Equal Citizenship and Convergence

I argue against Lori Watson and Christie Hartley's recent criticisms of convergence approaches to public justification. In particular, I argue that convergence approaches can capture what is distinctive about democratic decision-making and provide an attractive account of stability for the right reasons.     

Word superiority over isolated letters: The neglected case of forward masking

Previous research shows that when briefly presented alphabetic stimuli are followed by pattern masks, letters in words are reported more accurately than are isolated letters (the “Word-Letter Phenomenon,” or WLP); however, when these masks are replaced by blank fields, the WLP disappears. These findings have led to the popular notion that the WLP reflects selective masking of ongoing stimulus processing and so critically depends on the use of poststimulus masks. Here we report three experiments which re-examine the role of masking in the WLP by contrasting the effects of postmasked displays with the effects of premasked displays in which words and isolated letters werepreceded by a pattern mask and followedby a completely blank field. Despite the critical role generally assigned to poststimulus pattern masks, similar WLPs were obtained with pre- and postmasked displays. Implications for theories of word and letter recognition are discussed.     

Does Conscientiousness Explain the Relationship Between Integrity and Job Performance?

There is a meta-analytic evidence that scores on integrity tests are related to measures of overall job performance, but it is not clear why this relationship exists. One hypothesis that would account for this correlation is that both integrity and performance measures are related to the personality trait conscientiousness, and that statistically controlling for conscientiousness would substantially reduce the integrity-performance correlation. To test this hypothesis, we used the results of three meta-analyses to estimate the components needed to calculate the partial correlation between integrity and performance, controlling for conscientiousness. Partialling had little effect; the best estimate of the corrected zero-order and partial correlations between integrity and performance were 0.34 and 0.28, respectively. Sensitivity analyses suggest that imprecision in the estimates of the various components of this partial correlation cannot reasonably explain the small effects of partialling.     

Timing the shift in retinal local signs that accompanies a saccadic eye movement

Thephantom array was used to probe the time course of the shift in retinal local signs that accompanies a saccadic eye movement. The phantom array materializes when one saccades in the dark across a point light source blinking 120 times per second. One sees a stationary array of flashes—the first materializes discretely near the intended endpoint of the saccade, and subsequent flashes materialize progressively closer to the actual position of the blinking light. Four trained observers indicated the perceived location, relative to the phantom array, of a 1-msec marker flash (M) produced by two LEDs (light-emitting diodes) that vertically bracketed the blinking light. The marker was seen as spatially coincident with the first flash when it flashed 80 to 0 msec before the saccade, and was seen as spatially coincident with either the first flash or the actual position of the blinking light when it flashed mare than 80 msec before the saccade, indicating, respectively, that the shaft is presaccadic and rather abrupt.