The motive to avoid success: A further examination

Horner's (1968) “fear of success” study was replicated and expanded. One hundred seventy-seven high school (HS) and college students wrote stories in response to the following cues: “After first-term finals, John (Anne) finds himself (herself) at the top of his (her) medical-school class.” Results indicated similarity of response of HS men, HS women, and college men, all of whom expressed more fear of success imagery in response to the Anne cue than to the John cue. College women did not conform to this pattern.     

Neonates' heart rate,sucking rhythm,and sucking amplitude as a function of the sweet taste

In previous studies of human newborn sucking, the effects of increasing fluid sweetness and/or volume included a decrease in sucking rate within sucking bursts and, paradoxically, an increase in heart rate. To determine whether the heart rate increase can be attributed to increased sucking amplitude for sweeter fluids, sucking and heart rates of 20 full-term infants were studied. Half sucked for three consecutive 2-min periods, first receiving small drops of water for each suck, then no fluid, then 15% sucrose. The other half experienced the reverse order. The results for sucking and heart rate were consistent with previous studies; sucking rates within bursts were slowest for sucrose and fastest for no fluid. Heart rate was higher for sucrose than for the other fluid conditions, however, only in the water-first group. The heart rate increase was significant on statistical tests which controlled for sucking amplitude as well as for several other motor variables. Sucking amplitude itself varied with fluid sweetness in the water-first group only, in which it was highest for water. There were more total sucks, longer sucking bursts, and less time between successive bursts under the sucrose condition. Multivariate statistics helped establish a set of dependent variables—sucking rate within bursts, total number of sucks, and heart rate—which most parsimoniously describes the effects of fluid sweetness. A hedonic explanation of the response of newborns to sweetness is thus reiterated.     

Maintenance and generalization of trained metamnemonic awareness by educable retarded children

The majority of educable retarded children (young group, MA 6; old group, MA 8) required to estimate their memory span was found to be unrealistic estimators. Following training in span estimation the older subjects improved under both explicit and implicit feedback conditions, while younger children only benefited from explicit feedback. Three posttests of the effects of training revealed long-term (1-year) maintenance of training for older subjects but younger subjects showed post-test improvement only on an immediate test. While long-term maintenance was found for older subjects, generalization to similar span-estimation tests was not found. The utility of training metamnemonic knowledge which does not generalize was questioned and alternate training procedures were proposed.     

Begging the Question: A Case Study

The essay starts by presenting two accounts of begging the question, John Biro's epistemic account and David Sanford's doxastic account. After briefly comparing these accounts, the essay will study an argument suspected of begging the question and subsequently apply the epistemic and doxastic accounts to this test case. It is found that the accounts of Biro and Sanford do not analyse the test case adequately, therefore a new account is developed using the idea of a knowledge-base.     

A non-commutative generalization of Łukasiewicz rings

The goal of the present article is to extend the study of commutative rings whose ideals form an MV-algebra as carried out by Belluce and Di Nola [1] to non-commutative rings. We study and characterize all rings whose ideals form a pseudo MV-algebra, which shall be called here generalized Łukasiewicz rings. We obtain that these are (up to isomorphism) exactly the direct sums of unitary special primary rings.     

Passing markers: A theory of contextual influence in language comprehension

Most Artificial Intelligence theories of language either assume a syntactic component which serves as “front end” for the rest of the system, or else reject all attempts at distinguishing modules within the comprehension system. In this paper we will present an alternative which, while keeping modularity, will account for several puzzles for typical “syntax first” theories. The major addition to this theory is a “marker passing” (or “spreading activation”) component, which operates in parallel to the normal syntactic component.     

Conflict tasks and the diffusion framework: Insight in model constraints based on psychological laws

Formal models of decision-making have traditionally focused on simple, two-choice perceptual decisions. To date, one of the most influential account of this process is Ratcliff’s drift diffusion model (DDM). However, the extension of the model to more complex decisions is not straightforward. In particular, conflicting situations, such as the Eriksen, Stroop, or Simon tasks, require control mechanisms that shield the cognitive system against distracting information. We adopted a novel strategy to constrain response time (RT) models by concurrently investigating two well-known empirical laws in conflict tasks, both at experimental and modeling levels. The two laws, predicted by the DDM, describe the relationship between mean RT and (i) target intensity (Piéron’s law), (ii) standard deviation of RT (Wagenmakers–Brown’s law). Pioneering work has shown that Piéron’s law holds in the Stroop task, and has highlighted an additive relationship between target intensity and compatibility. We found similar results in both Eriksen and Simon tasks. Compatibility also violated Wagenmakers–Brown’s law in a very similar and particular fashion in the two tasks, suggesting a common model framework. To investigate the nature of this commonality, predictions of two recent extensions of the DDM that incorporate selective attention mechanisms were simulated and compared to the experimental results. Both models predict Piéron’s law and the violation of Wagenmakers–Brown’s law by compatibility. Fits of the models to the RT distributions and accuracy data allowed us to further reveal their relative strengths and deficiencies. Combining experimental and computational results, this study sets the groundwork for a unified model of decision-making in conflicting environments.     

The Virtue of Emerson's Imitation of Christ: From William Ellery Channing to John Brown

Christians have traditionally conceived of the moral life as an imitation of Christ, whereby followers enter into fellowship with God. The American Transcendentalists can be understood as extending rather than dispensing with this legacy. For Emerson, a person cultivates virtues by imitating those she loves and admires. Ultimately, however, the virtues enable her to innovate on received models, to excel by pressing beyond exemplars. Emerson's famous line, “imitation is suicide,” is not a contradiction but a fulfillment of the imitation of Christ, understood in his terms. In his own time, John Brown was the public figure who, for Emerson, most nearly exemplified this innovative imitation of Christ. An examination of exemplarity, of this artful union of imitation and innovation in moral and spiritual formation, sheds light on how modern agents can cultivate the virtues needed to be at home in the modern world.