Go with the flow: How to master a nonlinear multiple-cue judgment task

The authors examined the cognitive processes that participants use in linear and nonlinear multiple-cue judgment tasks, hypothesizing that people are unable to use explicit cue abstraction in a nonlinear task, instead turning to exemplar memory. Experiment 1 confirmed that people are unable to use cue abstraction in nonlinear tasks but failed to confirm the hypothesized, spontaneous shift to exemplar memory. Instead, the participants appeared to be trapped in persistent and futile attempts to abstract the cue-criterion relations. Only after being instructed to rely on exemplar memory in Experiment 2 did they master the nonlinear task. The results suggest that adaptive shifts of representation need not occur spontaneously and that analytical thought may sometimes harm performance in nonlinear tasks.     

The cognitive substrate of subjective probability

The prominent cognitive theories of probability judgment were primarily developed to explain cognitive biases rather than to account for the cognitive processes in probability judgment. In this article the authors compare 3 major theories of the processes and representations in probability judgment: the representativeness heuristic, implemented as prototype similarity, relative likelihood, or evidential support accumulation (ESAM; D. J. Koehler, C. M. White, & R. Grondin, 2003); cue-based relative frequency; and exemplar memory, implemented by probabilities from exemplars (PROBEX; P. Juslin & M. Persson, 2002). Three experiments with different task structures consistently demonstrate that exemplar memory is the best account of the data whereas the results are inconsistent with extant formulations of the representativeness heuristic and cue-based relative frequency.     

Is there a Scandinavian psychology? A bibliometric note on the publication profiles of Denmark,Finland, Norway,and Sweden

This note presents a quantitative bibliometric analysis based on information obtained from the PsycINFO database concerning publication patterns in different subfields of Scandinavian psychology for the years 1984 to 1997. A cluster analysis shows that the publication profiles of the Scandinavian countries are more similar to each other than to both the profile of the USA and a norm profile based on all countries except the USA and Scandinavia. The main differences are that the relative proportions of articles dealing with psychological disorders are higher and the relative proportions of articles dealing with educational psychology are lower for Scandinavia than for the rest of the world. Within the Scandinavian countries, Finland and Sweden form one cluster with higher relative proportions of psychophysiological articles, and Denmark and Norway form one cluster with higher relative proportions of articles dealing with psychological disorders.     

Providing Foundations for Coherentism

We prove that four theses commonly associated with coherentism are incompatible with the representation of a belief state as a logically closed set of sentences. The result is applied to the conventional coherence interpretation of the AGM theory of belief revision, which appears not to be tenable. Our argument also counts against the coherentistic acceptability of a certain form of propositional holism. We argue that the problems arise as an effect of ignoring the distinction between derived and non-derived beliefs, and we suggest that the kind of coherence relevant to epistemic justification is the coherence of non-derived beliefs. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Presumption of Nothingness

Several distinguished philosophers have argued that since the state of affairs where nothing exists is the simplest and least arbitrary of all cosmological possibilities, we have reason to be surprised that there is in fact a non-empty universe. We review this traditional argument, and defend it against two recent criticisms put forward by Peter van Inwagen and Derek Parfit. Finally, we argue that the traditional argument nevertheless needs reformulation, and that the cogency of the reformulated argument depends partly on whether there are certain conceptual limitations to what a person can hypothetically doubt.     

Explicationist Epistemology and the Explanatory Role of Knowledge

Journal for General Philosophy of Science - It has been argued that much of contemporary epistemology can be unified under Carnap’s methodology of explication, which originated in the...     

Mapping the Structure of Semantic Memory

Aggregating snippets from the semantic memories of many individuals may not yield a good map of an individual’s semantic memory. The authors analyze the structure of semantic networks that they sampled from individuals through a new snowball sampling paradigm during approximately 6 weeks of 1‐hr daily sessions. The semantic networks of individuals have a small‐world structure with short distances between words and high clustering. The distribution of links follows a power law truncated by an exponential cutoff, meaning that most words are poorly connected and a minority of words has a high, although bounded, number of connections. Existing aggregate networks mirror the individual link distributions, and so they are not scale‐free, as has been previously assumed; still, there are properties of individual structure that the aggregate networks do not reflect. A simulation of the new sampling process suggests that it can uncover the true structure of an individual’s semantic memory.     

A 32-Year Longitudinal Study of Child and Adolescent Pathways to Well-Being in Adulthood

The purpose of the study was to investigate the relative importance of child and adolescent social and academic pathways to well-being in adulthood (32-years) indicated by a sense of meaning, social engagement, positive coping and prosocial values. Data were drawn from a 15 wave (32-year) longitudinal study of the health and development of around 1000 New Zealanders (Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, New Zealand). Moderate continuity in social connectedness (0.38) and high continuity in academic ability (0.90) was observed across childhood and adolescence. Adolescent social connectedness was a better predictor of adult well-being than academic achievement (0.62 vs. 0.12). There was evidence of an indirect pathway from adolescent academic achievement to adult well-being through social connectedness (0.29). Indicators of well-being in adulthood appear to be better explained by social connection rather than academic competencies pathways. Implications for promoting longer term well-being during the school years are discussed.