Williamson’s Woes

This is a reply to Timothy Williamson’s paper ‘Tennant’s Troubles’. It defends against Williamson’s objections the anti-realist’s knowability principle based on the author’s ‘local’ restriction strategy involving Cartesian propositions, set out in The Taming of the True. Williamson’s purported Fitchian reductio, involving the unknown number of books on his table, is analyzed in detail and shown to be fallacious. Williamson’s attempt to cause problems for the anti-realist by means of a supposed rigid designator generates a contradiction with arithmetic right away, upon instantiating the obviously relevant theorem that every natural number is provably odd or provably even. The paper also explains and formulates a globally restricted knowability principle, which likewise blocks the attempted reductio.     

Quality home visits: Activities to promote meaningful interactions

Examination of and support for specific practices that promote high-quality home visiting are essential as family support programs continue to expand across the country. The current study used direct observation of 91 home visits across 41 home visitors to examine relations among interaction partners, content of the interactions, the home-visitors’ activities, and quality of home-visitors’ practices and family-members’ engagement within programs funded by the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting program. More time spent in triadic interactions focused on child-related content, as measured by the Home Visit Rating Scale-Revised, was related to higher quality of family engagement in home visits, as measured with the Home Visit Observation Rating Scales. Time spent in adult-focused interactions and administrative tasks, however, was related to lower quality of home-visiting practices and family engagement. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Eye remember you: the effects of gaze direction on face recognition in children and adults

Children and adults were tested on a forced‐choice face recognition task in which the direction of eye gaze was manipulated over the course of the initial presentation and subsequent test phase of the experiment. To establish the effects of gaze direction on the encoding process, participants were presented with to‐be‐studied faces displaying either direct or deviated gaze (i.e. encoding manipulation). At test, all the faces depicted persons with their eyes closed. To investigate the effects of gaze direction on the efficiency of the retrieval process, a second condition (i.e. retrieval manipulation) was run in which target faces were presented initially with eyes closed and tested with either direct or deviated gaze. The results revealed the encoding advantages enjoyed by faces with direct gaze was present for both children and adults. Faces with direct gaze were also recognized better than faces with deviated gaze at retrieval, although this effect was most pronounced for adults. Finally, the advantage for direct gaze over deviated gaze at encoding was greater than the advantage for direct gaze over deviated gaze at retrieval. We consider the theoretical implications of these findings.     

Expert memory: the interaction of stimulus structure,attention, and expertise

This experiment focuses on the three‐way interaction between domain‐relevant structure, attention to domain‐relevant structure, and expertise in their effect on recall for field‐hockey information. It was predicted that experts' recall would decrease with the amount of domain‐relevant structure, but only when they were able to attend to the structure within the stimuli. Novices' recall was not predicted to vary with these factors. The study used a 3 × 2 × 2 mixed‐design with one between‐subjects factor, field hockey expertise (expert and novice), and two within‐subjects factors, domain‐relevant structure (high, moderate and low) and attention to structure (attending and non‐attending). Twenty‐four experts and 24 novices each listened to six audio‐taped scenarios (1 in each of the 6 structure × attention conditions) describing a sequence of field hockey play and recall was tested. The results demonstrated significant main effects for expertise, structure, and attention, and interactions of (a) structure and expertise, and (b) structure and attention. Importantly, the significant structure, attention, and expertise interaction provided the first direct empirical support for the constraint attunement hypothesis (Vicente and Wang, 1998 ) and for that aspect of the template theory (Gobet and Simon, 1996a , b ). Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How schemas affect eyewitness memory over repeated retrieval attempts

After observing a crime eyewitnesses are typically interviewed many times over an extended period of time. We examined how schema for a crime influenced the types of information eyewitnesses remembered and forgot across multiple interviews. People's schema for a bank robbery were identified, and recall of schema‐consistent, schema‐inconsistent and schema‐irrelevant information was extracted from eyewitness interviews conducted in two experiments which manipulated retention interval (3 days–12 weeks) and number of interviews (2–4). Consistent with fuzzy‐trace and associative network theories, schemas preserved accuracy for information central to the crime (schema‐consistent and inconsistent) at the expense of schema‐irrelevant information. Schema‐consistent intrusions did not increase across interviews. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Memory awareness disruptions in amnestic mild cognitive impairment: comparison of multiple awareness types for verbal and visuospatial material

Successful memory is normally accompanied by explicit awareness of retrieval and confidence in the accuracy of the retrieval product. Prior findings suggest that these features of metamemory can be dissociated from retrieval accuracy in Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI). However, the literature on this question contains variable and conflicting results, likely because of differences in experimental conditions. We sought to systematically evaluate memory awareness disruptions in aMCI using multiple measures and stimulus formats within the same individuals. Memory awareness was tested with global predictions and postdictions, judgments of learning, confidence level ratings, and modified feeling-of-knowing ratings in tasks of visuospatial and verbal memory. These tests were administered to 14 individuals with aMCI and 15 healthy, age-matched controls. Memory awareness accuracy was calculated as the correspondence between subjective judgments and memory performance.Individuals with aMCI demonstrated impaired global and trial-level retrospective task awareness for visuospatial and verbal stimuli. Additionally, modified feeling-of-knowing awareness was impaired selectively for verbal stimuli. Statistical effect sizes for global awareness impairments were comparable to impairments in several objective neuropsychological memory assessments.Memory awareness (metamemory) disruptions in aMCI were most evident for a subset of subjective judgment types and task input modalities. These findings advance understanding of the nature of memory impairments in aMCI and support the utility of incorporating memory awareness testing to better characterize memory integrity in older adults.     

Self-Deception and Responsibility for Addiction

ABSTRACT We frequently accuse heavy drinkers and drug users of self‐deception if they refuse to admit that they are addicted. However, given the ways in which we usually conceptualize it, acknowledging addiction merely involves swapping one form of self‐deception for another. We ask addicts to see themselves as in the grip of an irresistible desire, and to accept that addiction is an essentially physiological process. To the extent this is so, we, as much as the addicts, suffer from self‐deception, and the responsibility for their state is in part ours. Conversely, since addicts are compelled to accept a self‐deceptive image of themselves, they are at least partially excused from blame for their self‐deception.