Animals and artifacts may not be treated equally: differentiating strong and weak forms of category-specific visual agnosia

We examined a categorical dissociation hypothesis of category-specific agnosia using hierarchical regression to predict the naming responses of three agnosia patients while controlling a wide variety of perceptual and conceptual between-category differences. The living-nonliving distinction remained a significant predictor for two of the patients after controlling for all the other factors. For one remaining patient, the categorical variable was not significant once the form-function correlation of different objects was controlled. We argue that the visual system may use various subprocesses at different stages, some of which reflect true categorical organization and some of which reflect a unitary feature-based system that distinguishes kinds.     

Once More Unto the Breach: Type B Physicalism,Phenomenal Concepts,and the Epistemic Gap

Type B, or a posteriori, physicalism is the view that phenomenal-physical identity statements can be necessarily true, even though they cannot be known a priori—and that the key to understanding their status is to understand the special features of our phenomenal concepts, those concepts of our experiential states acquired through introspection. This view was once regarded as a promising response to anti-physicalist arguments that maintain that an epistemic gap between phenomenal and physical concepts entails that phenomenal and physical properties are distinct. More recently, however, many physicalists have lost confidence in the view, and have proposed less promising defences of physicalism—or have become outright sceptical about its prospects. I argue here that these physicalists have underestimated the resources of Type B physicalism and are thereby retreating too quickly—or fighting battles that have already been won.     

Adult Antisocial Behavior And Affect Regulation Among Primary Crack/Cocaine-Using Women

The relationship between deficits in affect regulation and Adult Antisocial Behavior (ASB) in primary crack/cocaine-using women was explored in a sample of 80 inner-city women. Narrative early memories were coded for two components of affect regulation, Affect Tolerance and Affect Expression, using the Epigenetic Assessment Rating Scale (EARS; Wilson, Passik, & Kuras, 1989 ). ASB was measured by the adult criteria of Antisocial Personality Disorder on the SCID-SAC ( Spitzer, Williams, Gibbon, & First, 1993 ). Analyses compared primary crack/cocaine-using women with and without ASB on the affect regulation measures. Findings using memories of primary caretakers revealed that women with ASB had significantly poorer capacity for Affect Tolerance and Affect Expression than women without ASB, suggesting that ASB is significantly associated with differences in the capacity to regulate emotional experience among primary crack/cocaine-using women.     

Information Processing at Successive Stages of Decision Making: Need for Cognition and Inclusion-Exclusion Effects

Levin and Jasper's (1995) phased narrowing technique for tracking changes in information usage across successive stages of the decision-making process was combined with Huneke's (1996) “pull-down menu” extension of Payne, Bettman, and Johnson's (1988) software package for generating measures of information processing. Because this technique provided considerable data for each individual subject at each stage, we were able to focus on individual differences in information processing across stages, most notably differences related to need for cognition (NC; Cacioppo & Petty, 1982). In a computerized information search and decision task, 60 college students were first asked to narrow their options for purchasing a notebook computer to form a consideration set and were then asked to make a final choice from this set. At the consideration set formation stage, half the subjects were instructed to adopt a mindset to include options while the other half were asked to exclude options. Especially in the inclusion condition where subjects showed greater narrowing of options, high NC subjects processed information in a more focused manner with greater depth and breadth than did low NC subjects, and the quality of their selections tended to be higher. There was no evidence of widespread shifts in strategy as individuals moved from set formation to final choice but, as a group, high NC subjects were more successful at adaptive decision making.     

Simultaneous factor analysis of several Gramian matrices

Given several Gramian matrices, a least-square fit to all the matrices by one factor matrix, with a predetermined number of factors, is shown to be the principal axes solution of the average of the matrices.     

Learning More About and With the Face–Name Mnemonic Strategy

With the face–name mnemonic strategy, choosing and using ‘prominent’ facial features in interactive images can be difficult. The temptation is to stray from less‐than‐distinctive facial features and instead to associate an individual's name clue with an additional concrete detail (e.g., a headband). To examine this issue, undergraduates viewed face photographs with or without additional details under one of three conditions: own best method, fully imposed mnemonic, and partially imposed mnemonic. Experiment 2 examined a somewhat parallel situation that occurs when applying the strategy to abstract artwork (paintings with less familiar, less concrete elements) versus applying it to representational artwork (paintings with more familiar concrete elements). Our findings suggest that some pictorial stimuli (e.g., facial photos with details; representational paintings) are easier to work with mnemonically than are others (e.g., facial photos by themselves; abstract art). Moreover, in both experiments, mnemonic students displayed performance advantages on both immediate and delayed tests. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Question-asking strategies after severe closed head injury.

This investigation examined problem solving behaviors in survivors of severe closed head injury. Fourteen patients and 10 neurologically intact controls were administered the Twenty Questions procedure, requiring them to guess items the examiner was thinking of in a picture array. Relative to controls, survivors required more trials to guess the items and utilized a strategy characterized by attention to the individual pictures rather than to their shared conceptual features. The importance of problem solving impairments to neurobehavioral outcome after head injury is discussed.