What is it to be aware of your awareness of red? A review essay of Michelle Montague’s The Given

In this review essay of Michelle Montague’s The Given we focus on the central thesis in the book: the awareness of awareness thesis. On that thesis, a state of awareness constitutively involves an awareness of itself. In Section 2, we discuss what the awareness of awareness thesis amounts to, how it contrasts with the transparency of experience, and how it might be motivated. In Section 3, we discuss one of Montague’s two theoretical arguments for the awareness of awareness thesis. A view that accepts the awareness of awareness thesis, Montague argues, is to be preferred over competing views because it outperforms them in accounting for the property attributions one makes in perceptual experience. We suggest that it is not clear that this argument for the awareness of awareness thesis is successful. Finally, in Section 4 we consider the relation between Montague’s view of color experience and what she calls Strawson’s datum, arguing that Montague may not be able to explain this datum as straightforwardly as she supposes. This, we suggest, threatens Montague’s second theoretical argument for the awareness of awareness thesis.     

What Do Parents of Children with Down Syndrome Think about Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT)?

This study explores the attitudes of parents of children with Down syndrome towards non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) and widening the scope of prenatal screening. Three focus groups (n = 16) and eleven individual interviews with Dutch parents (and two relatives) of children with Down syndrome were conducted. Safety, accuracy and earlier testing were seen as the advantages of NIPT. Some participants were critical about the practice of screening for Down syndrome, but acknowledged that NIPT enables people to know whether the fetus is affected and to prepare without risking miscarriage. Many feared uncritical use of NIPT and more abortions for Down syndrome. Concerns included the consequences for the acceptance of and facilities for children with Down syndrome, resulting in more people deciding to screen. Participants stressed the importance of good counseling and balanced, accurate information about Down syndrome. Testing for more disorders might divert the focus away from Down syndrome, but participants worried about “where to draw the line”. They also feared a loss of diversity in society. Findings show that, while parents acknowledge that NIPT offers a better and safer option to know whether the fetus is affected, they also have concerns about NIPT’s impact on the acceptance and care of children with Down syndrome.     

Experiential tourist shopping value: Adding causality to value dimensions and testing their subjectivity

Previous literature on consumer behavior has tackled the experiential approach in retailing services in depth; however, most of the previous studies have concentrated on the simultaneous but not concatenated effects of value dimensions on satisfaction and/or loyalty. Furthermore, tourists' shopping behavior remains an underdeveloped area of study from the experiential perspective. This work explores experiential tourist shopping value, aiming to (a) explain tourists' loyalty to retailers by adding causality to experiential dimensions and (b) prove the subjectivity of these values. After a diachronic and synchronic review of the literature on experiential shopping value, a structural model with a chain of effects consisting of product quality, service quality, self‐esteem and shopping enjoyment on loyalty, and a multidimensional index as a second‐order model were built with partial least squares and tested on a purposive sample of 374 tourists in Valencia (Spain). Our findings revealed a sequential approach to tourists' shopping experiences where utilitarian values led to social and hedonic ones, all of which were antecedents of loyalty to retailers. Furthermore, the index showed differences by gender and nationality. Although our results are context specific, they add to the value creation process as they show a sequence of effects, and a fully subjective value provision, which changes according to demographics. The originality of this work is that it contributes to the suitability of the experiential paradigm in explaining tourists' shopping behavior by promoting interest in this specific, underdeveloped target area, and also by adding causality and proving the subjectivity of experiential value dimensions.     

Right or wrong, familiar or novel in pictorial list discrimination learning

The interaction between nonassociative learning (presentation frequencies) and associative learning (reinforcement rates) in stimulus discrimination performance was investigated. Subjects were taught to discriminate lists of visual pattern pairs. When they chose the stimulus designated as right they were symbolically rewarded and when they chose the stimulus designated as wrong they were symbolically penalised. Subjects first learned one list and then another list. For a "right" group the pairs of the second list consisted of right stimuli from the first list and of novel wrong stimuli. For a "wrong" group it was the other way round. The right group transferred some discriminatory performance from the first to the second list while the control and wrong groups initially only performed near chance with the second list. When the first list involved wrong stimuli presented twice as frequently as right stimuli, the wrong group exhibited a better transfer than the right group. In a final experiment subjects learned lists which consisted of frequent right stimuli paired with scarce wrong stimuli and frequent wrong stimuli paired with scarce right stimuli. In later test trials these stimuli were shown in new combinations and additionally combined with novel stimuli. Subjects preferred to choose the most rewarded stimuli and to avoid the most penalised stimuli when the test pairs included at least one frequent stimulus. With scarce/scarce or scarce/novel stimulus combinations they performed less well or even chose randomly. A simple mathematical model that ascribes stimulus choices to a Cartesian combination of stimulus frequency and stimulus value succeeds in matching all these results with satisfactory precision.     

The relationship of borderline personality disorder, life events and functioning in an Australian psychiatric sample

Studies have documented poor functioning and higher rates of negative life events in association with personality disorders (PDs), in particular with borderline personality disorder (BPD). The current study investigated the impact of recent life events, daily hassles and uplifts on psychosocial functioning in patients with PDs, while extending previous research by examining the role of perceived coping effectiveness and perceived stress of recent life events. Ninety-seven participants (Axis I group, N = 30; BPD group, N = 23; Other PD group, N = 44) completed measures of functioning, recent life events, daily hassles and uplifts. Results indicated that the BPD group reported the poorest levels of functioning, especially interpersonal functioning. The BPD group also reported more negative life events, particularly in the interpersonal relationships, personal health, crime, and financial domains. The BPD group experienced less uplifts, more hassles and found employment circumstances particularly stressful and difficult to cope with. Intensity of hassles was a predictor of functioning independent of a BPD diagnosis. A greater frequency of life events was closely associated with a non-BPD diagnosis in predicting a decrease in psychosocial functioning.     

Canceling out both the real and the spectral lines

Neglect patients typically show motor perseveration while canceling targets on the ipsilesional side. This behavior can be influenced by the presence vs. absence of targets on the (neglected) contralesional side (). As alternative explanations, the authors proposed (i) directional hypokinesia--the patient cannot perform reaching movements towards detected left-sided targets, and thus carries on canceling on the right side, and (ii) allochiria--the patient misperceives left-sided targets as located on the right side, and cancels them there. We report here data from a patient (EZ) that might confirm the second hypothesis. EZ was presented with 19 displays in which the number and position of cancellation targets on both sides were varied systematically. EZ showed motor perseveration while canceling, but this tendency did not vary across conditions. Interestingly though, EZ also drew cancellation marks in the empty space between the ipsilesional targets, and this phenomenon was significantly more intense when there were more targets on the neglected side. As EZ's comments suggested, such a behavior might reflect the attempt to cancel out delusional targets. Our speculation is that those objects were generated by allochiria.     

German noun plurals: a challenge to the dual-mechanism model

In this article, the authors test one of the central claims of the Dual-Mechanism Model (Pinker and Prince, 1994), that is, that regular inflection equals default inflection. Based on results from an elicitation task with eight agrammatic Broca's aphasics and a lexical decision task with unimpaired subjects, the authors show that this assumption is not borne out. Their data on German plural inflection rather indicate that regular inflection is not necessarily identical to default inflection. To capture the German data, they have to assume regular but input-restricted inflection besides regular default inflection.