Don’t make a fetish of faults: a vindication of moral luck

Philosophical Studies - Is it appropriate to blame people unequally if the only difference between them was a matter of luck? Suppose Alice would drive recklessly if she could, Belen drove...     

Ryle on knowing how: Some clarifications and corrections

I argue for an account of know‐how as a capacity for practical judgment—a view I derive from Gilbert Ryle. I begin by offering an interpretation of Ryle and by correcting a number of widespread misconceptions about his views in the current debate. I then identify some problems with Ryle's account and finally present my own view which, I argue, retains Ryle's insights while avoiding his mistakes.     

Individual cognitive style affects flood-risk perception and mitigation intentions

Risk perception of natural hazards has been widely studied as one of the potential determinants of people's behaviors and behavioral intentions. However, individual differences can also affect risk perception. The present work focused on the link between an individual cognitive mindset (i.e., level of holism) and flood-risk perception. It also assessed the consequences of such a link on public and personal mitigation intentions, taking into account the sense of connection with the environment, the psychological distance from the adverse event, and the role played by previous personal experience with flooding. Our study (N = 191) showed that the individual cognitive style predicted risk perceptions and personal (for both experienced and no-experience groups) and public (only for experienced group) mitigation intentions, through the mediation of the sense of connection with the environment and the psychological distance from the adverse event. Results are discussed in terms of their practical implications for public communication and policies about environmental hazards.     

The Neural Bases of Drawing. A Meta-analysis and a Systematic Literature Review of Neurofunctional Studies in Healthy Individuals

Neuropsychology Review - Drawing is a multi-component process requiring a wide range of cognitive abilities. Several studies on patients with focal brain lesions and functional neuroimaging studies...     

Opposite strain-dependent differences for intermale aggressive behavior elicited by individual housing and housing with a female in the mouse

Male mice of the C57BL/6 strain show a significant increase in aggression toward a nonaggressive male conspecific following 72 hr of individual housing. However, this increase was no longer evident following 2 weeks of individual housing. When housed with a female, C57BL/6 mice show significantly more aggression than singly housed mice of the same strain after 72 hr as well as 2, 4, 8 weeks of differential housing. Male C57BL/6 mice housed with a female also show significantly higher levels of aggression than DBA/2 mice living in the same housing condition after 4 or 8 weeks of differential housing. Finally, male DBA/2 mice individually housed for 8 weeks are significantly more aggressive than mice of the same strain housed with a female for the same time. These results indicate that the increase in aggressive behavior observed following isolation and cohabitation with a female in the mouse is not the same phenomenon. © 1994 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Modeling the Influence of Language Input Statistics on Children's Speech Production

We trained a computational model (the Chunk-Based Learner; CBL) on a longitudinal corpus of child–caregiver interactions in English to test whether one proposed statistical learning mechanism—backward transitional probability—is able to predict children's speech productions with stable accuracy throughout the first few years of development. We predicted that the model less accurately reconstructs children's speech productions as they grow older because children gradually begin to generate speech using abstracted forms rather than specific “chunks” from their speech environment. To test this idea, we trained the model on both recently encountered and cumulative speech input from a longitudinal child language corpus. We then assessed whether the model could accurately reconstruct children's speech. Controlling for utterance length and the presence of duplicate chunks, we found no evidence that the CBL becomes less accurate in its ability to reconstruct children's speech with age.