Event-method directed forgetting: Forgetting a video segment is more effortful than remembering it

Videos were presented depicting events such as baking cookies or cleaning a fish tank. Periodically, the video paused and an instruction to Remember (R) or Forget (F) the preceding video segment was presented; the video then resumed. Participants later responded more accurately to cued-recall questions (E1) and to true/false statements (E2–5) regarding R segments than F segments. This difference was larger for specific information (the woman added 3 cups of flour) than for general information (the woman added flour). Participants were also slower to detect visual probes presented following F instructions compared to those presented following R instructions. These findings suggest that intentional forgetting is an effortful process that can be performed even on segments of otherwise continuous events and that the result is a relatively impoverished representation of the unwanted information in memory.     

From a Continental Point of View: The Role of Logic in the Analytic-Continental Divide

My discussion addresses the differences between analytic and continental philosophy concerning the use of logic and exact reasoning in philosophical practice. These differences are mainly examined in the light of the controversial dominance of Hegel's concept of logic (and theory of concept) in twentieth-century continental philosophy. The inquiry is developed in two parts. In the first (Sections 1-2), I indicate some aspects of the analytic-continental divide, pointing to the role that the topic 'logic and philosophy' plays in it. In the second part (Sections 3-6), I give a short account of the views of logic which are typical of the three main trends of continental philosophy (see Table 1). I also suggest how, with the aid of some typical analytical devices, some continental 'anti-logical' attitudes may be corrected, on their own terms.     

Habermas and Dummett: Beyond Dogmatism and Scepticism

In this article I suggest a way of overcoming the traditional dichotomy between analytic and continental philosophy by pointing at some similarities between apparently disparate philosophical approaches, viz. those of Michael Dummett and Jürgen Habermas. The comparison revolves around the so-called 'paradox of analysis', which poses a dilemma concerning philosophical propositions: these are allegedly shown to be either trivial or unsecured. Both Dummett and Habermas offer ways out of the dilemma, through recognition of the intersection of analysis with life. A transcendentally characterized conception of language is conceived by both as the only way to overcome the haunting objective m subjective distinction. Thus they offer fresh insights into the nature of meaning and truth, and the place these occupy within philosophical systems. Both philosophers take the notions of justification and procedural rationality to be primary in the order of philosophical explanation. Meaning is not conceived in terms of representation and truth conditions, but in terms of validity claims. Truth is not viewed as independent and static, but as historically conditioned and constantly unfolding. As a result, even the statements of logic, and certainly those of philosophy, find a place between the alleged emptiness of analyticity and the robust empirical character of science. This common ground represents, I believe, one of the new faces of post-analytic m and hence also post-continental m philosophy. Parts of it are shared by other contemporary philosophers, such as Derrida and Brandom. What marks this new Weltanschauung is the way it surpasses the current eliminativist trends in philosophy.     

Response to ‘Somatic Intentionality Bifurcated: A Sellarisan Response to Sachs’s Merleau-Pontyan Account of Intentionality’

ABSTRACT

This article advances a new analysis of stupidity as a distinctive form of cognitive failing. Section 1 outlines some problems in explicating this notion and suggests some desiderata. Section 2 sketches an existing model of stupidity, found in Kant and Flaubert, which serves as a foil for my own view. In Section 3, I introduce my theory: I analyse stupidity as form of conceptual self-hampering, characterised by a specific aetiology and with a range of deleterious effects. In Section 4, I show how this proposal meets the desiderata and I clarify how it diverges from existing accounts. My position is close to a ‘public health approach’, in contrast to the virtue/vice framework employed by Engel or Mulligan.     

Why philosophy and history matter: A conversation with Ann Taves

The article picks up some ideas that Ann Taves presents in her book Religious Experience Reconsidered, and looks at possible conversations that are not fleshed out in detail in Taves' book. In particular, it is argued that the disciplinary confrontation with philosophy and with historiography is of crucial importance if the disciplines of cognitive science and psychology of religion want to become in the future what they pretend to be nowda serious alternative and complement to the study of religion as we know it from other contexts, such as cultural studies and historiography     

A probabilistic threshold model: Analyzing semantic categorization data with the Rasch model

According to the Threshold Theory (Hampton, 1995, 2007) semantic categorization decisions come about through the placement of a threshold criterion along a dimension that represents items' similarity to the category representation. The adequacy of this theory is assessed by applying a formalization of the theory, known as the Rasch model (Rasch, 1960; Thissen & Steinberg, 1986), to categorization data for eight natural language categories and subjecting it to a formal test. In validating the model special care is given to its ability to account for inter- and intra-individual differences in categorization and their relationship with item typicality. Extensions of the Rasch model that can be used to uncover the nature of category representations and the sources of categorization differences are discussed.     

Pursuing Franklin’s Dream: Philosophical and Historical Roots of Service-Learning

Two decades ago service-learning as an innovation lingered on the periphery of the academy. Today, service-learning has spread across American higher education. Few educational innovations have achieved such relatively rapid success. This article describes the historical and philosophical underpinnings of service-learning. It notes some of the significant debates that have occurred among its practitioners. The authors draw from experience at their university, the University of Pennsylvania, to describe the importance of connecting service-learning to the core educational and civic missions of a college or university, as well as to provide a case study of how that connection might be made.     

Physiological Arousal and Political Beliefs

It is by now well known that political attitudes can be affected by emotions. Most earlier studies have focused on emotions generated by some political event (e.g., terrorism or increased immigration). However, the methods used in previous efforts have made it difficult to untangle the various causal pathways that might link emotions to political beliefs. In contrast, we focus on emotions incidental (i.e., irrelevant) to the decision process, allowing us to cleanly trace and estimate the effect of experimentally induced anxiety on political beliefs. Further, we build upon innovative new work that links physiological reactivity (Hatemi, McDermott, Eaves, Kendler, & Neale, 2013; Oxley et al., 2008a) to attitudes by using skin conductance reactivity as a measure of emotional arousal. We found that anxiety—generated by a video stimulus—significantly affected physiological arousal as measured by tonic skin‐conductance levels, and that higher physiological reactivity predicted more anti‐immigration attitudes. We show that physiological reactivity mediated the relationship between anxiety and political attitudes.     

Older sisters and younger brothers: The impact of siblings on preference for competition

Psychology studies have long argued the possibility that sibling structure, such as birth order and the sex of siblings, shapes one’s personality traits. One of the core issues involved is that of who rates subjects’ personality traits in studies. The present studies (N = 135 in Study 1, N = 232 in Study 2) surpassed the examinations performed in previous studies by obtaining information regarding one of the key personality traits, preference for competition, using a framework developed via experimental economics rather than subjective ratings. Despite the fact that the two studies involved different types of task, we consistently observed that older sisters exerted a significant impact on their younger siblings in both studies. In particular, having an older sister was negatively associated with men’s competitive preferences. We also obtained suggestive evidence that having an older sister was positively associated with women’s competitive preferences. Our results support sibling hypotheses from the perspective of experimental economics.     

The seven sins of consumer psychology

Consumer psychology faces serious issues of internal and external relevance. Most of these issues originate in seven fundamental problems with the way consumer psychologists plan and conduct their research—problems that could be called “the seven sins of consumer psychology.” These seven “sins” are (1) a narrow conception of the scope of consumer behavior research; (2) adoption of a narrow set of theoretical lenses; (3) adherence to a narrow epistemology of consumer research; (4) an almost exclusive emphasis on psychological processes as opposed to psychological content; (5) a strong tendency to overgeneralize from finite empirical results, both as authors and as reviewers; (6) a predisposition to design studies based on methodological convenience rather than on substantive considerations; and (7) a pervasive confusion between “theories of studies” and studies of theories. Addressing these problems (“atoning for these sins”) would greatly enhance the relevance of the field. However, this may require a substantial rebalancing of the field's incentives to reward actual research impact rather than sheer number of publications in major journals.