Friendship, Justice, and Aristotle: Some Reasons to Be Sceptical

It is sometimes held that modern institutionally-focussed conceptions of social justice are lacking in one essential respect: they ignore the importance of civic friendship or solidarity. It is also, typically simultaneously, held that Aristotle’s thought provides a fertile ground for elucidating an account of civic friendship. I argue, first, that Aristotle is no help on this score: he has no conception of distinctively civic friendship. I then go on to argue that the Kantian distinction between perfect and imperfect duties is more useful than talk of civic friendship in capturing the non-institutional demands of social justice.     

Does working memory change with age? The interactions of concurrent articulation with the effects of word length and acoustic confusion

ABSTRACT

The effects of acoustic confusion (phonological similarity), word length, and concurrent articulation (articulatory suppression) are cited as support for Working Memory's phonological loop component (e.g., Baddeley, 2000 Baddeley, A. D. 2000. The phonological loop and irrelevant speech effect: Some comments on Neath. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 7: 544–549. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 7, 544). Research has focused on younger adults, with no studies examining whether concurrent articulation reduces the word length and acoustic confusion effects among older adults. In the current study, younger and older adults were given lists of similar and dissimilar letters (Experiment 1) or long and short words (Experiment 2) for immediate serial reconstruction of order. Items were presented visually or auditorily, with or without concurrent articulation. As expected, younger and older adults demonstrated effects of acoustic confusion, word length, and concurrent articulation. Further, concurrent articulation reduced the effects of acoustic confusion and word length equally for younger and older adults. This suggests that age-related differences occur in overall performance, but do not reflect an age-related deficiency in the functioning of the phonological loop component of working memory.     

Who? What? When? Using a timeline technique to facilitate recall of a complex event

Accurately recalling a complex multi-actor incident presents witnesses with a cognitively demanding retrieval task. Given the important role played by temporal context in the retrieval process, the current research tests an innovative timeline technique to elicit information about multiple perpetrators and their actions. Adopting a standard mock witness paradigm, participants were required to provide an account of a witnessed event. In Experiment 1, the timeline technique facilitated the reporting of more correct details than a free recall, immediately and at a two-week retention interval, at no cost to accuracy. Accounts provided using the timeline technique included more correct information about perpetrator specific actions and fewer sequencing errors. Experiment 2 examined which mnemonic components of the timeline technique might account for these effects. The benefits of exploiting memory organization and reducing cognitive constraints on information flow are likely to underpin the apparent timeline advantage.     

Predicting youth access to tobacco: the role of youth versus store-clerk behavior and issues of ecological validity.

Twenty-one 15- to 17-year-olds attempted to purchase cigarettes in 232 stores in the manner that confederates typically do in access studies, as well as in the manipulative ways (e.g., lying about their ages) that youth smokers do, thereby modeling youth access to tobacco within versus outside of studies, respectively. Youth typical-research versus manipulative behavior was contrasted with clerk behavior (requests for youth ID cards) to examine the relative contributions of both to youth access to tobacco for the 1st time. Results revealed that clerk behavior was the strongest predictor of cigarette sales to youth and hence underscore the need for interventions with merchants. Sales nonetheless were higher under youth-manipulative conditions and thereby highlight the low ecological validity of access research.     

Predictors of representational aggression in preschool children of low‐income urban African American adolescent mothers

Responses to five doll‐story stems thematically related to attachment experiences with the mother were videotaped in the home and used to evaluate child, maternal, and environmental predictors of representational aggression in 93 preschool children of African American women receiving public assistance who had become pregnant as teenagers. Significant correlations were found between representational aggression and child's gender (male), birth weight, maternal depressive affect, maternal educational attainment, recent employment, mother's historical residence with her own mother, and felt social support, accounting for 40% of the variance in representational aggression. A significant Felt Social Support × Gender interaction effect suggested that girls of mothers who perceive higher levels of felt social support are more likely to represent less aggression in their stories; felt social support was not associated with boys' representational aggression. A significant Felt Social Support × Employment interaction effect suggested that representational aggression is associated with lower levels of felt social support only among employed mothers. Findings suggest that different pathways exist for representational aggression in children of low‐income adolescent mothers, which nevertheless share predictors associated with poverty.     

On the space-time structure of human interlimb co-ordination

In three experiments we show, using behavioural measures of movement outcome, as well as movement trajectory information and resultant kinematic profiles, that there is a strong tendency for the limbs to be co-ordinated as a unitary structure even under conditions where the movements are of disparate difficulty. Environmental constraints (an obstacle placed in the path of one limb, but not in the other) are shown to modulate the space-time behaviour of both limbs (Experiment II). Our results obtain for symmetrical (Experiment I) as well as asymmetrical movements that involve non-homologous muscle groups (Experiment III). These findings suggest that in multi-joint limb movements, the many degrees of freedom are organised to function temporarily as a single coherent unit that is uniquely specific to the task demands placed on it. For movements in general, and two-handed movements in particular, such units are revealed in a partitioning of the relevant force demands for each component (a force scaling characteristic) and a preservation of the internal “topology” of the action, as indexed by the relative timing among components. These features, as well as systematic deviations from perfect synchrony between the limbs can be rationalised by a model that assumes the limbs behave qualitatively like non-linear oscillators.     

Asymmetries in the discrete and pseudocontinuous regulation of visually guided reaching.

An experiment was conducted to examine the contribution of the hemispheres to the organization of aiming movements. The spatial positions of targets were obtained by extrapolating from brief visual displays of geometric patterns. The patterns comprised linear, quadratic, cubic, and quartic mathematical functions and varied in spatial complexity. Vision of the hand was also manipulated. While the hands did not differ in spatial accuracy, movements made by the right hand were of shorter duration and had higher peak velocities. The stimulus pattern strongly influenced kinematics, in particular the number of discrete modifications of the movement trajectory. Vision of the hand resulted in superior accuracy, although subjects were unable to compare the relative positions of the limb and the target. Vision of the hand did not lead to an increase in discrete adjustments, suggesting that visual information was used in a continuous fashion. Movements into ipsilateral space differed from those into contralateral space with respect to a number of parameters.     

The Effect of Practice on the Control of Rapid Aiming Movements: Evidence for an Interdependency Between Programming and Feedback Processing

The purpose of this experiment was to investigate how the control of aiming movements performed as fast and as accurately as possible changes with practice. We examined: (1) the influence of visual feedback on the initial impulse and error correction phases of aiming movements during acquisition; and (2) the effect of removing visual feedback at different levels of practice. Results from the acquisition trials indicated that vision had a major impact on the organization of the initial impulse and error correction phases. Also, consistent with findings from research involving temporally constrained movements, the cost of removing vision was greater after extensive levels than after moderate levels of practice. Collectively, these results denote the importance of visual feedback to the learning of this particular class of aiming movements. Learning appears to be a dual process of improved programming of the initial impulse and increased efficiency of feedback processing. Practice not only acts on programming and feedback processes directly, but also indirectly through a reciprocal interplay between these two processes.