The Effects of Type and Amount of Pretraining on Transfer in Concept Formation

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of 2 types of directed attention pretraining, a form of stimulus predifferentiation, on immediate- and delayed-transfer tasks in concept identification. In both experiments, the participants received either the “seeing-and-discriminating” or “seeing” technique of pretraining, except for those assigned to the control group. The participants received different amounts of pretraining. In the first experiment, participants were required to learn new concepts from the same category for the delayed-transfer task, whereas in the second experiment, the delayed-transfer task involved concepts from a different category. Among the major findings in both experiments are that the pretraining methods resulted in positive transfer on all transfer tasks. In general, the seeing-and-discriminating method yielded a more positive transfer than the seeing technique. Maximal positive transfer effects were found with a small number of trials. The implications of the findings for understanding the effectiveness of various training methods used for problem solving are discussed.     

Children's Understanding of Second‐Order False Belief: Comparisons of Content and Method of Assessment

This research examined children's performance on second‐order false belief tasks as a function of the content area for the belief and the method of assessing understanding. A total of 70 kindergarten and first‐grade children responded to four second‐order stories. On two stories, the task was to judge a belief about a belief, and on two, the task was to judge a belief about an emotion. On one trial within each group, the task was to predict the target's belief, and on one trial, the task was to explain the belief. Older children outperformed younger children on the prediction measure. Differences as a function of content area and method of assessment were limited; when they did occur, performance was generally better with belief than with emotion as the target, and better with prediction than with explanation as the response criterion. Finally, there was no relation between number of siblings and performance.     

Practical Conditions for Revealing Kabbalistic Knowledge

In this lecture, given on 17 June 2004, the author describes the conditions for proper disclosure of the wisdom of Kabbalah. He explains that today everyone is entitled and indeed is required to know about its true meaning. Expounding on the three past bans—“no need to disclose,” “impossible to disclose,” and “the Creator's personal secret”—Makaron demonstrates why today they have been (at least partially) lifted.     

Self creation and the limitless void of dissociation: the 'as if' personality

The concept of the 'as if' personality has been used variously in analytic literature without having formed part of a clinically based theoretical development over time. The author discusses the bases of her notion of the 'as if' personality, as observed across a number of patients and supervised patients in intensive, long term analytic treatment. In this composite clinical picture, a grouping of elements that form a particular kind of defence of the self is identified in certain patients with an exceptional capacity for creative engagement in the world, surpassing expectations given their background. The picture includes the presence of physical breakdown and illness, as psychic suffering arising from early narcissistic wounding and from a physical, emotional and/or sexual abusive familial environment, was held for too long in bodily memory but not in mind. A distinction is made between the 'as if' personality, the persona and the false self. The 'as if' personality concerns the action of defensive dissociation deriving from very early experiences of internalizing the presence of an absent object, creating the sense of an internal void at the core of the self. At the same time, the self is capable of acts of self creation through a succession of identifications and internalizations with other sources of environmental nourishment, which substitute for, and are constructed around, the original sense of internal emptiness. Thus are restored, but only up to a point, the resources of the originally diminished self. Until these resources have been used up, the self is often able to excel in activities to an exceptional degree. The countertransference is shown to be the means of both useful but often perilously obtained clinical experience and information, supporting the work along the hazardous analytic journey.     

Consensus conference on environmental values in radiation protection: a report on building consensus among experts

During the fall of 2001 (October 22–25), The Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority (NRPA) and the Agricultural University of Norway arranged a consensus conference on the protection of the environment against ionising radiation. The motive for the conference was the need to study the ethical and philosophical basis for protection of nature in its own right. The conference was funded by Nordic Nuclear Safety Research (NKS), in cooperation with the International Union of Radioecology (IUR). The National Committee for Research Ethics in Science and Technology (NENT) was hired as facilitators for the consensus process. This paper will give a brief outline of the aims and method of the conference, distinguishing these from other kinds of consensus conferences. The paper ends with some general reflections on the appropriateness of seeking consensus on ethics-related issues among experts.     

Differentiating explanations of attitude-consistent behavior: the role of perspectives and mode of perspective taking

We examined whether participants could differentiate between explanations of attitude-consistent behavior related to EU membership given from two perspectives (EU supporter and EU opponent) by means of three perspective taking modes (the explainer's own perspective, imagined in-group members' perspective, and imagined out-group members' perspective). Participants were presented with explanations provided from different perspectives and perspective taking modes, and they were asked to judge the extent to which they agreed with each explanation, to guess the attitude of the provider of each explanation, and to rate the quality of each explanation in various respects. Participants could not differentiate between explanations given by in-group members and out-group members who imagined the same perspective. They responded more favorably to explanations given from own perspective than from the imagined perspectives. The results suggest that there exists a shared understanding about how both sides should explain attitude-consistent behavior, but this understanding is measurably different from the actual explanations.     

Some Thoughts about the Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever

The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever was first described by the late George Boolos in the Spring 1996 issue of the Harvard Review of Philosophy. Although not dissimilar in appearance from many other simpler puzzles involving gods (or tribesmen) who always tell the truth or always lie, this puzzle has several features that make the solution far from trivial. This paper examines the puzzle and describes a simpler solution than that originally proposed by Boolos.     

The other side of false belief: Constructing the objectivity of reality

Young children appear not to grasp the independence between objective reality and subjective beliefs, as evidenced by their errors on false belief tasks. Whereas decades of research have examined children's developing understanding of the subjectivity of beliefs, however, almost no research has examined the other side of the issue: How do humans come to understand the objectivity of reality, and why is this understanding important? To help address this gap, this article proposes an evolutionary-developmental account of how the understanding that reality is objective may have emerged in human thinking. Three key steps are highlighted: (i) phylogenetic foundations in great ape competitive mindreading, (ii) ontogenetic foundations in preverbal infant joint attention, and (iii) key experiences of perspectival conflict in linguistic humans. Functionally, the concept of an objective reality facilitated collaborative reasoning and joint decision-making. To arrive at good joint decisions, individuals needed to recognize that both their own beliefs and others' beliefs could be wrong—with respect to the objective reality.