McDowell’s new conceptualism and the difference between chickens,colours and cardinals

McDowell recently renounced the assumption that the content of any knowledgeable, perceptual judgement must be included in the content of the knowledge grounding experience. We argue that McDowell’s introduction of a new category of non-inferential, perceptual knowledge is incompatible with the main line of argument in favour of conceptualism as presented in Mind and World [McDowell, John. 1996. Mind and World. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press]. We reconstruct the original line of argument and show that it rests on the assumption that a specific model of justification, the Comparison Model, must apply to all cases of non-inferential, perceptual knowledge. We then show that the Comparison Model cannot be applied to McDowell’s new category of non-inferential, perceptual knowledge. As a consequence, McDowell is in need of an alternative model of justification and an alternative argument for conceptualism. We propose such an alternative model of justification based on McDowell’s reading of Sellars, but argue that the model only serves to make the need for an alternative motivation for conceptualism more urgent.     

Attentional shifts to emotionally charged cues: Behavioural and erp data

Abstract

When information activated in memory involves emotional associations, the ability to shift attention away from an emotional cue is impaired compared to an emotionally neutral cue. The purpose of the present study was to investigate how emotional stimuli modulate attentional processes, and how this is reflected in localised brain electrical activity. Eight emotion and eight neutral words served as cues in a covert attention spatial orienting task. The cues were either valid or invalid indicators of which hemifield the target would be presented to. In the remaining trials, no cue was presented prior to the target. Twenty subjects were instructed to manually respond to the target as fast as possible. Event-related potentials (ERPs) showed an enhanced P3 component to the emotion words. The ERPs to the target showed enhanced P1 and P3 components on invalid trials, with emotional cues. There were faster reaction times (RTs) to validly cued targets, but only when the emotion words served as cues. The results demonstrated that the emotional cues elicited sustained focused attention, facilitating an engage mechanism of spatial orienting.     

Measuring and testing awareness of emotional face expressions

Comparison of behavioural measures of consciousness has attracted much attention recently. In a recent article, Szczepanowski et al. conclude that confidence ratings (CR) predict accuracy better than both the perceptual awareness scale (PAS) and post-decision wagering (PDW) when using stimuli with emotional content (fearful vs. neutral faces). Although we find the study interesting, we disagree with the conclusion that CR is superior to PAS because of two methodological issues. First, the conclusion is not based on a formal test. We performed this test and found no evidence that CR predicted accuracy better than PAS (p = .4). Second, Szczepanowski et al. used the present version of PAS in a manner somewhat different from how it was originally intended, and the participants may not have been adequately instructed. We end our commentary with a set of recommendations for future studies using PAS.     

Measuring consciousness: task accuracy and awareness as sigmoid functions of stimulus duration

When consciousness is examined using subjective ratings, the extent to which processing is conscious or unconscious is often estimated by calculating task performance at the subjective threshold or by calculating the correlation between accuracy and awareness. However, both these methods have certain limitations. In the present article, we propose describing task accuracy and awareness as functions of stimulus intensity (thus obtaining an accuracy and an awareness curve) as suggested by Koch and Preuschoff (2007). The estimated lag between the curves describes how much stimulus intensity must increase for awareness to change proportionally as much as accuracy and the slopes of the curves are used to assess how fast accuracy and awareness increases and whether awareness is dichotomous. The method is successfully employed to assess consciousness characteristics on data from four different awareness scales.     

Bus drivers' exposure to bullying at work: an occupation-specific approach

The present study employs an occupation-specific approach to examine bus drivers' exposure to bullying and their trait anger, job engagement, job satisfaction and turnover intentions. A total of 1,023 bus drivers from a large public transport organization participated in the study. The findings show that bus driving can be a high risk occupation with regard to bullying, since 70% of the bus drivers had experienced one or more acts typical of bullying during the last six months. As many as 11% defined themselves as victims of bullying, 33% of whom (i.e. 3.6% of the total sample) see themselves as victims of frequent bullying. Colleagues were most frequently reported as perpetrators. Exposure to bullying was negatively related to job engagement and job satisfaction and positively related to turnover intentions. Job engagement and job satisfaction mediated the relationship between bullying and intention to leave, respectively. Trait anger had an interaction effect on the relationship between bullying and turnover intentions. This study indicates that workplace bullying has context-specific aspects that require increased use of context-specific policies and intervention methods.     

Phonological typicality influences sentence processing in predictive contexts: reply to Staub, Grant, Clifton, and Rayner (2009)

In 2 separate self-paced reading experiments, Farmer, Christiansen, and Monaghan (2006) found that the degree to which a word's phonology is typical of other words in its lexical category influences online processing of nouns and verbs in predictive contexts. Staub, Grant, Clifton, and Rayner (2009) failed to find an effect of phonological typicality when they combined stimuli from the separate experiments into a single experiment. We replicated Staub et al.'s experiment and found that the combination of stimulus sets affects the predictiveness of the syntactic context; this reduces the phonological typicality effect as the experiment proceeds, although the phonological typicality effect was still evident early in the experiment. Although an ambiguous context may diminish sensitivity to the probabilistic relationship between the sound of a word and its lexical category, phonological typicality does influence online sentence processing during normal reading when the syntactic context is predictive of the lexical category of upcoming words.     

The Vienna comparative cognition technology (VCCT): An innovative operant conditioning system for various species and experimental procedures

This article describes a laboratory system for running learning experiments in operant chambers with various species. It is based on a modern version of a classical learning chamber for operant conditioning, the so-called ??Skinner box??. Rather than constituting a stand-alone unit, as is usually the case, it is an integrated part of a comprehensive technical solution, thereby eliminating a number of practical problems that are frequently encountered in research on animal learning and behavior. The Vienna comparative cognition technology combines modern computer, stimulus presentation, and reinforcement technology with flexibility and user-friendliness, which allows for efficient, widely automatized across-species experimentation, and thus makes the system appropriate for use in a broad range of learning tasks.