荀子、王充等对鬼神迷信的批判

荀子在《解蔽》里,对于鬼神迷信做了生动的分析批判。他说道:夏首的南边有个叫涓蜀梁的人,此人既愚而又事事恐惧。在月光明亮的晚上走路,低头见自己的影子,以为是伏在地上的鬼,仰头见自己的头发,又以为是站着的妖怪。吓得转身就跑, 回到家中,竟然惊吓而死。由此,荀子得出结论说:凡人们认为有鬼,必定是有精神恍惚、心智不清的时候留下的印象。荀子     

Is visual short-term memory object based? Rejection of the "strong-object" hypothesis

Is the capacity of visual short-term memory (VSTM) limited by the number of objects or by the number of features? VSTM for objects with either one feature or two color features was tested. Results show that capacity was limited primarily by the number of colors to be memorized, not by the number of objects. This result held up with variations in color saturation, blocked or mixed conditions, duration of memory image, and absence or presence of verbal load. However, conjoining features into objects improved VSTM capacity when size-orientation and color-orientation conjunctions were tested. Nevertheless, the number of features still mattered. When feature heterogeneity was controlled, VSTM for conjoined objects was worse than VSTM for objects made of single features. Our results support a weak-object hypothesis of VSTM capacity that suggests that VSTM is limited by both the number of objects and the feature composition of those objects.     

A simulation study of the degrees of freedom of movement in reaching and grasping

The question of independently controlled components in the act of reaching and grasping has attracted interest experimentally and theoretically. Data from 35 studies were recently found consistent with simulated kinematic finger and thumb trajectories optimised for minimum jerk. The present study closely reproduces those trajectories using a discrete-time model based on minimum acceleration. That model was further used to generate two-dimensional trajectories for finger and thumb to reach and grasp an elliptical object with varying position and/or orientation. Orthogonalisation of these four trajectories revealed one degree of freedom when direction of reach was constant and two degrees of freedom when direction of reach varied, irrespective of object distance and orientation. These simulations indicate that reach and grasp movements contain redundancy that is removable by formation of task-dependent synergies. As skilled movement can be planned and executed in a low dimension workspace, control of these independent components lessens central workload.     

Windowed cross-correlation and peak picking for the analysis of variability in the association between behavioral time series

Cross-correlation and most other longitudinal analyses assume that the association between 2 variables is stationary. Thus, a sample of occasions of measurement is expected to be representative of the association between variables regardless of the time of onset or number of occasions in the sample. The authors propose a method to analyze the association between 2 variables when the assumption of stationarity may not be warranted. The method results in estimates of both the strength of peak association and the time lag when the peak association occurred for a range of starting values of elapsed time from the beginning of an experiment.     

Large number discrimination in 6-month-old infants

Two experiments with the Stroop paradigm were conducted to investigate the role of phonological codes in access to the meaning of Chinese characters. Subjects named the ink color of viewed characters or color patches. Key items were color characters, their homophones with the same tone, homophones with different tones, and semantic associates. Apart from finding the usual Stroop interference effect, homophones produced significant interference in the incongruent condition, provided that they had the same tone as the color characters. The interference effect from homophones, however, was significantly smaller than that from color characters. Semantic associates generated an interference effect in the incongruent condition, an effect of the same magnitude as the effect from the same-tone homophones. Finally, in the congruent conditions, all the key items yielded facilitations compared to neutral controls, though the facilitation from color characters was larger than the facilitations from other types of characters. These findings suggest that phonological codes in Chinese are activated obligatorily and provide early sources of constraint in access to meaning.     

Perception of dynamic acoustic patterns by an individual with unilateral verbal auditory agnosia

Previous studies have found that subjects diagnosed with verbal auditory agnosia (VAA) from bilateral brain lesions may experience difficulties at the prephonemic level of acoustic processing. In this case study, we administered a series of speech and nonspeech discrimination tests to an individual with unilateral VAA as a result of left-temporal-lobe damage. The results indicated that the subject's ability to perceive steady-state acoustic stimuli was relatively intact but his ability to perceive dynamic stimuli was drastically reduced. We conclude that this particular aspect of acoustic processing may be a major contributing factor that disables speech perception in subjects with unilateral VAA.     

Spatial context learning in visual search and change detection

Humans conduct visual search more efficiently when the same display is presented for a second time, showing learning of repeated spatial contexts. In this study, we investigate spatial context learning in two tasks: visual search and change detection. In both tasks, we ask whether subjects learn to associate the target with the entire spatial layout of a repeated display (configural learning) or with individual distractor locations (nonconfigural learning). We show that nonconfigural learning results from visual search tasks, but not from change detection tasks. Furthermore, a spatial layout acquired in visual search tasks does not enhance change detection on the same display, whereas a spatial layout acquired in change detection tasks moderately enhances visual search. We suggest that although spatial context learning occurs in multiple tasks, the content of learning is, in part, task specific.     

Associative learning improves visual working memory performance

The ability to remember visual stimuli over a short delay period is limited by the small capacity of visual working memory (VWM). Here the authors investigate the role of learning in enhancing VWM. Participants saw 2 spatial arrays separated by a 1-s interval. The 2 arrays were identical except for 1 location. Participants had to detect the difference. Unknown to the participants, some spatial arrays would repeat once every dozen trials or so for up to 32 repetitions. Spatial VWM performance increased significantly when the same location changed across display repetitions, but not at all when different locations changed from one display repetition to another. The authors suggest that a major role of learning in VWM is to mediate which information gets retained, rather than to directly increase VWM capacity.     

达米特论意义和真

达米特的反实在论意义理论在当代语言哲学中占据重要地位.本文主要分析了他对"意义"和"真"这两个概念的解释,指出他的意义理论完全是一种形式说明,或者说,是对意义理论本身的形式构造.同时,达米特反对用真值条件来解释意义,主要是根据他对"真"这个概念有着不同的理解:他把"真"看作我们在具体场合说出的句子的属性.达米特的思想受到了各方面的批评,他也在这种批评和反批评过程中不断完善自己的思想.     

What kind of memory supports visual marking?

In visual search tasks, if a set of items is presented for 1 s before another set of new items (containing the target) is added, search can be restricted to the new set. The process that eliminates old items from search is visual marking. This study investigates the kind of memory that distinguishes the old items from the new items during search. Using an accuracy paradigm in which perfect marking results in 100% accuracy and lack of marking results in near chance performance, the authors show that search can be restricted to new items not by visual short-term memory (VSTM) of old locations but by a limited capacity and slow-decaying VSTM of new locations and a high capacity and fast-decaying memory for asynchrony.