So why can’t you intend to drink the toxin?

In this paper I revisit Gregory Kavka’s Toxin Puzzle and propose a novel solution to it. Like some previous accounts, mine postulates a tight link between intentions and reasons but, unlike them, in my account these are motivating rather than normative reasons, i.e. reasons that explain (rather than justify) the intended action. I argue that sensitivity to the absence of possible motivational explanations for the intended action is constitutive of deliberation-based intentions. Since ordinary rational agents display this sensitivity, when placed in the toxin scenario they will believe that there is no motivational explanation for actually drinking the toxin and this is why they can’t form the intention to drink it in the first place. I thus argue that my Motivating-Explanatory Reason Principle correctly explains the toxin puzzle, thereby revealing itself as a genuine metaphysical constraint on intentions. I also explore at length the implications of my account for the nature of intention and rational agency.     

Is a life without meaning satisfying? The moderating role of the search for meaning in satisfaction with life judgments

Results from two studies revealed that the relation between meaning in life and life satisfaction was moderated by the extent to which the rater was searching for meaning in his or her life. In Studies 1a and 1b, the presence of meaning was more strongly related to life satisfaction for those who were actively searching for meaning in life than for those who were not. Study 2 extended the finding to judgments concerning a fictitious target's life satisfaction based on experimentally manipulated information regarding meaning in life. Thus, the role of meaning in life satisfaction judgments varies across individuals, depending on the level of search for meaning in life. These results suggest that search for meaning behaves like a schema increasing the salience of meaning-relevant information, and provides new ways of understanding people's efforts to establish meaningful lives.     

Does conspicuity enhance distraction? Saliency and eye landing position when searching for objects

While visual saliency may sometimes capture attention, the guidance of eye movements in search is often dominated by knowledge of the target. How is the search for an object influenced by the saliency of an adjacent distractor? Participants searched for a target amongst an array of objects, with distractor saliency having an effect on response time and on the speed at which targets were found. Saliency did not predict the order in which objects in target-absent trials were fixated. The within-target landing position was distributed around a modal position close to the centre of the object. Saliency did not affect this position, the latency of the initial saccade, or the likelihood of the distractor being fixated, suggesting that saliency affects the allocation of covert attention and not just eye movements.     

Processing fluency as a predictor of salience asymmetries in the Implicit Association Test

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the most popular indirect measure of attitudes in social psychology. Rothermund and Wentura (2001, 2004) suggested that artifacts such as salience asymmetries are a source of compatibility effects in the IAT, and, therefore, the IAT does not necessarily measure attitude. They claim that salience asymmetries correspond with visual search asymmetries, such that the stimulus categories that are more quickly detected in a visual search task are also compatible in the IAT. We propose that processing fluency is a more reliable indicator of salience asymmetries in the IAT than are visual search asymmetries. To test this hypothesis, we set processing fluency in opposition to visual search asymmetry to see which variable better predicted IAT effects. In one pair of categories, the category that was more quickly detected in visual search was also more fluently processed in a binary classification task. In a second pair of categories, the category that was more quickly detected in visual search was the less fluently processed category. Across four experiments, we demonstrated that compatibility effects in the IAT corresponded with differences in processing fluency between categories, rather than with visual search asymmetries.     

Exploring conflict- and target-related movement of visual attention

Intermixing trials of a visual search task with trials of a modified flanker task, the authors investigated whether the presentation of conflicting distractors at only one side (left or right) of a target stimulus triggers shifts of visual attention towards the contralateral side. Search time patterns provided evidence for lateral attention shifts only when participants performed the flanker task under an instruction assumed to widen the focus of attention, demonstrating that instruction-based control settings of an otherwise identical task can impact performance in an unrelated task. Contrasting conditions with response-related and response-unrelated distractors showed that shifting attention does not depend on response conflict and may be explained as stimulus-conflict-related withdrawal or target-related deployment of attention.     

Task-dependent sensitisation of perceptual and semantic processing during visual search for words

Two experiments examined the impact of task-set on people's use of the visual and semantic features of words during visual search. Participants' eye movements were recorded while the distractor words were manipulated. In both experiments, the target word was either given literally (literal task) or defined by a semantic clue (categorical task). According to Kiefer and Martens, participants should preferentially use either the visual or semantic features of words depending on their relevance for the task. This assumption was partially supported. As expected, orthographic neighbours of the target word attracted participants' attention more and took longer to reject, once fixated, during the literal task. Conversely, semantic associates of the target word took longer to reject during the categorical task. However, they did not attract participants' attention more than in the literal task. This unexpected finding is discussed in relation to the processing of words in the peripheral visual field.     

Memory benefits during visual search depend on difficulty

In three experiments we explored whether memory for previous locations of search items influences search efficiency more as the difficulty of exhaustive search increases. Difficulty was manipulated by varying item eccentricity and item similarity (discriminability). Participants searched through items placed at three levels of eccentricity. The search displays were either identical on every trial (repeated condition) or the items were randomly reorganised from trial to trial (random condition), and search items were either relatively easy or difficult to discriminate from each other. Search was both faster and more efficient (i.e., search slopes were shallower) in the repeated condition than in the random condition. More importantly, this advantage for repeated displays was greater (1) for items that were more difficult to discriminate and (2) for eccentric targets when items were easily discriminable. Thus, increasing target eccentricity and reducing item discriminability both increase the influence of memory during search.     

Autonomy,Sanity and Moral Theory

The concept of autonomy plays atleast two roles in moral theory. First, itprovides a source of constraints upon action:because I am autonomous you may not interferewith me, even for my own good. Second, itprovides a foundation for moral theory: humanautonomy has been thought by some to producemoral principles of a more general kind.This paper seeks to understand what autonomyis, and whether the autonomy of which we arecapable is able to serve these roles. We wouldnaturally hope for a concept of autonomy thatis value-neutral rather than value-laden. Thatis to say, we would want the judgement that Iam autonomous to depend wholly on, say,structural features of my psychology, and in noway to require us to make ethical judgements, orother value judgements. Being value-neutral isperhaps desirable in a concept of autonomyserving the first role, and plausiblyindispensible in one playing the second. Ishall argue, however, that value-neutral conceptionsof autonomy are impoverished and out of linewith our intuitions; set out and defendan explicitly value-laden conception ofautonomy; and explore the implications of such a view for theability of autonomy to play the rolesmentioned above.