Subliminal repetition primes help detection of phonemes in a picture: Evidence for a phonological level of the priming effects

In this research, we combine a cross-form word–picture visual masked priming procedure with an internal phoneme monitoring task to examine repetition priming effects. In this paradigm, participants have to respond to pictures whose names begin with a prespecified target phoneme. This task unambiguously requires retrieving the word-form of the target picture's name and implicitly orients participants' attention towards a phonological level of representation. The experiments were conducted within Spanish, whose highly transparent orthography presumably promotes fast and automatic phonological recoding of subliminal, masked visual word primes. Experiments 1 and 2 show that repetition primes speed up internal phoneme monitoring in the target, compared to primes beginning with a different phoneme from the target, or sharing only their first phoneme with the target. This suggests that repetition primes preactivate the phonological code of the entire target picture's name, hereby speeding up internal monitoring, which is necessarily based on such a code. To further qualify the nature of the phonological code underlying internal phoneme monitoring, a concurrent articulation task was used in Experiment 3. This task did not affect the repetition priming effect. We propose that internal phoneme monitoring is based on an abstract phonological code, prior to its translation into articulation.     

Guest Editorial: French Analytic Philosophy Today

Philosophical Studies -     

A test of the quasi-circumplex structure of human values

Schwartz’s value system (SVS) has been widely used in different disciplines (e.g., psychology, management, and marketing). Although the value structure seems to be validated when data are analyzed through multidimensional scaling, we show that the quasi-circumplex structure of human values is not supported when confirmatory analysis approaches (e.g., CIRCUM and constrained confirmatory factor analysis) are used. Based on two samples of French and Swiss respondents, confirmatory tests of SVS provide little support for its quasi-circumplex structure, mainly due to problems of construct and discriminant validity resulting from multicollinearity between value types.     

Brain Recording,Mind-Reading,and Neurotechnology: Ethical Issues from Consumer Devices to Brain-Based Speech Decoding

Science and Engineering Ethics - Brain reading technologies are rapidly being developed in a number of neuroscience fields. These technologies can record, process, and decode neural signals. This...     

Introspective forgetting

We model the forgetting of propositional variables in a modal logical context where agents become ignorant and are aware of each others’ or their own resulting ignorance. The resulting logic is sound and complete. It can be compared to variable-forgetting as abstraction from information, wherein agents become unaware of certain variables: by employing elementary results for bisimulation, it follows that beliefs not involving the forgotten atom(s) remain true. The work for this publication was mainly carried out while Hans van Ditmarsch was associated to: Institut de Recherche en Informatique, Université Paul Sabatier, France.     

Universal moral grammar: a critical appraisal

A new framework for the study of the human moral faculty is currently receiving much attention: the so-called 'universal moral grammar' framework. It is based on an intriguing analogy, first pointed out by Rawls, between the study of the human moral sense and Chomsky's research program into the human language faculty. To assess UMG, we ask: is moral competence modular? Does it have an underlying hierarchical grammatical structure? Does moral diversity rest on culture-dependant parameters? We review the evidence and argue that formal grammatical concepts are of limited value for the study of moral judgments, moral development and moral diversity.     

The Mother-child Relationship as an Archetype for the Relationship between the Virgin Mary and Humanity in the Gospels and the Book of Revelation

Following the work of Stevens Rogers (2002), this article starts with the premise that humanity can be seen as a child growing in changing relationship with his or her mother. With Jesus representing humanity, the relationship between a mother and a child can be an archetype for understanding the changing relationship between the Virgin Mary and humanity as narrated in the Gospels and the Book of Revelation. With the Annunciation by the Angel, the Boy Jesus in the Temple, the wedding at Cana, and Mary at the foot of the cross as developmental stages, this article shows the changing relationship between humanity and the Virgin Mary. Pierre M. Balthazar is a student in the PsyD program in Clinical Psychology at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology.