Size-distance paradox with accommodative micropsia

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that the paradoxical relative distance judgment associated with the size-distance paradox is due to the visual system’s assuming equal linear size and perceiving a smaller angular size for the closer stimulus equal in visual angle. In Experiment I, two different sized coins were presented successively, and 16 Ss were asked to give ordinal judgments of apparent distance and apparent size. When the two coins depicted the same figures, the closer stimulus was judged to be farther and smaller, more frequently, than when two coins depicted different figures. In Experiment II, 48 Ss were asked to give ratio judgments of apparent distance, apparent linear size, and apparent angular size for two stimuli which were presented successively. When the stimuli were of equal shape, the mean ratios of the far stimulus to the near stimulus were smaller for the apparent distance but larger for the apparent linear size and angular size than when the stimuli were of different shape. The obtained distance judgments were consistent with the hypothesis but the obtained judgments of linear size and angular size were not.     

Apparent movement and change in perceived location of a simulus produced by a change in accommodative vergence

Using a psychophysical method of adjustment, 175 Ss, ranging in age from 3 to 20 years, made four adjustments each of a luminous line to subjective vertical, horizontal, and 45-deg tilts in the dark. There were no significant differences in mean errors of adjustment to the vertical and horizontal over the ages tested. There were significant differences in intra-S variability of adjustment to the horizontal and vertical, with the greatest improvement occurring before age 10. Older children and adults produced significantly larger mean errors of adjustment to the 45-deg tilt than did the younger children; but the variability of settings by younger children was very high, indicating that they did not discriminate the 45-deg tilt more accurately than the older groups. The intra-S variability at all ages showed that adjustment was more accurate to the horizontal and vertical than to the 45-deg tilt.     

Two-component theory of the suffix effect: Contrary evidence

The suffix effect is the selective impairment in recall of the final items of a spoken list when the list is followed by a nominally irrelevant speech item, or suffix. It is widely assumed to comprise a bottom-up, or structural, effect restricted to the terminal item and a top-down, or conceptually sensitive, effect confined to the preterminal items. Reported here are eight experiments that challenge this view by demonstrating that the terminal suffix effect, as well as the preterminal suffix effect, is susceptible to conceptual influence. The entire suffix effect may be better conceived of as a phenomenon arising from perceptual grouping.     

Giving the boot to the bootstrap: how not to learn the natural numbers

According to one theory about how children learn the concept of natural numbers, they first determine that "one", "two", and "three" denote the size of sets containing the relevant number of items. They then make the following inductive inference (the Bootstrap): The next number word in the counting series denotes the size of the sets you get by adding one more object to the sets denoted by the previous number word. For example, if "three" refers to the size of sets containing three items, then "four" (the next word after "three") must refer to the size of sets containing three plus one items. We argue, however, that the Bootstrap cannot pick out the natural number sequence from other nonequivalent sequences and thus cannot convey to children the concept of the natural numbers. This is not just a result of the usual difficulties with induction but is specific to the Bootstrap. In order to work properly, the Bootstrap must somehow restrict the concept of "next number" in a way that conforms to the structure of the natural numbers. But with these restrictions, the Bootstrap is unnecessary.     

Freedom,moral responsibility,and the failure of universal defeat

Proponents of manipulation arguments against compatibilism hold that manipulation scope (how many agents are manipulated) and manipulation type (whether the manipulator intends that an agent perform a particular action) do not impact judgments about free will and moral responsibility. Many opponents of manipulation arguments agree that manipulation scope has no impact but hold that manipulation type does. Recent work by Latham and Tierney (2022, 2023) found that people's judgments were sensitive to manipulation scope: people judged that an agent was less free and responsible when a manipulation was existential (impacting at least one but not all agents) than when the manipulation was universal (impacting every agent). This study examines people's judgements about existential and universal manipulation cases that involve both intentional and non-intentional outcomes. We found that manipulation scope also affects people's free will and responsibility judgments in manipulation cases involving both intentional and non-intentional outcomes. Interestingly, we also found that manipulation type influences the effect that manipulation scope has on people's free will judgments but not their moral responsibility judgments, which indicates that people's free will and responsibility judgments can come apart. This puts pressure on the prevalent assumption that judgments about free will and moral responsibility are conceptually bound together.     

Still Just the Study of Men and Crime? A Content Analysis

Several authors have argued that criminologyisan androcentric discipline. This study examined bothrecent and earlier crime and delinquency literature inorder to investigate changes in the degree ofandrocentrism in criminology. Articles were sampled from fourmajor criminology journals from the periods 1974-1978and 1992-1996 (n = 202 and n = 174, respectively). As anindicator of androcentricity, we compared the proportion of journal articles that includedboth males and females in the sample vs. the proportionof articles that only sampled one sex. As an indicatorof overgeneralization (the tendency of androcentricresearch to present itself as generalizable to bothsexes), we measured the proportion of articles thatspecifically noted in the title that one sex wassampled. Results suggest that while females are sampled much more frequently than in the past, male isstill very much the norm within criminologicalresearch.     

Involuntary attentional shifts due to orientation differences

We tested the ability of orientation differences to cause involuntary shifts of visual attention and found that these attentional shifts can occur in response to an orientation “pop-out” display. Texturelike cue stimuli consisting of discrete oriented bars, with either uniform orientation or containing a noninformative orthogonally oriented bar, were presented for a variable duration. Subsequent to or partially coincident with the cue stimulus was the target display of a localization or two-interval forced-choice task, followed by a mask display. Naive subjects consistently showed greater accuracy in trials with the target at the location of the orthogonal orientation compared with trials with uniformly oriented bars, with only 100 msec between the cue and mask onsets. Discriminating these orientations required a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 50–70 msec. The attentional facilitation is transient, in most cases absent, with a cue-mask SOA of 250 msec. These results suggest that the preattentive character of some texture discrimination tasks with SOAs of only 100 msec is vitiated by the involuntary attentional shifts that are caused by orientation differences.