuitively e is relevant to h. For instance, ‘Die A came up 1 and die B came up 1, 3, 5 or 6’ is probabilistically irrelevant to ‘Die A came up odd and die B came up even’, yet, intuitively, it is not, irrelevant to that claim, in the sense that ‘Sydney has a harbour Bridge’ is irrelevant to it. In the context of decision making this notion of irrelevance combined with such rules as ‘Do not expend resources on irrelevant evidence’ leads to bad results. A stronger notion of irrelevance fitting our intuitions and the contexts of decision making is proposed: e is irrelevant to h if and only if every part of e is probabilistically irrelevant to every part of h. However, we need to take care in determining what counts as part of a statement.     

Visual short-term memory benefit for objects on different 3-D surfaces

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) plays an important role in visual cognition. Although objects are located on different 3-dimensional (3-D) surfaces in the real world, how VSTM capacity may be influenced by the presence of multiple 3-D surfaces has never been examined. By manipulating binocular disparities of visual displays, the authors found that more colored objects could be held in VSTM when they were placed on 2 rather than on 1 planar 3-D surfaces. This between-surface benefit in VSTM was present only when binding of objects' colors to their 3-D locations was required (i.e., when observers needed to remember which color appeared where). When binding was not required, no between-surface benefit in VSTM was observed. This benefit in VSTM could not be attributed to the number of spatial locations attended within a given surface. It was not due to a general perceptual grouping effect either, because grouping by motion and grouping by different regions of the same surface did not yield the same benefit. This increment in capacity indicates that VSTM benefits from the placement of objects in a 3-D scene.     

Reconsolidation and memory infidelity in Lymnaea

Lymnaea stagnalis were operantly conditioned to not perform aerial respiratory behaviour in a specific context (i.e. context-1). The memory for this learned response was reactivated 3 days later in context-1. During the 1 h reconsolidation period following memory reactivation, randomly picked snails were either maintained in context-1 or exposed to a new context (i.e. context-2). One hour later in the post-reconsolidation period, snails in context-1 were placed for 1 h in context-2 and vice-versa. In neither the hypoxic reconsolidation nor the post reconsolidation periods did snails receive a reinforcing stimulus when they opened their pneumostome. All snails were blindly tested for memory 24 h later period in context-2. Only those snails that had been exposed to context-2 during the reconsolidation period exhibited 'memory' for context-2. That is, memory infidelity was observed. Snails exposed to context-2 in only the post-reconsolidation period did not show memory for context-2. The immediate cooling of snails after their exposure to the new context in the reconsolidation period blocked the formation the implanted memory. Snails trained in context-1 and exposed to context-2 in the consolidation period only, also did not have memory for context-2. However, the memory for context-1 could still be recalled following successful implantation of the 'new' memory. All data presented here are consistent with the notion that during the reconsolidation process memory can be updated.