Cue competition effects in human causal learning

Five experiments involving human causal learning were conducted to compare the cue competition effects known as blocking and unovershadowing, in proactive and retroactive instantiations. Experiment 1 demonstrated reliable proactive blocking and unovershadowing but only retroactive unovershadowing. Experiment 2 replicated the same pattern and showed that the retroactive unovershadowing that was observed was interfered with by a secondary memory task that had no demonstrable effect on either proactive unovershadowing or blocking. Experiments 3a, 3b, and 3c demonstrated that retroactive unovershadowing was accompanied by an inflated memory effect not accompanying proactive unovershadowing. The differential pattern of proactive versus retroactive cue competition effects is discussed in relationship to amenable associative and inferential processing possibilities.     

Skultety's Categories of Competition – A Competing Conceptualisation?

A recent article in this journal attempts to link categories of sport competition to appropriate psychologies of participants in the different sorts of competition. It criticises accounts of competition which understand it in relation to a very restricted range of psychologies because the purposes and psychologies with which people enter and engage in competition vary enormously. So, taking as a starting point a consensus view among sport philosophers of the key conditions governing competition, work is undertaken to identify fundamental distinctions drawing from the conditions, which are said to result in a fourfold typology of competitions. The final step is to suggest psychologies most suited to the components of the typology. My article examines this project and produces reasons to doubt its success.     

Challenging sex segregation: A philosophical evaluation of the football association’s rules on mixed football

The Football Association (FA) has been under pressure to allow girls to play in mixed teams since 1978, following 12-year old Theresa Bennett’s application to play with boys in a local league. In 1991, over a decade after Bennett’s legal challenge, the FA agreed to remove its ban on mixed football and introduced Rule C4 in order to permit males and females to play together in competitive matches under the age of 11. More recently, following a campaign by parents, coaches, local Members of Parliament and the Women’s Sport Foundation, the FA agreed to trial mixed football for the under-12 to under-15 age categories in order to establish, among other things, the risk of injury to players in sex-integrated competitions. A series of exponential changes ensued: between 2010 and 2014, the age at which mixed football was permitted increased from U11 to U16. In 2015, the FA announced the decision to raise the age limit on mixed football from U16 to U18 for the forthcoming 2015–2016 season. We critically examine the reasons given by the FA for enforcing segregated participation beyond the age of 18, namely that males have an unfair advantage and that females face an unacceptable risk of injury. We also discuss the argument that removing the ban might harm the women’s game. In conclusion, we suggest that the FA ought to abandon the ban on mixed football over the age of 18.     

New stable icosahedral phases in Al-Pd-Ru and Al-Pd-Os systems

We have found stable icosahedral (i) phases in alloys with nominal compositions around Al 72 Pd 17 Ru 11 and Al 72 Pd 17 Os 11 . They display very sharp X-ray diffraction peaks, indicating high structural order as in other Al-based i-phases such as i-(Al-Pd-TM) (transition metal TM = Mn or Re) and i-(Al-Cu-TM) (TM =Fe, Ru or Os). The i phases are formed via peritectic reaction and, upon heating, they transform into a mixture of a liquid and the 1/0 cubic approximant phase. The electrical resistivity of the i phases was measured in a wide temperature range from 14K to above their melting points and a reversible change of the resistivity across the melting point has been observed in situ for the first time.     

Why is information displaced from visual working memory during visual search?

Research has shown that performing visual search while maintaining representations in visual working memory displaces up to one object's worth of information from memory. This memory displacement has previously been attributed to a nonspecific disruption of the memory representation by the mere presentation of the visual search array, and the goal of the present study was to determine whether it instead reflects the use of visual working memory in the actual search process. The first hypothesis tested was that working memory displacement occurs because observers preemptively discard about an object's worth of information from visual working memory in anticipation of performing visual search. Second, we tested the hypothesis that on target absent trials no information is displaced from visual working memory because no target is entered into memory when search is completed. Finally, we tested whether visual working memory displacement is due to the need to select a response to the search array. The findings rule out these alternative explanations. The present study supports the hypothesis that change-detection performance is impaired when a search array appears during the retention interval due to nonspecific disruption or masking.     

Challenges of patient‐led mental health services to psychoanalytic clinicians

This paper considers implications to psychoanalytic psychotherapy of the British Government's decision to implement a patient choice agenda for state‐funded mental health services in England and Wales. It places the patient choice agenda in the context of consumerist society and argues that the complex nature of psychoanalytic psychotherapy leaves it more vulnerable than other psychological therapy modalities to compete in the current reality of ‘consumer’‐led public mental health, which, in turn reflects a profoundly changed social context from that to which psychoanalysis traces its roots. Unless psychoanalytic clinicians recognize and find ways to adjust to this context they will jeopardize the survival of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in an increasingly market‐orientated model of mental healthcare provision in the public sector, eager to promote more ‘consumer friendly’ psychological therapy models.     

Can Competition Ever be Fair? Challenging the Standard Prejudice

In this paper, we challenge the usual argument which says that competition is a fair mechanism because it ranks individuals according to their relative preferences between effort and leisure. This argument, we claim, is very insufficient as a justification of fairness in competition, and we show that it does not stand up to scrutiny once various dynamic aspects of competition are taken into account. Once the sequential unfolding of competition is taken into account, competition turns out to be unfair even if the usual fairness argument is upheld. We distinguish between two notions of fairness, which we call U-fairness, where U stands for the usual fairness notion, and S-fairness, where S stands for the sequential aspect of competition. The sequential unfairness of competition, we argue, comprises two usually neglected aspects connected with losses of freedom: first of all, there is an eclipse of preferences in the sense that even perfectly calculating competitors do not carry out a trade-off between effort and ranking; and second, competitive dynamics leads to single-mindedness because the constraints on the competitors choices always operate in the sense of increased competitiveness and, therefore, in the direction of an increased effort requirements. We argue (1) that competition is S-unfair even if it is U-fair, (2) that as S-unfairness increases, the ethical relevance of U-fairness itself vanishes, so that (3) by focusing as they usually do on U-fairness alone, economists neglect a deeper aspect of unfairness.     

Honeybees (Apis mellifera) holding on to memories: response competition causes retroactive interference effects

Five experiments on honeybees examined how the learning of a second task interferes with what was previously learned. Free flying bees were tested for landmark-based memory in variations on a paradigm of retroactive interference. Bees first learned Task 1, were tested on Task 1 (Test 1), then learned Task 2, and were tested again on Task 1 (Test 2). A 60-min delay (waiting in a box) before Test 2 caused no performance decrements. If the two tasks had conflicting response requirements, (e.g., target right of a green landmark in Task 1 and left of a blue landmark in Task 2), then a strong decrement on Test 2 was found (retroactive interference effect). When response competition was minimised during training or testing, however, the decrement on Test 2 was small or nonexistent. The results implicate response competition as a major contributor to the retroactive interference effect. The honeybee seems to hold on to memories; new memories do not wipe out old ones.     

Representation and competition in the perception of spoken words

We present data from four experiments using cross-modal priming to examine the effects of competitor environment on lexical activation during the time course of the perception of a spoken word. The research is conducted from the perspective of a distributed model of speech perception and lexical representation, which focuses on activation at the level of lexical content. In this model, the strength of competition between simultaneously active lexical items depends on the degree of coherence between their distributed semantic and phonological representations. Consistent with this model, interference effects are more complete when the purely semantic aspects of these coactive representations are probed (using semantic priming) than when phonological aspects are probed as well (using repetition priming).     

结果冲突与作业难度对双重作业绩效的影响

运用单作业和双作业操作探讨结果冲突与作业难度对双重作业绩效的影响。结果表明：（１）信息干扰对双作业操作有着明显的影响。信息干扰越大,结果冲突效应越大,双作业操作绩效越差。（２）作业难度对双作业绩效有明显影响。作业难度越大,双作业操作绩效越差。根据实验结果,本研究提出了双因素假设：信息干扰和资源竞争是影响双作业操作绩效的两个主要因素。