Natural paths to invention: Reinventing the wheel

Four studies explored candidate pathways underlying the invention of the “wheeled cart.” In Study 1, heuristics were abstracted from subjects’ judgements of different precursor paths to the wheeled cart. In Studies 2 and 3, these heuristics were tested for generality across different precursor paths. In Study 4, subjects ranked the order of incorporating parts into the wheeled cart. While the studies cannot “prove” that the wheeled cart developed in one of the candidate ways, they show that interesting and important heuristics of invention can be uncovered from subject’s judgements. Examining candidate paths to important inventions is a method worthy of exploration. Together, the four studies indicate that important historical inventions might be examined experimentally. Doing so yields potentially important invention heuristics.     

Psychological Distress Among Religious Nonbelievers: A Systematic Review

Studies of religious belief and psychological health are on the rise, but most overlook atheists and agnostics. We review 14 articles that examine differences between nonbelievers and believers in levels of psychological distress, and potential sources of distress among nonbelievers. Various forms of psychological distress are experienced by nonbelievers, and greater certainty in one’s belief system is associated with greater psychological health. We found one well-documented source of distress for nonbelievers: negative perceptions by others. We provide recommendations for improving research on nonbelievers and suggest a model analogous to Pargament’s tripartite spiritual struggle to understand the stresses of nonbelief.     

Using ecphoric confidence ratings to discriminate seen from unseen faces: The effects of retention interval and distinctiveness

Theories of confidence processing for recognition judgments suggest that confidence indexes the degree of match between a presented stimulus and an image in memory (ecphoric similarity). Recent research has demonstrated that having participants rate their confidence that a face had been previously seen provides an equivalent or a better index of the stimulus's status than does eliciting a simple binary response (Sauer, Brewer, & Weber, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 137: 528-547, 2008). Using a face recognition paradigm, we manipulated retention interval and stimulus distinctiveness to directly test the suggestion that confidence indexes ecphoric similarity and to probe the boundary conditions for using confidence ratings to discriminate seen from unseen faces. Consistent with the proposed ecphoric basis for confidence ratings, mean confidence was higher for previously seen than for unseen faces, and conditions conducive to the formation of strong memories improved confidence-based discrimination. In all conditions, after the application of a classification algorithm, confidence ratings provided a more sensitive index of face status (i.e., seen or unseen) than did binary responses.     

Demenz mit Lewy-K?rperchen

Die Demenz mit Lewy-K?rperchen („dementia with Lewy-bodies“, „DLB“) ist nach dem Morbus Alzheimer die zweith?ufigste degenerative Demenz des h?heren Lebensalters. Klinisch ist sie durch einen progressiven kognitiven Abbau mit im Vordergrund stehenden St?rungen von Aufmerksamkeit, frontal-exekutiven Funktionen, visuell-r?umlichen und visuell-konstruktiven Leistungen sowie ausgepr?gten Schwankungen der kognitiven Leistungsf?higkeit charakterisiert. Eine wesentliche Ged?chtnisst?rung muss im Frühstadium nicht bestehen. Die differenzialdiagnostische Abgrenzung von anderen Demenzformen, vor allem zum Morbus Alzheimer kann in der Praxis schwierig sein, zumal sich Klinik und Pathologie der beiden Erkrankungen überlappen k?nnen.     

James Taylor. Buddhism and postmodern imaginings in Thailand: The religiosity of urban space

This paper focuses on the career of a Burmese preaching monk and on what happened to him in November 2011, following a particularly successful series of sermons on the ‘ten duties of a Buddhist king’. Belonging to the lineage of the Mogok abbot, this monk was known as the ‘Frying pan’ abbot and had gained a considerable influence through the combination of systematic preaching and of humanitarian aid and social action. The turn to mass preaching was aimed, in his case, to implement moral reform and located him in the monastic lineages that contest established powers to such an extent that, eventually, he was banned from large public preaching in the region of Rangoon by the religious body administrating the Sangha. This case is examined from the point of view of renunciation that defines the position occupied by monks in Theravadin societies as opposed to that of the laity, and as representative of a specific moment in the articulation of religion and politics in Myanmar.     

Facilitating Game Play: How Others Affect Performance at and Enjoyment of Video Games

The current study implements the drive theory of social facilitation to explain the influence of audience presence in video game play. This integration is an important one for research aiming to understand the experience of video game play, as the social aspect of video game play is a relevant dimension of the technology often ignored in research on gaming experiences. The study finds a significant positive association between non-gaming cognitive abilities (such as hand–eye coordination and mental rotation ability) and performance at a first-person shooter. Data also support the social facilitation hypothesis: Game play in the presence of a physical audience significantly predicts increased game performance. Social facilitation effects are only found for low-challenge games where the drive-inducing capacity of task challenge is minimized. Resultant influences on game enjoyment are less clear.     

The Experimental Derivation of a New Formula for Mental Work

(Anderson, H. H., &; Anderson, Gladys L. An Introduction to Projective Techniques. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1951.) Reviewed by Robert M. Allen.