Predictive minds in Ouija board sessions

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Ouija board sessions are illustrious examples of how subjective feelings of control – the Sense of Agency (SoA) - can be manipulated in real life...     

Instrumental and hostile aggression in childhood disruptive behavior disorders

An analogue task of instrumental and hostile aggression during a competitive game was evaluated in a sample of clinically-referred 8-to 12-year-old aggressive boys. Similar to a prior task in a normative sample (Having, Wallace, & La Forme, 1979), both types of aggression increased during provocation as compared to baseline, indicating the success of the provocation manipulation, with moderate correlations between the two aggressive responses. The aggressive group with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and the aggressive group without ADHD each had higher rates of instrumental aggression than controls. Only the aggressive/ADHD group had higher rates of hostile aggression than controls. Parent Child Behavior Checklist ratings indicated a modest but significant unique relationship between instrumental aggression and delinquency. The high rate of both types of aggression in the aggressive/ADHD group suggests that comorbid ADHD and aggression may result in qualitative differences in aggressive behavior. The high rate of hostile aggression in the aggressive-ADHD group supports theoretical assumptions regarding the relationship of hostile aggression to poor impulse control.This research was supported in part by grants to the first author from the Medical College of Pennsylvania, the Allegheny-Singer Research Institute, NIMH First Award (MH4682), and support from NICHD Mental Retardation Research Center Core Center Grant (DH26979); and NIMH grants (MH40364 and MH00590) awarded to the second author. The authors are grateful to Marianne Torchinsky and Abby Michaleski for assistance in data collection. Preliminary data were presented at the annual meetings of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy, New York, November 1988, and the Society for Research in Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, Costa Mesa, CA, January 1990.     

Animal welfare and individual characteristics: a conversation against speciesism

It seems impossible for a human being not to have some point of view concerning nonhuman animal (hereafter animal) welfare. Many people make decisions about how humans are permitted to treat animals using speciesist criteria, basing their decisions on an individual's species membership rather than on that animal's individual characteristics. Although speciesism provides a convenient way for making difficult decisions about who should be used in different types of research, we argue that such decisions should rely on an analysis of individual characteristics and should not be based merely on species membership. We do not argue that the concept of species is never useful or important. To make our points, we present a conversation among a skeptic, an agnostic, and a proponent of the view that our moral obligations to an animal must be based on an analysis of that individual's characteristics. In the course of the discussion, concepts such as personhood, consciousness, cognitive ability, harm, and pain are presented, because one's understanding of these concepts informs his or her ethical decisions about the use of animals by humans.     

Are criminals better lie detectors? Investigating offenders' abilities in the context of deception detection

The present research examined lie detection abilities of a rarely investigated group, namely offenders. Results of the studies conducted thus far indicated a better performance of offenders compared to non‐offenders when discriminating between true and false messages. With two new studies, we aimed at replicating offenders' superior abilities in the context of deception detection. Results of Study 1 (N = 76 males), in contrast, revealed that offenders were significantly worse at accurately classifying true and false messages compared to non‐offenders (students). Results of Study 2 (N = 175 males) revealed that offenders' discrimination performance was not significantly different compared to non‐offenders (clinic staff). An internal meta‐analysis yielded no significant difference between offenders and non‐offenders, questioning the generalizability of previous findings.     

What Determines Voting Behaviors of Muslim Minorities in Europe: Muslim Identity or Left-Right Ideology?

Voting is key to political integration of immigrant-background minorities, but what determines their voting preferences remains unclear. Moreover, dual-citizen minorities can vote differently in their country of residence and origin. Using a representative survey of Turkish-Muslim minorities in two cities in Belgium (N = 447, M_age = 36.3), we asked whether left-right ideology or religious identity predicted their voting in their country of residence and origin, besides typical predictors of right-wing voting (i.e., efficacy, deprivation, and authoritarianism). Authoritarianism, low political efficacy, and high deprivation predicted voting for right-wing parties in Turkey, whereas the latter two, surprisingly, predicted voting for the left in Belgium. Latent class analyses of their religious practices distinguished “moderate” versus “strict” Muslims. While “strict” Muslims voted for right-wing parties in Turkey, ideology did not predict their voting. Conversely, in Belgium, while Muslim identity did not predict their voting, ideology did. Analyzing their combined effects, “moderate” Muslims voted based on their ideology—right-leaning voting for the right, whereas “strict” Muslims voted according to their interests as a disadvantaged minority in Belgium—thus voting for the left—or as a devout Muslim in Turkey—thus voting for the right. Our results elucidate processes underlying the voting behaviors of European-Muslim minorities.     

The emergence and development of tradition in reform Jewish worship, 1970–1999

It is axiomatic to note the increased amount of traditional ritual, customs, ceremonies and observances in Reform Jewish worship in the past three decades. These include hakafot, talitot, kippot and bowing the head and bending the knee during prayer. Although we may disagree about when to mark the beginning of this increase (Maurice Eisendrath, then president of the umbrella organization of Reform congregations, insisted in his 1964 autobiography, Can Faith Survive?, that he “wanted no neo-Orthodoxy in Reform today”), I argue that the end of the dignified English service with hymns such as “All the World has Come to Serve Thee” became widespread only in the 1970s, primarily because of the influence of a generation of Reform rabbis who, beginning in 1970, were required to spend a year in Jerusalem. I explore the use of the word mitzvah as a test case, noting its absence before this period, the continued discomfort with it on theological grounds (the increase in tradition was not accompanied by any return to traditional theological categories), but the comfort with it when used as an equivalent for tsedakah or tikkun olam. And I use several synagogues as case studies of the implications — better, ambivalence — about this phenomenon.     

Sequential learning using temporal context

The temporal context model (TCM) has been extensively applied to recall phenomena from episodic memory. Here we use the same formulation of temporal context to construct a sequential learning model called the predictive temporal context model (pTCM) to extract the generating function of a language from sequentially-presented words. In pTCM, temporal context is used to generate a prediction vector at each step of learning and these prediction vectors are in turn used to construct semantic representations of words on the fly. The semantic representation of a word is defined as the superposition of prediction vectors that occur prior to the presentation of the word in the sequence. Here we create a formal framework for pTCM and prove several useful results. We explore the effect of manipulating the parameters of the model on learning a sequence of words generated by a bi-gram generating function. In this simple case, we demonstrate that feeding back the constructed semantic representation into the temporal context during learning improves the performance of the model when trained with a finite training sequence from a language with equivalence classes among some words. We also describe , a variant of the model that is identical to pTCM at steady state. has significant computational advantages over pTCM and can improve the quality of its prediction for some training sequences.     

Reply to Farrell and Lewandowsky: Recency—contiguity interactions predicted by the temporal context model

Farrell and Lewandowsky (2008) argued that the temporal context model (TCM; Howard & Kahana, 2002) cannot explain nonmonotonicities in the contiguity effect seen at extreme lags. However, TCM actually predicts these nonmonotonicities to the extent that end-of-list context persists as a retrieval cue during recall and to the extent that end-of-list context generates a recency effect. We show that the observed nonmonotonicity in the contiguity effect interacts with the recency effect, as predicted by TCM. In conditions, such as immediate and continualdistractor free recall, that exhibit strong recency, one observes more prominent nonmonotonicities in the contiguity effect than in conditions, such as delayed free recall, that attenuate recency. The nonmonotonicities in the contiguity effect at extreme lags, and the interactions between recency and contiguity, result from the role of end-of-list context as a retrieval cue in TCM. Results of an additional simulation based on the Howard and Kahana (2002) version of TCM may be downloaded from http://pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.