An empirical and computational investigation of perceiving and remembering event temporal relations

Events have beginnings, ends, and often overlap in time. A major question is how perceivers come to parse a stream of multimodal information into meaningful units and how different event boundaries may vary event processing. This work investigates the roles of these three types of event boundaries in constructing event temporal relations. Predictions were made based on how people would err according to the beginning state, end state, and overlap heuristic hypotheses. Participants viewed animated events that include all the logical possibilities of event temporal relations, and then made temporal relation judgments. The results showed that people make use of the overlap between events and take into account the ends and beginnings, but they weight ends more than beginnings. Neural network simulations showed a self-organized distinction when learning temporal relations between events with overlap versus those without.     

Impaired self-reflection in psychiatric disorders among adults: A proposal for the existence of a network of semi independent functions

Self-reflection plays a key role in healthy human adaptation. Self-reflection might involve different capacities which may be impaired to different degrees relatively independently of one another. Variation in abilities for different forms of self-reflection are commonly seen as key aspects of many adult mental disorders. Yet little has been written about whether there are different kinds of deficits in self-reflection found in mental illness, how those deficits should be distinguished from one another and how to characterize the extent to which they are interrelated. We review clinical and experimental literature and suggest four different forms of deficits in self-reflection: (a) sense of ownership of one’s own thoughts and actions, (b) emotional awareness, (c) distinction between fantasy and reality and (d) the integration of a range of different views of oneself and others. We propose how these different impairments in self-reflection are linked with one another.     

How individualism–collectivism orientations predict happiness in a collectivistic context

We discuss how individualistic/collectivistic orientations of employees predict affective well-being at work, and how this relationship is moderated by the perceptions of spirit of camaraderie in organizations. The sample comprises 161 employees of 109 organizations operating in Portugal, a collectivistic culture. The findings suggest that: (a) collectivistic individuals show higher affective well-being than individualists; (b) this relationship is moderated by the employees’ perceptions of the spirit of camaraderie in their organizations; (c) higher affective well being levels tend to be experienced by collectivists who find working in an organizational context to be rich in spirit of camaraderie, and lower levels of affective well being are expressed by individualists who perceive poor spirit of camaraderie in their working environments. The paper emphasizes that employee happiness can have different bases in different cultures and that individualism/collectivism orientations do not operate in the same way in different cultural and organizational contexts. We are very grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.     

自我和他人的协调与心理理论的神经机制

有关心理理论神经机制的研究远未达到共识。从自我与他人协调的角度看,可认为它是一个由多脑区有机组织而成的系统。自我中心化偏差是人类认知的一种默认选择,要正确理解他人的心理状态,需要抑制自我中心偏差。因此,心理理论的加工至少包括以下几个不同的过程：通过模拟自我理解他人,相应的加工脑区为镜像神经元系统;从他人与客体形成的二元关系中表征心理状态的内容,相应脑区是颞顶联合区;对模拟自我进行抑制,相应脑区为背外侧额叶;以及整合协调以上几个过程,其脑区可能是内侧前额叶     

Do maternal stress and home environment mediate the relation between early income‐to‐need and 54‐months attentional abilities?

Using Ecological Systems Theory and stage sequential modelling procedures for detecting mediation, this study examined how early developmental contexts impact preschoolers' performances on a measure of sustained attention and impulse control. Data from 1273 European‐American and African‐American participants in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care were used to identify the potential mediators of the relation between early household income‐to‐need (INR) and 54‐month impulsivity and inattention. Exploratory analyses were also conducted to determine whether the relationships between early income, home environment, parenting stress, and the outcome variables differ for African‐American versus European‐American‐American children. We found modest support for the study hypothesis that 36‐month home environment quality mediated the INR/attention relationship. INR accounted for more home environment score variance and home environment accounted for more Impulsivity score variance for African‐American children. Home environments were related to inattention in the European‐American, but not African‐American, group. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Prospective coding in event representation

A perceived event such as a visual stimulus in the external world and a to-be-produced event such as an intentional action are subserved by event representations. Event representations do not only contain information about present states but also about past and future states. Here we focus on the role of representing future states in event perception and generation (i.e., prospective coding). Relevant theoretical issues and paradigms are discussed. We suggest that the predictive power of the motor system may be exploited for prospective coding not only in producing but also in perceiving events. Predicting is more advantageous than simply reacting. Perceptual prediction allows us to select appropriate responses ahead of the realization of an (anticipated) event and therefore, it is indispensable to flexibly and timely adapt to new situations and thus, successfully interact with our physical and social environment.     

Are Newcomb problems really decisions?

Richard Jeffrey long held that decision theory should be formulated without recourse to explicitly causal notions. Newcomb problems stand out as putative counterexamples to this ‘evidential’ decision theory. Jeffrey initially sought to defuse Newcomb problems via recourse to the doctrine of ratificationism, but later came to see this as problematic. We will see that Jeffrey’s worries about ratificationism were not compelling, but that valid ratificationist arguments implicitly presuppose causal decision theory. In later work, Jeffrey argued that Newcomb problems are not decisions at all because agents who face them possess so much evidence about correlations between their actions and states of the world that they are unable to regard their deliberate choices as causes of outcomes, and so cannot see themselves as making free choices. Jeffrey’s reasoning goes wrong because it fails to recognize that an agent’s beliefs about her immediately available acts are so closely tied to the immediate causes of these actions that she can create evidence that outweighs any antecedent correlations between acts and states. Once we recognize that deliberating agents are free to believe what they want about their own actions, it will be clear that Newcomb problems are indeed counterexamples to evidential decision theory.     

从多元概化理论看高考综合能力测试的改进

通过多元概化理论的研究发现,高考综合能力测试（2001,广东）的总体信度达到了可以接受的水平（0.784）。但测验中各部分对总方差的贡献程度与预定的赋分比例有较大差距。其中,地理和政治的贡献度偏低,化学和历史的贡献度偏高。这表明有（历史和化学）偏科特点的考生得到了较高的综合分数。又经决策(D)研究发现,增加地理部分的题量会反常地降低测验的总体信度,这说明有不少高分考生答错或主动放弃了地理科题目。因此,如何有效控制各部分的实际贡献程度、避免负面导向是当前高考综合能力测试亟待解决的问题。     

Basic Infobase Change

Generalisations of theory change involving arbitrary sets of wffs instead of belief sets have become known as base change. In one view, a base should be thought of as providing more structure to its generated belief set, and can be used to determine the theory change operation associated with a base change operation. In this paper we extend a proposal along these lines by Meyer et al. We take an infobase as a finite sequence of wffs, with each element in the sequence being seen as an independently obtained bit of information, and define appropriate infobase change operations. The associated theory change operations satisfy the AGM postulates for theory change. Since an infobase change operation produces a new infobase, it allows for iterated infobase change. We measure iterated infobase change against the postulates proposed by Darwiche et al. and Lehmann.     

Deconstructing consumer behaviour: theory and practice

This paper challenges the conventional opposition, or distinction, between consumer behaviour theory and practice. This binary dualism, it is argued, is predicated on a simplistic ‘either/or’ logic that ignores the effects theory and practice have on each other. Furthermore, it obscures a hierarchical relationship between academic researchers and marketing practitioners in which basic research is more dominant and privileged than applied research. In response to these criticisms, an alternative ‘both/and’ logic is proposed for exploring the interrelationships between consumer behaviour theory and practice and new social relations among consumer researchers. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications.