Unconsidered preferences

Modern contractarians ground morality on preferences that are “considered' to the requisite degree. This move is inadmissible for contractarians. If what counts as a considered preference is external to the agent's estimations, it robs the requisite (to contractarians) motivational force for agents to be moral. There is also a danger of begging the question by grounding morality on pre-approved motives. If the determination of considered preferences is subjective, on the other hand, then a considered preference can be none other than a preference held presently by the actor—whether or not it will sustain sufficient reflection. If so, the introduction of ‘considered’ preferences is idle. Either way, it's bad.     

Air force officer qualifying test validity for predicting pilot training performance

The AFOQT was validated for the prediction of pilot training criteria. Subjects were 7,563 men and women selected for pilot training on the basis of educational attainment and AFOQT scores. Criterion variables included daily flight training grades, check flight grades in subsonic and transonic aircraft, and overall academic performance in the 53 week pilot training course. Test validities were presented as observed, corrected for multivariate range restriction, and corrected for multivariate range restriction and unreliability. The Aviation Information and Instrument Comprehension tests, measures of job knowledge, were most predictive of daily and check flights in the initial subsonic jet aircraft. This reflects the relative greater importance of prior job knowledge early in training. The Scale Reading test, a measure of perceptual speed, was most predictive for daily and check flights in the advanced transonic training aircraft. The Arithmetic Reasoning test, a good measure of general cognitive ability, was most predictive of aeronautics in ground school. The development of an improved pilot selection composite is suggested by the results of the validity analyses.The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Department of the Air Force, Department of Defense, or the Government of the United States.     

Effects of divided attention at encoding and retrieval: Further data

Division of attention (DA) at the time of learning has large detrimental effects on subsequent memory performance, but DA at retrieval has much smaller effects (Baddeley, Lewis, Eldridge, & Thomson, 1984, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113, 518–540; Craik, Govoni, Naveh-Benjamin, & Anderson, 1996, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 125, 159–180). Experiment 1 confirmed the relatively small effects of DA on retrieval and also showed that retrieval operations do consume processing resources. The experiment also found that the effect is not attributable to a trade-off in performance with the concurrent task or to recognition decisions made on the basis of familiarity judgments. Participants made levels-of-processing (LOP) judgments during encoding to check whether deeper semantic judgments were differentially vulnerable to the effects of DA. In fact DA did not interact with LOP. Experiment 2 explored reports that the comparatively slight effect of DA on recognition accuracy is accompanied by a compensatory increase in recognition latency (Baddeley et al., 1984). The experiment replicated findings that neither DA nor differential emphasis between recognition and a concurrent continuous reaction time (CRT) task affected recognition accuracy, but also found evidence for a lawful trade-off in decision latencies between recognition and CRT performance. Further analysis showed that the relationship between response rates on the two tasks was well described by a linear function, and that this function was demonstrated by the majority of individual participants. It is concluded that the small effect of DA on recognition performance is attributable to a trade-off within the recognition task itself; accuracy is maintained by a compensatory increase in decision latency.     

Anticipation in Real‐World Scenes: The Role of Visual Context and Visual Memory

The human sentence processor is able to make rapid predictions about upcoming linguistic input. For example, upon hearing the verb eat, anticipatory eye‐movements are launched toward edible objects in a visual scene (Altmann & Kamide, 1999). However, the cognitive mechanisms that underlie anticipation remain to be elucidated in ecologically valid contexts. Previous research has, in fact, mainly used clip‐art scenes and object arrays, raising the possibility that anticipatory eye‐movements are limited to displays containing a small number of objects in a visually impoverished context. In Experiment 1, we confirm that anticipation effects occur in real‐world scenes and investigate the mechanisms that underlie such anticipation. In particular, we demonstrate that real‐world scenes provide contextual information that anticipation can draw on: When the target object is not present in the scene, participants infer and fixate regions that are contextually appropriate (e.g., a table upon hearing eat). Experiment 2 investigates whether such contextual inference requires the co‐presence of the scene, or whether memory representations can be utilized instead. The same real‐world scenes as in Experiment 1 are presented to participants, but the scene disappears before the sentence is heard. We find that anticipation occurs even when the screen is blank, including when contextual inference is required. We conclude that anticipatory language processing is able to draw upon global scene representations (such as scene type) to make contextual inferences. These findings are compatible with theories assuming contextual guidance, but posit a challenge for theories assuming object‐based visual indices.     

Healing Without Waging War: Beyond Military Metaphors in Medicine and HIV Cure Research

Military metaphors are pervasive in biomedicine, including HIV research. Rooted in the mind set that regards pathogens as enemies to be defeated, terms such as “shock and kill” have become widely accepted idioms within HIV cure research. Such language and symbolism must be critically examined as they may be especially problematic when used to express scientific ideas within emerging health-related fields. In this article, philosophical analysis and an interdisciplinary literature review utilizing key texts from sociology, anthropology, history, and Chinese and African studies were conducted to investigate the current proliferation of military metaphors. We found the use of these metaphors to be ironic, unfortunate, and unnecessary. To overcome military metaphors we propose to (1) give them less aggressive meanings, and/or (2) replace them with more peaceful metaphors. Building on previous authors' work, we argue for the increased use of “journey” (and related) metaphors as meaningful, cross-culturally appropriate alternatives to military metaphors.     

The effects of food deprivation,aggression, and isolation on infanticide in the male Mongolian gerbil

Male Mongolian gerbils show an increase in infanticide and pup-cannibalism after 24-hr food deprivation, suggesting that food acquisition is a function of this activity. Dominant animals show high levels of infanticide, but subordinate animals are inhibited from this activity. An increase in infanticide is seen when males from a single sex group are isolated; this increase resembles that observed when a male is separated from his pregnant mate [Elwood, 1980]. These results suggest a mechanism whereby males are normally brought into a noninfanticidal state during cohabitation with their pregnant mates owing to subordination by the latter. In this manner males are able to utilize strange pups as food but avoid harming their own offspring.