Likelihood ratio decisions in memory: Three implied regularities

We analyze four general signal detection models for recognition memory that differ in their distributional assumptions. Our analyses show that a basic assumption of signal detection theory, the likelihood ratio decision axis, implies three regularities in recognition memory: (1) the mirror effect, (2) the variance effect, and (3) the z-ROC length effect. For each model, we present the equations that produce the three regularities and show, in computed examples, how they do so. We then show that the regularities appear in data from a range of recognition studies. The analyses and data in our study support the following generalization: Individuals make efficient recognition decisions on the basis of likelihood ratios.     

Hypnotic susceptibility and verbal automaticity: automatic and strategic processing differences in the Stroop color-naming task.

The original hypothesis of Dixon, Brunet, and Laurence (1990) that highly hypnotizable (HH) subjects process words more automatically than do low hypnotizable (LH) subjects was retested in a paradigm that separated strategic from automatic processes in the Stroop color-naming task. The words red and blue preceded a color patch that was red or blue. Subjects were told that the word predicted the opposite color 75% of the time. Automatic and strategic processes were assessed by varying the interstimulus interval (ISI) between the word and the color patch. Both HH and LH subjects showed significant strategic effects (faster incongruent-trial, color-naming reaction times than congruent-trial reaction times at ISIs over 400 ms), but only HH subjects showed significant automaticity (significantly faster congruent-trial reaction times than incongruent-trial reaction times at 16.7 ms, the lowest ISI).     

Bioethics in the twenty-first century: why we should pay attention to eighteenth-century medical ethics.

Those of us who work in the field of bioethics tend to think that, because the word "bioethics" is new, so too the field is new in all respects, but we are not the first to do bioethics. John Gregory (1724-1773) did bioethics just as we do it, at least two centuries before we thought to do it. He deployed philosophical methods as sophisticated as our own. Indeed, Gregory took up the very best moral philosophy available to thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, namely, David Hume's moral philosophy and its core concept of sympathy. Gregory also responded in a conceptually powerful and clinically applicable way to the problems of his time, just as we do. I want here to outline Gregory's accomplishment and to identify some aspects of its importance for bioethics in the twenty-first century.     

A low-cost solid state device for producing delayed auditory feedback

This paper presents a design for construction of a relatively low-cost solid state delayed auditory feedback device. The advantages of this unit are that it is reliable, flexible, easy to operate, and it does not require audio tape.