Aging and Autobiographical Memory: The Long and Bumpy Road

This article serves as an introduction to this special issue of Journal of Adult Development that deals with the topic of aging and autobiographical memory. Methodological issues, empirical findings, and theoretical frameworks that bear on older adults' autobiographical recall are discussed. Special emphasis is placed on an examination of the factors that underlie the offset of infantile amnesia and the reminiscence bump. An integrative approach to the study of aging and autobiographical memory is proposed that brings together paradigms from experimental psychology, clinical neuropsychology, and neuroimaging.     

The Course of Representation in Memory During the Comprehension of Paragraphs

The course of the representation built in memory from a text during comprehension of paragraphs was studied by a probe technique (immediate item recognition). Three experiments showed that response times, the main variable, gradually increase as a function of the lag between the probe (a word or an atomic proposition) and its target in the text. In Experiment 3 the same result was also found with a priming technique. The absence of any kick-up over the course of time was confirmed by several additional analyses of individual data. The results were only weakly consistent with models assuming two distinct memory stores, in particular a specific “short-term memory store,” but highly consistent with models involving semantic activation and subsequent gradual deactivation.     

THE RELIGION OF A SCIENTIST: EXPLORATIONS INTO REALITY (RELIGIO PHILOSOPHI NATURALIS)

Abstract. Sir Thomas Browne's reflection on the synthesis between his Christian religion and his practice as a medical doctor, made over three centuries ago, leads into reflections on the present relation between religion and science in the personal experience of the writer. An account is given of how the actual practice of scientific investigation led the author to theistic inferences and how the study of DNA provoked questions concerning reductionism and emergence. This evoked the need for a map of knowledge, and an attempt is presented in a figure which also serves to clarify what kind of realistic reference is involved in both scientific and humanistic contexts–especially with respect to personal language. Theological investigations thereby receive at least provisional legitimization and, with this encouragement, the article pursues the questions of the nature of the divine Source ("God") of the world's being and becoming, of God's interaction and communication with the world, especially with human beings in that world. The penultimate section outlines why the writer considers an explicit communication from God to humanity in Jesus of Nazareth is coherent with the foregoing and what this implies for human fulfillment, individually and corporately. The article concludes with a plea for humility before God and nature in our inquiries in the spirit both of Sir Thomas Browne and of the arch "agnostic" T. H. Huxley.     

Confidence in own and others' knowledge

A person's confidence judgement of a statement reflects his/her degree of belief in the correctness of that statement. Deficient ability to assess the correctness of statements (or beliefs) can have serious consequences in many situations. This study compares the realism (calibration) of subjects' confidence ratings in two situations ( n = 64). The first situation was when the subjects confidence rated their own answers to general knowledge questions. The second was when the subjects gave confidence ratings of another person's answers to general knowledge questions. The results show that subjects were more poorly calibrated and were more overconfident in the second situation, i.e. when they gave confidence ratings of answers given by another person, compared with when they rated their own answers. The data further indicates that the results can not be explained in terms of the amount of cognitive processes invested when making the confidence judgements. For example, the subjects rated the other person's answers to questions they had answered themselves, and to questions they had not seen before. No differences in confidence or in calibration and other measures of judgmental realism were found between these two categories of questions. Nor did instructions to imagine the thought process of the other person improve any of these measures. The subjects disagreed with the other person's answer on 23% of all occasions. Significantly poorer calibration was shown where subjects disagreed with the other person than where they agreed. Contents of a social nature attended to by the subjects may have affected the results. The results, when related to previous research in the area, give rise to the question of how the social situation can be arranged to achieve the best calibration.     

Modelling argumentation and modelling with argumentation

This paper discusses the epistemological and methodological bases of a scientific theory of meaning and proposes a detailed version of a formal theory of argumentation based on Anscombre and Ducrot's conception. Argumentation is shown to be a concept which is not exclusively pragmatic, as it is usually believed, but has an important semantic body. The bridge between the semantic and pragmatic aspects of argumentation consists in a set of gradual inference rules, called topoi, on which the argumentative movement is based. The content of each topos is determined at the pragmatic level, while the constraints on the forms of the topoi attached to a sentence are determined at the semantic level. Applications and possible applications toartificial intelligence and to cognitive sciences are discussed. In particular, the gradual models used to account for argumentation are shown to be extremely promising for Knowledge management, a discipline which includes knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, transmission of knowledge (communication, interfaces, etc.), knowledge production (decision help, reasoning, etc.). A first formal model is presented and discussed: it is shown in details how it accounts for most of the argumentative features of sentences containing but, little and a little, and how it can be extended to describe sentences containing other argumentative connectives. However, this model is shown to be too simple and to violate the compositionality principle, which is shown, in the first section, to bean important methodological principle for any scientific theory. After a detailed analysis of the possible reasons for this violation, an improved model is proposed and its adequacy is discussed.     

嗓声鉴别的脑事件相关电位研究

该项工作研究了21名女大学生和研究生鉴别两个陌生人的噪声时,六个脑区的事件相关电位(ERPs)。结果表明,双音节语义嗓声的鉴别更易引起明显的ERPs变化;两个陌生人嗓声不等概率呈现,较等概率呈现更易引起明显的ERPs变化。在单音节嗓声鉴别中,在左额区引起N200波波幅增高;而在右颞区引起P300波潜伏期的增长。在双音节语义嗓声鉴别中,除右顶叶外在其它五个脑区引起P300波波幅增高,在右额区引起P300波潜伏期明显缩短。     

THE THEOLOGICAL-SCIENTIFIC VISION OF ARTHUR PEACOCKE

Abstract. Arthur Peacocke has made seminal contributions to the interdisciplinary field of Christian theology and natural science. First, this paper presents a summary of his work, including his argument that critical realism provides for theology and science a common philosophical basis preferable to that of reductionistic materialism, vitalistic dualism, or divine interventionism. In specific, Peacocke proposes a form of panentheism in light of cosmology and evolution: God is immanent in and transcendent to the universe, with its open-ended processes characterized by both law and chance. God suffers with the travail of evolution; and Jesus is the normative realization of God's creative involvement with nature—a form of emergence with continuity. This paper then critiques each of these philosophical and theological positions.     

The many-worlds theory of consciousness

This paper sketches a new and somewhat heterodox metaphysical theory of consciousness: the “many-worlds theory”. It drops the assumption that all conscious subjects’ experiences are features of one and the same world and instead associates different subjects with different “first-personally centred worlds”. We can think of these as distinct “first-personal realizers” of a shared “third-personal world”, where the latter is supervenient, in a sense to be explained. This is combined with a form of modal realism, according to which different subjects’ first-personally centred worlds are all real, though only one of them is present for each subject. The theory offers a novel way of capturing the irreducibly subjective nature of conscious experience without lapsing into solipsism. The paper also looks at some scientific theories of consciousness, such as integrated information theory, through the proposed lens and reconsiders the hard problem of consciousness.     

语义分类任务中部件位置在汉字识别中的作用

采用Go/NoGo语义分类任务, 在贴近自然语言理解的任务模式下探讨了部件位置的加工时程问题。实验操纵了部件位置频率, 并进一步区分了造成部件相对位置频率发生变化的两种来源, 一是操纵部件整体频率(包含某部件的所有汉字集合)的变化, 保持特殊位置上的部件频率(某部件出现在特定位置上的汉字集合)不变; 二是操纵特殊位置上的部件频率的变化, 保持整体部件频率不变。结果表明, 无论是变化整体部件频率还是变化特殊位置上的部件频率, 两者都引发了P200和N400的变化, 且所引发的P200在峰潜时(peak latency)上差异不显著。此外, 两种操作都没有引发N/P150的变化。因此本研究在贴近自然语言理解的任务中进一步肯定了部件位置在汉字阅读中的作用, 既可以影响汉字亚词汇水平的字形加工, 也可以影响汉字的语义提取。     

小学生义符一致性意识的发展研究

采用类别一致性判断任务考察汉语儿童义符一致性意识的发展特征。结果表明：(1)儿童的义符一致性意识随着年级增长而提高。三年级儿童尚未获得一致性意识, 四年级儿童初步具备义符一致性意识, 五年级儿童的义符一致性意识获得了长足的发展, 六年级儿童获得了完善的义符一致性意识。(2)义符一致性意识与认知发展水平、已有知识及加工策略有密切关系。应该有意识地培养儿童的义符一致性意识。