Two modes of confidence rating: An effect of episodic information of participant's own past responses in a repeated-question paradigm

Abstract: General knowledge questions with two answer alternatives were employed in experimental session 1; in session 2, the same questions were presented together with participants' own session-1 responses. In order to examine whether or not the episodic information of participant's own responses would suppress standard confidence-rating mode in session 2, rates of answer- and confidence-changes between sessions were analyzed. In session 2, participants were able to change the confidence value to another, if they thought the initial value inadequate. They then had a chance to change the answer to the other and rated their confidence in the new answer. The major results were as follows: (a) Between-session answer change rate was very low; (b) Between-session answer change rate was not a monotonic decreasing function of confidence; (c) However, the rate depended on confidence change from session 1 to before-answer-change rating. These results clearly contrasted with a previous study ( Saito, 1998 ) in which episodic information of participant's own session 1 answers and confidence values was not presented. It was argued that the episodic information triggered another mode of confidence rating or a decision inertia effect.     

知情同意中患方权利人的排序

知情同意是重要的病人权利之一,患方知情同意权的排序,直接关系到病人的利益,是一个不容忽视的伦理问题,也是一个必须解决的实践问题,对知情同意的内容,患方权利人的范围,资格和排序从医学伦理学角度进行初步分析,同时探讨了在特殊情况下知情同意权的伦理悖论和操作上的两难问题,我们认为,在医疗行业快速市场化的今天,尽快建立病人权利法规,对包括知情同意权在内的病人权利作出法律规定,已经是十分必要和十分迫切了。     

Global and local evaluations of public speaking performance in social anxiety

Differences in the relative use of global and local information (seeing the forest vs. the trees) may explain why people with social anxiety often do not benefit from corrective feedback, even though they pay close attention to details in social situations. In the current study, participants high (n = 43) or low (n = 47) in social anxiety symptoms gave a series of brief speeches, and then self-rated their speaking performance on items reflecting global and local performance indicators (self-assessment) and also received standardized performance feedback from an experimenter. Participants then completed a questionnaire asking how they thought the experimenter would rate their performance based on the feedback provided (experimenter assessment). Participants completed the self- and experimenter assessments again after 3 days, in addition to a measure of postevent processing (repetitive negative thinking) about their speech performance. Results showed that, as hypothesized, the High SA group rated their performance more negatively than the Low SA group. Moreover, the High SA group's ratings of global aspects of their performance became relatively more negative over time, compared to their ratings of local aspects and the Low SA group's ratings. As expected, postevent processing mediated the relationship between social anxiety group status and worsening global performance evaluations. These findings point to a pattern of progressively more negative global evaluations over time for persons high in social anxiety.     

Informative Aboutness

Pretheoretically, (B) ‘all believers are immortal’ is about all believers, but (1) B is not about any unbeliever. Similarly, (M) ‘all mortals are unbelievers’ is not about any immortal, but (2) M is about all mortals. But B and M are logically equivalent universal generalizations, so arguably they are about exactly the same objects; by (2), they are about those mortals who are unbelievers, contradicting (1). If one responds by giving up (1), is there still a sense in which B treats unbelievers differently from believers? I argue that there is. B is uninformative about unbelievers but informative about believers, in the following sense: for any object o, the information that B provides only about o—namely, ‘o is a believer only if o is immortal’—is entailed (and thus rendered redundant) by ‘o is an unbeliever’ but not by ‘o is a believer’.     

Motor Planning Influences the Perceived Timing of Vibrotactile Stimuli in an Amplitude-Dependent Manner

The authors characterized how motor planning influences temporal order judgment (TOJ) tasks. They examined this by applying vibrotactile stimulation during the planning stages of a bimanual arm movement that would bring the arms into a crossed configuration. The authors have previously shown that planning to cross the arms induces a subjective reversal of spatially defined temporal order judgments that evolves over the course of the planning period. It was unclear, however, whether this effect is modulated by the extent to which the arms would be crossed after movement. The authors examined this issue by having participants plan to move to 4 different targets that would leave the arms in crossed configurations of varying extents. The results demonstrate that even though cutaneous stimuli were applied before the movements, if participants were planning to move into a more crossed configuration, performance on the TOJ task worsened depending on where they were in the planning process. This data suggest the brain uses planning signals to predict sensations from impending movements in a context-dependent manner.     

On the Philosophy of Bitcoin/Blockchain Technology: Is it a Chaotic,Complex System?

The philosophy of blockchain technology is concerned, among other things, with blockchain ontology, how it might be characterised, how it is being created, implemented, and adopted, how it operates in the world, and how it evolves over time. This paper concentrates on whether Bitcoin/blockchain can be considered a complex system and, if so, whether it is a chaotic one. Beyond mere academic curiosity, a positive response would raise concerns about the likelihood of Bitcoin/blockchain entering a 2010‐Flash‐Crash‐type of chaotic regime, with catastrophic consequences for financial systems based on it. The paper starts by highlighting the relevant details of the Bitcoin/blockchain ecosystem formed by the blockchain itself, bitcoin end users (payers and payees), capital gains seekers, miners, full nodes maintainers, and developers, and their interactions. Then the Information Theory of Complex Systems is briefly discussed for later use. Finally, the blockchain is investigated with the help of Crutchfield's Statistical Complexity measure. The low non‐null statistical complexity value obtained suggests that the blockchain may be considered algorithmically complicated but hardly a complex system and unlikely to enter a chaotic regime.     

Balancing Effort and Information Transmission During Language Acquisition: Evidence From Word Order and Case Marking

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial languages containing optional case marking and either flexible or fixed constituent order. Learners of the flexible order language used case marking significantly more often. This result parallels the typological correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of case marking in a language and provides a possible explanation for the historical development of Old English to Modern English, from flexible constituent order with case marking to relatively fixed order without case marking. In addition, learners of the flexible order language conditioned case marking on constituent order, using more case marking with the cross‐linguistically less frequent order, again mirroring typological data. These results suggest that some cross‐linguistic generalizations originate in functionally motivated biases operating during language learning.     

Further differentiating item and order information in semantic memory: students’ recall of words from the “CU Fight Song”, Harry Potter book titles,and Scooby Doo theme song

University of Colorado (CU) students were tested for both order and item information in their semantic memory for the “CU Fight Song”. Following an earlier study by Overstreet and Healy [(2011). Item and order information in semantic memory: Students’ retention of the “CU fight song” lyrics. Memory & Cognition, 39, 251–259. doi:10.3758/s13421-010-0018-3], a symmetrical bow-shaped serial position function (with both primacy and recency advantages) was found for reconstructing the order of the nine lines in the song, whereas a function with no primacy advantage was found for recalling a missing word from each line. This difference between order and item information was found even though students filled in missing words without any alternatives provided and missing words came from the beginning, middle, or end of each line. Similar results were found for CU students’ recall of the sequence of Harry Potter book titles and the lyrics of the Scooby Doo theme song. These findings strengthen the claim that the pronounced serial position function in semantic memory occurs largely because of the retention of order, rather than item, information.     

Tactile Ranschburg effects: facilitation and inhibitory repetition effects analogous to verbal memory

The present paper examines the effect of within-sequence item repetitions in tactile order memory. Employing an immediate serial recall procedure, participants reconstructed a six-item sequence tapped upon their fingers by moving those fingers in the order of original stimulation. In Experiment 1a, within-sequence repetition of an item separated by two-intervening items resulted in a significant reduction in recall accuracy for that repeated item (i.e., the Ranschburg effect). In Experiment 1b, within-sequence repetition of an adjacent item resulted in significant recall facilitation for that repeated item. These effects mirror those reported for verbal stimuli (e.g., Henson, 1998a Henson, R. N. A. (1998a). Item repetition in short-term memory: Ranschburg repeated. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24(5), 1162–1181. doi:doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.24.5.1162[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. Item repetition in short-term memory: Ranschburg repeated. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24(5), 1162–1181. doi:doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.24.5.1162). These data are the first to demonstrate the Ranschburg effect with non-verbal stimuli and suggest further cross-modal similarities in order memory.     

Maintenance of item and order information in verbal working memory

Although verbal recall of item and order information is well-researched in short-term memory paradigms, there is relatively little research concerning item and order recall from working memory. The following study examined whether manipulating the opportunity for attentional refreshing and articulatory rehearsal in a complex span task differently affected the recall of item- and order-specific information of the memoranda. Five experiments varied the opportunity for articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing in a complex span task, but the type of recall was manipulated between experiments (item and order, order only, and item only recall). The results showed that impairing attentional refreshing and articulatory rehearsal similarly affected recall regardless of whether the scoring procedure (Experiments 1 and 4) or recall requirements (Experiments 2, 3, and 5) reflected item- or order-specific recall. This implies that both mechanisms sustain the maintenance of item and order information, and suggests that the common cumulative functioning of these two mechanisms to maintain items could be at the root of order maintenance.