Evolution and Providence: A Response to Thomas Tracy

The role of chance in evolutionary process need not negate belief in the purposes of the Creator. The nature of causality is not determined by science alone, for it requires also acts of metaphysical decision. Moreover, science's accounts of physical reality are notably patchy, with relationships between different regimes often ill-understood An honest science cannot exclude the exercise of agency, either human or divine. Evolutionary insight can offer some help with the problems of theodicy.     

The Developmental Origin of Metacognition

We explain metacognition as a management of cognitive resources that does not necessitate algorithmic strategies or metarepresentation. When pragmatic, world‐directed actions cannot reduce the distance to the goal, agents engage in epistemic action directed at cognition. Such actions often are physical and involve other people, and so are open to observation. Taking a dynamic systems approach to development, we suggest that implicit and perceptual metacognition emerges from dyadic reciprocal interaction. Early intersubjectivity allows infants to internalize and construct rudimentary strategies for monitoring and control of their own and others' cognitions by emotion and attention. The functions of initiating, maintaining, and achieving turns make proto‐conversation a productive platform for developing metacognition. It enables caregiver and infant to create shared routines for epistemic actions that permit training of metacognitive skills. The adult is of double epistemic use to the infant—as a teacher that comments on and corrects the infant's efforts, and as the infant's cognitive resource in its own right. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Faith Organizations and Ethnically Diverse Elders: A Community Action Model

SUMMARY

In this article we argue that faith organizations should become involved in developing social service programs for older adults in the community. In the current political climate, the government is providing fewer social service programs, and future prospects for services are bleak. The literature provides evidence that religion and faith-based organizations are important in the lives of Americans, particularly the current cohort of ethnically diverse elders. Our earlier Korean church study found that Korean older people benefit from church-based services and church-involved, older Koreans had higher rates of well-being. Churches remain untapped resources and we believe they should be extensively involved in provision of community programs. We offer a twelve-step model for the development of community programs under the auspices of faith organizations: The Faith-Based Community Action Model (FBCAM).     

Knowledge-telling and knowledge-transforming arguments in mock jurors' verdict justifications

According to the “story model” a juror constructs an implicit mental model of a story telling what happened as the basis for the verdict choice. But the explicit justification of a verdict choice could take the form of a story (knowledge telling) or the form of a relational (knowledge-transforming) argument structure that brings together diverse, non-chronologically related pieces of evidence. The study investigates whether people tend towards knowledge telling or knowledge transforming, and whether use of these argument structure types are related to skilled argument and epistemic understanding. A sample of people on jury duty chose and justified verdicts in two abridged cases. Participants tended to display the same argument structure and argument skill across cases. Those using knowledge-transforming structures were more successful at the juror argument skills task and had a higher level of epistemic understanding. The discussion suggests that jurors approach their task with an epistemic orientation towards knowledge telling or knowledge transforming.     

Unintentional collective action

In this paper, I examine the manner in which analyses of the action of single agents have been pressed into service for constructing accounts of collective action. Specifically, I argue that the best analogy to collective action is a class of individual action that Carl Ginet has called ‘aggregate action.’ Furthermore, once we use aggregate action as a model of collective action, then we see that existing accounts of collective action have failed to accommodate an important class of (what I shall call) ‘unintentional collective actions.’     

A Moorean paradox of desire

A prevalent assumption among philosophers who believe that people can intentionally deceive themselves (intentionalists) is that they accomplish this by controlling what evidence they attend to. This article is concerned primarily with the evaluation of this claim, which we may call ‘attentionalism’. According to attentionalism, when one justifiably believes/suspects that not-p but wishes to make oneself believe that p, one may do this by shifting attention away from the considerations supportive of the belief that not-p and onto considerations supportive of the belief that p. The details of this theory are elaborated, its theoretical importance is pointed out, and it is argued that the strategy is supposed to work by leading to the repression of one's knowledge of the unwelcome considerations. However, I then show that the assumption that this is possible is opposed by the balance of a relevant body of empirical research, namely, the thought-suppression literature, and so intentionalism about self-deception cannot find vindication in the attentional theory.     

Community Engagement as Liberal Performance,as Critical Intellectualism and as Praxis

This article aims to illustrate that engagement is a dynamic and evolutionary process, moulded by contesting ideological, social actor and contextual forces. For purposes of illustration, I draw on a university-affiliated, participatory enactment of community engagement as a case example. The case illustrates that community engagement may assume a form of action, critical intellectualism and praxis. As action, community engagement is oriented towards performance of liberal democracy. Community engagement, as shaped by the critical intellectualism of the Black Consciousness philosophy, reflects community self-affirmation, autonomy and intellectual independence. Community engagement as praxis may be characterised by reflexivity, vision-making and the building of interpersonal relationships. Community engagement is marked by a dynamic interplay between race, power and counter-hegemonic ideology.     

Rhythmic sensorimotor coordination is resistant but not immune to auditory stream segregation

In a recent study of musicians' sensorimotor synchronization with auditory sequences composed either of beat and subdivision tones differing in pitch or of beat tones only, Repp (2009) found that the phase correction response (PCR) to perturbed beats was inhibited by the presence of subdivisions regardless of whether beats and subdivisions formed integrated or segregated perceptual streams. The present study used a different paradigm in which perturbed subdivisions triggered the PCR. At the slower of two sequence tempi, the PCR was equally large in integrated and segregated conditions, but at the faster tempo stream segregation reduced the PCR substantially. This new finding indicates that although the PCR is strongly resistant to auditory stream segregation, it is not totally immune to it.     

Effects of visual cue and response assignment on spatial stimulus coding in stimulus–response compatibility

Tlauka and McKenna (2000 Tlauka, M. and McKenna, F. P. 2000. Hierarchical knowledge influences stimulus–response compatibility effects. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 53A: 85–103.  [Google Scholar]) reported a reversal of the traditional stimulus–response compatibility (SRC) effect (faster responding to a stimulus presented on the same side than to one on the opposite side) when the stimulus appearing on one side of a display is a member of a superordinate unit that is largely on the opposite side. We investigated the effects of a visual cue that explicitly shows a superordinate unit, and of assignment of multiple stimuli within each superordinate unit to one response, on the SRC effect based on superordinate unit position. Three experiments revealed that stimulus–response assignment is critical, while the visual cue plays a minor role, in eliciting the SRC effect based on the superordinate unit position. Findings suggest bidirectional interaction between perception and action and simultaneous spatial stimulus coding according to multiple frames of reference, with contribution of each coding to the SRC effect flexibly varying with task situations.     

Temporal coordination between performing musicians

Many common behaviours require people to coordinate the timing of their actions with the timing of others' actions. We examined whether representations of musicians' actions are activated in coperformers with whom they must coordinate their actions in time and whether coperformers simulate each other's actions using their own motor systems during temporal coordination. Pianists performed right-hand melodies along with simple or complex left-hand accompaniments produced by themselves or by another pianist. Individual performers' preferred performance rates were measured in solo performance of the right-hand melody. The complexity of the left-hand accompaniment influenced the temporal grouping structure of the right-hand melody in the same way when it was performed by the self or by the duet partner, providing some support for the action corepresentation hypothesis. In contrast, accompaniment complexity had little influence on temporal coordination measures (asynchronies and cross-correlations between parts). Temporal coordination measures were influenced by a priori similarities between partners' preferred rates; partners who had similar preferred rates in solo performance were better synchronized and showed mutual adaptation to each other's timing during duet performances. These findings extend previous findings of action corepresentation and action simulation to a task that requires precise temporal coordination of independent yet simultaneous actions.