Relativism,realism, and subjective facts

Synthese - Relativists make room for the possibility of “faultless disagreement” by positing the existence of subjective propositions, i.e. propositions true from some points of view...     

Affective influences on within-person changes in work performance as mediated by attentional focus

A great deal of research has investigated the performance consequences of affective experiences at work, but the mediating mechanisms that explain these consequences remain understudied. In this study, we used experience sampling method to examine within-person relationships between changes in affective states and episodic performance, as mediated by attentional allocation and regulation. Our findings show that within-person changes in negative affective states have a concurrent association with episodic performance as mediated by reduced attentional allocation and regulation, while positive affective states are associated with better performance, as mediated by enhanced attentional allocation and regulation. Our results are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the performance and attentional consequences of affective states at work.     

Comorbidity of Pediatric Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder and Anxiety Disorders: Impact on Symptom Severity and Impairment

This study explored the impact of comorbidity on symptom severity and treatment outcome in a sample of 75 pediatric Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder (OCD) patients. Forty received cognitive–behavioral therapy (CBT). Overall, 56% had a comorbid disorder. Results revealed that youth with comorbid disorders (anxiety or otherwise) endorsed significantly more anxiety symptoms than youth with OCD only. Youth with comorbidities instead of or in addition to anxiety exhibited more severe OCD symptoms than youth with OCD alone or an anxiety-only comorbidity. Youth in the comorbidities instead of or in addition to anxiety group had the poorest CBT response relative to the other groups. These results suggest that relative to those with OCD alone or with an anxiety disorder comorbidity, youth with comorbidities instead of or in addition to anxiety have a differing clinical presentation (e.g., more severe symptoms) and worse psychotherapy outcome.

A corpus-based analysis of verb continuation frequencies for syntactic processing

In the experimental study of how much verb guidance occurs in parsing syntactic ambiguity, the preference of an ambiguously subcategorized verb for its continuations is a relevant factor in the choice of the stimuli and in the interpretation of the results. Many methods have been used to measure this bias, ranging from experimenter's intuitions to sentence completion studies. In this paper, I assume that an acceptable definition of frequency is the count of the occurrences in a corpus, and I provide some cooccurrence counts calculated on a set of verbs and their syntactic siblings in a subset of the Penn Treebank (Marcus, Santorini, & Marcinkiewicz, 1993). Second, I perform some correlations with sentence completion and sentence production studies, which show that the two data collection methods are not strongly correlated with the corpus counts. Finally, I analyze the stimuli of some experiments which have shown evidence both in favor of the garden path theory of sentence processing and the lexical guidance theory. I argue that all the stimuli were balanced, and that a minimal attachment effect is not a consequence of the overall NP-bias of the stimuli. Moreover, evidence from the relation between processing times and verb completions with declarative and interrogative complementizers is used to argue that the parser is sensitive to the lexical content of the complementizers.     

Social context shapes cognitive abilities: associative memories are modulated by fight outcome and social isolation in the crab Neohelice granulata

Animal Cognition - Cognitive abilities of an animal can be influenced by distinct social experiences. However, the extent of this modulation has not been addressed in different learning scenarios:...     

Quantification of Tactile Cueing for Enhanced Target Search Capacity

Soldiers on today's battlefield find themselves monitoring a host of displays in both vehicles and command centers, with personal-mounted displays looming in the near future. Such display proliferation makes the task of managing limited visual attention while searching for information extremely demanding and the potential for critical information loss due to visual demand overload. Cueing has traditionally provided a performance advantage in search tasks, with the current experiment exploring whether and how a specific tactile display format could guide visual attention. In particular, the use of the tactile cues decreased search response time by more than 30%. This was not a trade of speed for accuracy because the frequency of missed signals themselves was also reduced by approximately 70%, and false positives were suppressed by the addition of the tactile cue by over 50%. These findings represent useful foundational outcomes against which to compare other forms of sensory cueing.     

Associations between miscellaneous symptoms and symptom dimensions: an examination of pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in children and adults is a heterogeneous disorder associated with significant psychosocial impairment. Although factor analytic studies have identified symptom dimensions, these analyses do not capture the varied miscellaneous symptoms that fail to load on a specific dimension despite being functionally related. The present study sought to extend the findings of previous research in adults to a sample of youth with OCD (n=131). Logistic regression analyses were used to examine the predictive value of each of the four symptom factors (contamination symptoms, obsessions and checking, symmetry and ordering, and hoarding) to the miscellaneous OCD symptoms. The vast majority of miscellaneous symptoms (17 of the 18 symptoms) were associated with one or more symptoms factors (i.e., contamination symptoms, obsessions and checking, symmetry, and ordering). Hoarding was not related to any miscellaneous symptom. In addition to improving our understanding about the clinical presentation of pediatric OCD, findings also have important assessment (e.g., understanding which miscellaneous symptoms relate to certain dimensions) and treatment implications (e.g., hierarchy development).