Children's predictions of consistency in people's actions

Past research suggests that young children are often reluctant to generalize about people's behavior. Three experiments involving 102 4-5-year-olds, 84 7-8-year-olds, and 107 adults explored the conditions under which inductive inferences about people are made. There was an age-based increase in propensity to predict consistency in psychological/intentional causal relations. Children often predicted change; people would behave differently in the future than they did in the past. Younger children limited predictions of consistency to non-psychological contexts. Older children showed some appreciation of stable motivations (e.g. traits, preferences). The results are consistent with the hypothesis that children's theories of mind emphasize situational influences, with personal influences appearing in middle-childhood.     

The goal as process: music and the search for the Self

This paper explores and compares the processes of music and analysis from the author's experience as a musician, piano teacher and analyst. It explains how the use of music improvisation in analysis (with simple percussion instruments) can powerfully enhance the dialogue between the unconscious and conscious psyche, as well as deepen the relationship between analyst and analysand. This is connected theoretically to Jung's active imagination and Winnicott's concept of play within the analytic encounter. Finally, the question is raised whether analytic trainings could do more to expose trainees to the possibility of using music within the analytic encounter. This touches on the more basic and controversial issue (which often separates analytical psychology and psychoanalysis) of whether expressive therapy should be used in analysis at all.     

Entailment with Near Surety of Scaled Assertions of High Conditional Probability

An assertion of high conditional probability or, more briefly, an HCP assertion is a statement of the type: The conditional probability of B given A is close to one. The goal of this paper is to construct logics of HCP assertions whose conclusions are highly likely to be correct rather than certain to be correct. Such logics would allow useful conclusions to be drawn when the premises are not strong enough to allow conclusions to be reached with certainty. This goal is achieved by taking Adams" (1966) logic, changing its intended application from conditionals to HCP assertions, and then weakening its criterion for entailment. According to the weakened entailment criterion, called the Criterion of Near Surety and which may be loosely interpreted as a Bayesian criterion, a conclusion is entailed if and only if nearly every model of the premises is a model of the conclusion. The resulting logic, called NSL, is nonmonotonic. Entailment in this logic, although not as strict as entailment in Adams" logic, is more strict than entailment in the propositional logic of material conditionals. Next, NSL was modified by requiring that each HCP assertion be scaled; this means that to each HCP assertion was associated a bound on the deviation from 1 of the conditional probability that is the subject of the assertion. Scaling of HCP assertions is useful for breaking entailment deadlocks. For example, it it is known that the conditional probabilities of C given A and of ¬ C given B are both close to one but the bound on the former"s deviation from 1 is much smaller than the latter"s, then it may be concluded that in all likelihood the conditional probability of C given A B is close to one. The resulting logic, called NSL-S, is also nonmonotonic. Despite great differences in their definitions of entailment, entailment in NSL is equivalent to Lehmann and Magidor"s rational closure and, disregarding minor differences concerning which premise sets are considered consistent, entailment in NSL-S is equivalent to entailment in Goldszmidt and Pearl"s System-Z ⁺. Bacchus, Grove, Halpern, and Koller proposed two methods of developing a predicate calculus based on the Criterion of Near Surety. In their random-structures method, which assumed a prior distribution similar to that of NSL, it appears possible to define an entailment relation equivalent to that of NSL. In their random-worlds method, which assumed a prior distribution dramatically different from that of NSL, it is known that the entailment relation is different from that of NSL.     

Art, dreams and active imagination: a post-Jungian approach to transference and the image

The term active imagination is sometimes applied rather uncritically to describe all forms of creative activity that take place in depth psychology. Whilst there are many forms of expression that evoke or are evoked by active imagination, they cannot automatically be classed as active imagination. In this article investigation of visualized mental imagery, dreams and art reveals three distinct forms of image-based psychological activity. Integrated and mediated within the transference and countertransference dynamic, it is proposed that the engagement in active imagination reflects and is influenced by the transference. Distinctions between sign and symbol, simple and big dreams as well as diagrammatic and embodied imagery clarify the differences. Examples from clinical practice demonstrate each mode in action within the analytic frame.     

Likelihood inference on the underlying structure of IRT models

The assumptions underlying item response theory (IRT) models may be expressed as a set of equality and inequality constraints on the parameters of a latent class model. It is well known that the same assumptions imply that the parameters of the manifest distribution have to satisfy a more complicated set of inequality constraints which, however, are necessary but not sufficient. In this paper, we describe how the theory for likelihood-based inference under equality and inequality constraints may be used to test the underlying assumptions of IRT models. It turns out that the analysis based directly on the latent structure is simpler and more flexible. In particular, we indicate how several interesting extensions of the Rasch model may be obtained by partial relaxation of the basic constraints. An application to a data set provided by Educational Testing Service is used to illustrate the approach.We thank Dr. Gorman and Dr. Rogers of the Educational Testing Service for providing the data analyzed in Section 4. We also thank three reviewers for comments and suggestions.This revised article was published online in August 2005 with the PDF paginated correctly.     

Transitive responding in hooded crows requires linearly ordered stimuli

Eight crows were taught to discriminate overlapping pairs of visual stimuli (A+ B-, B+ C-, C+ D-, and D+ E-). For 4 birds, the stimuli were colored cards with a circle of the same color on the reverse side whose diameter decreased from A to E (ordered feedback group). These circles were made available for comparison to potentially help the crows order the stimuli along a physical dimension. For the other 4 birds, the circles corresponding to the colored cards had the same diameter (constant feedback group). In later testing, a novel choice pair (BD) was presented. Reinforcement history involving stimuli B and D was controlled so that the reinforcement/nonreinforcement ratios for the latter would be greater than for the former. If, during the BD test, the crows chose between stimuli according to these reinforcement/nonreinforcement ratios, then they should prefer D; if they chose according to the diameter of the feedback stimuli, then they should prefer B. In the ordered feedback group, the crows strongly preferred B over D; in the constant feedback group, the crows' choice did not differ significantly from chance. These results, plus simulations using associative models, suggest that the orderability of the postchoice feedback stimuli is important for crows' transitive responding.     

Experience and inference: how far will science carry us?

This paper begins with a view of the remarkable understanding of infant and child development that has evolved from research and observation. The limitations of this contribution from science to the multi-dimensional context-based individuality of each human in his or her intersubjective realm are then considered. For a contemporary view we must recognize the influence of the variability of experiences and the inferences drawn from them. Inferences involve symbolization and culturally derived archetypes as illustrated in a clinical example.     

The influence of hierarchy on probability judgment

Consider the task of predicting which soccer team will win the next World Cup. The bookmakers may judge Brazil to be the team most likely to win, but also judge it most likely that a European rather than a Latin American team will win. This is an example of a non-aligned hierarchy structure: the most probable event at the subordinate level (Brazil wins) appears to be inconsistent with the most probable event at the superordinate level (a European team wins). In this paper we exploit such structures to investigate how people make predictions based on uncertain hierarchical knowledge. We distinguish between aligned and non-aligned environments, and conjecture that people assume alignment. Participants were exposed to a non-aligned training set in which the most probable superordinate category predicted one outcome, whereas the most probable subordinate category predicted a different outcome. In the test phase participants allowed their initial probability judgments about category membership to shift their final ratings of the probability of the outcome, even though all judgments were made on the basis of the same statistical data. In effect people were primed to focus on the most likely path in an inference tree, and neglect alternative paths. These results highlight the importance of the level at which statistical data are represented, and suggest that when faced with hierarchical inference problems people adopt a simplifying heuristic that assumes alignment.     

Picture interpretation and Jungian typology

This study examined a Jungian picture interpretation schema, which utilizes a specific quadrant method. This proposed schema, which is used in training at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, attaches significance to specific areas of a drawing. The upper left of a drawing is associated with the father; the lower left with the unconscious; the lower right with the mother; and the upper right with the future. Three questions served as the foci of this study: Is the schema valid? Do certain types within Jung's personality theory respond better than others to the schema? Does the schema work best when it elicits a strong affective response from the person who created the picture? Subjects took one of two tests: a space domain test, or a colour associative test. The results revealed only two significant effects: a positive association (in the space domain test) between unconscious material with the unconscious quadrant and a negative association (in the colour associative test) of mother material with the mother quadrant. These results suggest that the Jungian quadrant schema used to interpret drawings is invalid and of minimal practical utility. Other methods of picture interpretation are discussed as well as suggestions for future research that would be helpful to this field.