The statistical recommendations of the American Psychological Association Publication Manual: Effect sizes,confidence intervals,and meta‐analysis

Estimation based on effect sizes, confidence intervals, and meta‐analysis usually provides a more informative analysis of empirical results than does statistical significance testing, which has long been the conventional choice in psychology. The sixth edition of the American Psychological Association Publication Manual now recommends that psychologists should, wherever possible, use estimation and base their interpretation of research results on point and interval estimates. We outline the Manual's recommendations and suggest how they can be put into practice: adopt an estimation framework, starting with the formulation of research aims as ‘How much?’ or ‘To what extent?’ questions. Calculate from your data effect size estimates and confidence intervals to answer those questions, then interpret. Wherever appropriate, use meta‐analysis to integrate evidence over studies. The Manual's recommendations can assist psychologists improve they way they do their statistics and help build a more quantitative and cumulative discipline.     

婴儿语音感知发展及其机制

语音感知的发展状况对个体的语言发展有着深远影响。生命的第一年中, 在语言经验的作用下, 婴儿的语音感知从最初的普遍性感知逐渐发展为对母语的特异性感知。研究者们提出统计学习机制对这一过程加以解释, 即婴儿对语言环境中语音的频次分布十分敏感, 可以通过对频次分布的计算, 从语音的连续体中区分出在母语中起区别意义作用的各个语音范畴。同时, 功能性重组机制和一些社会性线索也会对婴儿语音感知的发展产生重要影响。     

Neural correlates of feigned memory impairment are distinguishable from answering randomly and answering incorrectly: an fMRI and behavioral study

Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have identified activation in the prefrontal-parietal-sub-cortical circuit during feigned memory impairment when comparing with truthful telling. Here, we used fMRI to determine whether neural activity can differentiate between answering correctly, answering randomly, answering incorrectly, and feigned memory impairment. In this study, 12 healthy subjects underwent block-design fMRI while they performed digit task of forced-choice format under four conditions: answering correctly, answering randomly, answering incorrectly, and simulated feigned memory impairment. There were three main results. First, six areas, including the left prefrontal cortex, the left superior temporal lobe, the right postcentral gyrus, the right superior parietal cortex, the right superior occipital cortex, and the right putamen, were significantly modulated by condition type. Second, for some areas, including the right superior parietal cortex, the right postcentral gyrus, the right superior occipital cortex, and the right putamen, brain activity was significantly greater in feigned memory impairment than answering randomly. Third, for the areas including the left prefrontal cortex and the right putamen, brain activity was significantly greater in feigned memory impairment than answering incorrectly. In contrast, for the left superior temporal lobe, brain activity was significantly greater in answering incorrectly than feigned memory impairment. The results suggest that neural correlates of feigned memory impairment are distinguishable from answering randomly and answering incorrectly in healthy subjects.     

THE MANY WORRIES OF MANY WORLDS

Theological engagement with quantum mechanics has been dominated by the Copenhagen interpretation, failing to reflect the fact that philosophers and physicists alike are increasingly moving away from the Copenhagen interpretation in favor of other approaches. One such approach, Hugh Everett's so-called Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI), is being taken increasingly seriously. As the MWI's credibility grows, it is imperative that metaphysicians, theologians, and philosophers of religion engage with its ideas and their implications. This article does just that, setting out some implications of Everettian Quantum Mechanics that are particularly relevant to theism. It argues that taking seriously the radical consequences of the Everett interpretation means facing at least three major worries for theism pertaining to personal identity, the problem of evil, and salvation. The article concludes by calling on theologians and philosophers of religion to address these worries, in order that these matters of religious significance remain both coherent and credible if the MWI turns out to be correct.     

Historically recontextualizing Sidman's Tactics: How behavior analysis avoided psychology's methodological Ouroboros

Psychology is undergoing major cultural changes methodologically, with efforts to redefine how psychologists analyze and report their data. Davidson (2018) argued that psychology's methodological crises stem from mechanical objectivity involving the adoption of an analytic tool as source of dependable knowledge. This has led to institutionalization, and eventually uncritical ritualistic use, such as happened with null hypothesis statistical testing. Davidson invoked the mythological symbol of the Ouroboros to represent the endless churning of statistical fads. Sidman (1960), in his Tactics of Scientific Research provided a shield from these problems in terms of the premium he placed on the experience, expertise, judgement, and decision-making of the scientist, that appear to be absent in psychology's ritualized processes.     

INTERPRETATION NEUTRALITY FOR QUANTUM THEOLOGY

Within contemporary scientific and science-adjacent communities, it is generally accepted that quantum physics is our best theory. For this reason, it is understandable—and laudable—that scholars interested in questions at the intersection of science and theology wish to meaningfully engage with this physics. Recent work in foundations of physics has, however, importantly altered the landscape of quantum theory; in this article, my goal is to introduce these advances, then make an argument within this new landscape that I hope will be useful for certain theological inquiries. Specifically, I shall argue from grounds of the physics itself that one may, with clear philosophical conscience, access the majority of quantum theory's tools, models, and explanations while maintaining an interpretation-neutral yet realist stance toward this physics.     

Epistemic Judgments are Insensitive to Probabilities

Multiple epistemological programs make use of intuitive judgments pertaining to an individual’s ability to gain knowledge from exclusively probabilistic/statistical information. This paper argues that these judgments likely form without deference to such information, instead being a function of the degree to which having knowledge is representative of an agent. Thus, these judgments fit the pattern of formation via a representativeness heuristic, like that famously described by Kahneman and Tversky to explain similar probabilistic judgments. Given this broad insensitivity to probabilistic/statistical information, it directly follows that these epistemic judgments are insensitive to a given agent’s epistemic status. From this, the paper concludes that, breaking with common epistemological practice, we cannot assume that such judgments are reliable.     

Tracking transitional probabilities and segmenting auditory sequences are dissociable processes in adults and neonates

Since speech is a continuous stream with no systematic boundaries between words, how do pre-verbal infants manage to discover words? A proposed solution is that they might use the transitional probability between adjacent syllables, which drops at word boundaries. Here, we tested the limits of this mechanism by increasing the size of the word-unit to four syllables, and its automaticity by testing asleep neonates. Using markers of statistical learning in neonates’ EEG, compared to adult behavioral performances in the same task, we confirmed that statistical learning is automatic enough to be efficient even in sleeping neonates. We also revealed that: (1) Successfully tracking transition probabilities (TP) in a sequence is not sufficient to segment it. (2) Prosodic cues, as subtle as subliminal pauses, enable to recover words segmenting capacities. (3) Adults’ and neonates’ capacities to segment streams seem remarkably similar despite the difference of maturation and expertise. Finally, we observed that learning increased the overall similarity of neural responses across infants during exposure to the stream, providing a novel neural marker to monitor learning. Thus, from birth, infants are equipped with adult-like tools, allowing them to extract small coherent word-like units from auditory streams, based on the combination of statistical analyses and auditory parsing cues.

Research Highlights

• Successfully tracking transitional probabilities in a sequence is not always sufficient to segment it.
• Word segmentation solely based on transitional probability is limited to bi- or tri-syllabic elements.
• Prosodic cues, as subtle as subliminal pauses, enable to recover chunking capacities in sleeping neonates and awake adults for quadriplets.

     

The Learning Signal in Perceptual Tuning of Speech: Bottom Up Versus Top-Down Information

Cognitive systems face a tension between stability and plasticity. The maintenance of long-term representations that reflect the global regularities of the environment is often at odds with pressure to flexibly adjust to short-term input regularities that may deviate from the norm. This tension is abundantly clear in speech communication when talkers with accents or dialects produce input that deviates from a listener's language community norms. Prior research demonstrates that when bottom-up acoustic information or top-down word knowledge is available to disambiguate speech input, there is short-term adaptive plasticity such that subsequent speech perception is shifted even in the absence of the disambiguating information. Although such effects are well-documented, it is not yet known whether bottom-up and top-down resolution of ambiguity may operate through common processes, or how these information sources may interact in guiding the adaptive plasticity of speech perception. The present study investigates the joint contributions of bottom-up information from the acoustic signal and top-down information from lexical knowledge in the adaptive plasticity of speech categorization according to short-term input regularities. The results implicate speech category activation, whether from top-down or bottom-up sources, in driving rapid adjustment of listeners' reliance on acoustic dimensions in speech categorization. Broadly, this pattern of perception is consistent with dynamic mapping of input to category representations that is flexibly tuned according to interactive processing accommodating both lexical knowledge and idiosyncrasies of the acoustic input.