Harmony,structure, and force in the Essai analytique sur les facultés de l'âcme of Charles Bonnet

The psychological works of Charles Bonnet of Geneva (1720–1793) have customarily been read as part of the mentalistic traditions of associationism or Leibnizianism. They are better understood as part of a campaign—directed against the radical Enlightenment —to reclaim the human body for religion by the paradoxical strategy of incorporating a materialist conception of the human mind into the framework of divine providence. Bonnet's embodied psychology treats the soul as an intrinsically indeterminate force, and attributes the capacity of the mind to organize experience to highly specialized fibers, providentially constructed to correspond to the created world.     

A defense of the very idea of moral deference pessimism

Philosophical Studies - Pessimists think that there is something wrong with relying on deference for one’s moral beliefs—at least if one is morally mature. Call this no deference. They...     

Speaker’s reference,stipulation, and a dilemma for conceptual engineers

Philosophical Studies - Advocates of conceptual engineering as a method of philosophy face a dilemma: either they are ignorant of how conceptual engineering can be implemented, or else it is...     

Negotiator cognitions: A descriptive approach to negotiators' understanding of their opponents

Substantial evidence exists that negotiators frequently fail to attain readily available and mutually beneficial outcomes. This paper provides a preliminary model of why these failures occur. We assume that negotiators are decision makers, and that their errors derive from cognitive processes ignored by utility-maximization theories. We focus on one part of the model: the systematic tendency to ignore the cognitions of opponent negotiators. Empirical evidence clarifying negotiators' cognitive processes is generated using verbal protocol techniques in a controlled negotiation task. The results show that subjects simplify the negotiation task, in part by ignoring contingencies introduced by the knowledge possessed by their opponents. The discussion focuses on how subjects simplify the task and how the decision-making perspective helps redirect the negotiation literature.     

Influence of drafting during swimming on ratings of perceived exertion during a swim-to-cycle transition in well-trained triathletes

After the swim to cycle transition of a triathlon, perceived exertion (RPE) during cycling was higher than during a single cycling bout for 8 well-trained triathletes, but swimming in a drafting position led to lower RPE responses and energy cost of cycling than swimming alone.     

When parallel processing in visual word recognition is not enough: new evidence from naming

Low-frequency irregular words are named more slowly and are more error prone than low-frequency regular words (the regularity effect). Rastle and Coltheart (1999) reported that this irregularity cost is modulated by the serial position of the irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondence, such that words with early irregularities exhibit a larger cost than words with late ones. They argued that these data implicate rule-based serial processing, and they also reported a successful simulation with a model that has a rule-based serial component—the DRC model of reading aloud (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001). However, Zorzi (2000) also simulated these data with a model that operates solely in parallel. Furthermore, Kwantes and Mewhort (1999) simulated these data with a serial processing model that has no rules for converting orthography to phonology. The human data reported by Rastle and Coltheart therefore neither require a serial processing account, nor successfully discriminate among a number of computational models of reading aloud. New data are presented wherein an interaction between the effects of regularity and serial position of irregularity is again reported for human readers. The DRC model simulated this interaction; no other implemented computational model does so. The present results are thus consistent with rule-based serial processing in reading aloud.     

The Bursts and Lulls of Multimodal Interaction: Temporal Distributions of Behavior Reveal Differences Between Verbal and Non‐Verbal Communication

Recent studies of naturalistic face‐to‐face communication have demonstrated coordination patterns such as the temporal matching of verbal and non‐verbal behavior, which provides evidence for the proposal that verbal and non‐verbal communicative control derives from one system. In this study, we argue that the observed relationship between verbal and non‐verbal behaviors depends on the level of analysis. In a reanalysis of a corpus of naturalistic multimodal communication (Louwerse, Dale, Bard, & Jeuniaux, 2012 ), we focus on measuring the temporal patterns of specific communicative behaviors in terms of their burstiness. We examined burstiness estimates across different roles of the speaker and different communicative modalities. We observed more burstiness for verbal versus non‐verbal channels, and for more versus less informative language subchannels. Using this new method for analyzing temporal patterns in communicative behaviors, we show that there is a complex relationship between verbal and non‐verbal channels. We propose a “temporal heterogeneity” hypothesis to explain how the language system adapts to the demands of dialog.     

The hierarchical order of processes underlying the direction illusion and the direction aftereffect

Motion perception involves the processing of velocity signals through several hierarchical stages of the visual cortex. To better understand this process, a number of studies have sought to localise the neural substrates of two misperceptions of motion direction, the direction illusion (DI) and the direction aftereffect (DAE). These studies have produced contradictory evidence as to the hierarchical order of the processing stages from which the respective phenomena arise. We have used a simple stimulus configuration to further investigate the sequential order of processes giving rise to the DI and DAE. To this end, we measured the two phenomena invoked in combination, and also manually parsed this combined effect into its two constituents by measuring the two phenomena individually in both possible sequential orders. Comparing the predictions made from each order to the outcome from the combined effect allowed us to test the tenability of two models: the DAE-first model and the DI-first model. Our results indicate that DAE-invoking activity does not occur earlier in the motion processing hierarchy than DI-invoking activity. Although the DI-first model is not inconsistent with our data, the possible involvement of non-sequential processing may be better able to reconcile these results with those of previous studies.     

Representing Spatial Structure Through Maps and Language: Lord of the Rings Encodes the Spatial Structure of Middle Earth

Spatial mental representations can be derived from linguistic and non‐linguistic sources of information. This study tested whether these representations could be formed from statistical linguistic frequencies of city names, and to what extent participants differed in their performance when they estimated spatial locations from language or maps. In a computational linguistic study, we demonstrated that co‐occurrences of cities in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit predicted the authentic longitude and latitude of those cities in Middle Earth. In a human study, we showed that human spatial estimates of the location of cities were very similar regardless of whether participants read Tolkien’s texts or memorized a map of Middle Earth. However, text‐based location estimates obtained from statistical linguistic frequencies better predicted the human text‐based estimates than the human map‐based estimates. These findings suggest that language encodes spatial structure of cities, and that human cognitive map representations can come from implicit statistical linguistic patterns, from explicit non‐linguistic perceptual information, or from both.