How do young children deal with hybrids of living and non‐living things: The case of humanoid robots

In this experiment, we tested children's intuitions about entities that bridge the contrast between living and non‐living things. Three‐ and four‐year‐olds were asked to attribute a range of properties associated with living things and machines to novel category‐defying complex artifacts (humanoid robots), a familiar living thing (a girl), and a familiar complex artifact (a camera). Results demonstrated that 4‐year‐olds tended to treat the category‐defying entities like members of the inanimate group, while 3‐year‐olds showed more variability in their responding. This finding suggests that preschoolers' ability to classify complex artifacts that cross the living–non‐living divide becomes more stable between the ages of 3 and 4 and that children at both ages draw on a range of properties when classifying such entities.     

Does The Necessity of Mathematical Truths Imply Their Apriority?

It is sometimes argued that mathematical knowledge must be a priori, since mathematical truths are necessary, and experience tells us only what is true, not what must be true. This argument can be undermined either by showing that experience can yield knowledge of the necessity of some truths, or by arguing that mathematical theorems are contingent. Recent work by Albert Casullo and Timothy Williamson argues (or can be used to argue) the first of these lines; W. V. Quine and Hartry Field take the latter line. I defend a version of the argument against these, and other objections.     

Lifestyle interventions in the treatment of childhood overweight: a meta-analytic review of randomized controlled trials.

CONTEXT: Evaluating the efficacy of pediatric weight loss treatments is critical. OBJECTIVE: This is the first meta-analysis of the efficacy of RCTs comparing pediatric lifestyle interventions to no-treatment or information/education-only controls. DATA SOURCES: Medline, PsycINFO, and Cochrane Controlled Trials Register. STUDY SELECTION: Fourteen RCTs targetting change in weight status were eligible, yielding 19 effect sizes. DATA EXTRACTION: Standardized coding was used to extract information on design, participant characteristics, interventions, and results. DATA SYNTHESIS: For trials with no-treatment controls, the mean effect size was 0.75 (k = 9, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.52-0.98) at end of treatment and 0.60 (k = 4, CI = 0.27-0.94) at follow-up. For trials with information/education-only controls, the mean ES was 0.48 (k = 4, CI = 0.13-0.82) at end of treatment and 0.91 (k = 2, CI = 0.32-1.50) at follow-up. No moderator effects were identified. CONCLUSIONS: Lifestyle interventions for pediatric overweight are efficacious in the short term with some evidence for extended persistence. Future research is required to identify moderators and mediators and to determine the optimal length and intensity of treatment required to produce enduring changes in weight status.     

Nonword repetition in lexical decision: Support for two opposing processes

We tested and confirmed the hypothesis that the prior presentation of nonwords in lexical decision is the net result of two opposing processes: (1) a relatively fast inhibitory process based on global familiarity; and (2) a relatively slow facilitatory process based on the retrieval of specific episodic information. In three studies, we manipulated speed-stress to influence the balance between the two processes. Experiment 1 showed item-specific improvement for repeated nonwords in a standard “respond-when-ready” lexical decision task. Experiment 2 used a 400-ms deadline procedure and showed performance for nonwords to be unaffected by up to four prior presentations. In Experiment 3 we used a signal-to-respond procedure with variable time intervals and found negative repetition priming for repeated nonwords. These results can be accounted for by dual-process models of lexical decision (e.g., Balota & Chumbley, 1984; Balota & Spieler, 1999).     

Self-Affirmation Reduces Biased Processing of Health-Risk Information

An experiment tested whether a positive experience (the endorsement and recall of one's past acts of kindness) would reduce biased processing of self-relevant health-risk information. Women college students (N = 66) who reported high or low levels of daily caffeine use were exposed to both risk-confirming and risk-disconfirming information about the link between caffeine consumption and fibrocystic breast disease (FBD). Participants were randomly assigned to complete an affirmation of their kindness via questionnaire or to a no-affirmation condition. Results indicated that the affirmation manipulation made frequent caffeine drinkers more open, less biased processors of risk-related information. Relative to frequent caffeine drinkers who did not affirm their kindness, frequent caffeine drinkers in the affirmation condition oriented more quickly to the risk-confirming information, rated the risk-confirming information as more convincing than the risk-disconfirming information, and recalled less risk-disconfirming information at a 1-week follow-up. They also reported greater perceived personal control over reducing their level of caffeine consumption. Although frequent caffeine drinkers in the affirmation condition initially reported lower intentions to reduce their caffeine consumption, there was no evidence that they were less likely to decrease their caffeine consumption at the follow-up. The possibility that positive beliefs and experiences function as self-regulatory resources among people confronting threats to health and well-being is discussed.     

Representativeness reasoning and the search for the origins of stuttering: A return to basic observations

In this paper, we present our views on theories of the distal and proximal causes of stuttering. We suggest that the search for the etiology of stuttering has been hampered by the inappropriate use of the representativeness heuristic, a method of reasoning which proposes that the effects of a disorder reflect its causes. We encourage a return to the ideas of Froeschels and Bluemel so that the representativeness heuristic might properly be employed in investigations into the proximal, mechanical causes of stuttering and into the etiological implications of the repetitions of early stuttering.     

Prospective remembering: Perceptually driven or conceptually driven processes?

Converging experimental operations and several prospective memory tasks were used across three experiments to determine the extent to which prospective remembering is supported by datadriven versus conceptually driven processes. In all experiments, subjects were asked to perform an action when a target item later occurred. When the semantic context changed from encoding to test, prospective memory significantly declined (Experiment 1). When the target event (the item, which in its subsequent appearance in the experiment was the signal to perform the action) was presented as a word (relative to picture presentation, Experiment 2) or was encoded nonsemantically (relative to semantic encoding, Experiment 3), there was a decline in prospective memory performance. Dividing attention during prospective memory retrieval substantially reduced prospective memory performance (Experiment 3). The results of this research indicated that prospective memory is largely conceptually driven, and it behaves more similarly to direct rather than indirect conceptual tests. We suggest that prospective remembering of the type studied here is mediated by a reflexive episodic associative memory system as proposed by Moscovitch (1994).