MEANING AND FREQUENCY IN A BINOCULAR RIVALRY SITUATION

When a word perception task was studied under conditions of binocular rivalry, the meaningful one of two rivalling strings of letters was identified more often than the other. Differences in frequency of the trigrams in the Norwegian language had no effect.     

AUTONOMIC INDICES OF HABITUATION TO COMPLEX AND SIMPLE STIMULI

Skin conductance and heart rate were continuously recorded in 8 subjects repeatedly exposed to a perceptual-conflict test and to auditory signals. (1) Both complex and simple stimuli gave rise to a pronounced increase in skin conductance, the magnitude of response decreasing with number of repetitions. For both types of stimuli a linear relationship was obtained when GSR, measured as the change in log conductance, was plotted against the logarithm of the stimulus number. (2) Each presentation of the conflict test increased heart rate, magnitude of change decreasing approximately linearly with number of trials.     

GENERATION OF WORDS FROM STEREOSCOPICALLY PRESENTED NON-WORD STRINGS OF LETTERS

R ommetveit , R., B erkley , M. & B røgger , J. Generation of words from stereoscopically presented non-word strings of letters. Scand. J. Psychol. , 1968, 9, 150–156.—Subjects were exposed to stereoscopically presented pairs of non-word strings of letters (e.g. shar/shap). Instead of responding with either left- or right-eye image, they frequently reported seeing a word generated by combining the two images (e.g., 'sharp'). The way a particular pair of superimposed letters (such as r and p) will be processed, seemed to depend upon semantic and morphological aspects. As rivals for the same serial position in two different words, only one of them will be 'seen'. When appropriate as neighbors in the same word, both tend to be seen, and in the appropriate spatial arrangement.     

Moral Motivation Pluralism

Motivational externalists and internalists of various sorts disagree about the circumstances under which it is conceptually possible to have moral opinions but lack moral motivation. Typically, the evidence referred to are intuitions about whether people in certain scenarios who lack moral motivation count as having moral opinions. People’s intuitions about such scenarios diverge, however. I argue that the nature of this diversity is such that, for each of the internalist and externalist theses, there is a strong prima facie reason to reject it. That much might not be very controversial. But I argue further, that it also gives us a strong prima facie reason to reject all of these theses. This is possible since there is an overlooked alternative option to accepting any of them: moral motivation pluralism, the view that different internalist and externalist theses correctly accounts for different people’s concepts of moral opinions, respectively. I end the paper with a discussion of methodological issues relevant to the argument for moral motivation pluralism and of the consequences of this view for theories about the nature of moral opinions, such as cognitivism and non-cognitivism.     

Teaching Philosophy of Science to Science Students: An Alternative Approach

Studies in Philosophy and Education -     

STAGES IN CONCEPT FORMATION

Previous studies revealed a pre-functional stage of concept learning, in that the relevant stimulus attribute aquired perceptual distinctiveness at a stage of learning when subjects as yet were unable to sort instances into appropriate categories. This early stage of perceptual learning prior to behavioral manifestation could not be identified under the novel conditions introduced in the present experiment: sensory predifferentiation training and an extra request to verbalize the concept.     

The Skin Picking Impact Scale: Factor structure,validity and development of a short version

In the present study, we examined the psychometric properties of the Skin Picking Impact Scale (SPIS; Keuthen, Deckersbach, Wilhelm et al., 2001), a 10 item self‐report questionnaire designed to assess the psychosocial impact of skin picking disorder (SPD). Participants were 650 individuals who met criteria for SPD in an online survey. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated a unitary factor structure with high internal consistency (α = 0.94). Consequently, we constructed an abbreviated 4‐item version that retained good internal consistency (α = 0.87) and a robust factor structure. Both the short and the full versions demonstrated discriminant and convergent/concurrent validity. In conclusion, the findings indicate that both versions are psychometrically sound measures of SPD related psychosocial impact; however, some potential limitations of the full scale are discussed.     

Meaning,Context, and Control:Convergent trends and controversial issues in current Social‐scientific research on Human cognition and communication

A survey of a wide range of social‐scientific disciplines reveals a definite convergence of theoretical interest in human cognition and communication as situated, concerned, and embedded in social commitment. Recent contributions within situation semantics and cognitive science explicitly reject some of the constraints inherent in their shared philosophical heritage and prepare novel ground for dialogues between fields as far apart as formal semantics and ‘dialogical’ text theory. Issues such as purely cognitive versus motivational aspects of human situatedness, and the relationship between models of individual information processing, on the one hand, and hermeneutic‐dialectic assumptions about social and collective features of meaning and mind, on the other, are thus made topics of cross‐disciplinary discussions. These are some of the many problems in need of further clarification if we want to explore the possibility of bridging and/or transcending the gulf between analytic‐rationalist and hermeneutic‐dialectic contributions to our insight into human cognition and communication.