Repetition increases false recollection in older people

Aging is accompanied by an increase in false alarms on recognition tasks, and these false alarms increase with repetition in older people (but not in young people). Traditionally, this increase was thought to be due to a greater use of familiarity in older people, but it was recently pointed out that false alarms also have a clear recollection component in these people. The main objective of our study is to analyze whether the expected increase in the rate of false alarms in older people due to stimulus repetition is produced by an inadequate use of familiarity, recollection, or both processes. To do so, we carried out an associative recognition experiment using pairs of words and pairs of images (faces associated with everyday contexts), in which we analyzed whether the repetition of some of the pairs increases the rate of false alarms in older people (compared to what was found in a sample of young people), and whether this increase is due to familiarity or recollection (using a remember‐know paradigm). Our results show that the increase in false alarms in older people due to repetition is produced by false recollection, calling into question both dual and single‐process models of recognition. Also, older people falsely recollect details of never studied stimuli, a clear case of perceptual illusions. These results are better explained in terms of source‐monitoring errors, mediated by people's retrieval expectations.     

Enactment supports unitisation of action components and enhances the contribution of familiarity to associative recognition

Memory for actions is usually better following subject-performed tasks (SPT) than verbal tasks (VT). We hypothesised that enactment unitises the components of actions such that familiarity can support associative recognition following SPT. To examine this hypothesis, participants studied verb–object pairs in a SPT or VT condition. During testing, they discriminated between intact, recombined and new items and made Remember/Know judgments; additionally, their EEGs were recorded. Associative recognition was better following SPT than VT. Early frontal event-related potentials (ERPs) were graded according to the item status following SPT, but no such effects were found after VT. Similarly, the late parietal ERPs were graded following SPT, whereas these effects were smaller and did not differ between intact and recombined items following VT. We conclude that enactment unitised the action and object so that familiarity could contribute to associative recognition and that recollection became sensitive to the amount of the matching associative information.     

Religion,Democracy and the ‘Dawla Madaniyya’ of the Arab Spring

The object of this article is to review and evaluate a debate that has been taking place among Muslim and Arab writers for some time now about the concept of ‘dawla madaniyya’ (‘civil state/government’), and the place of religion in democratic politics. More precisely, it will be suggested that the current popularity of the term ‘dawla madaniyya’ signifies only a partial meeting of minds between Islamists and their liberal and secular opponents. By and large, the concept seems to have an instrumental value as part of an on-going discursive struggle between various political orientations about the place of Islam in the social–political order. On the basis of our discussion of the terms of the debate, a new approach to conceptualizing the disagreement will be suggested. The goal of this is not to resolve the disagreement, but rather to sharpen it in a way that shows what is required to achieve significant progress. The final resolution of the disagreement must await a more radical convergence of ideas than currently exists – a convergence that touches not only on standards of reasonableness but also on substantive beliefs and values.     

Fred Dallmayr’s postmodern vision of Confucian democracy: a critical examination

As an advocate of ‘comparative political theory,’ Fred Dallmayr has long engaged with Confucianism with a new vision for democracy suitable in East Asia but little attention has been paid to his idea of Confucian democracy, which he presents as a specific mode of ethical or relational democracy. This paper investigates Dallmayr’s ethical vision of Confucian democracy, first, by articulating his postmodern reconceptualization of democracy in terms of post-humanism and, second, by examining his post-humanist reevaluation of Confucian virtue ethics as a critical resource for ethical democracy. It argues that the ethical vision of Confucian democracy, though morally appealing, should not dismiss the important instrumental value of democracy as a political system and, rather, find a way to integrate democracy’s instrumental and intrinsic values in a way that can enhance the qualitative relationality between people, political agents, and the common good.     

整合对联结再认和项目再认的促进作用：“只有收益”观点

研究旨在探讨整合如何影响联结再认和项目再认及其加工过程。编码阶段要求被试学习复合词和非复合词, 提取阶段完成联结再认和项目再认测验。结果显示, 复合词比非复合词有更好的联结再认表现, 但在项目再认表现上两者之间没有显著的差异。ERP结果显示, 在联结再认上, 复合词诱发显著的FN400效应(与熟悉性加工有关)和LPC效应(与回想加工有关), 非复合词只诱发显著的LPC效应, 且复合词比非复合词有更大的LPC效应。在项目再认上, 复合词比非复合词诱发更大的FN400效应。总而言之, 整合在促进联结再认的同时并不会损害项目再认的表现, 支持了“只有收益”观点。     

Reasoning Is for Arguing: Understanding the Successes and Failures of Deliberation

Theoreticians of deliberative democracy have sometimes found it hard to relate to the seemingly contradictory experimental results produced by psychologists and political scientists. We suggest that this problem may be alleviated by inserting a layer of psychological theory between the empirical results and the normative political theory. In particular, we expose the argumentative theory of reasoning that makes the observed pattern of findings more coherent. According to this theory, individual reasoning mechanisms work best when used to produce and evaluate arguments during a public deliberation. It predicts that when diverse opinions are discussed, group reasoning will outperform individual reasoning. It also predicts that individuals have a strong confirmation bias. When people reason either alone or with like‐minded peers, this confirmation bias leads them to reinforce their initial attitudes, explaining individual and group polarization. We suggest that the failures of reasoning are most likely to be remedied at the collective than at the individual level.     

Novel associative processing and aging: effect on creative production

ABSTRACT

Creative production has been reported to decline with age. This study investigated age-related differences in creative verbal production. Participants were 30 younger and 30 older adults. Study testing included language and cognitive assessments and the experimental task wherein participants created short stories incorporating words that are not commonly related, semantically or associatively. The resulting stories were rated by independent blinded judges for originality, cohesion, appropriateness, and organization. Younger adults' stories were rated as being significantly more original and more appropriate. Integrating unrelated words to create original stories requires activating widely distributed lexical-semantic networks to develop novel associations. Potential decreased neural network connectivity due to white matter degradation, commonly seen in normal aging, as well as decrements in front-executive disengagement may have affected older adults' performance on this story creation task. Future research using neuroimaging may elucidate possible neuroanatomic correlates of age-related changes in associative creative production..     

Perceptual Learning in the Rat: Stimulus Differentiation or Latent Inhibition of Common Elements?

Preexposure to an unreinforced stimulus facilitates learning (perceptual learning) under some conditions, but it can have the opposite effect (latent inhibition) under other conditions. Researchers have suggested that perceptual learning depends on a change of context, whereas latent inhibition is usually context specific. The associative theory explains both phenomena within a single framework. The authors report 4 experiments that show that perceptual learning does not depend on a context change. The experiments suggest that latent inhibition, unlike perceptual learning, depends on passive exposure. Thus the results do not support the associative theory. They are more consistent with Gibson's stimulus-differentiation theory.     

Politics and Miracle: Radical Democracy and Non-Interventionist Divine Action

This paper elucidates Nancey Murphy's theology of special divine action in order to show its unique coherence as well as explore some political implications of this theory. Besides showing itself to be a fruitful conceptualization of both “the miraculous” and the natural world, this paper argues that Murphy's insights can be extended to address a pressing question in contemporary political theology: the nature and function of power in increasingly pluralistic societies. The upshot, drawing on the connection between conceptualizations of miracle and sovereignty made by Carl Schmitt, is that Murphy's non-interventionist theory of divine action at the quantum level “fits” with an equally non-interventionist account of political authority from below, at the level of an active, democratically engaged citizenry.