Modality effects: Do they fall on deaf ears?

The present study tests the assumption of the PAS theory of echoic memory (Greene & Crowder, 1984) that the representation of acoustic features is necessary in producing modality effects. Performance by deaf subjects was compared to hearing subjects on serial and free-recall tasks with vocalizing and non-vocalizing conditions. For the serial tasks, typical modality and acoustic similarity effects were observed with hearing subjects, and no such effects were found with deaf subjects. However, for the free-recall task, modality effects were found for both deaf and hearing subjects. It is unlikely that phonological coding resulting from gestural cues mediates the modality effect, as phonological confusion errors for deaf and hearing subjects did not correlate with the size of this effect.     

Utilitarian alternatives to Act Utilitarianism

One problem for any utilitarian alternative to act utilitarianism, such as rule utilitarianism, is the feeling that act utilitarianism is the most natural form of utilitarianism. Other forms seen unmotivated, inconsistent, or irrational. This argument is found in Smart, Foot and Slote. It turns on the assumption that utilitarianism must be motivated by the "teleological motivation", the idea that one must derive one's entire moral theory from the notion of the good. I respond that act utilitarianism itself has a problem from the point of view of the teleological motivation, a problem solved, surprisingly, by several utilitarian alternatives including rule utilitarianism.