Facts and Possibilities: A Model‐Based Theory of Sentential Reasoning

This article presents a fundamental advance in the theory of mental models as an explanation of reasoning about facts, possibilities, and probabilities. It postulates that the meanings of compound assertions, such as conditionals (if) and disjunctions (or), unlike those in logic, refer to conjunctions of epistemic possibilities that hold in default of information to the contrary. Various factors such as general knowledge can modulate these interpretations. New information can always override sentential inferences; that is, reasoning in daily life is defeasible (or nonmonotonic). The theory is a dual process one: It distinguishes between intuitive inferences (based on system 1) and deliberative inferences (based on system 2). The article describes a computer implementation of the theory, including its two systems of reasoning, and it shows how the program simulates crucial predictions that evidence corroborates. It concludes with a discussion of how the theory contrasts with those based on logic or on probabilities.     

Locating Responsible Research and Innovation Within Access and Benefit Sharing Spaces of the Convention on Biological Diversity: the Challenge of Emerging Technologies

This paper reviews the location of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) approaches within the access and benefit sharing (ABS) policy spaces of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and Nagoya Protocol. We describe how a range of dialogues on ethical research practices found a home, almost inadvertently, within the ABS policy process. However, more recent RRI dialogues around emerging technologies have not been similarly absorbed into ABS policy, due in part to the original framing of ABS and associated definitional and scope issues. Consideration is given to the challenges posed to these policy processes by the transformative and rapid nature of scientific and technological change today, including the emerging field of synthetic biology. Drawing on experiences from regulating ABS, we emphasize that the integration of RRI into policies for new, emerging, or poorly understood activities such as synthetic biology faces deficiencies such as limits to government capacity, jurisdictional confusion, shortages in funds, and an absence of strategic approaches. We conclude that a coordinated combination of diverse policy processes within the CBD might provide an invaluable space for RRI dialogues on social justice, sustainability, biosafety, and other issues raised by emerging technologies.     

Judging Yourself as You Judge Others: Moral Development and Exculpation

This study investigated two main issues: Whether people's judgments about real-life moral transgressions are affected by the role they play in them and whether self-serving biases in such judgments vary with level of moral development. One-hundred twenty university students took Colby and Kohlberg's (1987) test of moral judgment and made open-ended and rating-scale judgments about three real-life transgressions they considered moral in nature. As expected, participants made more exculpatory judgments about transgressions they committed than they did about transgressions others committed, but participants did not judge transgressions committed against them more harshly than they judged transgressions committed against others. The higher participants scored on Kohlberg's test the less they externalized and excused their moral transgressions. Contrary to expectation, this relation also applied to moral judgments about transgressions committed by others against others. These findings have important implications for models of moral development and social cognition.     

Retrograde Enhancement of Human Kinesthetic Memory by Alcohol: Consolidation or Protection against Interference?

Alcohol intake is known to impair memory in animals and humans. However, five studies reported that “medium” (0.05 ml/kg body weight) to “high” (1.0 ml/kg body weight) doses of alcohol improved memory when drunk immediately after initial learning of verbal or visual material. It was proposed that alcohol brought about this retroactive facilitation either through enhanced consolidation of memory traces or by protecting against retroactive interference. The present double blind study compared the performances of an alcohol and a placebo group on a kinesthetic memory task before alcohol or placebo intake and at retest 1 h after consumption. A second experiment was identical to the first except that all subjects carried out two trials on a T maze in the hour between testing and retesting. The alcohol group in the first experiment performed significantly better than the placebo group at retest (p< .05) but this was not the case in the second experiment. Alcohol therefore enhanced performance on the kinesthetic memory task in the first experiment but may not have protected against the moderate interference from the T maze in the second. The low levels of alcohol could have had a stimulant effect on trace consolidation, perhaps via raised blood glucose levels.     

Finding Spirits in Spirituality: What are We Measuring in Spirituality and Health Research?

Journal of Religion and Health - What are we asking when we ask about spirituality? When research subjects check survey boxes for “religiosity” and “spirituality” measures...     

The somatotopy of speech: Phonation and articulation in the human motor cortex

A sizable literature on the neuroimaging of speech production has reliably shown activations in the orofacial region of the primary motor cortex. These activations have invariably been interpreted as reflecting “mouth” functioning and thus articulation. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare an overt speech task with tongue movement, lip movement, and vowel phonation. The results showed that the strongest motor activation for speech was the somatotopic larynx area of the motor cortex, thus reflecting the significant contribution of phonation to speech production. In order to analyze further the phonatory component of speech, we performed a voxel-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies of syllable-singing (11 studies) and compared the results with a previously-published meta-analysis of oral reading (11 studies), showing again a strong overlap in the larynx motor area. Overall, these findings highlight the under-recognized presence of phonation in imaging studies of speech production, and support the role of the larynx motor cortex in mediating the “melodicity” of speech.     

Parents’ Monitoring Knowledge Attenuates the Link Between Antisocial Friends and Adolescent Delinquent Behavior

Developmental trajectories of parents’ knowledge of their adolescents’ whereabouts and activities were tested as moderators of transactional associations between friends’ antisociality and adolescent delinquent behavior. 504 adolescents (50% female) provided annual reports (from ages 12 to 16) of their parents’ knowledge and (from ages 13 to 16) their own delinquent behavior and their friends’ antisociality. Parents also reported the adolescents’ delinquent behavior. Growth mixture modeling was used to identify two sub-groups based on their monitoring knowledge growth trajectories. Adolescents in the sub-group characterized by decreasing levels of parents’ knowledge reported more delinquent behavior and more friend antisociality in early adolescence, and reported greater increases in delinquent behavior and friend antisociality from early to middle adolescence compared to adolescents in the sub-group characterized by increasing levels of parents’ knowledge. Transactional associations consistent with social influence and social selection processes also were suppressed in the increasing knowledge sub-group as compared to the decreasing knowledge sub-group. Findings of this study were presented at the 2005 biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.