PurposeIn Western society, the measurement of weight is prioritized over a person’s bodily experience. Hermeneutic philosopher Gadamer warned against the emphasis on measurement, rather than experience, in the medical sciences. An examination of the complexity of the experience of weight provides the opportunity to shift focus from quantifying the connection between health and weight to the experience of the person being weighed.MethodsThis qualitative hermeneutic study aims to understand people’s experiences of weight from the interviews of professionals and lay experts. Interviews (...) were analyzed using an interpretive hermeneutic method.ResultsThe interviews revealed that weight was experienced as a number imbued with meaning and bias, as a number that could be manipulated, and as a constant and anticipated bodily change. Weight change was expected and often unwelcomed, despite weight being a quality of the body that is always in flux. External measures of weight meant to monitor wellness and health inadvertently became an unhealthy fixation that prevented some participants from fully participating in life events and appreciating the stages their bodies were in.ConclusionWeight change is a necessary condition of being human, and bodies are and will be constantly changing. To achieve health and harmony, one must fit together the acceptance of change and their bodily experience of weight. It is often the preoccupation with weight, not weight itself, that gets in the way of living. (shrink)

To what extent can external incentives influence students’ effort and learning in online course contexts? While cognitive science research has found that monetary incentives can increase goal-directed cognitive effort in certain laboratory tasks, attempts to use monetary incentives to increase students’ academic performance in naturalistic settings has shown mixed results. In two experiments, we tested the influence of a monetary incentive on immediate and delayed tests of computer-based educational performance. In Experiment 1, participants were assigned to receive monetary incentives for (...) correct quiz responses, or receive no additional incentive for correct responses other than finding out their score, and we found no significant difference in total score across groups. In Experiment 2, we used a within-subjects design to test whether participants performed better when they were provided monetary incentives for correct responses on quiz questions. Here, participants performed significantly better on incentivized quiz questions. Thus, monetary incentives may increase performance in online learning tasks when participants can anchor the “stakes” of an incentive compared to no external incentive. These findings highlight potential benefits of external incentives for promoting effort and learning in online contexts, although further research is needed to determine the most useful educationally-relevant extrinsic incentives, as well as potential negative effects of incentives on long-term intrinsic motivation. (shrink)

Williamson (1986) presents a troublesome example of the contingent a priori ; troublesome, because it does not involve indexicals, and hence cannot be defused via the usual two-dimensional strategies. Here I explore how the example works, via an examination of crucial belief-forming method M, partly in response to Hawthorne (2002) and the questions there raised for 'hyperreliable' belief-forming methods. I suggest that, when used to form a belief, M does its special work through creating a verifying state of affairs which (...) guarantees the truth of the belief thus formed. This creative link can be said to account for the knowledge-conferring status of M. But it also provides us with a way to defuse the purported example of the contingent a priori . The knowledge at issue is only a priori in virtue of this creative link, an importantly different epistemic achievement from standard cases of a priori knowledge. One important moral to be drawn is that the a priori / a posteriori distinction does not appear to be slicing the epistemological beast at its joints. (shrink)

The dual-code proposal of number representation put forward by Cohen Kadosh & Walsh (CK&W) accounts for only a fraction of the many modes of numerical abstraction. Contrary to their proposal, robust data from human infants and nonhuman animals indicate that abstract numerical representations are psychologically primitive. Additionally, much of the behavioral and neural data cited to support CK&W's proposal is, in fact, neutral on the issue of numerical abstraction.

We demonstrate that the quantum-mechanical description of composite physical systems of an arbitrary number of similar fermions in all their admissible states, mixed or pure, for all finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, is not in conflict with Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII). We discern the fermions by means of physically meaningful, permutation-invariant categorical relations, i.e. relations independent of the quantum-mechanical probabilities. If, indeed, probabilistic relations are permitted as well, we argue that similar bosons can also be discerned in all (...) their admissible states; but their categorical discernibility turns out to be a state-dependent matter. In all demonstrated cases of discernibility, the fermions and the bosons are discerned (i) with only minimal assumptions on the interpretation of quantum mechanics; (ii) without appealing to metaphysical notions, such as Scotusian haecceitas, Lockean substrata, Postian transcendental individuality or Adamsian primitive thisness; and (iii) without revising the general framework of classical elementary predicate logic and standard set theory, thus without revising standard mathematics. This confutes: (a) the currently dominant view that, provided (i) and (ii), the quantum-mechanical description of such composite physical systems always conflicts with PII; and (b) that if PII can be saved at all, the only way to do it is by adopting one or other of the thick metaphysical notions mentioned above. Among the most general and influential arguments for the currently dominant view are those due to Schrodinger, Margenau, Cortes, Dalla Chiara, Di Francia, Redhead, French, Teller, Butterfield, Giuntini, Mittelstaedt, Castellani, Krause and Huggett. We review them succinctly and critically as well as related arguments by van Fraassen and Massimi. (shrink)

Infants are sensitive to statistical regularities (i.e., transitional probabilities, or TPs) relevant to segmenting words in fluent speech. However, there is debate about whether tracking TPs results in representations of possible words. Infants show preferential learning of sequences with high TPs (HTPs) as object labels relative to those with low TPs (LTPs). Such findings could mean that only the HTP sequences have a word‐like status, and they are more readily mapped to a referent for that reason. But these findings could (...) also suggest that HTP sequences are easier to encode, just like any other predictable sequence. Here we aimed to distinguish between these explanations. To do so, we built on findings that infants become resistant to learning labels that are not typical of their native language as they approach 2 years of age and add words to their lexicons. If tracking TPs in speech results in identifying candidate words, at this age TPs may have reduced power to confer lexical status when they yield a unit that is very dissimilar to word forms that are typical of infants’ native language. Indeed, we found that at 20 months, English‐learning infants with relatively small vocabularies learned HTP Italian words (but not LTP words) as object labels, while infants with larger vocabularies resisted learning HTP Italian words. These findings suggest that the HTP sequences may be represented as candidate words, and more broadly, that TP statistics are relevant to word learning. (shrink)

Language and culture endow humans with access to conceptual information that far exceeds any which could be accessed by a non-human animal. Yet, it is possible that, even without language or specific experiences, non-human animals represent and infer some aspects of similarity relations between objects in the same way as humans. Here, we show that monkeys’ discrimination sensitivity when identifying images of animals is predicted by established measures of semantic similarity derived from human conceptual judgments. We used metrics from computer (...) vision and computational neuroscience to show that monkeys’ and humans’ performance cannot be explained by low-level visual similarity alone. The results demonstrate that at least some of the underlying structure of object representations in humans is shared with non-human primates, at an abstract level that extends beyond low-level visual similarity. Because the monkeys had no experience with the objects we tested, the results suggest that monkeys and humans share a primitive representation of object similarity that is independent of formal knowledge and cultural experience, and likely derived from common evolutionary constraints on object representation. (shrink)

The capacity to generate recursive sequences is a marker of rich, algorithmic cognition, and perhaps unique to humans. Yet, the precise processes driving recursive sequence generation remain mysterious. We investigated three potential cognitive mechanisms underlying recursive pattern processing: hierarchical reasoning, ordinal reasoning, and associative chaining. We developed a Bayesian mixture model to quantify the extent to which these three cognitive mechanisms contribute to adult humans’ performance in a sequence generation task. We further tested whether recursive rule discovery depends upon relational (...) information, either perceptual or semantic. We found that the presence of relational information facilitates hierarchical reasoning and drives the generation of recursive sequences across novel depths of center embedding. In the absence of relational information, the use of ordinal reasoning predominates. Our results suggest that hierarchical reasoning is an important cognitive mechanism underlying recursive pattern processing and can be deployed across embedding depths and relational domains. (shrink)

Hierarchical cognitive mechanisms underlie sophisticated behaviors, including language, music, mathematics, tool-use, and theory of mind. The origins of hierarchical logical reasoning have long been, and continue to be, an important puzzle for cognitive science. Prior approaches to hierarchical logical reasoning have often failed to distinguish between observable hierarchical behavior and unobservable hierarchical cognitive mechanisms. Furthermore, past research has been largely methodologically restricted to passive recognition tasks as compared to active generation tasks that are stronger tests of hierarchical rules. We argue (...) that it is necessary to implement learning studies in humans, non-human species, and machines that are analyzed with formal models comparing the contribution of different cognitive mechanisms implicated in the generation of hierarchical behavior. These studies are critical to advance theories in the domains of recursion, rule-learning, symbolic reasoning, and the potentially uniquely human cognitive origins of hierarchical logical reasoning. (shrink)

Infants are sensitive to statistics in spoken language that aid word‐form segmentation and immediate mapping to referents. However, it is not clear whether this sensitivity influences the formation and retention of word‐referent mappings across a delay, two real‐world challenges that learners must overcome. We tested how the timing of referent training, relative to familiarization with transitional probabilities (TPs) in speech, impacts English‐learning 23‐month‐olds’ ability to form and retain word‐referent mappings. In Experiment 1, we tested infants’ ability to retain TP information (...) across a 10‐min delay and use it in the service of word learning. Infants successfully mapped high‐TP but not low‐TP words to referents. In Experiment 2, infants readily mapped the same words even when they were unfamiliar. In Experiment 3, high‐ and low‐TP word‐referent mappings were trained immediately after familiarization, and infants readily remembered these associations 10 min later. In sum, although 23‐month‐old infants do not need strong statistics to map word forms to referents immediately, or to remember those mappings across a delay, infants are nevertheless sensitive to these statistics in the speech stream, and they influence mapping after a delay. These findings suggest that, by 23 months of age, sensitivity to statistics in speech may impact infants’ language development by leading word forms with low coherence to be poorly mapped following even a short period of consolidation. (shrink)

Although pride has been central to philosophical and religious discussions of emotion for thousands of years, it has largely been neglected by psychologists. However, in the past decade a growing body of psychological research on pride has emerged; new theory and findings suggest that pride is a psychologically important and evolutionarily adaptive emotion. In this article we review this accumulated body of research and argue for a naturalist account of pride, which presumes that pride emerged by way of natural selection. (...) In this view, pride is prevalent in human life because of the functional and adaptive role it has played in the attainment, maintenance, and communication of social status throughout our evolutionary history. (shrink)

In a crisis, societal needs take precedence over a patient’s best interests. Triage guidelines, however, differ on whether limited resources should focus on maximizing lives or life-years. Choosing between these two approaches has implications for neonatology. Neonatal units have ventilators, some adaptable for adults. This raises the question of whether, in crisis conditions, guidelines for treating extremely premature babies should be altered to free-up ventilators. Some adults who need ventilators will have a survival rate higher than some extremely premature babies. (...) But surviving babies will likely live longer, maximizing life-years. Empiric evidence demonstrates that these babies can derive significant survival benefits from ventilation when compared to adults. When “triaging” or choosing between patients, justice demands fair guidelines. Premature babies do not deserve special consideration; they deserve equal consideration. Solidarity is crucial but must consider needs specific to patient populations and avoid biases against people with disabilities and extremely premature babies. (shrink)

This paper examines the legal and ethical aspects of traceback testing, a process in which patients who have been previously diagnosed with ovarian cancer are identified and offered genetic testing so that their family members can be informed of their genetic risk and can also choose to undergo testing. Specifically, this analysis examines the ethical and legal limits in implementing traceback testing in cases when the patient is deceased and can no longer consent to genetic testing.

Downsizing is a process whereby human relations management emerges as a critical skill in its effective management. This paperis about perceptions of employees of a small-sized Turkish firm who survived successive downsizing decisions. It was found that downsizing affected the organizational justice-related perceptions of survivors. The questionnaire used to explore organizational justice-related perceptions involved three dimensions and was developed by Saunders and Thornhill (1999). Procedural, interactional and distributive justice-related perceptions of survivors were influenced by the way management handled the (...) process. Management credibility, communication and commitment were other variables studied. The findings supported the view that downsizing not only affects the victims but also the survivors. (shrink)

ObjectivesTo investigate the external and ecological validity of a standardized test of children’s executive functioning, the Behavioral Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome for Children.BackgroundThere are few standardized measures for assessing executive functions in children, and the evidence for the validity of most measures is currently limited.MethodA normative sample of 256 children and adolescents from age 8–16 years completed the BADS-C, and a parent or teacher completed rating scales of the child’s everyday problems related to EF and Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, (...) a commonly used measure of emotional, social, cognitive, and behavioral problems.ResultsExploratory factor analyses yielded a two-factor structure to the BADS-C, indicative of monitoring and abstract reasoning processes, and a three-factor structure to the DEX-C, reflecting behavioral, and cognitive components of the dysexecutive syndrome as well as emotional responsiveness. Regression analyses showed significant relationships between BADS-C scores and everyday functioning as reported on the DEX and SDQ. Furthermore, there were significant differences in BADS-C scores between those children in the upper and lower quartiles on the SDQ.ConclusionResults provide tentative evidence of BADS-C and DEX-C construct, convergent and predictive validity. (shrink)

Free will can be understood as a novel form of action control that evolved to meet the escalating demands of human social life, including moral action and pursuit of enlightened self-interest in a cultural context. That understanding is conducive to scientific research, which is reviewed here in support of four hypotheses. First, laypersons tend to believe in free will. Second, that belief has behavioral consequences, including increases in socially and culturally desirable acts. Third, laypersons can reliably distinguish free actions from (...) less free ones. Fourth, actions judged as free emerge from a distinctive set of inner processes, all of which share a common psychological and physiological signature. These inner processes include self-control, rational choice, planning, and initiative. (shrink)

Williams and DeSteno (2010) and Gladkova (2010) question the validity, utility, and theoretical support for the bifurcation of pride into hubristic and authentic facets. Though these commentators highlight unanswered questions and important directions for future research, we argue that the broad, evolutionarily informed framework for the two facets, presented in our target article nonetheless provides the best fit and explanation for the existing pattern of evidence. We offer several empirical suggestions for future studies addressing the questions raised by the commentators, (...) and emphasize the need for emotion researchers to hew closely to empirical data in developing theoretical accounts. (shrink)

One of the central questions in both metaethics and empirical moral psychology is whether moral judgments are the products of reason or emotions. This way of putting the question relies on an overly simplified view of reason and emotion as two fully independent cognitive faculties whose causal contributions to moral judgment can be cleanly separated. However, there is a significant body of evidence in the cognitive sciences that seriously undercuts this conception of reason and emotion, and supports the view that (...) moral judgments are caused by a complex interplay of psychological mechanisms that are both cognitive and affective, but in a way that is not simply a function of the independent causal contributions of reason and emotion. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this view for metaethics. (shrink)

Transcriptional enhancer sequences have been shown to play a pivotal role in the regulation of some highly expressed genes. First described in eukaryotic viruses, the discovery of enhancers has augmented the previously defined control‐sequence motifs to give a more complete understanding of eukaryotic transcriptional regulatory mechanisms. Some properties of enhancers that distinguish them from other regulatory sequences include their ability to function in a position‐ and orientation‐independent manner. Furthermore, the observation that some enhancers and transcriptional promoters exhibit tissue specificity in (...) their activity has generated considerable interest. Enhancer activation is thought to involve sequence‐specific DNA‐binding proteins but the process by which this leads to an increase in the initiation of transcription remains obscure. Although viral enhancers are more fully characterized, several cellular enhancers have recently been identified. One such enhancer sequence has been detected in a 3′ flanking region of a highly expressed human placental lactogen gene. This enhancer can increase the transcriptional rate of an adjacent gene by at least 50‐fold. (shrink)

This chapter explores how morality can be rational if moral intuitions are resistant to rational reflection. There are two parts to this question. The normative problem is whether there is a model of moral justification which can show that morality is a rational enterprise given the facts of moral dumbfounding. Appealing to the model of reflective equilibrium for the rational justification of moral intuitions solves this problem. Reflective equilibrium views the rational justification of morality as a back-and-forth balancing between moral (...) theory and moral intuition, and therefore does not require that individual moral intuitions be directly responsive to rational reflection. The psychological problem is whether human psychology actually implements the processes required for reflective equilibrium. The psychological problem is far more difficult, and requires appealing to a dual-process view of moral judgement that regards moral intuitions and moral theories as belonging to different mental systems. (shrink)

What role does moral reasoning play in moral judgment? More specifically, what causal role does moral reasoning have in the production of moral judgments? Recently, many philosophers and psychologists have attempted to answer this question by drawing on empirical data. However, these attempts fall short because there has been no sustained attention to the question of what moral reasoning is. This paper addresses this problem, by providing a general account of moral reasoning in terms of a capacity, and suggests how (...) this account of moral reasoning can provide a way forward in current debates. (shrink)

In Clark’s thoughtful analysis of the evolution of the two facets of pride, he suggests that the concurrent existence of hubristic and authentic pride in humans represents a “persistence problem,” wherein the vestigial trait (hubristic pride) continues to exist alongside the derived trait (authentic pride). In our view, evidence for the two facets does not pose a persistence problem; rather, hubristic and authentic pride both likely evolved as higher-order cognitive emotions that solve uniquely human—but distinct— evolutionary problems. Instead of being (...) conceptualized as serial homologues, with one the vestigial form of the other, we argue that hubristic and authentic pride are both derived homologues of a vestigial proto-pride emotion that existed in our shared ancestry with other primates. (shrink)

Decaying wood, while an abundant and stable resource, presents considerable nutritional challenges due to its structural rigidity, chemical recalcitrance, and low nitrogen content. Despite these challenges, certain insect lineages have successfully evolved saproxylophagy (consuming and deriving sustenance from decaying wood), impacting nutrient recycling in ecosystems and carbon sequestration dynamics. This study explores the uneven phylogenetic distribution of saproxylophagy across insects and delves into the evolutionary origins of this trait in disparate insect orders. Employing a comprehensive analysis of gut microbiome data, (...) from both saproxylophagous insects and their non‐saproxylophagous relatives, including new data from unexplored wood‐feeding insects, this Hypothesis paper discusses the broader phylogenetic context and potential adaptations necessary for this dietary specialization. The study proposes the “Detritivore‐First Hypothesis,” suggesting an evolutionary pathway to saproxylophagy through detritivory, and highlights the critical role of symbiotic gut microbiomes in the digestion of decaying wood. (shrink)

Bowers et al. rightly emphasise that deep learning models often fail to capture constraints on visual perception that have been discovered by previous research. However, the solution is not to discard deep learning altogether, but to design stimuli and tasks that more closely reflect the problems that biological vision evolved to solve, such as understanding scenes and preparing skilled action.

Abstractabstract:This essay proposes an unconventional approach to teaching "religion and medicine" to American medical students. Received frameworks for such teaching—articulated around faith denomination or "spirituality"—may imply that religiosities and their health effects are grounded in theology or transcendence, respectively. These frameworks may reify, or misrepresent relationships between, religion and science—for example, in supporting notions of conflict, or of an essentially secular character of technical progress. They can neglect ways in which biomedicine and its institutions are themselves engaged with and productive (...) of religious values. In order to move toward fuller student appreciation of diverse religious materialities and embodiments in health and biomedicine, the essay proposes "the sacred, in practice" as an organizing rubric. This pedagogical intervention pivots on notions of sacrality in anthropologies of religion and offers students a wide path to consider a spectrum of material, gestural conditions, and activities—transformative techniques, intensely valued objects, trusted texts, rituals—that mark and propagate religious valences and commitments within and around contemporary biomedicine. This sacred-in-practice approach meshes with standard theological and spiritual framings of the religion/health/medicine nexus, yet offers more capacious and flexible connections to work for which medical students are training, involving vulnerable bodies and material technologies of tremendous life- and world-shaping potency. (shrink)

There is a certain kind of tension in recent accounts of the role of reasons in virtue ethics between two plausible claims that pull in different directions. First, that virtues are the central normative notion in virtue ethics; and second, that virtue is a kind of responsiveness to reasons: that reasons explain both what it is to act from virtue, and what the virtues are. I argue that this is a serious tension and necessitates a different account of the relationship (...) between virtues and reasons; one that explains the distinctive normative contribution of virtue, central to virtue ethics, and that also captures the ways in which virtues structure practical reason itself and provide normative reasons for thinking, feeling, and acting. I develop a view, which I call virtues as reasons structure, that achieves these aims by drawing a theoretical and practical distinction between reasons from virtue and reasons for virtue. On this view, character traits explain what reasons a person has. A generous person, for example, is one who characteristically takes certain facts to be reasons for action; these are reasons from the virtue. Reasons for the virtues have a different role in theoretical and practical reflection in grounding claims with respect to which character traits to develop. I conclude by arguing that this view does not lead to a problematic kind of relativism and suggest further lines of inquiry. (shrink)

A new variety of empirical skeptical moral arguments have been put forward in recent years, drawing on data from neuroscience, social and behavioral psychology, and economics, which strongly suggest that emotions play a central causal role in moral judgment, and that reasoning has at most a limited supplementary causal role in small portion of moral judgments. It follows from these empirical finding, it is argued, that moral judgments and morality more generally cannot be grounded in reason in the right sort (...) of way to be rational. I argue that there are at least three distinct ways of understanding what it means to claim that moral reasoning is necessary to moral judgment. First, that moral reasoning is directly causally necessary to every moral judgment; second that moral reasoning is causally necessary to the ordinary development of the capacity for moral judgment, but is not directly causally implicated in every particular instance of moral judgment; and third that moral reasoning is necessary to a well-ordered capacity for moral judgment. I argue that the empirical data does support the claim that reasoning is not necessary to moral judgment in at least the first sense, perhaps in the second, but not in third, and that this is sufficient to provide for the rationality of moral judgments and morality more generally. (shrink)

Further Thoughts on Counterfactuals, Compatibilism, Conceptual Mismatches, and Choices: Response to Commentaries Content Type Journal Article Pages 31-34 DOI 10.1007/s12152-010-9067-3 Authors Roy F. Baumeister, Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL USA A. William Crescioni, Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL USA Jessica L. Alquist, Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL USA Journal Neuroethics Online ISSN 1874-5504 Print ISSN 1874-5490 Journal Volume Volume 4 Journal Issue Volume 4, Number 1.