Varying reinforcement magnitude on interval schedules

In Experiment 1, rats were trained on either a random-interval or a variable-interval 60-sec schedule of reinforcement, and reinforcement magnitude was varied across conditions between one and four pellets. Although the two schedules maintained different patterns of behaviour, patterns and rates of responding were not systematically affected by the variation in reinforcement magnitude. In Experiment 2, a regulated probability interval schedule that generated similar rates of reinforcement to those of the schedules of Experiment 1 was used, with the pattern of behaviour generated resembling that typical of a random-interval schedule. Changing reinforcement magnitude again produced few systematic changes in behaviour. In Experiment 3, a variable-ratio schedule was used within a procedure that otherwise resembled that of Experiments 1 and 2. Increasing the reinforcement magnitude now decreased the rates of responding, and examination of the patterns of responding showed that this came about because rates of responding were higher early in the interreinforcer interval in the one-pellet condition. These experiments demonstrate the insensitivity of behaviour under interval schedules to changes in reinforcement magnitude and suggest the operation of mechanisms different from those engaged by ratio schedules and discretetrial learning procedures.     

Earnings of Immigrants in Traditional and Non-Traditional Destinations: A Case Study from Atlantic Canada

Despite growing interest in the regionalization of immigration, comparative studies of the labor market outcomes of immigrants in traditional and non-traditional destinations remain limited in Canada. Using Atlantic Canada as a non-traditional destination and drawing data from the 2006 Census of Population, this study compares the determinants of immigrant earnings in this region with those of three major traditional destinations, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver (MTV). Results indicate the returns to postgraduate degrees and foreign credentials on earnings are higher in Atlantic Canada than MTV, although the costs of being visible minorities and speaking non-official language(s) at home are not statistically different between the two destinations. Results also show the earning disparities linked to employment in ethnic businesses are smaller in Atlantic Canada. This paper discusses implications of these findings for immigrant settlement policy.     

Present Bias and Everyday Self‐Control Failures: A Day Reconstruction Study

Everyday life is full of self‐control problems. The economist's favorite explanation for self‐control problems is present bias. This paper tests whether experimentally elicited present bias predicts self‐control problems in everyday life. We measure present bias by using a standard incentivized delay discounting task and everyday self‐control by using the day reconstruction method (DRM). Because this is the first study to measure everyday self‐control by using the DRM, we also validate the method by showing that its data replicate key results from the seminal Everyday Temptation Study. We find that present bias does not predict everyday self‐control. This points to a distinction between decreasing impatience (as measured in delay discounting tasks) and visceral influences (as occurring in everyday life) as determinants of self‐control problems. We argue that decision making research can benefit from the DRM as a cost‐effective tool that complements lab and field experiments to better understand economic preference measures and their correlates in everyday life decision making. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sensitivity to tonality across the pitch range

Striking changes in sensitivity to tonality across the pitch range are reported. Participants were presented a key-defining context (do-mi-do-sol) followed by one of the 12 chromatic tones of the octave, and rated the goodness of fit of the probe tone to the context. The set of ratings, called the probe-tone profile, was compared to an established standardised profile for the Western tonal hierarchy. The presentation of context and probe tones at low and high pitch registers resulted in significantly reduced sensitivity to tonality. Sensitivity was especially poor for presentations in the lowest octaves where inharmonicity levels were substantially above the threshold for detection. We propose that sensitivity to tonality may be influenced by pitch salience (or a co-varying factor such as exposure to pitch distributional information) as well as suprathreshold inharmonicity.     

A Spirituality of Dissent: Religion,culture and post-colonial criticism

This paper examines one aspect of post-colonial criticism— the relationship between culture and its representation— and considers the relevance of this for understanding children's spirituality in contemporary, global context. The paper provides particular focus on the now widely held premise in post-colonial criticism that domination within political and social systems is dependent upon the control and manipulation of cultural representation, with particular focus on the cultural representation of religion in British education. The crucial idea here is that such domination (including the disempowerment and subjugation of minorities) is dependent upon the creation of a culturally imagined 'other'. It is argued that this alienating socio-political and economic dimension of spirituality— and essentially colonial notion of 'otherness'— has largely been ignored in discussions of contemporary spirituality. The paper thus introduces into current debate the language of post-colonial criticism in order to demonstrate the inherent, if underplayed, politicization of spirituality. It concludes with a call to re-examine the representation of culture within a global, post-colonial framework through the characterization of a 'spirituality of dissent'.     

Hierarchies, similarity, and interactivity in object recognition: "category-specific" neuropsychological deficits.

Category-specific impairments of object recognition and naming are among the most intriguing disorders in neuropsychology, affecting the retrieval of knowledge about either living or nonliving things. They can give us insight into the nature of our representations of objects: Have we evolved different neural systems for recognizing different categories of object? What kinds of knowledge are important for recognizing particular objects? How does visual similarity within a category influence object recognition and representation? What is the nature of our semantic knowledge about different objects? We review the evidence on category-specific impairments, arguing that deficits even for one class of object (e.g., living things) cannot be accounted for in terms of a single information processing disorder across all patients; problems arise at contrasting loci in different patients. The same apparent pattern of impairment can be produced by damage to different loci. According to a new processing framework for object recognition and naming, the hierarchical interactive theory (HIT), we have a hierarchy of highly interactive stored representations. HIT explains the variety of patients in terms of (1) lesions at different levels of processing and (2) different forms of stored knowledge used both for particular tasks and for particular categories of object.     

Private School,College Admissions and the Value of Education

In this article, I defend a proposal to cap the proportion of students admitted to elite colleges who were educated at elite, often private, schools to not more than the proportion of students who attend such schools in society as a whole. In order to defend this proposal, I draw on recent debates that pit principles of equality against principles of adequacy, and I defend the need for a pluralist account of educational fairness that includes both elements. I argue that while equality best captures our convictions about unfairness in access to the instrumental and positional benefits of education, such as job prospects and college admission, adequacy best captures our convictions about unfairness in stunting the development of human talent and the intrinsic benefits of education. The proposal to cap the proportion of private school students at elite universities advances both of these, usually conflicting, principles because it permits unequal but efficient talent development through the vehicle of private tuition and elite schooling, and yet promises to seriously curtail the unfair positional instrumental benefits of private or elite schooling by having those students compete against each other and not students who did not attend elite schools. The policy also achieves its aim consistent with preserving some attractive aspects of parental choice. Towards the end of the article I consider a number of practical objections and an alternative proposal.     

A perceptual investigation of polytonality

Summary Four experiments investigated the perception of tonal structure in polytonal music. The experiments used musical excerpts in which the upper stave of the music suggested a different key than the lower stave. In Experiment 1, listeners rated the goodness of fit of probe tones following an excerpt from Dubois's Circus. Results suggested that listeners were sensitive to two keys, and weighted them according to their perceived importance within the excerpt. Experiment 2 confirmed that music within each stave reliably conveyed key structure on its own. In Experiment 3, listeners rated probe tones following an excerpt from Milhaud's Sonata No. 1 for Piano, in which different keys were conveyed in widely separate pitch registers. Ratings were collected across three octaves. Listeners did not associate each key with a specific register. Rather, ratings for all three octave registers reflected only the key associated with the upper stave. Experiment 4 confirmed that the music within each stave reliably conveyed key structure on its own. It is suggested that when one key predominates in a polytonal context, other keys may not contribute to the overall perceived tonal structure. The influence of long-term knowledge and immediate context on the perception of tonal structure in polytonal music is discussed.