The contact principle and utilitarian moral judgments in young children

In three experiments involving 207 preschoolers and 28 adults, we investigated the extent to which young children base moral judgments of actions aimed to protect others on utilitarian principles. When asked to judge the rightness of intervening to hurt one person in order to save five others, the large majority of children aged 3 to 5 years advocated intervention in contrast to another situation with the reverse cost/benefit ratio. This course of action was seen as acceptable by most children only when it did not require the agent to have physical contact with the victim and the victim’s harm was intended to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Overall, the children’s responses were remarkably similar to those reported in adult studies. These findings document the extent to which some constraints on moral judgment are present in early human development.     

Objective age of acquisition for 223 Italian words: Norms and effects on picture naming speed

The present study provides a set of objective age of acquisition (AoA) norms for 223 Italian words that may be useful for conducting cross-linguistic studies or experiments on Italian language processing. The data were collected by presenting children from the ages of 2 to 11 with a normed picture set (Lotto, Dell’Acqua, & Job, 2001). Following the study of Morrison, Chappell, and Ellis (1997), we report two measures of objective AoA. Both measures strongly correlated with each other, and they also showed a good correlation with the rated AoA provided by adult participants. Furthermore, we assessed the relationship between the AoA measures and other variables used in psycholinguistic experiments. Regression analyses showed that familiarity, typicality, and word frequency were significant predictors of AoA. AoA, but not word frequency, was found to determine naming latencies. Finally, we present a path model in which AoA is a mediator in predicting speed in picture naming. The norms and the picture set can also be downloaded from http://dpss.psy.unipd.it/files/strumenti.php and from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Individual differences and reasoning: A study on personality traits

Personality can play a crucial role in how people reason and decide. Identifying individual differences related to how we actively gather information and use evidence could lead to a better comprehension and predictability of human reasoning. Recent findings have shown that some personality traits are related to similar decision‐making patterns showed by people with mental disorders. We performed research with the aim to investigate delusion‐proneness, obsessive‐like personality, anxiety (trait and state), and reasoning styles in individuals from the general population. We introduced personality trait and state anxiety scores in a regression model to explore specific associations with: (1) amount of data‐gathered prior to making a decision; and (2) the use of confirmatory and disconfirmatory evidence. Results showed that all our independent variables were positively or negatively associated with the amount of data collected in order to make simple probabilistic decisions. Anxiety and obsessiveness were the only predictors of the weight attributed to evidence in favour or against a hypothesis. Findings were discussed in relation to theoretical assumptions, predictions, and clinical implications. Personality traits can predict peculiar ways to reason and decide that, in turn, could be involved to some extent in the formation and/or maintenance of psychological disorders.     

Death and the Evolution of Language

My hypothesis is that the cognitive challenge posed by death might have had a co-evolutionary role in the development of linguistic faculties. First, I claim that mirror neurons, which enable us to understand others’ actions and emotions, not only activate when we directly observe someone, but can also be triggered by language: words make us feel bodily sensations. Second, I argue that the death of another individual cannot be understood by virtue of the mirror neuron mechanism, since the dead provide no neural pattern for mirroring: this cognitive task requires symbolic thought, which in turn involves emotions. Third, I describe the symbolic leap of the human species as a cognitive detachment from the here and now, allowing displaced reference: through symbols the human mind can refer to what is absent, possible, or even impossible (like the presence of a dead person). Such a detachment has had a huge adaptive impact: adopting a coevolutionary standpoint can help explain why language is as effective as environmental inputs in order to stimulate our bodily experience. In the end I suggest a further coevolutionary “reversal”: if language is necessary to understand the death of the other, it might also be true that the peculiar cognitive problem posed by the death of the other (the corpse is present, but the other is absent) has contributed to the crucial transition from an indexical sign system to the symbolic level, i.e., the “cognitive detachment”. Death and language, as Heidegger claimed, have an essential relation for humans, both from an evolutionary and a phenomenological perspective: they have shaped the symbolic consciousness that make us conceive of them.     

A logistic approach to knowledge structures

Models for quantitative (or numerical) testing like e.g. educational testing have a relatively long tradition in psychology, while the qualitative (or nonnumerical) approach to psychometrics is more recent. The approach presented in this paper can be regarded as an attempt to integrate, to some extent, the numerical and nonnumerical fields. In numerical testing a subject is characterized by some real-valued parameter representing her level or ability. In the nonnumerical approach the knowledge state of an individual is represented by the subset of problems that the individual is capable of solving. We propose a model in which the relationship between the ability levels and the knowledge states is worked out on a probabilistic basis. The central idea is that the ability parameters and the knowledge states are not independent. A logistic model is derived which specifies the probabilities of the knowledge states conditional on the ability levels. We show that the Rasch model arises as a special case of the proposed model.     

Lexicality and stimulus length effects in Italian dyslexics: role of the overadditivity effect.

The effect of lexicality and stimulus length was studied in 32 third- and fourth-grade Italian dyslexics and in 86 age-matched controls. A visual lexical decision task was used. As proposed by Faust et al. (1999), the results were analyzed in terms of raw reaction time (RT) data and using the z-score transformation to control for the presence of overadditivity effects. In terms of RTs, dyslexics showed a larger difference between words and nonwords (lexicality effect) and between short and long stimuli (length effect) than proficient readers. When data were transformed into z scores, only the group by length interaction remained significant while that with lexicality vanished. This pattern indicates that stimulus length has a specific role in Italian dyslexics' reading deficit; in contrast, slowness in responding to nonwords was not specific but was interpreted as one aspect of dyslexics' general inability to deal with alphabetical material (overadditivity effect).     

Mosaic trisomy 20 and mitigation in capital crimes sentencing: A review and case report

Trisomy 20 is a genetic abnormality in which individuals have an extra copy of chromosome 20. Complete trisomy 20 is rare and believed to be incompatible with life. A mosaic form of trisomy 20, in which only some cells or tissues contain the extra chromosome, is a relatively commonly encountered chromosomal abnormality found during prenatal testing, and c. 90% result in a normal phenotype. However, despite the absence of a consistent phenotype, certain findings have been reported across multiple cases of mosaic trisomy 20. These include an array of morphological findings, developmental delays, and learning disabilities. Beyond physical manifestations, a wide range of developmental and learning delays have also been reported. In this work, we provide an overview of the trisomy 20 literature and a case report of a young adult male with mosaic trisomy 20 who committed homicide. His developmental and life history, eventual diagnosis of mosaic trisomy 20, similarities and differences in his condition compared with prior research findings, and potentially new phenotypic findings associated with trisomy 20 that he manifested (childhood visual hallucinations, self‐injury, polydactyly) are presented. Additionally, the potential role of this genetic diagnosis in his neuropsychiatric history and its successful application as a mitigating factor at his capital sentencing trial are described. We did not identify other similar cases during our search of major scientific and legal databases. As a backdrop, the use of genetics in criminal trials is on the rise, and courts are increasingly likely to accept behavioral genetics evidence; therefore, it is crucial that the legal system is well acquainted with the opportunities and limitations of these approaches.     

The semantic specificity of gestures when verbal communication is not possible: The case of emergency evacuation

The aim of the present study was to examine the comprehension of gesture in a situation in which the communicator cannot (or can only with difficulty) use verbal communication. Based on theoretical considerations, we expected to obtain higher semantic comprehension for emblems (gestures with a direct verbal definition or translation that is well known by all members of a group, or culture) compared to illustrators (gestures regarded as spontaneous and idiosyncratic and that do not have a conventional definition). Based on the extant literature, we predicted higher semantic specificity associated with arbitrarily coded and iconically coded emblems compared to intrinsically coded illustrators. Using a scenario of emergency evacuation, we tested the difference in semantic specificity between different categories of gestures. 138 participants saw 10 videos each illustrating a gesture performed by a firefighter. They were requested to imagine themselves in a dangerous situation and to report the meaning associated with each gesture. The results showed that intrinsically coded illustrators were more successfully understood than arbitrarily coded emblems, probably because the meaning of intrinsically coded illustrators is immediately comprehensible without recourse to symbolic interpretation. Furthermore, there was no significant difference between the comprehension of iconically coded emblems and that of both arbitrarily coded emblems and intrinsically coded illustrators. It seems that the difference between the latter two types of gestures was supported by their difference in semantic specificity, although in a direction opposite to that predicted. These results are in line with those of Hadar and Pinchas‐Zamir (2004), which showed that iconic gestures have higher semantic specificity than conventional gestures.     

Between Causes and Reasons: Sellars,Hegel (and Lewis) on “Sensation”

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Sellars’ and Hegel’s treatment of ‘sensation’ – a notion that plays a central role in the reflections of both authors but which has garnered little scholarly attention. To disentangle the issues surrounding the notion and elaborate its role, function, and fate in their thought, I begin with a methodological question: what kind of philosophical argument leads Sellars and Hegel to introduce the concept of ‘sensation’ into their systems? Distinguishing between their two argumentative approaches, I maintain that Hegel offers what I broadly label a ‘transcendental’ argument for ‘sensation,’ which he presents in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and in the corresponding Lectures, whereas Sellars introduces the notion of sensation for what I term empirically ‘explanatory’ reasons. Next, I closely analyze Hegel’s and Sellars’ theories of sensation to produce a textually supported and conceptually coherent reading of their views on the notion. To clarify my methodological distinction and its stakes in Hegel’s and Sellars’ I will reference Lewis’ notion of the given.