The Interpretation of Anaphoric Noun Phrases Time Course, and Effects of Overspecificity

Two experiments investigated the interpretation of anaphoric noun phrases, and in particular those thatcould only be linked to their antecedents via knowledge-based inferences. The first experiment showed that much of the inferential processing was carried out as the anaphoric noun phrase was read, although there was some indication that inferential processing continued to the end of the clause. The second experiment attempted to establish why anaphoric noun phrases that are more specific than their antecedents cause problems. It showed that the difficulty did not lie in adding the extra information carried by the anaphor to the representation of the referent. Rather, we suggest, putting extra information in the anaphoric noun phrase disrupts the process of linking that noun phrase to its antecedent.     

Attitudes,Tracing, and Control

There is an apparent tension in our everyday moral responsibility practices. On the one hand, it is commonly assumed that moral responsibility requires voluntary control: an agent can be morally responsible only for those things that fall within the scope of her voluntary control. On the other hand, we regularly praise and blame individuals for mental states and conditions that appear to fall outside the scope of their voluntary control, such as desires, emotions, beliefs, and other attitudes. In order to resolve this apparent tension, many philosophers appeal to a tracing principle to argue that agents are morally responsible (only) for those attitudes whose existence can be traced back, causally, to a voluntary action or omission in the past. My aim in this article is to critically evaluate this tracing strategy and to argue that it gives us a misguided picture of when and why we are morally responsible for our attitudes. I argue that we should accept a ‘judgment sensitivity’ condition of moral responsibility rather than a ‘voluntary control’ condition, and defend this account against various objections.     

Attentional biases in geometric form perception

This paper reports the operation of robust attentional bias to the top and right during perception of small, single geometric forms. Same/different judgements of successively presented standard and comparison forms are faster when local differences are located at top and right rather than in other regions of the forms. The bias persists when form size is reduced to approximately one degree of visual angle, and it is unaffected by saccadic eye movements and by instructions to attend to other reliably differentiating regions of the forms. Results lend support in various degrees to two of the possible explanations of the bias: (1) a static, skewed distribution of attentional resources around eye fixation; and (2) biased, covert scanning that commences invariably at the top and right of stim ulus forms. Origins of the bias in terms of possible left-hemispheric capacity for constructing representations of visual stimuli from parts, as well as in terms of reading experience and prevailing optic flow during locomotion through space are considered. Recent investigations of conditions under which the bias can be maintained or reduced are mentioned.