The Development of Diagnostic Inference About Uncertain Causes

Young children can engage in diagnostic reasoning. However, almost all research demonstrating such capacities has investigated children’s inferences when the individual efficacy of each candidate cause is known. Here we show that there is development between ages five and seven in children’s ability to reason about the number of candidate causes whose efficacy is unknown (Study 1). We also find development between ages six and seven in these abilities when children are presented with several uncertain candidate causes in an additive causal system (Study 2). These findings demonstrate how children’s diagnostic reasoning abilities develop beyond the preschool years and illustrate possible relations between children’s developing diagnostic inference and scientific reasoning capacities.     

Spacing effects in real‐world classroom vocabulary learning

As a primary goal, educators often strive to maximize the amount of information pupils remember. In the lab, psychologists have found efficient memory strategies for retaining school‐related materials. One such strategy is the spacing effect, a memory advantage that occurs when learning is distributed across time instead of crammed into a single study session. Spaced learning is not often explicitly utilized in actual classrooms, perhaps due to a paucity of research in applied settings and with school‐aged children. The current study examined the spacing effect in real‐world fifth‐grade classrooms. We taught 39 children unfamiliar English words using both massed and spaced learning. Five weeks later, we tested vocabulary recall. One‐week spacing produced superior long‐term retention compared to massed learning. This finding demonstrates that the spacing effect can be generalized to vocabulary learning in applied settings and middle‐school‐aged children. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bayes and blickets: effects of knowledge on causal induction in children and adults

People are adept at inferring novel causal relations, even from only a few observations. Prior knowledge about the probability of encountering causal relations of various types and the nature of the mechanisms relating causes and effects plays a crucial role in these inferences. We test a formal account of how this knowledge can be used and acquired, based on analyzing causal induction as Bayesian inference. Five studies explored the predictions of this account with adults and 4-year-olds, using tasks in which participants learned about the causal properties of a set of objects. The studies varied the two factors that our Bayesian approach predicted should be relevant to causal induction: the prior probability with which causal relations exist, and the assumption of a deterministic or a probabilistic relation between cause and effect. Adults' judgments (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) were in close correspondence with the quantitative predictions of the model, and children's judgments (Experiments 3 and 5) agreed qualitatively with this account.     

Kant’s Regulative Metaphysics of God and the Systematic Lawfulness of Nature

In the “Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic” of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant contends that the idea of God has a positive regulative role in the systematization of empirical knowledge. But why is this regulative role assigned to this specific idea? Kant's account is rather opaque, and this question has also not received much attention in the literature. In this article, I argue that an adequate understanding of the regulative role of the idea of God depends on the specific metaphysical content Kant attributes to it in the Critique and other writings. I show that neither a heuristic principle of conceptual systematicity, nor conceiving God as a hypothesis of an intelligent designer, can satisfy the demands of reason to make the unity and necessity of the laws of nature intelligible. Regarding the positive account about the metaphysical content of the idea of God, I support my argument by referring to Kant's precritical discussion of the usefulness of the conception of God for the project of science, and by expounding Kant's critical account of the necessity of the laws of nature. Thus, my account sheds light on the continuity of Kant's conception of God and his appropriation of his own rationalistic metaphysics.     

Differences in Emotion Regulation Difficulties Across Types of Eating Disorders During Adolescence

Emotion regulation appears to play a key role in eating disorders. However, prior attempts to associate specific emotion regulation abilities with specific types of eating disorders resulted in inconsistent findings. Moreover, far less is known about emotion regulation in eating disorders during adolescence, a critical period of emotional development. The current study addresses this gap, comparing emotion regulation characteristics between adolescents with restrictive types of eating disorders and those with binge eating or purging types of eating disorders. Ninety-eight adolescents with eating disorders (49 with restrictive and 49 with binge eating/purging eating disorders) completed a set of questionnaires including the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS). The results revealed that binge eating/purging types of eating disorders were associated with greater difficulties in a variety of emotion regulation dimensions including impulse control, goal-directed behavior and access to effective emotion regulation strategies. Awareness and clarity of emotions were also worse in the binge eating/purging types of eating disorders, but this difference did not remain when comorbid psychopathology measures were controlled for. Moreover, the emotion regulation profile of adolescents with anorexia nervosa-binging/purging type was more similar to that of adolescents with bulimia nervosa than to that of adolescents with anorexia nervosa-restrictive type. While both restrictive and binge eating/purging eating disorders have been associated with emotion regulation difficulties, the current study shows that the presence of binge eating or purging episodes is linked with greater severity of emotion regulation deficits among adolescents with eating disorders.     

Will you touch a dirty diaper? Attitudes towards disgust and behaviour

Individuals differ in their willingness to engage with disgusting stimuli (e.g., dirty diapers). We propose that such differences are associated with attitudes towards disgust. Specifically, we predicted that people with less negative attitudes towards disgust (i.e., those who evaluate disgust less negatively) would be more willing to engage with disgusting stimuli. We asked participants to engage with disgusting stimuli in the laboratory and used two measures that assess behavioural and affective or cognitive components of attitudes towards disgust. As predicted, less negative attitudes towards disgust were associated with greater engagement with disgusting stimuli, above and beyond the current experience of disgust and the tendency to experience disgust. These findings stress the importance of attitudes towards emotions in understanding emotion-relevant behaviour.     

Children's knowledge of the relation between intentional action and pretending

Two experiments investigated preschoolers’ understanding of the relation between pretending and intentional action. In Experiment 1, both 3- and 4-year olds recognized that characters whose actions were intended as pretense were pretending. However, children also judged that characters whose actions gave them the appearance of an entity unintentionally were pretending to be that entity. In Experiment 2, 3-year olds reliably chose a character whose pretense actions were intentional as pretending over a character whose actions were guided by another intention. These data suggest that preschoolers have some understanding of the role of intentional action in pretense.     

Using feature preview to investigate the roles of top-down and bottom-up processing in conjunction search

The venerable conjunction search paradigm is a widely used tool to investigate how we search for items of interest from among visually complex surroundings. Models of visual search have long predicted that standard conjunction search is guided primarily by top-down processing. Prior attempts to test this claim experimentally have done so by altering some aspect of the standard conjunction search, whether by manipulating the distractor ratio or by including a feature singleton. Although suggestive, these manipulations result in a task that differs slightly from standard conjunction search. To leave the standard conjunction search paradigm intact, we used the feature preview task developed by Olds and Fockler [Olds, E. S., & Fockler, K. A. (2004). Does previewing one stimulus feature help conjunction search? Perception, 33, 195-216]. Our results show that in standard conjunction search the effect of bottom-up activation is not necessarily detrimental to search performance as previously suggested by computational models of visual search. Instead, bottom-up activation limits the scope of search, thereby boosting the efficiency of standard conjunction searches. Subjects also showed a bias to group items by color rather than orientation even when color differences were reduced nearly to threshold, indicating that the salience advantage of color is complemented by a general bottom-up preference for color.