Partial awareness distinguishes between measuring conscious perception and conscious content: Reply to Dienes and Seth

In their comment on Sandberg, Timmermans, Overgaard, and Cleeremans (2010), Dienes and Seth argue that increased sensitivity of the Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS) is a consequence of the scale being less exclusive rather than more exhaustive. According to Dienes and Seth, this is because PAS may measure some conscious content, though not necessarily relevant conscious content, “If one saw a square but was only aware of seeing a flash of something, then one has not consciously seen a square.” In this reply, we claim that there is a difference between conscious visual experience, which may be partial, and the resulting conscious content, which is conceptual. Whereas PAS measures the first, confidence judgments and post-decision wagering measure the second.     

Neural network applications in consumer behavior

This article introduces the concepts and terminology of artificial neural networks. The approach is demonstrated on data that represent a domain of interest to the consumer psychologist. ANNs are mathematical models that are commonly used in business applications to model relationships between variables. A key strength of ANNs is their flexibility, i.e. their ability to easily accommodate linear and non-linear relationships without any a priori functional form specification. They can easily be used to study topics of interest to consumer psychologists such as persuasion, influence, segmentation etc and can offer distinct advantages over traditional statistical techniques such as ANOVA and regression. We demonstrate the application of ANNs in three different areas: regression, non-linear principal component analysis and classification.     

When Effort is Threatening: The Influence of the Belief in a Just World on Americans' Attitudes Toward Antipoverty Policy

In the political context of the reauthorization of federal welfare reform legislation, a nationally representative sample of 1,570 adults in the United States completed a survey examining the factors that affect attitudes and policy preferences with regard to aid for low-income individuals and families in the United States. This study utilized an innovative survey technique, the factorial survey methodology (Rossi & Nock, 1982), which allows for the simultaneous experimental manipulation of a large number of factors through the use of a vignette. This research demonstrates how the portrayal of difficulties faced by people in need and the ways in which they attempt to overcome these difficulties affect support for policies designed to aid low-income individuals and families. In addition, this study of public attitudes considers the role that psychological orientations of the evaluators play in judgments of families in need. In this case, we examined how the evaluators' belief that the world is a just place influences their evaluations of deservingness. Consistent with our expectations, we found that the more efforts the vignette subject engaged in improving her situation, the less deserving of government benefits she was judged to be by respondents with a strong belief in a just world. The reverse was found among respondents with a weaker belief: more efforts were associated with greater judgments of deservingness.     

Deconstructing executive deficits among persons with autism: implications for cognitive neuroscience

Individuals with autism demonstrate impairments on measures of executive function (EF) relative to typically developing comparison participants. EF is comprised of several processes including inhibition, working memory and set shifting that develop throughout the lifespan. Impairments in EF may appear early in development and persist, or may represent a more transient delay which resolves with time. Given the unevenness of the cognitive profile of persons with autism, understanding the development of EF poses methodological challenges. These issues include those related to matching measures and the choice of comparison participants to which the performance of persons with autism will be compared. In the current review, we attempt to break down the processes of inhibition, working memory and set shifting among persons with autism. We propose to do this within a developmental perspective that highlights how matching measures and comparison participants can affect the interpretation of research findings.     

Single case research results as clinical outcomes

The movement toward evidence-based treatments, interventions, or practices pressures single case research (SCR) to use statistical summaries which have broad credibility. These summaries also need to be easily understood and useful in schools and clinics. To date the effect size families, “proportion of variance” (R², Eta²) and “standardized mean difference” (Cohen's d, Hedges' g) have little popularity in SCR. This paper demonstrates a set of alternative Clinical Outcome indices widely used in the field of medicine: Risk Difference, Relative Risk, Relative Risk Improvement, and Odds Ratio, which compare patients in treatment versus control conditions. Translated to SCR designs, the baseline phase becomes the control condition, the intervention phase becomes the treatment condition, and improvement is defined as non-overlapping data between phases. The positive attributes of Clinical Outcomes are demonstrated: (a) easily interpretable results, (b) close relationship with concept of non-overlapping data, (c) minimal data assumptions, (d) minimal statistical expertise required, (e) multiple contrasts possible for diagnostic understanding, (f) exact confidence intervals for results, and (g) close relationship to Pearson R effect size family.     

Sometimes One is More Than Two: When Collaboration Inhibits Knowledge Construction

In this paper I suggest that to better understand knowledge construction in science, and the role of social processes and collaboration in it, it is useful to distinguish between “elaborative knowledge” and “emergent knowledge.” Elaborative knowledge is constructed for solving clearly defined problems in established theoretical frameworks, and emergent knowledge refers to the knowledge constructed to reach a hierarchically higher and more complex level of scientific understanding. There are also two types of collaboration. On the one hand there is “dialogical collaboration” in which team members contribute to reaching the common clearly defined objective so that a team as a whole becomes qualitatively more complex than its members alone. On the other hand there is “unidirectional collaboration” where the result of collaboration is determined by one person, should be distinguished. There is evidence from multiple perspectives indicating that “elaborative knowledge” can be developed in both kinds of collaboration and sometimes ‘dialogical collaboration” is necessary for knowledge construction. However, for building “emergent knowledge,” it is argued, only individual or “unidirectional collaboration” is productive, and “dialogical collaboration” can hinder or even prevent the construction of this kind of knowledge.

Two Notions of Scientific Justification

Scientific claims can be assessed epistemically in either of two ways: according to scientific standards, or by means of philosophical arguments such as the no-miracle argument in favor of scientific realism. This paper investigates the basis of this duality of epistemic assessments. It is claimed that the duality rests on two different notions of epistemic justification that are well-known from the debate on internalism and externalism in general epistemology: a deontological and an alethic notion. By discussing the conditions for the scientific acceptability of empirical results, it is argued that intrascientific justification employs the deontological notion. Philosophical disputes such as those on scientific realism can by contrast be shown to rest on the alethic notion. The implications of these findings both for the nature of the respective epistemic projects and for their interrelation are explored.     

Response to Ted Peters’ “Models of God”

In “Models of God,” Ted Peters discusses a methodology for formulating and evaluating models of God, surveys nine models, and proposes one that he entitles “Eschatological Panentheism.” This paper provides critical comments on Peters’ methodological claims, taxonomy of models of God, and specific proposal. This paper has been delivered during APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God.Both Peters’ “Models of God” and these comments were presented at the “Models of God” mini-conference at the Pacific Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association in April of 2007.     

A methodological investigation of the Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm: Methods of analyses,picture selection and data rejection criteria

The Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm provides a sensitive measure of a child's online word comprehension. To complement existing recommendations (Fernald, Zangl, Portillo, & Marchman, 2008), the present study evaluates the impact of experimental noise generated by two aspects of the visual stimuli on the robustness of familiar word recognition with and without mispronunciations: the presence of a central fixation point and the level of visual noise in the pictures (as measured by luminance saliency). Twenty-month-old infants were presented with a classic word recognition IPL procedure in 3 conditions: without a fixation stimulus (No Fixation – noisiest condition), with a fixation stimulus before trial onset (Fixation, intermediate), and with a fixation stimulus, a neutral background and equally salient images (Fixation Plus – least noisy). Data were systematically analyzed considering a range of data selection criteria and dependent variables (proportion of looking time towards the target, longest look, and time-course analysis). Critically, the expected pronunciation and naming interaction was only found in the Fixation Plus condition. We discuss the impact of data selection criteria and the dependent variable choice on the modulation of these effects across the different conditions.     

Network Analysis in Community Psychology: Looking Back,Looking Forward

Network analysis holds promise for community psychology given the field's aim to understand the interplay between individuals and their social contexts. Indeed, because network analysis focuses explicitly on patterns of relationships between actors, its theories and methods are inherently extra‐individual in nature and particularly well suited to characterizing social contexts. But, to what extent has community psychology taken advantage of this network analysis as a tool for capturing context? To answer these questions, this study provides a review of the use network analysis in articles published in American Journal of Community Psychology . Looking back, we describe and summarize the ways that network analysis has been employed in community psychology research to understand the range of ways community psychologists have found the technique helpful. Looking forward and paying particular attention to analytic issues identified in past applications, we provide some recommendations drawn from the network analysis literature to facilitate future applications of network analysis in community psychology.