Looking for ideas: Eye behavior during goal-directed internally focused cognition

Humans have a highly developed visual system, yet we spend a high proportion of our time awake ignoring the visual world and attending to our own thoughts. The present study examined eye movement characteristics of goal-directed internally focused cognition. Deliberate internally focused cognition was induced by an idea generation task. A letter-by-letter reading task served as external task. Idea generation (vs. reading) was associated with more and longer blinks and fewer microsaccades indicating an attenuation of visual input. Idea generation was further associated with more and shorter fixations, more saccades and saccades with higher amplitudes as well as heightened stimulus-independent variation of eye vergence. The latter results suggest a coupling of eye behavior to internally generated information and associated cognitive processes, i.e. searching for ideas. Our results support eye behavior patterns as indicators of goal-directed internally focused cognition through mechanisms of attenuation of visual input and coupling of eye behavior to internally generated information.     

Number as a cognitive technology: evidence from Pirahã language and cognition

Does speaking a language without number words change the way speakers of that language perceive exact quantities? The Pirah? are an Amazonian tribe who have been previously studied for their limited numerical system [Gordon, P. (2004). Numerical cognition without words: Evidence from Amazonia. Science 306, 496-499]. We show that the Pirah? have no linguistic method whatsoever for expressing exact quantity, not even "one." Despite this lack, when retested on the matching tasks used by Gordon, Pirah? speakers were able to perform exact matches with large numbers of objects perfectly but, as previously reported, they were inaccurate on matching tasks involving memory. These results suggest that language for exact number is a cultural invention rather than a linguistic universal, and that number words do not change our underlying representations of number but instead are a cognitive technology for keeping track of the cardinality of large sets across time, space, and changes in modality.     

产前超声检查先天畸形的几点哲学思考

产前超声检查先天畸形是指在妊娠期应用超声检查技术检测母体内胎儿是否存在先天畸形,是产前诊断先天畸形的有效手段之一。本文从医学和哲学的角度对产前超声检查先天畸形的时间观、动态观、整体观以及超声检查先天畸形的相关伦理问题、规范性和局限性进行综合分析。     

Abstract thinking increases one’s sense of power

One’s subjective sense of power often has greater influence on behavior than the amount of power one actually possesses. We propose that this sense of power may be determined in part by one’s style of information processing. As abstract thought is less constraining than concrete thought, and having power leads to more abstract thought [Smith, P. K., & Trope, Y. (2006). You focus on the forest when you’re in charge of the trees: Power priming and abstract information processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 578-596.], we predicted that thinking more abstractly would make one feel more powerful. Indeed, in four experiments, abstract thought led to a greater sense of power, greater preference for high-power roles, and more feelings of control over the environment, relative to both a concrete-thought and a control condition. This bidirectional relationship between power and abstract thinking suggests one way in which power hierarchies may be unintentionally perpetuated.     

Carryover effects of analytic thought on preference quality

The current study used a novel within-subjects design to test for the effects of analytic thought (reasons analysis) on the quality of the resulting judgments, as well as on subsequent, unanalyzed judgments of the same stimuli. Participants rated eight Olympic dives at two points in time, 30 min apart, under both reasoning and control instructions, which were then correlated with the scores the dives received from the Olympic judges. Results revealed asymmetric effects of reasoning and non-reasoning strategies: reasoning impaired judgments even when the judgments had been previously made under control conditions, and participants’ two sets of ratings were more strongly correlated with each other when made under control conditions than when either set had been reasoned. Analyses of decision times and reason–judgment correlations suggest that the effects of analytic thought in this domain are partially due to a general shift in decision strategy, and not exclusively to biases in the content of generated reasons.     

Nietzsche as ‘Europe’s Buddha’ and ‘Asia’s Superman’

Nietzsche represents in an interesting way the well-worn Western approach to Asian philosophical and religious thinking: initial excitement, then neglect by appropriation, and swift rejection when found to be incompatible with one’s own tradition, whose roots are inexorably traced back to the ‘ancient’ Greeks. Yet, Nietzsche’s philosophical critique and methods - such as ‘perspectivism’ - offer an instructive route through which to better understand another tradition even if the sole purpose of this exercise is to perceive one’s own limitations through the eyes of the other: a self-destruktion of sorts. To help correct this shortcoming and begin the long overdue task of even-handed dialogue - or contemporary comparative philosophy - we will be served well by looking at Nietzsche’s mistakes, which in turn informed the tragic critic of the West of the last century, Martin Heidegger. We may learn here not to cast others in one’s own troubled image; and not to reverse cultural icons: Europe’s Superman, and Asia’s Buddha.

PHYSICAL SCALE EFFECTS AND PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

Abstract: The scales across which physical properties exist are vast and subtle in their effects on particular systems placed locally on such scales. For example, human experiential access is restricted only to partial segments of the mass density, size, and temperature scales of the universe. I argue that philosophers must learn to appreciate better the effects of physical scales. Specifically, thought experiments in philosophy should be more sensitive to physical scale effects, because the conclusion of a thought experiment may be undermined by unintentionally ignored scale effects, and the changes required to obtain the foreground state of affairs in a thought experiment might require unacknowledged scale‐spanning changes to the contextual background. I discuss four philosophical thought experiments: Putnam's Twin Earth and Brain in a Vat, Searle's Chinese Room, and Chalmers's Zombies Without Qualia. I close by briefly defending the greater interest and importance of physical possibility over logical possibility.     

A rational analysis of rule-based concept learning

This article proposes a new model of human concept learning that provides a rational analysis of learning feature-based concepts. This model is built upon Bayesian inference for a grammatically structured hypothesis space—a concept language of logical rules. This article compares the model predictions to human generalization judgments in several well-known category learning experiments, and finds good agreement for both average and individual participant generalizations. This article further investigates judgments for a broad set of 7-feature concepts—a more natural setting in several ways—and again finds that the model explains human performance.     

庄子、荀子主体性思想比较

本文从天人关系理论、心性论、理想人格理论三方面比较了庄子与苟子的主体性思想。文章认为庄子的主体性思想注重人的内在本性和心灵的独立和自由,苟子的主体性思想则注重人的道德修养和治理天下的实践,由此在三方面表现出不同的内涵与特征。