The Realist Wager: Challenging Rorty on His Home Ground

Philosophia - The paper is devoted to Richard Rorty’s thought, with the aim of exploiting a certain contention of his and directing it, as it were, against Rorty himself. Here is the...     

Uptake of Breast Screening is Influenced by Current Religion and Religion of Upbringing

Research has shown that individuals with a current religious affiliation are more likely to use preventive health services. The aim of this study was to determine whether breast screening uptake in Northern Ireland is higher amongst women with a current affiliation to an organised religion and, for those with no current affiliation, to examine whether their religion of upbringing is associated with uptake of breast screening. The Northern Ireland Longitudinal Study (NILS) was used to link Census and national breast screening data for 37,211 women invited for routine breast screening between 2001 and 2004. Current religious affiliation, religion of upbringing and other demographic and socio-economic characteristics were as defined on the Census form. Multivariate logistic regression was used to determine the relationship between religion affiliation and attendance. Uptake of breast screening is about 25% lower for those without a current religious affiliation. There are modest differences between Catholics and Protestants, with the latter about 11% more likely to attend for screening. For those with no current religion, the religion of upbringing appears to positively influence attendance rates. These differences remain after adjustment for all of the socio-demographic and socio-economic factors that have been shown to influence uptake rates of breast screening in the UK to date. Record linkage is an efficient way to examine equity across demographic characteristics that are not routinely available. The lower uptake amongst those with no religious affiliation may mean that screening services may find it difficult to maintain or improve uptake rate in an increasingly secularised society.     

Make it real: Belief in occurrence within episodic future thought

While the cognitive and neural bases of episodic future thinking are well documented, questions remain as to what gives the sense that an imagined event belongs to one’s personal future. Capitalizing on previous research on metacognitive appraisals in autobiographical remembering, we propose that episodic future thinking involves, in varying degrees, a subjective belief in the potential occurrence of imagined future events and we explore the nature and determinants of such belief. To this aim, participants provided justifications for belief in occurrence for a series of past and future events. For each event, they also assessed their subjective feelings (belief in occurrence, autonoetic experience, and belief in accuracy) and rated various characteristics of mental representations that might contribute to these feelings. Results showed that belief in the occurrence of future events mostly related to their integration in a broader autobiographical context, especially their relevance to personal goals and their personal plausibility. We also found that belief in occurrence, autonoetic experience, and belief in accuracy represented distinct subjective appraisals of future events, which depended in part on different determinants. Based on these findings, we propose a new theoretical model of subjective feelings associated with episodic future thinking that conceives of belief in occurrence as arising from metacognitive appraisals that shape the sense that imagined events belong to one’s personal future.     

Early morphological processing is morphosemantic and not simply morpho-orthographic: A violation of form-then-meaning accounts of word recognition

Many studies have suggested that a word’s orthographic form must be processed before its meaning becomes available. Some interpret the (null) finding of equal facilitation after semantically transparent and opaque morphologically related primes in early stages of morphological processing as consistent with this view. Recent literature suggests that morphological facilitation tends to be greater after transparent than after opaque primes, however. To determine whether the degree of semantic transparency influences parsing into a stem and a suffix (morphological decomposition) in the forward masked priming variant of the lexical decision paradigm, we compared patterns of facilitation between semantically transparent (e.g., coolant—cool) and opaque (e.g., rampant—ramp) prime—target pairs. Form properties of the stem (frequency, neighborhood size, and prime—target letter overlap), as well as related—unrelated and transparent—opaque affixes, were matched. Morphological facilitation was significantly greater for semantically transparent pairs than for opaque pairs. Ratings of prime—target relatedness predicted the magnitude of facilitation. The results limit the scope of form-then-meaning models of word recognition and demonstrate that semantic similarity can influence even early stages of morphological processing. The research reported here was supported by National Institute of Child Health and Development Grant HD-01994 to Haskins Laboratories.     

Participant and Word Gender in Age of Acquisition Effects: The Role of Gender Socialization

The age of acquisition (AoA) effect represents the processing advantage for developmentally earlier-acquired words. An initial norming study identified early and late AoA words having either a strong female-oriented (e.g., flute) or male-oriented (e.g., cigar) semantic bias. Forty-seven female and 45 male Scottish university students participated in a lexical decision task using 100 early and late AoA female- and male-oriented words. Reaction time data showed significant AoA effects for both females and males across both female- and male-oriented words, with faster responses to earlier than later acquired words. Females, however, took longer to respond to male-oriented words, particularly late AoA ones. Males demonstrated no effect of semantic gender. The pattern of effects is consistent with differential gender role socialization.     

Short-term memory performances during sustained wakefulness in patients with obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome

Both working and immediate memories were assessed every 4h by specific short-term memory tasks over sustained wakefulness in 12 patients with obstructive sleep apnea and hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS) and 10 healthy controls. Results indicated that OSAHS patients exhibited lower working memory performances than controls on both backward digit span and complex Sternberg tasks. Speed and accuracy on Sternberg tasks were affected by memory load in both groups. However, immediate memory was not impaired in OSAHS patients. Diurnal and nocturnal SaO(2) were correlated with speed and accuracy high-speed memory scanning performance on Sternberg tasks in patients. These results suggest specific working memory deficits associated with OSAHS over sustained wakefulness with a possible deficiency in the central executive responsible for the higher information processing, in addition to a potentially insufficient storage capacity. Among OSAHS patients, working memory ability involved in high-speed memory scanning may be impaired by chronic hypoxemia.     

Does the A-not-B error in adult pet dogs indicate sensitivity to human communication?

Recent dog-infant comparisons have indicated that the experimenter's communicative signals in object hide-and-search tasks increase the probability of perseverative (A-not-B) errors in both species (Topál et al. 2009). These behaviourally similar results, however, might reflect different mechanisms in dogs and in children. Similar errors may occur if the motor response of retrieving the object during the A trials cannot be inhibited in the B trials or if the experimenter's movements and signals toward the A hiding place in the B trials ('sham-baiting') distract the dogs' attention. In order to test these hypotheses, we tested dogs similarly to Topál et al. (2009) but eliminated the motor search in the A trials and 'sham-baiting' in the B trials. We found that neither an inability to inhibit previously rewarded motor response nor insufficiencies in their working memory and/or attention skills can explain dogs' erroneous choices. Further, we replicated the finding that dogs have a strong tendency to commit the A-not-B error after ostensive-communicative hiding and demonstrated the crucial effect of socio-communicative cues as the A-not-B error diminishes when location B is ostensively enhanced. These findings further support the hypothesis that the dogs' A-not-B error may reflect a special sensitivity to human communicative cues. Such object-hiding and search tasks provide a typical case for how susceptibility to human social signals could (mis)lead domestic dogs.     

The role of representation in computation

Reformers urge that representation no longer earns its explanatory keep in cognitive science, and that it is time to discard this troublesome concept. In contrast, we hold that without representation cognitive science is utterly bereft of tools for explaining natural intelligence. In order to defend the latter position, we focus on the explanatory role of representation in computation. We examine how the methods of digital and analog computation are used to model a relatively simple target system, and show that representation plays an in-eliminable explanatory role in both cases. We conclude that, to the extent that biologic systems engage in computation, representation is destined to play an explanatory role in cognitive science.