Judgment of duration relations: Simultaneous and sequential presentation

Four groups of subjects gave category ratings of total duration, average duration, or difference in duration of pairs of temporal intervals presented either simultaneously or successively. The results indicated that temporal information is combined in very different ways, depending on whether the members of the pairs must be monitored in parallel or sequentially. While judgments of successively presented intervals were reasonably consistent with the predictions of the appropriate linear models, judgments of simultaneously presented intervals were not. The latter judgments conformed more closely to the predictions of a vector sum model. These results appear to be in conflict with a model of duration perception recently proposed by Eisler (1975) based on the assumption that judgment of temporal intervals involves a simultaneous monitoring of two intervals even when the intervals to be compared are presented successively.     

Comments on “the measurement of factorial indeterminacy”

Guttman's index of indeterminacy (2² – 1) measures the potential amount of uncertainty in picking the right alternative interpretation for a factor. When alternative solutions for a factor are equally likely to be correct, then the squared multiple correlation ² for predicting the factor from the observed variables is the average correlation _AB between independently selected alternative solutionsA andB, while var ( _AB )=(1 – ²)²/s, wheres is the dimensionality of the space in which unpredicted components of alternative solutions are to be found. When alternative solutions for the factor are not equally likely to be chosen, ² is the lower bound for E( _AB ); however, E( _AB ) need not be a modal value in the distribution of _AB . Guttman's index and E( _AB ) measure different aspects of the same indeterminacy problem.     

Stimulus control of free-operant avoidance: The contribution of response rate and incentive relations between multiple-schedule components

The associations formed in the components of a multiple schedule can be classified as (1) stimulus-response (S-R) associations and (2) stimulus-reinforcer (S-S^R) associations. The present experiments sought to determine the individual contribution of these S-R and S-S^R associations to stimulus control by manipulating them independently. Responses postponed shocks by 25 sec in the presence of a tone alone and a light alone in all experiments. The contingencies programmed in the absence of both tone and light established a reference for the S-R and S-S^R associations in tone and in light. All four possible combinations of signalling response increase or decrease together with incentive increase or decrease were studied. Although the influence of the contingencies operating in the absence of tone and light was difficult to detect from response rates in tone or light, presenting tone and light together revealed clear effects. Response rates in tone and light together relative to those in either alone depended upon the contingency operating in the absence of tone and light. Stimulus-response and stimulus-reinforcer associations appeared to counteract each other when in opposition and combine together to enhance each other when in agreement. This suggested that the associations of a stimulus to response and to incentive combine algebraically in determining stimulus control. An algebraic analysis in terms of the S-R and S-S^R associations conditioned to the stimulus elements comprising the training and test stimuli accounted for the observed patterns of data.     

Christian Ethics In Jewish Terms: A Response to David Novak

While appreciating the illuminating qualities of Novak's account of natural law, Hauerwas also regards it as problematic precisely because of the unhealthy tension that remains between Novak's claim regarding the inseparability of theology and ethics, on the one hand, and his contention that the Noachian laws may 'be taken to be a universal requirement'of human reason, on the other. Hauerwas' central reservation is that Novak's account is the danger of abstracting from the law's sanctifying intent; i.e., its purpose to form a holy people. A consequence for Jewish-Christian dialogue, then, is a misplaced concentration on the role of the law in these respective traditions rather than different understandings of sanctification between (and within) these respective traditions.     

Memory and Counterfactual Simulations for Past Wrongdoings Foster Moral Learning and Improvement

In four studies, we investigated the role of remembering, reflecting on, and mutating personal past moral transgressions to learn from those moral mistakes and to form intentions for moral improvement. Participants reported having ruminated on their past wrongdoings, particularly their more severe transgressions, and they reported having frequently thought about morally better ways in which they could have acted instead (i.e., morally upward counterfactuals; Studies 1–3). The more that participants reported having mentally simulated morally better ways in which they could have acted, the stronger their intentions were to improve in the future (Studies 2 and 3). Implementing an experimental manipulation, we then found that making accessible a morally upward counterfactual after committing a moral transgression strengthened reported intentions for moral improvement—relative to resimulating the remembered event and considering morally worse ways in which they could have acted instead (Study 4). We discuss the implications of these results for competing theoretical views on the relationship between memory and morality and for functional theories of counterfactual thinking.     

Epistemic injustice in mathematics

We investigate how epistemic injustice can manifest itself in mathematical practices. We do this as both a social epistemological and virtue-theoretic investigation of mathematical practices. We delineate the concept both positively—we show that a certain type of folk theorem can be a source of epistemic injustice in mathematics—and negatively by exploring cases where the obstacles to participation in a mathematical practice do not amount to epistemic injustice. Having explored what epistemic injustice in mathematics can amount to, we use the concept to highlight a potential danger of intellectual enculturation.

     

Moral Values Reveal the Causality Implicit in Verb Meaning

Prior work has found that moral values that build and bind groups—that is, the binding values of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and preservation of purity—are linked to blaming people who have been harmed. The present research investigated whether people's endorsement of binding values predicts their assignment of the causal locus of harmful events to the victims of the events. We used an implicit causality task from psycholinguistics in which participants read a sentence in the form “SUBJECT verbed OBJECT because…” where male and female proper names occupy the SUBJECT and OBJECT position. The participants were asked to predict the pronoun that follows “because”—the referent to the subject or object—which indicates their intuition about the likely cause of the event. We also collected explicit judgments of causal contributions and measured participants' moral values to investigate the relationship between moral values and the causal interpretation of events. Using two verb sets and two independent replications (N = 459, 249, 788), we found that greater endorsement of binding values was associated with a higher likelihood of selecting the object as the cause for harmful events in the implicit causality task, a result consistent with, and supportive of, previous moral psychological work on victim blaming. Endorsement of binding values also predicted explicit causal attributions to victims. Overall, these findings indicate that moral values that support the group rather than the individual reliably predict that people shift the causal locus of harmful events to those affected by the harms.     

The Cross-Modal Coordination of Interpersonal Timing: Six-Week-Olds Infants' Gaze with Adults' Vocal Behavior

The purpose of this study was to examine the hypothesis that 6-week-old infants are capable of coordinated interpersonal timing within social interactions. Coordinated interpersonal timing refers to changes in the timing of one individual's behavior as a function of the timing of another individual's behavior. Each of 45, first-born 6-week-old infants interacted with his or her mother and a stranger for a total of 14 minutes. The interactions were videotaped and coded for the gaze behavior of the infants and the vocal behavior of the mothers and strangers. Time-series regression analyses were used to assess the extent to which the timing of each of the infants' gazes was coordinated with the timing of the adults' vocal behavior. The results revealed that (a) coordinated timing occurs between infants and their mothers and between infants and strangers as early as when infants are 6 weeks old, and (b) strangers coordinated the timing of their pauses with the infants to a greater extent than did mothers. The findings are discussed in terms of the role of temporal sensitivity in social interaction.