Origine de l’effet longueur de mots en mémoire à court terme verbale chez l’enfant

The current study investigated the determinants of the word length effect in five-, seven-, and nine-year-old children building on Henry (Q J Exp Psychol 43A (1991a) 35-52) previous work. Henry postulated that the word length effect observed in children was caused by verbal output and not rehearsal. Children were given an immediate serial recall task where full verbal recall is required and an immediate probed recall task where only one of the items has to be recall (the item indicated by the experimenter). In the probed recall task, the spatial probe previously used by Henry and criticized by Gathercole and Hitch (Gathercole, S.E., Hitch, G.J., 1993. Developmental Changes in Short-Term Memory: a Revised Working Memory Perspective. In: Collins A. F., Gathercole S. E., Conway M. A., Morris P. E. (Eds.), Theories of Memory. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hove, pp. 189-209) was changed for a pure verbal probe. Our results indicated that 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children were sensitive to words length when full verbal recall was required. On the contrary, word length effects were not found in five-, seven-, and nine-year-old children when recall was restricted to just one item. These results lend further support to Henry's hypothesis suggesting that the word length effect operates at recall time, through output delay.     

La connaissance du gain d’autrui : une incitation au risque ?

This research aims at suggesting a causal model of risk-taking, following the announcement of another player's gains in a gamble with elementary characteristics. Risk-taking was measured by investment ratio, the amount the participant decided to bet divided by his current total assets. According to Langer's definition [J Perso Soc Psychol 32 (1975) 311-328], the illusion of control was measured by the level of personal success. The results show that the knowledge of another's gain increased risk-taking and the expectancy of personal success. These results validated the causal-model wherein the effect of the knowledge of another's gain on risk-taking was mediated by the expectancy of personal success. The discussion relates mainly to the need for taking into account the fact that gamblers are not isolated decision-makers, but takes account of some social parameters which guide their choices and actions.     

Capacité de mémoire de travail et traitement du pronom chez l’enfant

The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and reading comprehension in children by testing the processing of pronouns. Two groups of nine- to ten-year-old children classified as high span and low span were administered a pronoun processing task. In this task, the computation of the antecedent referent for pronouns was varied by manipulating the distance between the pronoun and its antecedent and the availability of a gender cue. The results showed that compared to high-span children, low-span children experienced more difficulties in computing a pronoun's referent. High-span children spent longer reading sentences containing anaphoric pronouns when pronouns could not be resolved on the basis of the gender alone, suggesting that the pronouns were resolved as they were read. Low-span children tended to delay resolution until it was required by the task. In the question-answering times, low-span children were more adversely affected by distance than high-span children. Altogether these findings support the view that working memory capacity constrains resolution of anaphoric pronouns in children.     

De Finetti’s No-Dutch-Book Criterion for Gödel logic

We extend de Finetti’s No-Dutch-Book Criterion to Gödel infinite-valued propositional logic.     

Quantifiers and propositional attitudes: Quine revisited

Quine introduced a famous distinction between the ‘notional’ sense and the ‘relational’ sense of certain attitude verbs. The distinction is both intuitive and sound but is often conflated with another distinction Quine draws between ‘dyadic’ and ‘triadic’ (or higher degree) attitudes. I argue that this conflation is largely responsible for the mistaken view that Quine’s account of attitudes is undermined by the problem of the ‘exportation’ of singular terms within attitude contexts. Quine’s system is also supposed to suffer from the problem of ‘suspended judgement with continued belief’. I argue that this criticism fails to take account of a crucial presupposition of Quine’s about the connection between thought and language. The aim of the paper is to defend the spirit of Quine’s account of attitudes by offering solutions to these two problems. See also chapters four and five of Word and Object (Quine, 1960) and ‘Intensions Revisited’ (Quine, 1977).     

Rhetoric and the Reception Theory of Rationality in the Work of Two Buddhist Philosophers

Although rhetoric is not a category of ancient Indian philosophy, this paper argues that Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, 2 eighth-century Indian Buddhist philosophers, can nonetheless be seen to embrace a rhetorical conception of rationality. That is, while these thinkers are strong proponents of rational analysis and philosophical argumentation as tools for attaining certainty, they also uphold the contingent nature of all such processes. Drawing on the categories of the New Rhetoric, this paper argues that these Buddhist thinkers understand philosophical argumentation to be directed at a universal audience of rational beings, where this universal audience is not an actual audience but a rhetorical one constructed through the author’s particular and historically contingent conception of what counts as rational. A reception theory of rationality is one that holds that the rationality of an argument depends upon its acceptance by a rational audience. When philosophers recognize the historically contingent nature of what counts as rational, they can embrace a reception theory of rationality that neither reduces the rational to mere opinion nor restricts it to a single, absolute, and timeless standard.

Utilisation des intervalles de confiance au lieu des tests de signification : aspects épistémologiques et pratiques

The use of confidence intervals instead of significance tests is strongly recommended by the fifth edition of the manual of the American Psychological Association (2001). This possibility as well as other improvements in statistical practice are discussed in the framework of the major theoretical options subtending statistical inference and the way they have been applied in psychology for about 50 years. First, the suggestion of a complete ban on statistical testing is examined and rejected. Next, a procedure consisting in measuring the fit of two competing models based on the likelihood ratio is judged interesting and commendable. Finally, the superiority of an approach based on confidence intervals instead of significance tests is assessed and illustrated by its application to an experimental study aiming to demonstrate the absence instead of the presence of an effect of the independent variable.     

Value Dissonance and Ethics Failure in Academia: A Causal Connection?

Ethics failure in academia is not new, yet its prevalence, causes, and methods to prevent it remain a matter of debate. The author’s premise is that value dissonance underlies most of the reasons ethics failure occurs. Vignettes are used to illustrate value dissonance at the individual and institutional levels. Suggestions are offered for ways academic institutions can assume greater responsibility as a moral agency to prevent the occurrence of ethics failure.

正面自我标签对建议采纳的影响

研究设想给决策者“贴标签”会影响其建议采纳, 即当决策者受到某一词语或文字(标签)的描述, 其往往向标签所预示的方向发展。通过三个依次递进的研究, 探讨在有无获益希望及公开与否三种不同组合的决策场景中, 启动决策者正面自我标签对其建议采纳的影响。实验1采用2(正面自我标签：启动/未启动)×2(获益希望：有/无)组间设计, 实验2和实验3分别进一步研究无获益希望的公开场景和有希望获益的不公开场景, 分别以91、135和96名在校大学生为被试。结果发现：决策者正面自我标签启动使得其更容易采纳建议; 无获益希望公开条件下, 受印象管理或社会赞许性影响而显著提高建议采纳; 有获益希望的公开条件下, 决策者正面自我标签启动使得其积极情绪得到提升, 并进而促进其采纳建议, 而积极意义发现在积极情绪和建议采纳之间起中介作用。