The importance of what they care about

Many forms of contemporary morality treat the individual as the fundamental unit of moral importance. Perhaps the most striking example of this moral vision of the individual is the contemporary global human rights regime, which treats the individual as, for all intents and purposes, sacrosanct. This essay attempts to explore one feature of this contemporary understanding of the moral status of the individual, namely the moral significance of a subject’s actual affective states, and in particular her cares and commitments. I argue that in virtue of the moral significance of actual individuals, we should take actual cares and values very seriously—even if those cares and values are not expressions of the person’s autonomy—as partially constituting that individual as a concrete subject who is the proper object of our moral attention. In particular, I argue that a person’s actual cares and values have non-derivative moral significance. Simply because someone cares about something, that care is morally significant. In virtue of this non-derivative moral significance of cares, we ought to adopt of a commitment to accommodate others’ cares and a commitment not to frustrate their cares.     

Rejecting Sectarianism: Palestinian Christians' Role in Muslim–Christian Relations

The study of Muslim–Christian relations often focuses on Islamic theology and Muslim behavior while overlooking the role that Christians play in shaping interreligious encounters. This article examines a series of historical examples from various periods of Palestinian history that highlight Arab Christians' insistence that they were Palestinian Arabs first and were fully engaged in the nationalist movement. Palestinian Christians' approach to local politics, even in the face of interreligious conflict, allowed them to maintain far better relations with Muslims than Arab Christians in some neighboring Arab countries. By way of comparison, the article highlights the Druze's acceptance of a unique communal relationship to the Zionist leadership and later, to the state of Israel. The article concludes that, while modern Islamism presents a challenge to minority Christian groups, historical examples suggest that Christians' actions have a profound impact on the nature of Christian–Muslim relations.     

Consistently modeling the same movement strategy is more important than model skill level in observational learning contexts

The experiment undertaken was designed to elucidate the impact of model skill level on observational learning processes. The task was bimanual circle tracing with a 90° relative phase lead of one hand over the other hand. Observer groups watched videos of either an instruction model, a discovery model, or a skilled model. The instruction and skilled model always performed the task with the same movement strategy, the right-arm traced clockwise and the left-arm counterclockwise around circle templates with the right-arm leading. The discovery model used several movement strategies (tracing-direction/hand-lead) during practice. Observation of the instruction and skilled model provided a significant benefit compared to the discovery model when performing the 90° relative phase pattern in a post-observation test. The observers of the discovery model had significant room for improvement and benefited from post-observation practice of the 90° pattern. The benefit of a model is found in the consistency with which that model uses the same movement strategy, and not within the skill level of the model. It is the consistency in strategy modeled that allows observers to develop an abstract perceptual representation of the task that can be implemented into a coordinated action. Theoretically, the results show that movement strategy information (relative motion direction, hand lead) and relative phase information can be detected through visual perception processes and be successfully mapped to outgoing motor commands within an observational learning context.     

Spirituality as a Cultural Asset for Culturally Diverse Youth in Urban Schools

Spiritual issues are culturally important for many youth in urban schools. In this article, the authors describe how spirituality is associated with cultural values, mental health, coping strategies, and adjustment among culturally diverse youth. Using the case of a 17‐year‐old Samoan high school student, the authors demonstrate how spiritual issues related to faith, meaning making, and cultural identity can be addressed in a school counseling context.     

The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery

Motivated by computational analyses, we look at how teaching affects exploration and discovery. In Experiment 1, we investigated children’s exploratory play after an adult pedagogically demonstrated a function of a toy, after an interrupted pedagogical demonstration, after a naïve adult demonstrated the function, and at baseline. Preschoolers in the pedagogical condition focused almost exclusively on the target function; by contrast, children in the other conditions explored broadly. In Experiment 2, we show that children restrict their exploration both after direct instruction to themselves and after overhearing direct instruction given to another child; they do not show this constraint after observing direct instruction given to an adult or after observing a non-pedagogical intentional action. We discuss these findings as the result of rational inductive biases. In pedagogical contexts, a teacher’s failure to provide evidence for additional functions provides evidence for their absence; such contexts generalize from child to child (because children are likely to have comparable states of knowledge) but not from adult to child. Thus, pedagogy promotes efficient learning but at a cost: children are less likely to perform potentially irrelevant actions but also less likely to discover novel information.     

Learning a theory of causality

The very early appearance of abstract knowledge is often taken as evidence for innateness. We explore the relative learning speeds of abstract and specific knowledge within a Bayesian framework and the role for innate structure. We focus on knowledge about causality, seen as a domain-general intuitive theory, and ask whether this knowledge can be learned from co-occurrence of events. We begin by phrasing the causal Bayes nets theory of causality and a range of alternatives in a logical language for relational theories. This allows us to explore simultaneous inductive learning of an abstract theory of causality and a causal model for each of several causal systems. We find that the correct theory of causality can be learned relatively quickly, often becoming available before specific causal theories have been learned--an effect we term the blessing of abstraction. We then explore the effect of providing a variety of auxiliary evidence and find that a collection of simple perceptual input analyzers can help to bootstrap abstract knowledge. Together, these results suggest that the most efficient route to causal knowledge may be to build in not an abstract notion of causality but a powerful inductive learning mechanism and a variety of perceptual supports. While these results are purely computational, they have implications for cognitive development, which we explore in the conclusion.     

Widening the boundaries of the production effect

Words that are read aloud are more memorable than words that are read silently. The boundaries of this production effect (MacLeod, Gopie, Hourihan, Neary, & Ozubko, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36, 671-685, 2010) have been found to extend beyond speech. MacLeod and colleagues demonstrated that mouthing also facilitates memory, leading them to speculate that any distinct, item-specific response should result in a production effect. In Experiment 1, we found support for this conjecture: Relative to silent reading, three unique productions-spelling, writing, and typing-all boosted explicit memory. In Experiment 2, we tested the sensitivity of the production effect. Although mouthing, writing, and whispering all improved explicit memory when compared to silent reading, these other production modalities were not as beneficial as speech. We argue that the enhanced distinctiveness of speech relative to other productions-and of other productions relative to silent reading-underlies this pattern of results.