Changing One’s Mind on Moral Matters

Contemporary moral philosophy assumes an account of what it means to legitimately change one’s mind in ethics, and I wish to challenge this account by enlarging the category of the legitimate. I am just as eager to avoid illegitimate mind-changing brought on by deceit or brainwashing, but I claim that legitimacy should be defined in terms of transparency of method. A social reformer should not be embarrassed to admit that he acquired many beliefs about justice while reading Dickens. As such, appeals to the heart and the imagination are just as legitimate, within limits, as appeals to the mind; and showing can be as legitimate as telling. To demonstrate this, I consider the example of a vegetarian trying to ‘convert’ a carnivore. I then ask what it means when the carnivore claims to have been previously mistaken.     

Developmental dyslexia: Electrophysiological evidence of clinical subgroups

Event-related potentials (ERPs) to word and to musical-chord stimuli were recorded in 13 dyslexic boys and 13 age-matched normal readers. Normal readers and dyslexics whose reading handicaps involved visual-spatial processing deficits had greater word versus musical-chord ERP waveform differences over the left as compared to the right hemisphere. Dyslexics whose reading difficulties were related to auditory-verbal processing deficits did not exhibit this asymmetry. These results are interpreted as supportive of the hypothesis that the latter group of dyslexics has failed to develop normal left hemisphere specialization for processing of auditory-linguistic material.     

Effects of long- and variable-duration signals for food on activity,instrumental responding,and eating

Incentive-motivation theories typically assume that the conditioning of appetitive motivation involves the same parameters as Pavlovian salivary conditioning. In contrast, the Soltysik-Konorski model asserts that drive is inhibited by stimuli closely associated with food (salivary CSs) and augmented by stimuli more loosely associated with food (long and variable CS-US interval). Experiment 1 examined this latter proposition. Sixty-four rats were given extensive exposure to each of four environmental CSs, two while hungry and two while satiated. Within each deprivation condition, food was given 30–300 sec after placement of the rats in one environment, and was not given in the other environment. Performance on three separate measures—activity, lever-pressing, and food consumption—was higher in the environments previously associated with food. Experiment 2 examined the effects of discrete stimuli presented in advance of eating; in accord with the results of Experiment 1, food consumption was greater after a stimulus (1- to 9-min duration) previously paired with food than after no stimulus or after a stimulus unpaired with food. The overall results indicate (a) that stimuli associated with food become capable of facilitating a variety of food-directed behaviors, possibly via the conditioning of a common appetitive system, and (b) that a close association between the stimuli and food is not essential for such conditing to occur.     

Pretty pleases: The effects of physical attractiveness,race, and sex on receiving help

The major purpose of this study was to investigate whether favoritism for the physically attractive, a phenomenom demonstrated amost exclusively on the basis of rating scales, generalizes to nonreactive, behavioral helping responses. Four hundred and forty-two males and 162 female white adult callers in public phone booths in a large metropolitan airport found a completed graduate school application form, a photograph of the applicant, and an addressed, stamped envelope. The picture was used to convey information as to the physical attractiveness (attractive vs. unattractive), race (black vs. white), and sex of the applicant. As predicted, delivery of the application was facilitated more for attractive than unattractive persons. There was also a significant race effect, with whites receiving more help than blacks. Implications of these findings for the physical attractiveness literature are discussed.     

Transfer of inhibition after serial and simultaneous feature negative discrimination training

Three experiments examined the nature of inhibitory learning in Pavlovian simultaneous (A+, XA-) and serial (A+, X → A-) feature negative discrimination prodecures in a conditioned suppression situation with rat subjects. The feature (X) trained with simultaneous procedures readily inhibited suppression conditioned to another excitor (B) that was not involved in the feature negative discrimination with X. But the feature trained with serial procedures showed little or no ability to inhibit suppression conditioned to other excitors. These results were obtained with both between- and within-subjects designs, with a variety of test procedures, and after extinction of the A excitor used to establish the inhibition to X. They suggest that nature of the inhibition learned in feature negative discriminations depends on the temporal arrangement of stimuli. We favored the possibility that inhibitors established using simultaneous stimulus arrangements modulate behavior by acting on a representation of the unconditioned stimulus, but inhibitors established with serial procedures act on particular conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus associations.     

The expression of memorization in early childhood

This experiment examined the expression and effectiveness of memorization in young children. Sixty children at each of the ages 4, 5, and 6 were randomly assigned to a memory group or to one of two control groups. All of the children were told that they could play with a group of toys during a brief activity period; the children in the memory condition were also instructed to memorize a specified subset of the toys. Mnemonic mediators were identified on the basis of differences in the activity period behaviors of children given memory and play instructions. Relative to the children in the play groups, the children in the memory conditions played with the toys less; further, their use of naming and visual examination as mnemonic mediators differentiated the groups at all ages and increased with age. Only the oldest subjects given memory instructions, however, demonstrated superior recall. The relationships between activity period behavior and recall among the different conditions were explored with regression techniques. Although previous research has focused on identifying the earliest use of memory strategies, the present findings underscore the importance of examining the development of these skills.     

The eyes have it: Young children's discrimination of age in masked and unmasked facial photographs

The ability of preschool children to discriminate age, and their use of information from different facial areas in this task, was investigated. Most 4-year-olds were able to rank sets of seven facial photographs into age order successfully. Subsequently, they were presented with facial stimuli in which different regions of the face were masked out. Masking of the eyes produced a marked performance decrement, and masking of the nose and cheeks a slight decrement, relative to masking of either the mouth and chin, or of the hair and neck. Possible explanations of the results are discussed, together with the verbal comments of the children on the cues they were aware of using.     

Novelty responding and behavioral development in young,developmentally delayed children

This study examined whether or not a measure of information processing ability based on the discrimination of novel and familiar stimuli was related to behavioral development among developmentally-delayed infants. Two samples of handicapped infants were administered multiple measures of visual novelty discrimination and a battery of assessments which were representative of available measures of development in infancy. The results indicated that, as a group, the developmentally delayed infants were capable of discriminating novel and familiar stimuli. Also, correlational analyses indicated that responding to novelty was related to developmental accessment performance in both samples. This finding is consistent with previous data which indicates that novelty response measures are associated with important individual differences in young children.     

Foreperiod and stuttering severity effects on acoustic laryngeal reaction time

An earlier paper presented a model of the laryngeal reaction time (LRT) paradigm that included several factors that appeared to affect LRT values. The present study assesses the effects of two of these factors: foreperiod and stuttering severity. The former was assessed by the use of 13 foreperiod durations. The latter was assessed by classifying experimental subjects as either mild or severe stutterers. Both factors significantly affected LRT values. More importantly, these factors demonstrated a composite effect on group LRT differences. Specifically, mild stutterers' LRT values approached normal values as foreperiod increased, whereas severe stutterers' LRT values remained significantly greater than normal values at all foreperiods. Results are discussed in terms of differential posturing and/or vibration initiation deficits underlying stutterers' delayed LRT values. We caution that acoustic measurements alone are insufficient to specify fully the nature of the underlying deficits.