Through the Lenses of Gender, Race, and Class: Students’ Perceptions of Childless/Childfree Individuals and Couples

Earlier research has documented negative perceptions of childless couples, particularly the voluntarily childfree, among college students. In this project we used hypothetical vignettes to assess variations in students’ (N?=?478) perceptions of childless couples related to the couple’s race, occupations of husband and wife, and assumed reasons for childlessness. Perceptions were strongly influenced by occupational status and gender, but we found few race differences. Neither infertility nor chosen childlessness was rated negatively, but couples were rated more positively if they were perceived as temporarily rather than permanently childless. Our findings suggest that delayed parenthood is regarded as normative and that students have few negative biases regarding infertility or chosen childlessness. Perceptions were strongly conditioned by economic and employment considerations, which reflect current concerns about balancing work and family trajectories.     

Scientific Research and Human Rights: A Response to Kitcher on the Limitations of Inquiry

In his recent work exploring the role of science in democratic societies Kitcher (Science in a democratic society. Prometheus Books, New York, 2011) claims that scientists ought to have a prominent role in setting the agenda for and limits to research. Against the backdrop of the claim that the proper limits of scientific inquiry is John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle (Kitcher in Science, truth, and democracy. Oxford University Press, New York, 2001), he identifies the limits of inquiry as the point where the outcomes of research could cause harm to already vulnerable populations. Nonetheless, Kitcher argues against explicit limitations on unscrupulous research on the grounds that restrictions would exacerbate underlying social problems. I show that Kitcher’s argument in favor of dissuading inquiry through conventional standards is problematic and falls prey to the same critique he offers in opposition to official bans. I expand the conversation of limiting scientific research by recognizing that the actions that count as ‘science’ are located in the space between ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’. In this space, we often attempt to balance freedom of research, as scientific speech, against the disparate impact citizens might experience in light of such research. I end by exploring if such disparate impact justifies limiting research, within the context of the United States, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or under international human rights standards more generally.     

The subjective experience of object recognition: comparing metacognition for object detection and object categorization

Perceptual decisions seem to be made automatically and almost instantly. Constructing a unitary subjective conscious experience takes more time. For example, when trying to avoid a collision with a car on a foggy road you brake or steer away in a reflex, before realizing you were in a near accident. This subjective aspect of object recognition has been given little attention. We used metacognition (assessed with confidence ratings) to measure subjective experience during object detection and object categorization for degraded and masked objects, while objective performance was matched. Metacognition was equal for degraded and masked objects, but categorization led to higher metacognition than did detection. This effect turned out to be driven by a difference in metacognition for correct rejection trials, which seemed to be caused by an asymmetry of the distractor stimulus: It does not contain object-related information in the detection task, whereas it does contain such information in the categorization task. Strikingly, this asymmetry selectively impacted metacognitive ability when objective performance was matched. This finding reveals a fundamental difference in how humans reflect versus act on information: When matching the amount of information required to perform two tasks at some objective level of accuracy (acting), metacognitive ability (reflecting) is still better in tasks that rely on positive evidence (categorization) than in tasks that rely more strongly on an absence of evidence (detection).     

Das Problem der Geifteswiffenfchaft

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Orthodoxer und Liberaler Empirismus

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Improved mental rotation by near-sighted subjects

Several studies have shown significant correlations among factors such as sex, age, and hormone levels with performance on mental rotation tasks. To perform spatial rotation also seems to be related to cognitive abilities such as musical skills. The present experiment investigated a possible relationship for enhanced spatial abilities, as observed in near-sighted subjects, with mental rotation performance. 39 near-sighted and 21 normal-sighted subjects were tested on a mental rotation task using two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional objects. Near-sighted subjects displayed fewer errors in possible rotations than normal-sighted subjects. There was no difference in errors between groups in identification of mirror images ("impossible rotations"). Results were interpreted in terms of a relation between enhanced reliance on nonvisual information by near-sighted subjects and improved spatial representation.