The ability to sequence thoughts and actions is impaired in Parkinson’s disease. In PD, a distinct error pattern has been found in the offline performance of sequential working memory. This study examined how PD’s performance of sequential working memory unfolds over time using mouse tracking techniques. Non-demented patients with mild PD and healthy controls completed a computerized digit ordering task with a computer mouse. We measured response dynamics in terms of the initiation time, ordering time, movement time, and (...) area under the movement trajectory curve. This approach allowed us to distinguish between the cognitive processes related to sequence processing before the actual movement and the execution processes of the actual movement. PD patients showed longer initiation times, longer movement times, and more constrained movement trajectories than healthy controls. The initiation time and ordering time negatively correlated with the daily exposure to levodopa and D2/3 receptor agonists, respectively. The movement time positively correlated with the severity of motor symptoms. We demonstrated an altered temporal profile of sequential working memory in PD. Stimulating D1 and D2/3 receptors might speed up the maintenance and manipulation of sequences, respectively. (shrink)

Humans can pronounce a nonword. Some researchers have interpreted this behavior as requiring a sequential mechanism by which a grapheme-phoneme correspondence rule is applied to each grapheme in turn. However, several parallel-distributed processing models in English have simulated human nonword reading accuracy without a sequential mechanism. Interestingly, the Japanese psycholinguistic literature went partly in the same direction, but it has since concluded that a sequential parsing mechanism is required to reproduce human nonword reading accuracy. In this study, (...) by manipulating the list composition, we demonstrated that past psycholinguistic studies in Japanese have overestimated human nonword reading accuracy. When the more fairly reevaluated human performance was targeted, a newly implemented Japanese PDP model simulated the target accuracy as well as the error patterns. These findings suggest that PDP models are a more parsimonious way of explaining reading across various languages. (shrink)

We study human decision making in a simple forced‐choice task that manipulates the frequency and accuracy of available information. Empirically, we find that people make decisions consistent with the advice provided, but that their subjective confidence in their decisions shows 2 interesting properties. First, people's confidence does not depend solely on the accuracy of the advice. Rather, confidence seems to be influenced by both the frequency and accuracy of the advice. Second, people are less confident in their guessed decisions when (...) they have to make relatively more of them. Theoretically, we develop and evaluate a type of sequential sampling process model—known as a self‐regulating accumulator—that accounts for both decision making and confidence. The model captures the regularities in people's behavior with interpretable parameter values, and we show its ability to fit the data is not due to excessive model complexity. Using the model, we draw conclusions about some properties of human reasoning under uncertainty. (shrink)

The automation of many repetitive or dangerous human activities yields numerous advantages. In order to automate a physical task that requires a finite series of sequential steps, the translation of those steps in terms of a computational procedure is often required. Even apparently menial tasks like following a cooking recipe may involve complex operations that can’t be perfectly described in formal terms. Recently, several studies have explored the possibility to model cooking recipes as a computational procedure based on a (...) set of instructions. This vision is the foundation for the construction of robotics kitchen, as Moley. These kitchen robots have shown promising results. Moley, for instance, is the very first example of a new generation of bioinspired robotics, based on the reproduction of particular movement, cooking, through artificial arms and hands. It is entirely different from the current appliances present in our domestic domain because Moley is able to manipulate ingredients and interact with kitchen equipment in order to prepare a dish autonomously. Nonetheless, they have also shown several limitations. In particular, Moley is an entirely autonomous robot in a structured environment in which it knows precisely the object position and manipulates the ingredients based on a list of instructions and a training phase made by Machine Learning. In this contribution we contend that these limitations arise from an essential mismatch between computational procedures, as originally described by Turing in his seminal 1936 paper, and recipes. Computational procedures have been originally created to observe and modify formal symbols with formal operators. Thus, they are independent from time and they are ideally executed in a closed environment, in which the computer directly produces all the relevant changes required to produce the intended result. Recipes, instead, are followed in an open environment, in which, while time goes by, changes happen independently from the cook’s intervention: the cook puts the butter on the pan, starts the fire and then waits until the butter is melted. To operate effectively in the open environment a kitchen robot must couple computational procedures with sensors, e.g a sensor which provides a time signal. These sensors are de facto oracles for the procedures and yet are required to bridge the gap from the formal to the physical world. (shrink)

To explain social learning without invoking the cognitively complex concept of imitation, many learning mechanisms have been proposed. Borrowing an idea used routinely in cognitive psychology, we argue that most of these alternatives can be subsumed under a single process, priming, in which input increases the activation of stored internal representations. Imitation itself has generally been seen as a This has diverted much research towards the all-or-none question of whether an animal can imitate, with disappointingly inconclusive results. In the great (...) apes, however, voluntary, learned behaviour is organized hierarchically. This means that imitation can occur at various levels, of which we single out two clearly distinct ones: the a rather detailed and linear specification of sequential acts, and the a broader description of subroutine structure and the hierarchical layout of a behavioural Program level imitation is a high-level, constructive mechanism, adapted for the efficient learning of complex skills and thus not evident in the simple manipulations used to test for imitation in the laboratory. As examples, we describe the food-preparation techniques of wild mountain gorillas and the imitative behaviour of orangutans undergoing to the wild. Representing and manipulating relations between objects seems to be one basic building block in their hierarchical programs. There is evidence that great apes suffer from a stricter capacity limit than humans in the hierarchical depth of planning. We re-interpret some chimpanzee behaviour previously described as and suggest that all great apes may be able to imitate at the program level. Action level imitation is seldom observed in great ape skill learning, and may have a largely social role, even in humans. (shrink)

The adaptation-by-binding account and the arousal-biased competition model suggest that emotional arousal increases binding effects for transient links between stimuli and responses. Two highly-powered, pre-registered experiments tested whether transient stimulus-response bindings are stronger for high versus low arousing stimuli. Emotional words were presented in a sequential prime-probe design in which stimulus relation, response relation, and stimulus arousal were orthogonally manipulated. In Experiment 1 (N = 101), words with high and low arousal levels were presented individually in prime and probe (...) displays. In Experiment 2 (N = 170), a high arousing affective word was presented simultaneously with a neutral word during the prime display; in the subsequent probe display, either the arousing or the neutral word repeated or a different high versus low arousal word was shown. Data from both experiments did not demonstrate a modulation of SRBR effects by stimulus arousal and SRBR effects were of equal magnitude for word stimuli of high and low arousal levels. These null results are not in line with binding accounts that hypothesise a modulatory influence of emotional arousal on perception-action binding. (shrink)

The present study investigated the influence of emotional stimuli in the flanker task. In six experiments, separate influences of anticipating and reacting to valence-laden stimuli (affective pictures or facial expressions) on the flanker effect and its sequential modulation (also known as conflict adaptation) were examined. The results showed that there was little evidence that emotional stimuli influenced cognitive control when positive and negative stimuli appeared randomly during the flanker task. When positive and negative stimuli were separated between different participant (...) groups in order to exclude a possible contamination from the effect of one valence to that of another, the sequential modulation was reduced when valence-laden stimuli were anticipated or had been presented on a preceding trial, regardless of the valence of the stimuli. A similar pattern was also obtained with facial expressions but only for response accuracy and only after valence-laden stimuli were presented on a preceding trial. The influences of anticipating and reacting to emotional stimuli were only partially replicated in the final two experiments where the arousal and valence of affective pictures were manipulated orthogonally. The lack of consistent influences of emotional stimuli on the flanker effect challenges the existing theories that implicate affective contributions to cognitive control. (shrink)

As linguistic competence so clearly illustrates, processing sequences of events is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. For this reason perhaps, sequence learning behavior currently attracts considerable attention in both cognitive psychology and computational theory. In typical sequence learning situations, participants are asked to react to each element of sequentially structured visual sequences of events. An important issue in this context is to determine whether essentially associative processes are sufficient to understand human performance, or whether more powerful learning mechanisms are (...) necessary. To address this issue, we explore how well human participants and connectionist models are capable of learning sequential material that involves complex, disjoint, longdistance contingencies. We show that the popular Simple Recurrent Network model (Elman, 1990), which has otherwise been shown to account for a variety of empirical findings (Cleeremans, 1993), fails to account for human performance in several experimental situations meant to test the model’s specific predictions. In previous research (Cleeremans, 1993) briefly described in this paper, the structure of center-embedded sequential structures was manipulated to be strictly identical or probabilistically different as a function of the elements surrounding the embedding. While the SRN could only learn in the second case, human subjects were found to be insensitive to the manipulation. In the new experiment described in this paper, we tested the idea that performance benefits from “starting small effects” (Elman, 1993) by contrasting two conditions in which the training regimen was either incremental or not. Again, while the SRN is only capable of learning in the first case, human subjects were able to learn in both. We suggest an alternative model based on Maskara & Noetzel’s (1991) Auto-Associative Recurrent Network as a way to overcome the SRN model’s failure to account for the empirical findings.. (shrink)

In an unpublished note Reddy introduced an extended intuitionistic linear calculus, called LLMS (for Linear Logic Model of State), to model state manipulation via the notions of sequential composition and ‘regenerative values’. His calculus introduces the connective ‘before’ ▹ and an associated modality †, for the storage of objects sequentially reusable. Earlier and independently de Paiva introduced a (collection of) dialectica categorical models for (classical and intuitionistic) Linear Logic, the categories Dial2Set. These categories contain, apart from the structure needed (...) to model linear logic, an extra tensor product functor and an extra comonad structure corresponding to a modality related to the extra tensor product. It is surprising that these works arising from completely different motivations can be related in a meaningful way. In this article, following joint work with Corrêa and Haeusler, we first adapt Reddy's system LLMS providing a commutative version of the connective ‘before’ and its associated modality and then construct a dialectica category on Sets , which we show is a sound model for the modified version of Reddy's the system LLMSc. Moreover, following the work of Tucker, we provide another variant of the Dialectica categories with a non-commutative tensor and its associated modality, which models soundlyLLMS itself. We conclude with some speculation on future applications. (shrink)

A neurally plausible model of how the process of visually perceiving a letter in the context of a word is learned, and how such processing occurs in adults is proposed. The model consists of a collection of abstract letter feature detector neurons and their interconnections. The model also includes a learning rule that specifies how these interconnections evolve with experience. The interconnections between neurons can be interpreted as representing the spatially redundant, sequentially redundant, and transgraphemic information in letter string displays. (...) Anderson, Silverstein, Ritz, and Jones's (1977) “Brain‐State‐in‐a‐Box” (BSB) neural mechanism is then used to implement the proposed model. The resulting system makes explicit qualitative predictions using both letter recognition accuracy and reaction time as dependent measures. In particular, the model offers an integrated explanation of some experiments involving manipulations of orthographic regularity, masking, case alternations, and experience with words. The similarities and differences between the model and models proposed by Adams (1979) and McClelland and Rumelhart (1981) are also discussed. (shrink)

Ronan Reilly's connectionist simulation both strengthens and advances the theoretical model presented in my 1991 target article, “Language, Tools, and Brain: The Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Hierarchically Organized Sequential Behavior.” Reilly has tested the whole ontogenetic model with a single simulation study explicitly planned for this purpose. His methodology has established that the various components of the theoretical model imply and are compatible with one another. It has also indicated how learning can actualize a pre-established ontogenetic sequence of combining (...) lingusitic symbols and objects. His simulation suggests that the acquisition of linguistic speech may be facilitated by experience with object manipulation, but not vice versa. This hypothesis can and should be empirically tested through research on behavioral development in the two domains. Finally, Reilly has simulated brain architecture, as well as neural learning. His simulation therefore shows how the development of language and object manipulation can result from an interaction between preprogrammed neural architecture (analogous to network architecture) and experience (analogous to the network's training cycles). (shrink)

In three studies, we examined the relationship between implicit negotiation beliefs, moral disengagement, and a negotiator’s ethical attitudes and behavior. Study 1 found correlations between an entity theory that negotiation skills are fixed rather than malleable, moral disengagement, and appropriateness of marginally ethical negotiation tactics. Mediation analysis supported a model in which moral disengagement facilitated the relationship between entity theory and support for unethical tactics. Study 2 provided additional support for the mediation model in a sample of MBA students, whereby (...) predispositions to morally disengage mediated the effect of dispositional entity beliefs on unethical behavior in a negotiation exercise. In study 3, we manipulated implicit beliefs prior to a negotiation simulation and found that entity beliefs predict deception through two sequential mediators, extreme opening bids and state moral disengagement. (shrink)

This paper investigates how talk and practical action are coordinated during one type of activity involving professional communication: the service-­assessment sequence in hair salons. During this activity, a practical inspection of the haircut must be coupled with sequentially produced verbal acts. Our analysis of four examples reveals that there is no fixed relationship between the organization of talk and practical action. Instead, people manipulate this relationship on a moment-by-moment basis, often coordinating the two into a single, integral package, or relying (...) on one stream of action to achieve progress in the other. These findings imply that some multimodal activities that are brought into alignment may have their own, separate and independent procedural logic and sequencing patterns and that these can be brought into play to create or deal with constraints in each other. (shrink)

Current artificial neural network or connectionist models of music cognition embody feature-extraction and feature-weighting principles. This paper reports two experiments which seek evidence for similar processes mediating recognition of short musical compositions by musically trained and untrained listeners. The experiments are cast within a pattern recognition framework based on the vision-audition analogue wherein music is considered an auditory pattern consisting of local and global features. Local features such as inter-note interval, and global features such as melodic contour, are derived from (...) a two-dimensional matrix in which music is represented as a series of frequencies plotted over time.Manipulation of inter-note interval affected accuracy and reaction time measures in a discrimination task, whereas the same variables were affected by manipulation of melodic contour in a classification task. Musical training is thought of as a form of practice in musical pattern recognition and, as predicted, accuracy and reaction time measures of musically trained subjects were significantly better than those of untrained subjects. Given the evidence for feature-extraction and weighting processes in music recognition tasks, two connectionist models are discussed. The first is a single-layer perceptron which has been trained to discriminate between compositions according to inter-note interval. A second network, using the back-propagation algorithm and sequential input of patterns, is also discussed. (shrink)

The widely discussed "discursive dilemma" shows that majority voting in a group of individuals on logically connected propositions may produce irrational collective judgments. We generalize majority voting by considering quota rules, which accept each proposition if and only if the number of individuals accepting it exceeds a given threshold, where different thresholds may be used for different propositions. After characterizing quota rules, we prove necessary and sufficient conditions on the required thresholds for various collective rationality requirements. We also consider (...) class='Hi'>sequential quota rules, which ensure collective rationality by adjudicating propositions sequentially and letting earlier judgments constrain later ones. Sequential rules may be path-dependent and strategically manipulable. We characterize path-independence and prove its essential equivalence to strategy-proofness. Our results shed light on the rationality of simple-, super-, and sub-majoritarian decision-making. (shrink)

Our daily lives unfold continuously, yet our memories are organised into distinct events, situated in a specific context of space and time, and chunked when this context changes (at event boundaries). Previous research showed that this process, termed event segmentation, enhances object-context binding but impairs temporal order memory. Physiologically, peaks in pupil dilation index event segmentation, similar to emotion-induced bursts of autonomic arousal. Emotional arousal also modulates object-context binding and temporal order memory. Yet, these two critical factors have not been (...) systematically studied together. To address this gap, we ran a behavioural experiment using a paradigm validated to study event segmentation and extended it with emotion manipulation. During encoding, we sequentially presented greyscale objects embedded in coloured frames (colour changes defining events), with a neutral or aversive sound. During retrieval, we tested participants’ memory of temporal order memory and object-colour binding. We found opposite effects of emotion and event segmentation on episodic memory. While event segmentation enhanced object-context binding, emotion impaired it. On the contrary, event segmentation impaired temporal order memory, but emotion enhanced it. These findings increase our understanding of episodic memory organisation in laboratory settings, and potentially in real life with perceptual changes and emotion fluctuations constantly interacting. (shrink)

The increased interactivity and connectivity of computational devices along with the spreading of computational tools and computational thinking across the fields, has changed our understanding of the nature of computing. In the course of this development computing models have been extended from the initial abstract symbol manipulating mechanisms of stand-alone, discrete sequential machines, to the models of natural computing in the physical world, generally concurrent asynchronous processes capable of modelling living systems, their informational structures and dynamics on both symbolic (...) and sub-symbolic information processing levels. Present account of models of computation highlights several topics of importance for the development of new understanding of computing and its role: natural computation and the relationship between the model and physical implementation, interactivity as fundamental for computational modelling of concurrent information processing systems such as living organisms and their networks, and the new developments in logic needed to support this generalized framework. Computing understood as information processing is closely related to natural sciences; it helps us recognize connections between sciences, and provides a unified approach for modeling and simulating of both living and non-living systems. (shrink)

In his seminal Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault aims at outlining the historical course that led to the promulgation and consolidation of the institution of imprisonment as a means of punishment as well as narrating how the corresponding human type, i.e. the contemporary disciplined subject, has been shaped. Obviously, the disciplined subject gradually took the place of the tormented subject. Consequently, this study aims at describing the sequential mutations of the imposed punishment as it (...) progressively shifted from the spectacular slaughtering of the body to the strictly scientific manipulation of the non-material dimension of the human being. The reformation of the punitive practices “constructs” a docile body. It must be noticed, however, that this body is not necessarily guilty, since the disciplinary schemes concern everybody, even the most innocent sides of the everyday life as for example the hospital, the school or the barracks. Additionally, discipline is imposed through the division of the space, what Foucault calls the “art of allocation”, so that every working person is easily seen and supervised by the eye of the authority, while the disciplined subject is being forged gradually through the sense of responsibility before the flowing time. Foucault highlights the “political technology of the body”, that is its usurpation by the authorities, who aim at imposing to it adictated activity that produces palpable results in a binding frame of time. Although selective and brief, the present account of the punitive concepts of the three last centuries clarifies the fact that the authoritarian strategies are indissolubly interwoven with the different connotations of the human body, through the use of which they subdue human beings. (shrink)

In introductory chemistry courses, should students be encouraged to solve problems by reasoning based on conceptual understanding or by applying memorized facts and algorithms? Cognitive scientists have recently studied this issue with the assistance of new technologies. In the current consensus model for cognition, during problem solving the brain relies on “working memory” to sequentially process small elements of knowledge. Working memory is able to hold and manipulate virtually all elements that can be recalled “with automaticity” from long-term memory, but (...) very few elements that are not recallable. As one consequence, students can reliably solve well-structured science problems only if most of the facts and algorithms needed to solve the problem have previously been well memorized. To achieve automaticity in recall, facts and procedures must be committed to memory and then tagged with associations to other knowledge in the brain’s conceptual frameworks. Accommodation can be assisted by guided inquiry. Articles citing methods that can assist students in the development of automaticity are listed, and implications for chemistry instruction are discussed. (shrink)

A structure which generalizes formulas by including substitution terms is used to represent proofs in classical logic. These structures, called expansion trees, can be most easily understood as describing a tautologous substitution instance of a theorem. They also provide a computationally useful representation of classical proofs as first-class values. As values they are compact and can easily be manipulated and transformed. For example, we present an explicit transformations between expansion tree proofs and cut-free sequential proofs. A theorem prover which (...) represents proofs using expansion trees can use this transformation to present its proofs in more human-readable form. Also a very simple computation on expansion trees can transform them into Craig-style linear reasoning and into interpolants when they exist. We have chosen a sublogic of the Simple Theory of Types for our classical logic because it elegantly represents substitutions at all finite types through the use of the typed -calculus. Since all the proof-theoretic results we shall study depend heavily on properties of substitutions, using this logic has allowed us to strengthen and extend prior results: we are able to prove a strengthen form of the firstorder interpolation theorem as well as provide a correct description of Skolem functions and the Herbrand Universe. The latter are not straightforward generalization of their first-order definitions. (shrink)

Modern computing is generally taken to consist primarily of symbol manipulation. But symbols are abstract, and computers are physical. How can a physical device manipulate abstract symbols? Neither Church nor Turing considered this question. My answer is that the bit, as a hardware-implemented abstract data type, serves as a bridge between materiality and abstraction. Computing also relies on three other primitive—but more straightforward—abstractions: Sequentiality, State, and Transition. These physically-implemented abstractions define the borderline between hardware and software and between physicality and (...) abstraction. At a deeper level, asking how a physical device can interact with abstract symbols is the wrong question. The relationship between symbols and physical devices begins with the realization that human beings already know what it means to manipulate symbols. We build and program computers to do what we understand to be symbol manipulation. To understand what that means, consider a light switch. A light switch doesn’t turn a light on or off. Those are abstractions. Light switches don’t operate with abstractions. We build light switches, so that when flipped, the world is changed in such a way that we understand the light to be on or off. Similarly, we build computers to perform operations that we understand as manipulating symbols. (shrink)

Are you in control of your own mind? Are you currently awake or dreaming? Does the narrative of perceived reality necessarily follow a linear, sequential path? To what extent do other people play roles in our perceived realities distinct from the environments in which we exist and interact? How deeply can we manipulate the mind of another person? What ethical issues does such manipulation raise? These questions, which have both deep philosophical and urgent practical significance, are all raised by (...) the recent film Inception . In this review, we develop these questions both as they appear in the film and as relate to the world we perceive as being real. Inception is a very dense film, raising more major ideas than we can discuss here. For example, we do not discuss the resilience of ideas within our minds or the power of the subconscious; the latter topic is among those covered in a separate review . In our review, we will give away much of the plot , but also offer topics for consideration that deepen the viewing experience. (shrink)

L(ow) tone in Mandarin Chinese causes both downstep and post-low-bouncing. Downstep refers to the lowering of a H(igh) tone after a L tone, which is usually measured by comparing the H tones in a “H…HLH…H” sentence with a “H…HHH…H” sentence (cross-comparison), investigating whether downstep sets a new pitch register for the scaling of subsequent tones. Post-low-bouncing refers to the raising of a H tone after a focused L tone. The current study investigates how downstep and post-low-bouncing interact with focus and (...) phrasing in Mandarin Chinese. In the experiment, we systematically manipulated (a) the tonal environment by embedding two syllables with either LH or HH tone (syllable X and Y) sentence-medially in the same carrier sentences containing only H tones; (b) boundary strength between X and Y by introducing either a syllable boundary or a phonological phrase boundary; and (c) information structure by either placing a contrastive focus in the HL/HH word (XF), syllable Y (YF), or the sentence-final word (ZF). A wide-focus condition served as the baseline. With systematic control of focus and boundary strength around the L tone, the current study shows that the downstep effect in Mandarin is quite robust, lasting for 3–5 H tones after the L tone, but eventually levelling back again to the register reference line of a H tone. The way how focus and phrasing interact with the downstep effect is unexpected. Firstly, sentence-final focus has no anticipatory effect on shortening the downstep effect; instead, it makes the downstep effect lasts longer as compared to the wide focus condition. Secondly, the downstep effect still shows when the H tone after the L tone is on-focus (YF), in a weaker manner than the wide focus condition, and is overridden by the post-focus-compression. Thirdly, the downstep effect gets greater when the boundary after the L tone is stronger, because the L tone is longer and more likely to be creaky. We further analyzed downstep by measuring the F0 drop between the two H tones surrounding the L tone (sequential-comparison). Comparing it with F0 drop in all-H sentences (i.e., declination), it showed that the downstep effect was much greater and more robust than declination. However, creaky voice in the L tone was not the direct cause of downstep. At last, when the L tone was under focus (XF), it caused a post-low-bouncing effect, which is weakened by a phonological phrase boundary. Altogether, the results showed that although intonation is largely controlled by informative functions, the physical-articulatory controls are relatively persistent, varying within the pitch range of 2.5 semitones. Downstep and post-low-bouncing in Mandarin Chinese thus seem to be mainly due to physical-articulatory movement on varying pitch, with the gradual tonal F0 change meeting the requirement of smooth transition across syllables, and avoiding confusion in informative F0 control. (shrink)

The experience of embodiment may be studied using the rubber hand illusion. Little is known about the cognitive mechanism that elicits the feeling of embodiment. In previous models of the rubber hand illusion, bodily signals are processed sequentially. Such models cannot explain some more recent findings. Carruthers (2013) proposed a multidimensional model of embodiment, in which the processing of embodiment is understood in terms of conceptual hand space. Visual features of hands are represented along several dimensions. The rubber hand illusion (...) is then explained as the erroneous matching of the online representation of the artificial hand to the stored prototype in a space defined by those dimensions. We conducted the first experimental tests to investigate the multidimensional conceptual space account. First, participants performed a series of odd-one-out judgments for triads of hand images (including their own hand) and we then employed multidimensional scaling analyses. We found that a multidimensional model of perceived hand similarity could be fitted to our data. Second, we tested if a multisensory bodily signal manipulation (the rubber hand illusion) influences the position of the viewed artificial hand in hand space. We employed synchronous and asynchronous stroking and found that in the synchronous condition, which elicits the rubber hand illusion, compared to the asynchronous condition, which does not, the artificial hand was closer to the center of hand space; that is, to a prototype hand. We discuss these findings in the context of the Carruthers (2013) conceptual space model as well as other rubber hand illusion models. (shrink)

In this commentary, I consider variability as an ordinary and irremediable feature related to the indexicality not only of transcripts but first of all of transcribing. In this sense, it is not just a characteristic of transcripts as texts, which can be assessed in a kind of philological comparison comparing formal features of autonomous and fixed textual objects, but a characteristic of transcribing as a situated practice. Practices are irremediably indexical, reflexively tied to the context of their production and to (...) the practical purposes of their accomplishment. Thus, a transcript is an evolving flexible object; it changes as the transcriber engages in listening and looking again at the tape, endlessly checking, revising, reformatting it. Transcribing relies in a fundamental way not only on the possibility of fixing the relevant details in a complex multilayered representation but also on the possibility of manipulating them, playing them again and again, at different paces, positions, fragments, while transcribing their finely tuned coordination, their synchronization, the fine articulation between different projections and sequential implicativenesses. These manipulations are one of the ways in which transcribing is accomplished as a situated practice. (shrink)

Patients’ beliefs about the effectiveness of their treatments are key to the success of any intervention. However, since these beliefs are usually formed by sequentially accumulating evidence in the form of the covariation between the treatment use and the symptoms, it is not always easy to detect when a treatment is actually working. In Experiments 1 and 2, we presented participants with a contingency learning task in which a fictitious treatment was actually effective to reduce the symptoms of fictitious patients. (...) However, the base-rate of the symptoms was manipulated so that, for half of participants, the symptoms were very frequent before the treatment, whereas for the rest of participants, the symptoms were less frequently observed. Although the treatment was equally effective in all cases according to the objective contingency between the treatment and healings, the participants’ beliefs on the effectiveness of the treatment were influenced by the base-rate of the symptoms, so that those who observed frequent symptoms before the treatment tended to produce lower judgments of effectiveness. Experiment 3 showed that participants were probably basing their judgments on an estimate of effectiveness relative to the symptom base-rate, rather than on contingency in absolute terms. Data, materials, and R scripts to reproduce the figures are publicly available at the Open Science Framework. (shrink)

This article explores the temporal organization and manipulation of time in the production and presentation of news reports. Time is often cited as one of the most central organizing concepts of news production; indeed one of the major features of news reporting is the breaking of stories and the reporting of events `as they happen'. However, whilst much emphasis is placed upon time within media production, much of this pertains to the reporting of past and present events rather than the (...) reporting of the future. This article explores the future within news reporting through an examination of sequential events leading up to a main scheduled newsworthy event: the execution of Timothy McVeigh. It analyses how the production of `news' utilizes the future by relying upon prediction and speculation about what will happen and examines: how news can be seen to depend to a large degree on uncertainty for its value; the use of time frames within media reporting; and the way time is manipulated in the service of the recency and immediacy of news reporting. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 284-303 [Access article in PDF] Accidental Art:Tolstoy's Poetics of Unintentionality Michael A. Denner I ART'S ABILITY TO INFECT another with an emotion, the concept that has come to be probably the most readily identified catchphrase in What Is Art? (though it crops up in his earlier writings on art), derives from L. N. Tolstoy's dynamic identity claim about art: we know an artist has (...) created a genuine work of art when he "hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them." 1 "What is art?" is then a taxonomical question, and, according to Tolstoy, art is identifiable from non-art not by some set of external characteristics—the way, say, Aristotle categorized animals in his natural history—rather art is recognizable by its function, by what it does. In this sense art is like a tool: A given thing is art because it performs a certain task, much as one might claim a screwdriver is anything that sets and removes screws, regardless of its external characteristics. Tolstoy, in fact, repeatedly refers to art as "orudie," "a tool," or even "a weapon."It is worth noting from the outset that this metaphor of contagiousness is one of sublimated violence. For its passive "perceiver" (Tolstoy's characteristic term for the consumer of art), art amounts to irresistible, surreptitious emotional manipulation by an external entity. Tolstoy is ever attentive to the underlying meanings of the words he chooses, and I think he means to emphasize the latent, etymological meaning of the zarazit', to infect, the root of which is razit', to strike, a military term that likely resonated with Tolstoy, a war veteran. 2 Etymological arguments aside, Tolstoy makes explicit the psychological violation that goes hand-in-hand [End Page 284] with the experience of a work of art in a diary entry from a period of work on an earlier variant of What Is Art?: "One must hone the artistic work so that it penetrates. To hone a work means to make it perfect artistically, in which case it will pierce through the indifference...." 3 In an earlier version of the essay, Tolstoy offers "hypnotism" as a synonym for infection (p. 53).With its ability to "penetrate" through indifference and colonize, willy-nilly, the other, art accomplishes directly and immediately what no amount of rational argument could accomplish: "Art is differentiated from the activity of rational activity, which demands preparation and a certain sequence of knowledge (so that one cannot learn trigonometry before knowing geometry), by the fact that it acts on people independently of their state of development and education, that the charm of a picture, of sounds, or of forms, infects any man whatever his plane of development" (p. 178).The effect of art does not depend on some graduated, sequential process as it does for rational activity: art's infectiousness is immediate and irresistible. According to What Is Art?, the summum bonum of art's infectiousness, its best use, but notably not its only, is bringing about the Kingdom of God by effecting a change in the psychology of all the individuals who experience it. "Religious art," Tolstoy's supreme category of art, surmounts the (ultimately illusory for Tolstoy) individuality of the perceiver by inducing in him or her an emotional union with the artist and all others who have experienced the work of art, thereby inducting all perceivers into the universal collective of humankind: "In this freeing of our personality from its separation from other people, from its isolation, in this uniting of personality with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art" (p. 228). Art is a sacrament and the artist a priest of sorts.It is often said, even by those who have read the work, that Tolstoy "rejected" art in the last decades of his life, and What Is Art? is often cited as evidence. Granted, much of the book excoriates much of the art of the ages, but one must not... (shrink)

Cognitive control enables people to adjust their thoughts and actions according to the current task demands. Response inhibition and response adjustment are two key aspects of cognitive control. Here, we examined how the implicit processing of emotional information influences these two functions with the help of the double-step saccade task. Each trial had either a single target or two sequential targets. Upon a single target onset, participants were required to make a quick saccade, but upon two target onsets, participants (...) were instructed to inhibit their initial saccades and redirect their gaze to the second target. In three experiments, we manipulated the emotional information of the first and second targets. We found that irrelevant emotional information of the first target impaired response inhibition compared to non-emotional information (geometric shapes) of the first target. When non-emotional information (geometric shape) came as the first target, irrelevant angry emotional faces as the second target interfered with both response inhibition and response adjustment compared to irrelevant happy and neutral faces. We explain these results with previous findings that processing faces with irrelevant angry facial expressions take up many attentional resources, leaving fewer resources available for ongoing activities such as response inhibition and response adjustment. (shrink)

Punishment is fundamental to the evolution of cooperative norms in teams, organizations, and societies. Based on findings that people are faster when punishing others (relative to when withholding punishment), dual-process theories of punishment assert that humans have an intuitive tendency to punish, which requires effortful deliberation to overcome. Here, we propose an alternative single-process theory that models punishment decisions as a sequential sampling process. We provide supporting evidence for this theory using a public goods game experiment that experimentally manipulates (...) the cost–benefit tradeoff across the game. We show that people are not systematically faster when punishing (versus withholding) across tradeoffs. We also find an inverted-U-shaped relationship between response times and the strength of preferences for punishing, and a negative association between punishment rates and the relative speed of punishment across individuals. Further computational analysis using the drift–diffusion model (DDM) reveals that, on average, people exhibit a pre-disposition to withhold punishment. Our study provides a unified single-process framework for studying the micro-foundations of punishment and integrating process measures to better describe and predict behavior. (shrink)

The paper builds on both a simply typed term system ${\cal PR}^\omega$ and a computation model on Scott domains via so-called parallel typed while programs (PTWP). The former provides a notion of partial primitive recursive functional on Scott domains $D_\rho$ supporting a suitable concept of parallelism. Computability on Scott domains seems to entail that Kleene's schema of higher type simultaneous course-of-values recursion (scvr) is not reducible to partial primitive recursion. So extensions ${\cal PR}^{\omega e}$ and PTWP $^e$ are studied that (...) are closed under scvr. The twist are certain type 1 Gödel recursors ${\cal R}_k$ for simultaneous partial primitive recursion. Formally, ${\cal R}_k\vec{g}\vec{H}xi$ denotes a function $f_i \in D_{\iota\to\iota}$ , however, ${\cal R}_k$ is modelled such that $f_i$ is finite, or in other words, a partial sequence. As for PTWP $^e$ , the concept of type $\iota\to\iota$ writable variables is introduced, providing the possibility of creating and manipulating partial sequences. It is shown that the PTWP $^e$ -computable functionals coincide with those definable in ${\cal PR}^{\omega e}$ plus a constant for sequential minimisation. In particular, the functionals definable in ${\cal PR}^{\omega e}$ denoted ${\cal R}^{\omega e}$ can be characterised by a subclass of PTWP $^e$ -computable functionals denoted ${\rm PPR}^{\omega e}$ . Moreover, hierarchies of strictly increasing classes ${\cal R}^{\omega e}_n$ in the style of Heinermann and complexity classes ${\rm PPR}^{\omega e}_n$ are introduced such that $\forall n\ge 0. {\cal R}^{\omega e}_n ={\rm PPR}^{\omega e}_n$ . These results extend those for ${\cal PR}^\omega$ and PTWP [Nig94]. Finally, scvr is employed to define for each type $\sigma$ the enumeration functional $E^\sigma$ of all finite elements of $D_\sigma$. (shrink)

In two H215O PET scan experiments, we investigated the cerebral correlates of explicit and implicit knowledge in a serial reaction time (SRT) task. To do so, we used a novel application of the Process Dissociation Procedure, a behavioral paradigm that makes it possible to separately assess conscious and unconscious contributions to performance during a subsequent sequence generation task. To manipulate the extent to which the repeating sequential pattern was learned explicitly, we varied the pace of the choice reaction time (...) task—a variable that is known to have differential effects on the extent to which sensitivity to sequence structure involves implicit or explicit knowledge. Results showed that activity in the striatum subtends the implicit component of performance during recollection of a learned sequence, whereas the anterior cingulate/mesial prefrontal cortex (ACC/MPFC) supports the explicit component. Most importantly, we found that the ACC/MPFC exerts control on the activity of the striatum during retrieval of the sequence after explicit learning, whereas the activity of these regions is uncoupled when learning had been essentially implicit. These data suggest that implicit learning processes can be successfully controlled by conscious knowledge when learning is essentially explicit. They also supply further evidence for a partial dissociation between the neural substrates supporting conscious and nonconscious components of performance during recollection of a learned sequence. (shrink)

How do people make difficult decisions in situations involving substantial risk and uncertainty? In this study, we presented a difficult medical decision to three expert physicians in a combined “thinking aloud” and “cross examination” experiment. Verbatim transcripts were analyzed using script analysis to observe the process of constructing and making the decision, and using referring phrase analysis to determine the representation of knowledge of likelihoods. These analyses are compared with a formal decision analysis of the same problem to highlight similarities (...) and differences. The process of making the decision resembles an incremental, sequential‐refinement planning algorithm, where a complex decision is broken into a sequence of choices to be made with a simplified description of the alternatives. This strategy results in certain kinds of relevant information being underweighted in the final decision. Knowledge of likelihood appears to be represented as symbolic descriptions capturing categorical and ordinal relations with “landrhark” likelihoods, only some of which are described numerically. Numerical probabilities, capable of being combined and compared arithmetically, were not observed. These observations suggest an explanation for the heuristics and biases in human decision making under uncertainty in terms of the processes that manipulate symbolic descriptions of likelihoods and construct plans of action for situations involving risk and uncertainty. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato’s Second Republic: An Essay on the Laws by André LaksSusan Sauvé MeyerLAKS, André. Plato’s Second Republic: An Essay on the Laws. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2022. x + 278 pp. Cloth, $35.00When the unnamed Athenian of Plato’s Laws specifies the constitution and law code for the (fictional) city of Magnesia, he retreats from some of the more notorious principles that structure the ideal city in the (...) Republic, most notably the prohibition against private property and private families for the city’s rulers and the explicit mandate that the rulers be philosophers. Magnesia will be governed by its property-owning citizens in a constitutional regime where law is the supreme political authority. Both [End Page 355] retreats are marked by the Athenian as making Magnesia “second best” in relation to the ideal.One of Laks’s striking theses is that the ideal from which the Laws’s second-best city falls short is not simply that of the Republic. Within the Laws itself, he argues, the Athenian articulates a “legislative utopia” and a constitutional ideal that are only imperfectly realized in the city identified as “second.” The constitutional ideal is articulated in book 3 in the mandate that a constitution achieve a mean (meson) between democracy and monarchy, while the legislative ideal underwrites the mandate in book 4 that laws should have persuasive preludes.While the constitutional “mean” mandated in book 3 is often characterized as “the mixed constitution,” Laks argues that what is mandated is not a mixture of monarchical and democratic institutions, but rather a synthesis of democracy and monarchy, with each institution implementing both democratic and monarchical principles. Laks calls such a mean a “middle.” If the mandated constitutional “middle” were fully achieved, he claims, democratic equality would be synthesized with the inequality of monarchy and thereby transformed from arithmetical into proportional equality. Similarly, democratic freedom would be synthesized with submission to authority, and transformed from negative freedom from authority into the positive freedom of rationality. Laks proposes that the freedom to emerge from this “metamorphosis” is the “voluntary servitude to the laws” lauded in book 3. While he acknowledges that Plato nowhere identifies such servitude to law as freedom, Laks locates that conception on the horizon of the conceptual metamorphosis of freedom that he finds in the Laws.Neither synthesis—of equality or of freedom—is perfectly achieved in the city whose constitution and law code are specified in the Laws, according to Laks; this is the burden of his remark that the constitution of Magnesia is “a mixture (sit venia verbo) of a mix and a middle.” A residue of unmitigated arithmetical equality remains in the constitution specified in book 6 to the extent that it includes a paradigmatically democratic procedure, the lottery, among the otherwise meritocratic procedures for appointing citizens to public office. A residue of despotism remains in the law code of Magnesia to the extent that the persuasive preludes to its statutes employ the manipulative rhetoric of praise and blame rather than philosophical arguments that display the rational grounding of the law in divine reason.Both retreats from the ideal are necessitated, on Laks’s interpretation, by the imperfect rationality of human beings. Not every person can learn to appreciate the superiority of proportional to arithmetical equality, or the perfect rationality of the laws’ prescriptions. In a “legislative utopia” citizens will obey the law because they appreciate its rational grounding, but that ideal is not fully achievable in a community of human beings. However rational the laws’ prescriptions may be, citizens’ obedience must be secured by nonrational means as well—hence the Athenian’s characterization of the politeia of the Laws as a “tragedy” (817b). [End Page 356]Laks’s exposition of these (and other) themes over the course of the volume is cumulative rather than sequential, diffuse rather than regimented, and deliberately sensitive to the literary features of Plato’s text and the ways in which its message may be allusive, indirect, or equivocal. What emerges from Laks’s learned engagement with the text is an interpretation that is “suggested” (an oft used phrase in the volume) rather than mandated by... (shrink)

Although requests constitute a type of action that have been widely discussed within conversation analysis-oriented work, they have only recently begun to be explored in relation to the situated and multimodal dimensions in which they occur. The contribution of this paper resides in the integration of bodily-visual conduct (gaze and facial expression, gesture and locomotion, object manipulation) into a more grammatical account of requesting. Drawing on video recordings collected in two different hair salons located in the French-speaking part of Switzerland (...) and in France (23 h in total), this paper analyzes clients’ negative requests by exploring how they interface with the participants’ embodied conducts. Contrary to what the literature describes for positively formulated requests, with negative requests clients challenge an expectable next action (or ongoing action) by the hairdresser. One linguistic format constitutes the focus of this article, roughly glossable as ‘You don’t do [action X] too much (huh)’. Our analysis of a consistent collection of such formatted turns will show that clients present them (and hairdressers tend to treat them) in different ways, depending on how they relate to embodied conduct: When these turns are used by the client as instructions, they are accompanied by manipulations of the client’s own hair and tend to occur toward the initial phase of the encounter, at a stage when hairdressers and clients collaboratively negotiate the service in prospect. When uttered as directives, these turns are not accompanied by any touching practices from the client and are typically observable in subsequent phases of the encounter, making relevant an immediate linguistic or/and bodily response from the professional, as shown by the client who is actively pursuing mutual gaze with him/her. Therefore, an action cannot be distinguished from another on the basis of the turn format alone: Its sequential placement and the participants’ co-occurring embodied conduct contribute to its situated and shared understanding. By analyzing the clients’ use of a specific linguistic format conjointly with the deployment of specific embodied resources, this study will advance our understanding of how verbal resources and embodiment operate in concert with each other in the formation and understanding of actions, thereby feeding into new areas of research on the grammar-body interface. (shrink)

In so-called garden-path jokes, an initial semantic representation is violated, and semantic revision reestablishes a coherent representation. 48 jokes were manipulated in three conditions: (i) a coherent ending, (ii) a joke ending, and (iii) a discourse-incoherent ending. A reading times study ( N = 24) and three studies with recordings of ERP and pupil changes ( N = 21, 24, and 24, respectively) supported the hypothesized cognitive processes. Jokes showed increased reading times of the final word compared to coherent endings. (...) ERP data mainly indicated semantic integration difficulties (N400). Larger pupil diameters to joke endings presumably reflect emotional responses. ERP evidence for increased discourse processing efforts and emotional responses, as assumed to be reflected in modulations of the late left anterior negativity (LLAN) and in an enhanced late frontal positivity (fP600), respectively, remains however incomplete. Processing of incoherent endings was also accompanied by increased reading times, a stronger and sustained N400, and context-sensitive P600 effects. Together, these findings provide evidence for a sequential, non-monotonic, and incremental discourse comprehension of garden-path jokes. (shrink)

This article is devoted to the analysis of arguments from empirical science against free will. Its main purpose is to reveal their deep anti-naturalism. This anti-naturalism lies in the use of a concept of free will that cannot be the subject of naturalistic consideration, as well as in the various explanatory and ontological paradoxes that arguments from empirical science lead in case when someone is trying to generalize the explanatory principles underlying them. At the beginning of the article, the author (...) gives a general notion of the free will problem, a working definition of naturalism and the place of arguments from empirical science in discussions about free will. To achieve the main goal of the article, the author suggests a classification of arguments from empirical science, which includes five types: from prediction, from manipulation, from the brain, from illusion, from the substitution of concepts. In accordance with this classification, the structure of the article is defined, where each of the presented types is sequentially considered. The logic of considering each type of argument is approximately the same: explication of the essence of the argument of a particular type, its analysis, identification of basic principles and their generalization, demonstration of the negative consequences that it leads to, and answers to possible objections. In the course of the consideration, the author formulates an ontologically neutral concept of free will as a set of abilities associated with the agent’s control over his actions. At the end of the article, the main points is summed up, the idea of naturalistic compatibilism is proposed, the role of arguments from empirical science in discussions about free will is clarified, as is the problem of free will itself, the question of the sources of “chimerization” of naturalism is briefly highlighted, and the problem of completeness of the proposed reasoning is touched upon. (shrink)

The recurrent court-related mediation discourse studies have focused on mediation participants’ willingness. Drawing on a corpus of five situated recorded court-related civil mediation data in China, this article takes one of the frequently-used mediation resources ‘I don’t want X/y’ as a case study of formulating mediation ‘wants’. It is intended to explore mediation participants’ exploitation of the court-related mediation resources to express their mediation willingness/ intentions: how the mediator manipulates either side of the participants’ mediation discursive concepts; how the mediator (...) shift the trajectory of narrating the participants’ mediation dispute-facts to judging on the dispute-facts; and how the mediator deviates himself from the third-party neutral mediators’ mediating role. The value of analyzing this formulation ‘I don’t want X/y’ is to reveal the fact that such mediation practices in their recurrent environments might go against the court-related mediation principles such as being self-willingness, neutrality and uprightness. This article contributes to formulate mediation ‘wants’ strategically and promote the court-related mediation practices in the service of sequentially unfolding mediation interaction effectively. (shrink)

We report the results of an experiment in which human subjects were trained to perform a perceptual matching task. Subjects were asked to manipulate comparison objects until they matched target objects using the fewest manipulations possible. An unusual feature of the experimental task is that efficient performance requires an understanding of the hidden or latent causal structure governing the relationships between actions and perceptual outcomes. We use two benchmarks to evaluate the quality of subjects’ learning. One benchmark is based (...) on optimal performance as calculated by a dynamic programming procedure. The other is based on an adaptive computational agent that uses a reinforcement-learning method known as Q-learning to learn to perform the task. Our analyses suggest that subjects were successful learners. In particular, they learned to perform the perceptual matching task in a near-optimal manner (i.e., using a small number of manipulations) at the end of training. Subjects were able to achieve near-optimal performance because they learned, at least partially, the causal structure underlying the task. In addition, subjects’ performances were broadly consistent with those of model-based reinforcement-learning agents that built and used internal models of how their actions influenced the external environment. We hypothesize that people will achieve near-optimal performances on tasks requiring sequences of action—especially sensorimotor tasks with underlying latent causal structures—when they can detect the effects of their actions on the environment, and when they can represent and reason about these effects using an internal mental model. (shrink)

Can associative learning take place without awareness? We explore this issue in a sequence learning paradigm with amnesic and control participants, who were simply asked to react to one of four possible stimuli on each trial. Unknown to them, successive stimuli occurred in a sequence. We manipulated the extent to which stimuli followed the sequence in a deterministic manner (noiseless condition) or only probabilistically so (noisy condition). Through this paradigm, we aimed at addressing two central issues: first, we asked whether (...) sequence learning takes place in either condition with amnesic patients. Second, we asked whether this learning takes place without awareness. To answer this second question, participants were asked to perform a subsequent sequence generation task under inclusion and exclusion conditions, as well as a recognition task. Reaction times results show that amnesic patients learned the sequence only in the deterministic condition. However, they failed to be able to reproduce the sequence in the generation task. In contrast, we found learning for both sequence structures in control participants, but only control participants exposed to a deterministic sequence were successful in performing the generation task, thus suggesting that the acquired knowledge can be used consciously in this condition. Neither amnesic nor control participants showed correct old/new judgments in the recognition task. The results strengthen the claim that implicit learning is at least partly spared in amnesia, and the role of contextual information available for learning is discussed. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

A recent study has established that thinkers reliably engage in epistemic appraisals of concepts of natural categories. Here, five studies are reported which investigated the effects of different manipulations of category learning context on appraisal of the concepts learnt. It was predicted that dimensions of concept appraisal could be affected by manipulating either procedural factors or declarative factors. While known effects of these manipulations on metacognitive judgements such as category learning judgements and confidence at test were replicated, procedural (...) factors had no reliable effects on the dimensions of concept appraisal. Effects of declarative manipulations on some forms of concept appraisal were observed. (shrink)