Visualising mental representations: A primer on noise-based reverse correlation in social psychology

With the introduction of the psychophysical method of reverse correlation, a holy grail of social psychology appears to be within reach – visualising mental representations. Reverse correlation is a data-driven method that yields visual proxies of mental representations, based on judgements of randomly varying stimuli. This review is a primer to an influential reverse correlation approach in which stimuli vary by applying random noise to the pixels of images. Our review suggests that the technique is an invaluable tool in the investigation of social perception (e.g., in the perception of race, gender and personality traits), with ample potential applications. However, it is unclear how these visual proxies are best interpreted. Building on advances in cognitive neuroscience, we suggest that these proxies are visual reflections of the internal representations that determine how social stimuli are perceived. In addition, we provide a tutorial on how to perform reverse correlation experiments using R.     

Know thy agency in predictive coding: Meta-monitoring over forward modeling

Though the computation of agency is thought to be based on prediction error, it is important for us to grasp our own reliability of that detected error. Here, the current study shows that we have a meta-monitoring ability over our own forward model, where the accuracy of motor prediction and therefore of the felt agency are implicitly evaluated. Healthy participants (N = 105) conducted a simple motor control task and SELF or OTHER visual feedback was given. The relationship between the accuracy and confidence in a mismatch detection task and in a self-other attribution task was examined. The results suggest an accuracy-confidence correlation in both tasks, indicating our meta-monitoring ability over such decisions. Furthermore, a statistically identified group with low accuracy and low confidence was characterized as higher schizotypal people. Finally, what we can know about our own forward model and how we can know it is discussed.     

A study of metrics of distance and correlation between ranked lists for compositionality detection

Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is meaning-preserving, compositionality can be approximated as the semantic similarity between a phrase and a version of that phrase where words have been replaced by their synonyms. Different ways of representing such phrases exist (e.g., vectors (Kiela and Clark, 2013) or language models (Lioma, Simonsen, Larsen, and Hansen, 2015)), and the choice of representation affects the measurement of semantic similarity.We propose a new compositionality detection method that represents phrases as ranked lists of term weights. Our method approximates the semantic similarity between two ranked list representations using a range of well-known distance and correlation metrics. In contrast to most state-of-the-art approaches in compositionality detection, our method is completely unsupervised. Experiments with a publicly available dataset of 1048 human-annotated phrases shows that, compared to strong supervised baselines, our approach provides superior measurement of compositionality using any of the distance and correlation metrics considered.     

《易传》人性论探微

对<系辞>等传中论及人性及其与天道之关系的文字,古今学者的理解各有心得.作者认为,行<系辞>论性语义为一阴一阳的运行变化称之为道,人从天道变化中得到了善,人性使天道赋予人的这种善得到了完成和显现.并且认为,<易传>、<中庸>、<孟子>实际都是认为"性自命出,命从天降"的,都是在人性与天道有一致性的意义上肯定人性善的,故否定<易传>有性善论,以为<易>、<庸>、<孟>的人性说致思路数不同的观点,都是不合实际的.作者又认为,将天道赋予人道正义的意义又返而以支撑人道原则,自<易传>已然,宋儒的天道性命学说与此是一脉相承的,故否定理学与先秦儒学的联系也是不合事实的.作者还认为,中国古代思想家宣扬性善论的主题是弘扬理性,强化人们对人道的自觉与自信,其中凝聚的积极善良的正气,乃是我们民族文化的元神.     

A short note on the maximal point‐biserial correlation under non‐normality

The aim of this paper is to derive the maximal point‐biserial correlation under non‐normality. Several widely used non‐normal distributions are considered, namely the uniform distribution, t‐distribution, exponential distribution, and a mixture of two normal distributions. Results show that the maximal point‐biserial correlation, depending on the non‐normal continuous variable underlying the binary manifest variable, may not be a function of p (the probability that the dichotomous variable takes the value 1), can be symmetric or non‐symmetric around p = .5, and may still lie in the range from ?1.0 to 1.0. Therefore researchers should exercise caution when they interpret their sample point‐biserial correlation coefficients based on popular beliefs that the maximal point‐biserial correlation is always smaller than 1, and that the size of the correlation is always further restricted as p deviates from .5.     

幽明之故与天人之际--从船山易学的视域看

易学具有一个言幽明而不言有无的视域,明清之际的思想家王夫之的研究表明,从这个视域可以更为深入地理解中国哲学的基本问题:天人之际.天人之际的根本回答不在于流俗所理解的"天人合一",而在于天人相继.通过天人相继,确立的是人的自由以及人道的基本依据.而且,在幽明之故的视野中,还可以生发出中国古典思想对原善问题的基本理解,善不是别的,正是在人道的畛域内发生的对天人之间的存在连续性的努力.     

磁共振动态增强扫描(DCE-MRI)与动脉粥样硬化斑块内新生微血管相关性实验研究

通过动物实验探讨磁共振动态增强扫描成像参数S及SI%与动脉粥样硬化斑块内新生微血管的相关性。磁共振动态增强扫描参数S及SI%与新生微血管内皮细胞计数具有相关性(R=0.479,P0.01;R=0.433,P0.05),通过测定参数S及SI%对动脉粥样硬化斑块内新生微血管进行半定量测定,评价动脉硬化斑块易损性,为临床早期干预及治疗动脉硬化斑块提供可靠的影像学依据。     

Role of attention, memory, and covariation-detection processes in clinically significant eating-disorder symptoms

Cognitive theorists implicate a role for cognitive processing of shape- and weight-related information in the maintenance and potential etiology of eating disorders. The present study examines the role of women’s processing of information regarding other women’s body size and affect in eating disorder symptoms among young women. 253 female undergraduates completed attention, memory, and covariation-detection tasks that presented full-body photographs of young women, as well as an eating-disorder measure. High-Symptom women, relative to Medium- and Low-Symptom women, showed greater relative attention to body size than affect, better memory for body size and worse memory for affect, and enhanced sensitivity to the manipulated covariation between body size and affect. All participants perceived an illusory correlation between body size and affect. These findings suggest that cognitive theories may be extended usefully by considering processing of other-relevant and affective information, as well as the role of covariation-detection processes in eating disorders.     

Creating distinct implicit and explicit attitudes with an illusory correlation paradigm

Two studies used an illusory correlation procedure to test whether distinct implicit and explicit evaluations can result from the same learning episode. All participants learned twice as much about the qualities of one group (majority) than another (minority). In one condition, the ratio of positive to negative information was equal between groups. In other conditions, the majority group showed proportionally more positive qualities than the minority group, or vice versa. Participants in the pro-majority and pro-minority conditions formed both implicit and explicit attitudes consistent with the attitude induction. Participants in the illusory correlation condition showed the expected preference for the majority group (the illusory bias), but showed no implicit preference, suggesting distinct influences on implicit and explicit attitude formation. The effects are consistent with dual-process models in which implicit attitudes reflect accounting of covariation and explicit attitudes reflect interpretative judgments of that covariation.