I See Dead People: Insights From the Humanities Into the Nature of Plastinated Cadavers

Accounts from the humanities which focus on describing the nature of whole body plastinates are examined. We argue that this literature shows that plastinates do not clearly occupy standard cultural binary categories of interior or exterior, real or fake, dead or alive, bodies or persons, self or other and argue that Noël Carroll’s structural framework for horrific monsters unites the various accounts of the contradictory or ambiguous nature of plastinates while also showing how plastinates differ from horrific fictional monsters. In doing so, it offers an account of the varied reactions of those responding to exhibitions of plastinated whole bodies.     

Probabilistic single function dual process theory and logic programming as approaches to non-monotonicity in human vs. artificial reasoning

In this paper, it is argued that single function dual process theory is a more credible psychological account of non-monotonicity in human conditional reasoning than recent attempts to apply logic programming (LP) approaches in artificial intelligence to these data. LP is introduced and among other critiques, it is argued that it is psychologically unrealistic in a similar way to hash coding in the classicism vs. connectionism debate. Second, it is argued that causal Bayes nets provide a framework for modelling probabilistic conditional inference in System 2 that can deal with patterns of inference LP cannot. Third, we offer some speculations on how the cognitive system may avoid problems for System 1 identified by Fodor in 1983. We conclude that while many problems remain, the probabilistic single function dual processing theory is to be preferred over LP as an account of the non-monotonicity of human reasoning.     

The effects of age and emotional valence on recognition memory: An ex‐Gaussian components analysis

The aim of this work was to study the effects of valence and age on visual image recognition memory. The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) battery was used, and response time data were analyzed using analysis of variance, as well as an ex‐Gaussian fit method. Older participants were slower and more variable in their reaction times. Response times were longer for negative valence pictures, however this was statistically significant only for young participants. This suggests that negative emotional valence has a strong effect on recognition memory in young but not in old participants. The τ parameter, often related to attention in the literature, was smaller for young than old participants in an ex‐Gaussian fit. Differences on the τ parameter might suggest poorer attentional performance in old participants.     

Child Delinquents: Examining the Market for Criminal Futures

This article investigates child delinquency (offenders younger than 13 years of age). The population of child delinquents under various dispositions in the state of Louisiana, at one point in time, is described. Eighty youth are examined using the following characteristics: Race, Gender, Age, Offense Type (violent, nonviolent) Crime Category (felony, status offense, misdemeanor, and felony or misdemeanor) and Disposition (supervision, secure custody, and non-secure custody). Child delinquency is an important topic because the younger the age of first offense the greater the probability of a delinquent and criminal career. Findings reveal very few youth in secure custody and black males account for over half of the population of child delinquents. Over 75% of the population was 12 years of age.     

Tolerance for distorted faces: Challenges to a configural processing account of familiar face recognition

Face recognition is widely held to rely on ‘configural processing’, an analysis of spatial relations between facial features. We present three experiments in which viewers were shown distorted faces, and asked to resize these to their correct shape. Based on configural theories appealing to metric distances between features, we reason that this should be an easier task for familiar than unfamiliar faces (whose subtle arrangements of features are unknown). In fact, participants were inaccurate at this task, making between 8% and 13% errors across experiments. Importantly, we observed no advantage for familiar faces: in one experiment participants were more accurate with unfamiliars, and in two experiments there was no difference. These findings were not due to general task difficulty – participants were able to resize blocks of colour to target shapes (squares) more accurately. We also found an advantage of familiarity for resizing other stimuli (brand logos). If configural processing does underlie face recognition, these results place constraints on the definition of ‘configural’. Alternatively, familiar face recognition might rely on more complex criteria – based on tolerance to within-person variation rather than highly specific measurement.     

Crowd Effects in Unfamiliar Face Matching

Psychological research shows that humans can not reliably match unfamiliar faces. This presents a practical problem, because identity verification processes in a variety of occupational settings depend on people to perform these tasks reliably. In this context, it is surprising that very few studies have attempted to improve human performance. Here, we investigate whether distributing face matching tasks across groups of individuals might help to solve this problem. Across four studies, we measure the accuracy of the ‘crowd’ on a standard test of face matching ability and find that aggregating individual responses produces substantial gains in matching accuracy. We discuss the practical implications of this result and also suggest ways in which this approach might be used to improve our understanding of face perception more generally. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Contrast classes and matching bias as explanations of the effects of negation on conditional reasoning

In this paper the arguments for optimal data selection and the contrast class account of negations in the selection task and the conditional inference task are summarised, and contrasted with the matching bias approach. It is argued that the probabilistic contrast class account provides a unified, rational explanation for effects across these tasks. Moreover, there are results that are only explained by the contrast class account that are also discussed. The only major anomaly is the explicit negations effect in the selection task (Evans, Clibbens, & Rood, 1996), which it is argued may not be the result of normal interpretative processes. It is concluded that the effects of negation on human reasoning provide good evidence for the view that human reasoning processes may be rational according to a probabilistic standard.     

Preconscious analysis of global structure: Evidence from masked priming

According to the global precedence hypothesis, the perceptual processing of complex objects proceeds from global structure to the analysis of local elements. In the present study, we used a masked priming paradigm to explore whether the global or the local level of hierarchical letters is analysed at preconscious processing stages. Experiment 1 found masked priming only after global prime letters in focused‐attention conditions. Experiment 2 used a divided‐attention task in which attention was not focused specifically on either level of hierarchy and did not find any priming. Experiment 3 used otherwise the same task as Experiment 2 but biased attention either to the global or the local level by manipulating the probability that targets appeared at one level. Priming was found after global prime letters in the global‐bias condition but not in the local‐bias condition. Experiments 4a and 4b suggest that the size of the local letters was not responsible for the lack of priming after local primes. The results suggest a priority for global processing already at a preconscious level and that attentional factors may modulate processes at this level.