A Negative Mood Induction Procedure with Efficacy Across Repeated Administrations in Women

Although several experimental techniques are effective in inducing negative mood, none has established efficacy over repeated testing. The lack of mood induction tools validated across repeated administrations impedes study of emotional changes in the same individual over time. A brief, sad mood induction combining music and an autobiographical memory was administered to 17 women on 6 occasions (two 3-day sets over a 2-week period of time). Mood was measured before and after the induction procedure. Repeated measures ANOVAs showed that the induction produced a large increase in POMS depression (d = 1.48) that recurred consistently across all testing days. A brief negative mood induction combining music and autobiographical memory appears suitable for use in studies that involve repeated administrations.     

知觉和概念信息对3岁儿童归纳推理的影响

采用经典的三角归纳范式(Gelman & Markman,1986)研究了3岁儿童的归纳推理及其影响因素。采用龙长权、路晓英、李红和范籍丹(2008)的研究中相同的实验材料和程序,测试了3岁儿童的归纳,结果表明3岁儿童基于知觉相似和基于概念类别之间的差异不显著(实验一)。增加了与靶刺激在知觉上不相似且不属于同一类别的分心刺激之后,3岁儿童能够忽略分心刺激,表明3岁儿童不是在随机猜测(实验二)。分类实验表明3岁儿童能够根据概念关系对实验材料中的项目进行分类,表明3岁儿童具有关于实验项目的概念知识(实验三)。提高概念比较刺激与靶刺激的知觉相似程度,降低知觉比较刺激和概念比较刺激与靶刺激在知觉相似上的冲突程度之后,3岁儿童基于知觉相似和基于概念类别选择之间的差异仍不显著,表明抑制控制不是导致儿童在实验一中表现出基于知觉相似和基于概念类别之间差异不显著的原因(实验四)。降低概念比较刺激与靶刺激之间的类别等级结构,使概念比较刺激与靶刺激属于相同的基本水平类别时,3岁儿童能够主要基于概念类别进行归纳(实验五)。增加经典三角测试的前提的数量,3岁儿童也能主要基于概念类别进行归纳(实验六)。这些研究表明,3岁儿童在一定条件下能够基于概念类别进行归纳,多个因素能够影响3岁儿童在三角测试中的表现。     

The Need for a Revolution in the Philosophy of Science

There is a need to bring about a revolution in the philosophy of science, interpreted to be both the academic discipline, and the official view of the aims and methods of science upheld by the scientific community. At present both are dominated by the view that in science theories are chosen on the basis of empirical considerations alone, nothing being permanently accepted as a part of scientific knowledge independently of evidence. Biasing choice of theory in the direction of simplicity, unity or explanatory power does not permanently commit science to the thesis that nature is simple or unified. This current ‘paradigm’ is, I argue, untenable. We need a new paradigm, which acknowledges that science makes a hierarchy of metaphysical assumptions concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe, theories being chosen partly on the basis of compatibility with these assumptions. Eleven arguments are given for favouring this new ‘paradigm’ over the current one. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Discovering syntactic deep structure via Bayesian statistics

In the Bayesian framework, a language learner should seek a grammar that explains observed data well and is also a priori probable. This paper proposes such a measure of prior probability. Indeed it develops a full statistical framework for lexicalized syntax. The learner's job is to discover the system of probabilistic transformations (often called lexical redundancy rules) that underlies the patterns of regular and irregular syntactic constructions listed in the lexicon. Specifically, the learner discovers what transformations apply in the language, how often they apply, and in what contexts. It considers simpler systems of transformations to be more probable a priori. Experiments show that the learned transformations are more effective than previous statistical models at predicting the probabilities of lexical entries, especially those for which the learner had no direct evidence.     

Inductive reasoning about causally transmitted properties

Different intuitive theories constrain and guide inferences in different contexts. Formalizing simple intuitive theories as probabilistic processes operating over structured representations, we present a new computational model of category-based induction about causally transmitted properties. A first experiment demonstrates undergraduates’ context-sensitive use of taxonomic and food web knowledge to guide reasoning about causal transmission and shows good qualitative agreement between model predictions and human inferences. A second experiment demonstrates strong quantitative and qualitative fits to inferences about a more complex artificial food web. A third experiment investigates human reasoning about complex novel food webs where species have known taxonomic relations. Results demonstrate a double-dissociation between the predictions of our causal model and a related taxonomic model [Kemp, C., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2003). Learning domain structures. In Proceedings of the 25th annual conference of the cognitive science society]: the causal model predicts human inferences about diseases but not genes, while the taxonomic model predicts human inferences about genes but not diseases. We contrast our framework with previous models of category-based induction and previous formal instantiations of intuitive theories, and outline challenges in developing a complete model of context-sensitive reasoning.     

The spacing effect in children's memory and category induction

The spacing effect describes the robust phenomenon whereby memory is enhanced when learning events are distributed, instead of being presented in succession. We investigated the effect of spacing on children's memory and category induction. Three-year-old children were presented with two tasks, a memory task and a category induction task. In the memory task, identical instances of an object were presented and then tested in a multiple choice test. In the category induction task, different instances of a category were presented and tested in a multiple choice test. In both tasks, presenting the instances in a spaced sequence resulted in more learning than presenting the instances in a massed sequence, despite the difficulty created by the spaced sequence. The spaced sequence increased the difficulty of the task by allowing children time to forget the previous instance during the spaced interval.     

What you don’t know can’t hurt you: realism and the unconceived

Two of the most potent challenges faced by scientific realism are the underdetermination of theories by data, and the pessimistic induction based on theories previously held to be true, but subsequently acknowledged as false. Recently, Stanford (2006, Exceeding our grasp: Science, history, and the problem of unconceived alternatives. Oxford: Oxford University Press) has formulated what he calls the problem of unconceived alternatives: a version of the underdetermination thesis combined with a historical argument of the same form as the pessimistic induction. In this paper, I contend that while Stanford does present a novel antirealist argument, a successful response to the pessimistic induction would likewise defuse the problem of unconceived alternatives, and that a more selective and sophisticated realism than that which he allows is arguably immune to both concerns.

辅助生殖技术与女性生殖系统肿瘤的关系及其辩证思考

辅助生殖技术给不孕患者带来了希望,为肿瘤患者保留了生育能力,另一方面也可能导致女性生殖系统肿瘤和一系列伦理学问题。因此,用哲学的观点客观地看待辅助生殖技术与女性生殖系统肿瘤发生风险之间的关系,将有助于临床医生进一步提高辅助生殖技术安全性的认识,选择最佳的促排卵方案。     

儿童早期分类与基于类别的归纳的一致性

传统的观点认为,儿童早期的分类是基于类别的归纳的基础。根据这种观点,儿童早期的分类与基于类别的归纳是一致的。该研究在不同材料条件下测试了4岁儿童面临知觉相似和概念冲突时的自由分类与归纳推理的一致性。研究结果显示,在照片条件下,4岁儿童的自由分类和基于类别的归纳是不一致的,儿童的分类主要是基于知觉相似的,而基于类别的归纳主要是基于概念的;在线条画条件下,儿童的分类与基于类别的归纳是一致的,都主要是基于知觉相似的。这些结果显示,儿童早期的分类和基于类别的关系是复杂的。