Letters of Recommendation for the Predoctoral Internship in Medical Schools and Other Settings: Do They Enhance Decision Making in the Selection Process?

Since the 1970s, letters of recommendation to medical and other internship settings have surfaced as important variables in the internship selection process. However, several studies have challenged their value in the selection process, specifically by pointing out that these letters have an overly positive bias and fail to address applicant weaknesses. Our study, using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count text analysis method, developed a quantitative profile for a sample of letters of recommendation, determined whether letters differentiated among applicants with regard to positive/negative attributions, evaluated letters for positive and negative bias, and investigated potential gender bias of writers toward applicants. Results indicated that writers apply positive and negative attributions homogeneously across applicants, thus, rendering applicant differentiation on this basis impossible. Also, results demonstrated that letters of male and female writers were not biased toward male or female applicants. These findings, in combination with previous studies, question the utility of letters of recommendation as presently structured. Possible modifications are discussed.     

A review of Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa, The Bounds of Cognition

In The Bounds of Cognition, Fred Adams and Kenneth Aizawa treat the arguments for extended cognition to withering criticism. I summarize their main arguments and focus special attention on their distinction between the extended cognitive system hypothesis and the extended cognition hypothesis, as well as on their demand for a mark of the mental.     

Values Congruence and Organisational Commitment: P—O Fit in Higher Education Institutions

This study examines business students’ individual values and their perception of their university’s values and the relationship between these values and affective organisational commitment. Findings indicate that both groups of business students rated their personal values as consistent with the rankings of the major pan—cultural values with strong ethical orientation and self—development and learning values. In both educational institutions organisational vision values and individual conservatism values predicted affective commitment. Findings also indicate statistically significant differences between the students’ personal values and their perception of their university’s values, suggesting a degree of lack of P—O fit between the students’ values and their university’s values.     

Situational information contributes to object categorization and inference

Three experiments demonstrated that situational information contributes to the categorization of functional object categories, as well as to inferences about these categories. When an object was presented in the context of setting and event information, categorization was more accurate than when the object was presented in isolation. Inferences about the object similarly became more accurate as the amount of situational information present during categorization increased. The benefits of situational information were higher when both setting and event information were available than when only setting information was available. These findings indicate that situational information about settings and events is stored with functional object categories in memory. Categorization and inference become increasingly accurate as the information available during categorization matches situational information stored with the category.     

Bennett and “proxy actualism”

Karen Bennett has recently argued that the views articulated by Linsky and Zalta (Philos Perspect 8:431–458, 1994) and (Philos Stud 84:283–294, 1996) and Plantinga (The nature of necessity, 1974) are not consistent with the thesis of actualism, according to which everything is actual. We present and critique her arguments. We first investigate the conceptual framework she develops to interpret the target theories. As part of this effort, we question her definition of ‘proxy actualism’. We then discuss her main arguments that the theories carry a commitment to actual entities that do not exist. We end by considering and addressing a worry that might have been the driving force behind Bennett’s claim that Linsky and Zalta’s view is not fully actualistic.

Making sense of mirror neurons

The discovery of mirror neurons has been hailed as one of the most exciting developments in neuroscience in the past few decades. These neurons discharge in response to the observation of others’ actions. But how are we to understand the function of these neurons? In this paper I defend the idea that mirror neurons are best conceived as components of a sensory system that has the function to perceive action. In short, mirror neurons are part of a hitherto unrecognized “sixth sense”. In this spirit, research should move toward developing a psychophysics of mirror neurons.