The influence of intentional and incidental learning on acquiring spatial knowledge during navigation

In order to study the influence of intentional and incidental learning conditions on route learning, young adults walked a route through a university building. Half of the participants focused their attention on the route (intentional learning condition), while the other half did not (incidental learning condition). Five tests of spatial knowledge were employed: a route-length-estimation, landmark recognition, landmark ordering, map-drawing and navigation task. The intentional group performed better than the incidental group on the map-drawing and navigation task. No difference between the intentional and incidental group was found on the landmark-recognition and landmark-ordering task. Moreover, the intentional group overestimated the walking distance, while the incidental group underestimated it. These results suggest that route knowledge (landmark recognition and landmark ordering) requires less effortful processing than survey knowledge (developing a map-like representation and actual navigation).     

Ernest Becker and the Psychology of Worldviews

Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski offer experimental confirmation for Ernest Becker's claim that the fear of death is a powerful unconscious motive producing polarized worldviews and scapegoating. Their suggestion that their findings also prove Sigmund Freud's theory of repression, with worldviews as its irrational products, is questionable, although Becker's own statements about worldviews as "illusions" seem to invite such interpretation. Their basic theory does not depend on this, however, and abandoning it would enable them to take better advantage of their finding that worldviews incorporating the values of rationality and tolerance tend to counteract polarization effects.     

Resisting Explanation

Although explanation is widely regarded as an important concept in the study of rational inquiry, it remains largely unexplored outside the philosophy of science. This, I believe, is not due to oversight as much as to institutional resistance. In analytic philosophy it is basic that epistemic rationality is a function of justification and that justification is a function of argument. Explanation, however, is not argument nor is belief justification its function. I argue here that the task of incorporating explanation into the theory of rational inquiry poses a serious challenge to our basic concept of epistemic rationality as well as the a priori method of inquiry that still lies at the heart of analytic philosophy. Specifically, it pushes us toward a much stronger form of naturalism than is generally thought necessary, one in which argument and explanation are recognized as distinct and equally fundamental cognitive processes whose dynamic relationship is one of the central issues in the theory of rationality.     

Purchasing decisions,partial knowledge,and economic search experimental and simulation evidence

Several experimental studies have discovered high-performing heuristic strategies in the search for the most economic price of a good in situations where a searcher has both full prior knowledge and no prior knowledge of the underlying price distribution. This paper describes a new experiment set in a more realistic ‘partial-knowledge’ framework. Several new search heuristics are suggested which match well with observed behaviour, and which, over a large number of simulated trials, perform well in comparison with the optimal model and better than previously reported ‘no-knowledge’ rules.     

企业组织氛围与组织隐性知识共享之关系研究

本研究旨在考察组织氛围是否与企业中隐性知识的共享存在相关。是否可以以组织氛围的高低来预测企业中隐性知识的共享程度。本研究对辽宁省沈阳市和辽阳市的8家工业企业54个部门(班组)的463名员工组成的样本进行了问卷调查。结果表明,组织氛围的不同维度与隐性知识的不同因子的共享存在相关,组织氛围的不同维度能够在一定水平上预测隐性知识不同因子上的共享程度,但也显示隐性知识的不同因子共享机制并不一致。     

中国大学生第二语言知识的心理表征特征

采用启动效应的实验范式,基于不同加工水平的词汇判断任务,通过变化启动刺激与目标刺激的4个实验,考察了中国大学生第二语言知识的心理表征特征。被试为第二军医大学的学生38名。结果发现:在基于语义的范畴判断任务中,当启动刺激(英)和目标刺激(英)之间存在语义联想关系,得到了显著的启动效应(实验一);当启动刺激(英)和目标刺激(英)之间存在语音相同或相近关系,也得到了显著的启动效应(实验二);但在基于语音的词汇判断任务中,当启动刺激(英)和目标刺激(英)之间存在语义联想关系,没有得到启动效应(实验三);而当启动刺激(英)和目标刺激(英)之间存在语音相同或相近关系,得到了显著的启动效应(实验四)。这一结果表明,对于中国大学生程度的中英双语者来说,其第二语言(英语)知识的心理表征特征为:①语义联想特征和语音联想特征,符合激活扩散模型;②第二语言知识的心理表征,不仅在概念语义层有着联系,而且在词汇表征层也有相互的联系;其词汇表征层和语义概念表征层是分层表征的。     

Embodied simulation: From neurons to phenomenal experience

The same neural structures involved in the unconscious modeling of our acting body in space also contribute to our awareness of the lived body and of the objects that the world contains. Neuroscientific research also shows that there are neural mechanisms mediating between the multi-level personal experience we entertain of our lived body, and the implicit certainties we simultaneously hold about others. Such personal and body-related experiential knowledge enables us to understand the actions performed by others, and to directly decode the emotions and sensations they experience. A common functional mechanism is at the basis of both body awareness and basic forms of social understanding: embodied simulation. It will be shown that the present proposal is consistent with some of the perspectives offered by phenomenology.     

Children's hostile intent attributions and emotional distress: What do parents perceive?

Traditionally, assessments of social information processing and associated emotional distress have used children's self‐reports. We posit that additional informants, such as parents, may help illuminate the association between these variables and aggression. Our sample was composed of 222 dual‐parent families of fourth‐grade children (103 boys; 119 girls). Children responded to instrumental and relational provocations and their parents read the same scenarios and responded the way they believed their child would. Peer nominations provided aggression scores. We explored how means differed by provocation type (relational vs. instrumental), informant (mother, father, and child), and gender of child. The results also suggest that parent perceptions may effectively predict children's participation in relational and physical aggression, above and beyond the child's self‐reports.