Constructing Commitment: Brandom's Pragmatist Take on Rule‐Following

According to a standard criticism, Robert Brandom's “normative pragmatics”, i.e. his attempt to explain normative statuses in terms of practical attitudes, faces a dilemma. If practical attitudes and their interactions are specified in purely non‐normative terms, then they underdetermine normative statuses; but if normative terms are allowed into the account, then the account becomes viciously circular. This paper argues that there is no dilemma, because the feared circularity is not vicious. While normative claims do exhibit their respective authors' practical attitudes and thereby contribute towards establishing the normative statuses they are about, this circularity is not a mark of Brandom's explanatory strategy but a feature of social practice of which we theorists partake.     

Age effects in emotional prospective memory: cue valence differentially affects the prospective and retrospective component

While first studies suggested that emotional task material may enhance prospective memory performance in young and older adults, the extent and mechanisms of this effect are under debate. The authors explored possible differential effects of cue valence on the prospective and retrospective component of prospective memory in young and older adults. Forty-five young and 41 older adults performed a prospective memory task in which emotional valence of the prospective memory cue was manipulated (positive, negative, neutral). The multinomial model of event-based prospective memory was used to analyze effects of valence and age on the two prospective memory components separately. Results revealed an interaction indicating that age differences were smaller in both emotional valence conditions. For older adults positive cues improved the prospective component, while negative cues improved the retrospective component. No main effect of valence was found for younger adults on an overt accuracy measure, but model-based analyses showed that the retrospective component was enhanced in the positive compared with the negative cue condition. The study extends the literature in demonstrating that processes underlying emotional effects on prospective memory may differ depending on valence and age.     

Fast and accurate calculations for cumulative first-passage time distributions in Wiener diffusion models

We propose an improved method for calculating the cumulative first-passage time distribution in Wiener diffusion models with two absorbing barriers. This distribution function is frequently used to describe responses and error probabilities in choice reaction time tasks. The present work extends related work on the density of first-passage times [Navarro, D.J., Fuss, I.G. (2009). Fast and accurate calculations for first-passage times in Wiener diffusion models. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 53, 222–230]. Two representations exist for the distribution, both including infinite series. We derive upper bounds for the approximation error resulting from finite truncation of the series, and we determine the number of iterations required to limit the error below a pre-specified tolerance. For a given set of parameters, the representation can then be chosen which requires the least computational effort.     

Age benefits in everyday prospective memory: the influence of personal task importance, use of reminders and everyday stress

The present diary study examined everyday prospective memory tasks in younger and old adults and explored the role of personal task importance, use of reminders and everyday stress as possible correlates of age-related prospective memory performance in everyday life. Results revealed an age benefit in everyday prospective memory tasks. In addition, task importance was identified as a critical moderator of age-related prospective memory performance. More frequent use of reminders and lower levels of stress, however, were associated with better prospective memory performance in general but did not contribute to age-related prospective memory performance. Exploring further possible correlates of prospective memory revealed that the strategy to reprioritize initially planned intentions was associated with age benefits in everyday prospective memory. Results suggest that the age-related benefit observed in experimenter-given tasks transfers to everyday prospective memory and varies in dependence of motivational and cognitive factors. Implications for theoretical models of prospective memory and aging are discussed.     

Am I You?

It has been suggested that a rational being stands in what is called a “second-personal relation” to herself. According to philosophers like S. Darwall and Ch. Korsgaard, being a rational agent is to interact with oneself, to make demands on oneself. The thesis of the paper is that this view rests on a logical confusion. Transitive verbs like “asking”, “making a demand” or “obligating” can occur with the reflexive pronoun, but it is a mistake to assume that the reflexive and the non-reflexive use exhibit the same logical grammar. The thesis that they do is in part motivated by the assumption that to show that my relation to you bears the same form as my practical self-relation is to show that, fundamentally, you are not an object for me to think about and act on, but a subject with whom to think and act together. I argue, to the contrary, that if my addressing you exhibited the same form as a relation I could literally be said to stand in to myself, then the nexus between us would be such that I am irretrievably alienated from you. To allow the possibility of addressing oneself is to assume one of the following accounts of the second-person pronoun. Either one has to follow R. Heck and conceive it as a merely linguistic phenomenon whose content can be analyzed in terms of “the person to whom I'm now speaking”; or one has to internalize the second person and follow Ch. Korsgaard in taking its prior use to be entirely within and independent of its linguistic expression. But to account for the idea of mutual recognition requires a third view according to which address is an act of mind sui generis for which linguistic expression is essential.     

Zwangsbehandlung – eine Zwischenbilanz

Each medical treatment encroaches on patient rights; therefore, every patient has the right to freely decide whether to be treated or not and has the freedom to refuse treatment even if it is unreasonable from a medical perspective. The law acknowledges this freedom even if the patient is incapable of responsible self-determination as a result of (mental) illness. Treatment contrary to the patient’s declared intentions (“Zwangsbehandlung”—compulsory treatment) is allowed only under specific, strict circumstances. These requirements must be legally established in a clear and precise manner. On the basis of a number of cases concerning compulsory treatment with drugs of patients in a forensic psychiatric hospital, the Federal Constitutional Court therefore established specific guidelines. The Federal legislators and some state legislators have generally implemented these guidelines, even with reference to partly different settings, but considering the fact that these guidelines were related to a special treatment situation they also found differing solutions to some extent. Nevertheless, there are significant regulatory gaps remaining which in particular relate to the treatment of somatic diseases of psychiatric patients.     

Semantic interference from distractor pictures in single-picture naming: evidence for competitive lexical selection

Picture-naming studies have demonstrated interference from semantic-categorically related distractor words, but not from corresponding distractor pictures, and the lack of generality of the interference effect has been argued to challenge theories viewing lexical selection in speech production as a competitive process. Here, we demonstrate that semantic interference from context pictures does become visible, if sufficient attention is allocated to them. We combined picture naming with a spatial-cuing procedure. When participants’ attention was shifted to the distractor, semantically related distractor pictures interfered with the response, as compared with unrelated distractor pictures. This finding supports models conceiving lexical retrieval as competitive (Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999) but is difficult to reconcile with the response exclusion hypothesis (Finkbeiner & Caramazza, 2006b) proposed as an alternative.