The Gettier Intuition from South America to Asia

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research - This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail...     

The Experience of Intrusions Scale: a preliminary examination

Intrusive thoughts (i.e., unwelcome, distressing, involuntary thoughts) are prevalent in a variety of clinical conditions and are increasingly a focus of translational research. The goal of this study was to develop and preliminarily examine a brief self-report measure designed to assess clinically relevant aspects of the experience of intrusive thoughts related to a particular target. The Experience of Intrusions Scale (EIS) is a five-item measure that assesses the frequency, unpredictability, and unwantedness of intrusive thoughts, as well as the interference and distress caused by the intrusions, each on a five-point Likert-type scale. Five times over a four-] period, female undergraduates (N=160) completed the EIS in response to intrusive thoughts regarding a film clip depicting a sexual assault. On the first and last days, participants completed the EIS five minutes after watching the clip. In between film clip viewings, participants completed the EIS once per day. The EIS demonstrated good internal consistency, good to excellent test-retest reliability using both immediate post-stimulus and 24-hour time intervals, and convergent validity with two existing measures of intrusive phenomena: the White Bear Suppression Inventory (Wegner & Zanakos, 1994) and the Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist-Civilian Version (Weathers, Litz, Herman, Huska, & Keane, 1993).     

'My capital secret': Literature and the psychoanalytic agon

Taking as my departure point Freud 's unequivocal claim in The Question of Lay Analysis that psychoanalytic education should include "the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion, and the science of literature" ( Freud, 1926b, p . 246), I advocate for an integration of psychoanalysis with the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences in psychoanalytic training. Foundations in these fields are not only acceptable as preliminary to clinical training but will also provide the diverse intellectual climate that is urgently needed in psychoanalytic institutes whose discursive range is often quite narrow. To provide one example of the salutary effect of such disciplinary integration on clinical practice, I illustrate how the transformative power of literature provides compelling metaphors for the psychoanalytic encounter. Through an example drawn from within my own experience as literary critic and psychoanalyst, I describe the ways that the troubling tensions in Milton's Samson Agonistes functioned to illuminate, for me, an analysand 's 'capital secret'.     

The role of motion in children's categorization of objects.

Perceptual cues play a fundamental role in early categorization of objects. What is meant by perceptual cues in the literature, however, is not always clear. It is fair to say that they are typically understood to be static shape cues. A number of recent studies have suggested that dynamic perceptual cues, such as motion, may also be important in early categorization. The study presented here explored the role that motion plays in children's categorization of animal and non-animal kinds, such as geometric figures. Motion was directly pitted against shape as a cue for categorization. Results showed that 4-year-old children, confronted with a choice between shape and motion, significantly used motion cues over shape cues to categorize objects, regardless of whether they were animals or geometric figures. Seven-year-olds also tended to use motion more often to categorize animals but not when dealing with geometric figures. Older children, who have been found to have a clearer natural kind/artifact distinction, seem to appreciate the uniqueness of movement to animals and see motion as more relevant to their categorization but relatively less so to categorize geometric figures. This developmental shift in the categorization of animals and geometric figures based on motion was further confirmed by testing adults on the same tasks. Adults were found to base their judgements significantly more often on motion for animals but not for geometric figures. These findings support the view that children are initially guided by motion in object categorization, suggesting that motion plays an overriding role that is central in the process of concept acquisition and in the mechanisms by which concepts are later structured.     

Undernutrition by rearing in large litters delays the development of reflexive, locomotor, and memory processes in mice

In three experiments, the effects of early postnatal undernutrition on the ontogeny of several behavioral capacities of varying complexity were investigated in the mouse. Following birth, mouse pups in all experiments were reared in either "normally nourished" or "undernourished" conditions by maintaining litter sizes at 6 or 16, respectively. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the development of adultlike patterns of swimming behaviors and spontaneous locomotor activity, respectively, as a function of litter size. The maturation of both behavior patterns was delayed by about 2 days in the 16-litter mice. In Experiment 3, normally nourished and undernourished mice received 25 trials in a shock-escape T-maze at 9, 11, and 13 days of age, followed by similar retention tests 24 hr later. Although litter size had little effect upon correct turns at each age during training, mice reared in litters of six exhibited significant retention of prior training by 12 days of age, whereas comparable retention was not noted for the large litter mice until 14 days of age. Overall, these results suggest that nutritional deficits, imposed by rearing in large litters during the postnatal period of rapid central nervous system maturation, retard the development of behavioral capacities involving both unlearned and learned responses.     

Changes in sexist attitudes toward women during introductory women's and men's studies courses

Sexism toward women scores of university students at the beginning of an introductory women's and men's studies (gender studies) course were compared with sexism levels of the same students at the end of the course and with sexism levels of controls. Differences in sexism levels associated with Bem's sex role categories were investigated. Sexism levels among students in every category, except undifferentiated, were significantly lower at the end of the course, while controls showed no pre/post differences. As expected, males were higher than females both at pretest and at posttest, and sexism in both sex groups decreased significantly by equivalent amounts; but androgynous males in the introductory course were lower in sexism than sex-typed males and androgynous females were lower than sex-typed females. Undifferentiated subjects decreased in sexism least during the course, and cross-typed and androgynous males decreased most. The relationship of sexism to several additional variables not included in formal hypotheses also is discussed. These variables were age, religion, ethnicity, SES, and grade earned in the gender studies course.     

Priming of pop-out: I. Role of features

We examined a visual search task, in which observers responded to the high-acuity aspect of a popout target (shape of an odd-colored diamond or vernier offset of an odd spatial-frequency patch). Repetition of the attention-driving feature (color or spatial frequency) in this task primes the popout; repetition of the high-acuity aspect (shape, vernier offset) does not. Priming of pop-out is due to a decaying memory trace of the attention-focusing feature laid down with each trial. The trace exerts a diminishing effect over the following five to eight trials (≈30 sec), and its influence over this time is cumulative. Observers cannot willfully overcome the priming, which suggests that it is passive and autonomous. Both target facilitation and distractor inhibition are evident; the former has a greater effect. The phenomenon shows complete binocular transfer.     

Happy faces are habituated more slowly by infants of depressed mothers

Three-month-old infants of depressed (n=16) and non-depressed mothers (n=16) were habituated to video clips of a female model reciting phrases while posing happy or sad facial/vocal expressions and dishabituated to the alternate expressions. Overall, infants of depressed mothers took longer to habituate the video clips compared to infants of non-depressed mothers, and those assigned to habituate the sad video clips displayed a novelty response or dishabituated to the happy expressions. These findings suggest that 3-month-old infants of depressed mothers discriminate sad from happy expressions, however, they do not appear to perceive sad expressions as novel.