Auditory Long term Memory: Repetition Priming of Voice Recognition

Two experiments examined repetition priming in the recognition of famous voices. In Experiment 1, reaction times for fame decisions to famous voice samples were shorter than in an unprimed condition, when voices were primed by a different voice sample of the same person having been presented in an earlier phase of the experiment. No effect of voice repetition was observed for non-famous voices. In Experiment 2, it was investigated whether this priming effect is voice-specific or whether it is related to post-perceptual processes in person recognition. Recognizing a famous voice was again primed by having earlier heard a different voice sample of that person. Although an earlier exposure to that person's name did not cause any priming, there was some indication of priming following an earlier exposure to that person's face. Finally, earlier exposure to the identical voice sample (as compared to a different voice sample from the same person) caused a considerable bias towards responding 'famous'-i.e. performance benefits for famous but costs for nonfamous voices. The findings suggestthat (1) repetition priming invoice recognition primarily involves the activation of perceptual representations of voices, and (2) it is important to determine the conditions in which priming causes bias effects that need to be disentangled from performance benefits.     

Zur Interpretation der strukturalistischen Auffassung über die Prüfbarkeit von Theorien

Struve has tried to refute my critic of the structuralist thesis that testing theories leads in an epistemological circle. But he misunderstands the thesis he wants to defend.     

THE FILE DRAWER EFFECT AND PUBLICATION RATES IN MENSTRUAL CYCLE RESEARCH

The file drawer problem refers to a publication bias for positive results, leading to studies which support the null hypothesis being relegated to the file drawer. The assumption is that researchers are unable to publish studies with nonsignificant findings. A survey of investigators studying the menstrual cycle showed this assumption to be unwarranted. Much of the research did not lend itself to a hypothesis-testing model. A more important contribution to the likelihood of publication was research productivity, and researchers whose first study was published were more likely to have continued their work.     

Actor or victim of aggression: Divergent perspectives—divergent evaluations

The present study investigated the general assumption of perspective-specific dissent between actor and victim in evaluating aggressive interactions. Four experimental designs were established to test the relation of evaluations between (a) actor versus victim when judging a single act, (b) initiator versus reactor when judging action and reaction, and (c) actor as well as recipient when judging own versus other's behaviour. Results of 2 × 2 ANOVAs supported the hypotheses showing a consistently more favourable evaluation of identical actions by actors versus recipients with respect to the dependent variable ‘appropriateness’. For the second dependent variable ‘aggressiveness’ differences were not significant.     

Tarskian and Kripkean truth

A theory of the transfinite Tarskian hierarchy of languages is outlined and compared to a notion of partial truth by Kripke. It is shown that the hierarchy can be embedded into Kripkes minimal fixed point model. From this results on the expressive power of both approaches are obtained.     

TO WHAT EXTENT DO UNIQUE PARTS INFLUENCE RECOGNITION ACROSS CHANGES IN VIEWPOINT?

Abstract— We investigated how varying the number of unique pans within an object influences recognition across changes in viewpoint The stimuli were shaded objects composed of five three-dimensional volumes tinted end to end with varying connection angles Of the five volumes, zero, one, three, or jive were qualitatively distinct (e g, brick vs cone), the rest being tubes Sequential-matching and naming tasks depth Three major results stand out First, regardless of the number of distinct parts, there was increasingly poorer recognition performance viewpoint change for objects with one unique part was less than that for the other objects Third, additional pans beyond a single unique part produced strong viewpoint dependency comparable to that ob representations encode both quantitative and qualitative features     

Tarski hierarchies

The general notions of object- and metalanguage are discussed and as a special case of this relation an arbitrary first order language with an infinite model is expanded by a predicate symbol T₀ which is interpreted as truth predicate for . Then the expanded language is again augmented by a new truth predicate T₁ for the whole language plus T₀. This process is iterated into the transfinite to obtain the Tarskian hierarchy of languages. It is shown that there are natural points for stopping this process. The sets which become definable in suitable hierarchies are investigated, so that the relevance of the Tarskian hierarchy to some subjects of philosophy of mathematics are clarified.It should be noticed that these terms object language and meta language have only a relative sense. If, for instance, we become interested in the notion of truth applying to sentences, not of our original object-language, but of our meta-language, the latter becomes automatically the object-language of our discussion; and in order to define truth for this language, we have to go to a new meta-language — so to speak, to a meta-language of a higher level. In this way we arrive at a whole hierarchy of languages.(Tarski, 1986, p. 674f)