How should we understand the epistemic role of perception? According to epistemological disjunctivism (ED), a subject’s perceptual knowledge that p is to be explained in terms of the subject believing that p for a factive and reflectively accessible reason. I argue that ED raises far-reaching questions for rationality and deliberation; I illustrate those questions by setting up a puzzle about belief-suspension, and I argue that ED does not have the resources to make sense of the rationality of belief-suspension in (...) cases in which suspending is clearly rational. The conclusion that I draw from the puzzle is mainly negative: the epistemic contribution of perception cannot be explained in terms of a warrant-conferring relation between perception and belief. However, toward the end, I sketch a positive picture of the epistemic role of perception in terms of a direct explanatory relation between perception and knowledge. (shrink)

This research aimed to examine the agreement between body mass index -based nutritional status and perceived nutritional status overall and by socio-demographic factors and to state the association between the accuracy of weight perception and weight control practices in the Chilean adult population. A population-based cross-sectional study was carried out with 5,192 Chilean adult participants from the Chilean National Health Survey 2016–2017. Agreement between BMI-based weight status and body weight perception for the total sample (...) and across subgroups was determined using the weighted kappa coefficient. The agreement between BMI-based and perceived nutritional status of the total sample was fair. A higher rate of weight perception accuracy was identified in women, younger respondents, and participants with higher education, a higher income, and from urban areas than their counterparts. Respondents with overweight or obesity tended to underestimate their nutritional status. Actions to lose weight were higher in those who had the right perception of their overweight/obesity condition and those who overestimated their body weight, regardless of their nutritional status. In all groups, weight loss behaviors were more related to the perceived than the BMI-based nutritional status. The consequences of accurate perception of the nutritional status are discussed including its effects on body weight and mental health. (shrink)

Perceptual learning is an enduring change in the perceptual system – and our resulting perceptions – due to practice or repeated exposure to a perceptual stimulus. It is involved in the acquisition of perceptual expertise: the ability to make rapid and reliable high-level categorizations of objects unavailable to novices. Attentional weighting is one process by which perceptual learning occurs. Advancing our understanding of this process is of particular importance for understanding what is learned in perceptual learning. Attentional weighting seems to (...) favour the hypothesis that what experts learn is simply to better direct their attention to elements of the stimulus relevant to making post-perceptual categorizations. Here I argue against this hypothesis. Attentional weighting is an integral component of the process that allows experts to come to represent high-level properties in perceptual experience. (shrink)

This article critically explores the tension between perceptions of weight loss surgery as a last resort and as a tool. This tension stems from patients’ doubt and insecurity whether expectations for a healthy life will come through. Thus, even after surgery, traditional weight loss methods, including diets and exercise, are considered paramount. Drawing on a series of interviews with Norwegian women, we argue that the commercialization of weight loss surgeries as well as the moral stigmas attached to (...) such operations serve to perpetuate this tension. More specifically, the women were advised to leave their old habits behind, and embrace a healthier and more active lifestyle. In such a climate, we argue that undergoing surgery without subsequently embodying dietary and exercise norms is hardly an option. On the contrary, these become a moral obligation that modern women need to relate to—and perhaps negotiate—in order to repudiate stigmas attached to weight loss surgeries as a quick fix for those incapable of losing weight in the “proper” manner. (shrink)

Clarke and Beck discuss in their sections on congruency and confounds literature that has challenged the claim that the approximate number system represents numerical content. We argue that the propositions put forward by these studies aren't that far from the indirect model of number perception suggested by C&B.

Speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions and their boundaries are generally fuzzy and ambiguous in part because listeners often give differential weighting to these cue dimensions during phonetic categorization. This study explored how a listener's perception of a speaker's socio-indexical and personality characteristics influences the listener's perceptual cue weighting. In a matched-guise study, three groups of listeners classified a series of gender-neutral /b/-/p/ continua that vary in VOT and F0 at the onset of the following vowel. Listeners (...) were assigned to one of three prompt conditions and rated the talker in terms of vocal gender prototypicality, attractiveness, friendliness, confidence, trustworthiness, and gayness. Male listeners and listeners who saw a male face showed less reliance on VOT compared to listeners in the other conditions. Listeners' visual evaluation of the talker also affected their weighting of VOT and onset F0 cues, although the effects of facial impressions differ depending on the gender of the listener. The results demonstrate that individual differences in perceptual cue weighting are modulated by the listener's gender and his/her subjective evaluation of the talker. These findings lend support for exemplar-based models of speech perception and production where socio-indexical features are encoded as a part of the episodic traces in the listeners' mental lexicon. This study also shed light on the relationship between individual variation in cue weighting and community-level sound change by demonstrating that VOT and onset F0 co-variation in North American English has acquired a certain degree of socio-indexical significance. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is possible to embrace the predictive processing framework (PP) without reducing affordances to inferential perception. The cognitivist account of PP contends that it can capture relational perception, such as affordances. The rationale for this claim is that over time, sensory data becomes highly-weighted. This paper, however, will show the inconsistency of this claim in the face of the cognitivist premise that ‘encapsulated’ models can throw away ‘the body, the world, or other people’ [Hohwy (...) 2016: 265]. It is then showed how it is possible to embrace a non-cognitivist reading of PP—one that does not need to reduce affordances to representational content. (shrink)

The behavioral immune system (BIS) includes perceptual mechanisms for detecting cues of contamination. Former studies have indicated that moisture has a disgusting property. Therefore, moisture could be a target for detecting contamination cues by the BIS. We conducted two experiments to examine the psychophysical basis of moisture perception and clarify the relationship between the perception of moisture and the BIS. We assumed that the number of high luminance areas in a visual image provided optical information that would enable (...) the visual perception of moisture. In two experiments, we presented eight images of dough that contained different amounts of moisture as experimental stimuli. The amount of moisture shown in the images was increased in eight steps, from 28.6% to 42.9% of the total weight of the dough. In Experiment 1, the images were randomly presented on a computer display, and the participants (n = 22) were asked to rank the images in the order of the visually perceived moisture content. In Experiment 2, the participants (n = 15) completed pairwise comparisons based on the perceived moistness of the images. Furthermore, to examine the BIS responses, the participants rated the strength of disgust evoked by the stimuli, their motivation to avoid touching the stimuli, and the estimated magnitude of the risk of contamination by physical contact with the stimuli. The results indicated that the moisture content and the numbers of high luminance areas in the images accurately predicted the perception of moisture, suggesting that the detection of visual moisture was highly accurate, and the optical information served as an essential perceptual cue for detecting moisture. On the other hand, the BIS responses peaked in response to stimuli having approximately 33% to 39% moisture content. These results show that objects containing a moderate amount of moisture could be the target of visually detecting pathogens by the BIS. (shrink)

Previous work showed that the beginning of a sound is more important for the perception of loudness than later parts. When a short silent gap of sufficient duration is inserted into a sound, this primacy effect reoccurs in the second sound part after the gap. The present study investigates whether this temporal weighting occurs independently for different frequency bands. Sounds consisting of two bandpass noises were presented in four different conditions: a simultaneous gap in both bands, a gap in (...) only the lower frequency band, a gap in only the higher frequency band, or no gap. In all conditions, the temporal loudness weights showed a primacy effect at sound onset. For the frequency bands without a gap, the temporal weights decreased gradually across time, regardless of whether the other frequency band did or did not contain a gap. When a frequency band contained a gap, the weight at the onset of this band after the gap was increased. This reoccurrence of the primacy effect following the gap was again largely independent of whether or not the other band contained a gap. Thus, the results indicate that the temporal loudness weights are frequency specific. (shrink)

Income inequality has been empirically linked to interpersonal competition and risk-taking behaviors, but a separate line of findings consistently shows that individuals have inaccurate perceptions of the actual levels of income inequality in society. How can inequality be both consistently misperceived and yet a reliable predictor of behavior? The present study extends both these lines of research by evaluating if the scope of input used to assess income inequality (i.e., at the national, state, county, or postal code level) can account (...) for perception discrepancies and if actual/perceived inequality is associated with female intrasexual competition. Female participants recruited online from the general US population (_n_ = 691) provided demographic information, measures of perceived income inequality, and measures of intrasexual competition attitudes and behavior. Actual and perceived income inequality (at any level) did not predict negative attitudes toward other women or female weighting of physical appearance as a desirable trait. Perceived income inequality and actual county-level inequality was, however, predictive of female competition in the form of self-sexualization clothing choice. Further analyses found that age and importance placed on physical attractiveness also predicted women’s clothing choices. Perceptions of income inequality were predicted not by actual Gini indices, but by beliefs about the levels of poverty and income gaps. These results highlight the importance of better understanding the proximate cues by which people perceive environmental features such as inequality, and how those cues are used to adjust interpersonal behaviors. (shrink)

The traditional empiricist view of perception is that in perception we receive information through the senses of the so-called external world. This idea is reflected in the notions of the ‘given’ and of 1‘data’ which have figured so largely in theories of perception. Even if philosophers of this persuasion have gone on to say something about what we do with the data, it remains true that at rock bottom and in the last resort perception is thought (...) of as something passive. I have tried to chart the historical issues elsewhere, and I shall not repeat anything about them here. That is not my concern. I am here interested in the question whether the notion of a purely passive perceiver makes any sense in itself. That it does not has been suggested by philosophers on occasion. There are some brief remarks to that effect in G.E.M. Anscombe’s Intention ; and Stuart Hampshire’s Thought and Action lays great weight on action in connection with our awareness of the world, although I do not myself believe that the exact nature of the connection is clearly worked out by him. Some aspects of his views, however, have been taken up by Campbell Garnett with explicit reference to perception in his The Perceptual Process, with a resulting theory that bears more than a superficial resemblance to that of Maine de Biran. (shrink)

Neuroscientists commonly assume that the brain generates representations of a scene in various non-retinotopic 3D coordinate frames, for example in 'egocentric' and 'allocentric' frames. Although neurons in early visual cortex might be described as representing a scene in an eye-centred frame, using 2 dimensions of visual direction and one of binocular disparity, there is no convincing evidence of similarly organized cortical areas using non-retinotopic 3D coordinate frames nor of any systematic transfer of information from one frame to another. We propose (...) that perception and action in a 3D world could be achieved without generating ego- or allocentric 3D coordinate frames. Instead, we suggest that the fundamental operation the brain carries out is to compare a long state vector with a matrix of weights to choose an output. The processes involved in perception of a 3D scene and action within it depend, we suggest, on successive iterations of this basic operation. Advantages of this proposal include the fact that it relies on computationally well-defined operations corresponding to well-established neural processes. Also, we argue that from a philosophical perspective it is at least as plausible as theories postulating 3D coordinate frames. Finally, we suggest a variety of experiments that would falsify our claim. (shrink)

Rational individuals who perceive information sequentially are confronted to cognitive dissonance and dynamic uncertainty in a way that sets a natural limit to the ex post efficiency of their choices. From the normative perspective which ignores this dynamic uncertainty, their rationality seems limited. Sequential perception is assumed in a model of Bayesian revision of the contingent preference in a repeated choice. This model predicts both the cognitive dissonance phenomenon studied by Festinger and the formation of stable habits. It also (...) shows how an ordinary man can be rational with bounded informational and computational abilities and, for the same reasons, give a disproportionate weight to impressions without any normative value in his own choices and judgments. Sequential perception and cognitive consistency offer a credible alternative to the cognitive bias paradigm for predicting anomalies in choice and game behavior.Des individus logiques percevant l’information de manière séquentielle sont soumis à une dissonance cognitive et une incertitude dynamique qui limitent naturellement l’efficacité ex post de leurs choix. Du point de vue normatif, qui ignore cette incertitude dynamique, leur rationalité apparaît limitée. L’hypothèse de perception séquentielle est introduite dans un modèle de révision bayésienne de la préférence contingente lors d’un choix répété. Ce modèle prédit à la fois le phénomène de dissonance cognitive étudié par Festinger et la formation d’une habitude stable. Il montre aussi comment un homme ordinaire peut être rationnel sans disposer de capacités d’information et de calcul démesurées et, pour les mêmes raisons, subir l’influence disproportionnée d’impressions dénuées de valeur normative dans les choix ou les jugements qu’il porte. La perception séquentielle et la cohérence cognitive offrent une alternative crédible au paradigme des biais cognitifs pour expliquer tous les comportements humains qui réfutent la théorie normative des choix et des jeux. (shrink)

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has upended lives and thrown the taken for granted into disarray. One of the most affected groups were teachers and students, faced with the necessity of school closures and—where logistically feasible—an urgent shift to emergency remote instruction, often with little prior notice. In this contribution, based on an online survey involving participants from 91 countries, we offer a perspective bridging the two groups, by investigating the role of teachers' demographics and professional adaptation to emergency (...) remote teaching in their perception of how their students were coping with the novel situation. The resultant model explains 51% of variance, and highlights the relative weights of the predictor variables. Given the importance of teacher perceptions in the effectiveness of their instruction, the findings may offer valuable guidelines for future training and intervention programs. (shrink)

Previous data on the link between weight and suicidality is heterogenous. We aim to investigate the potential association between weight and suicidality among adolescents in the United Arab Emirates. We hypothesize that an association exists between weight and suicidality, with those at both extremes of weight suffering higher rates of suicidal ideation, planning and attempts. The 2016 UAE Global School Health Survey was used. Weight categories based on the World Health Organization Body Mass Index charts (...) were generated. Suicidality measures were based on questions on suicide ideation, planning, and attempt. Univariate and multivariate binary logistic regression were used. Overall, 3.6, 21.4, and 17.5% of students were found to be underweight, overweight, and obese, respectively. In total, 492 students reported suicidal ideation, 397 reported planning, and 389 reported attempts within the twelve months prior to the survey. In the multivariate logistic regression, being female, older, and of lower socioeconomic status were significantly associated with increased suicidal ideation, planning and attempts. Increased parental involvement was associated with decreased suicidality. The association between weight category and suicidality did not reach statistical significance. A significant proportion of Emirati teens are under- or over-weight, with one in seven and one in nine having considered or attempted suicide, respectively. However, this study finds no significant association between weight and suicide ideation, planning, or attempts. This may be due to cultural differences in weight perception. Further research into this association can aid in tailoring suicide prevention interventions. (shrink)

Peripheral vision has different functional priorities for mammals than foveal vision. One of its roles is to monitor the environment while central vision is focused on the current task. Becoming distracted too easily would be counterproductive in this perspective, so the brain should react to behaviourally relevant changes. Gist processing is good for this purpose, and it is therefore not surprising that evidence from both functional brain imaging and behavioural research suggests a tendency to generalize and blend information in the (...) periphery. This may be caused by the balance of perceptual influence in the periphery between bottom-up and top-down processing channels. Here, we investigated this interaction behaviourally using a peripheral numerosity discrimination task with top-down and bottom-up manipulations. Participants compared numerosity between the left and right peripheries of a screen. Each periphery was divided into a centre and a surrounding area, only one of which was a task relevant target region. Our top-down task modulation was the instruction which area to attend – centre or surround. We varied the signal strength by altering the stimuli durations i.e., the amount of information presented/processed. We found that numerosity perceived in target regions was affected by contextual information in neighbouring areas. This effect appeared as soon as stimulus duration allowed the task to be reliably performed and persisted even at the longest duration. We compared the pattern of results with an ideal-observer model and found a qualitative difference in the way centre and surround areas interacted perceptually in the periphery. When participants reported on the central area, the irrelevant surround would affect the response as a weighted combination – consistent with the idea of a receptive field focused in the target area to which irrelevant surround stimulation leaks in. When participants report on surround, we can best describe the response with a model in which occasionally the attention switches from task relevant surround to task irrelevant centre – consistent with a selection model of two competing streams of information. Overall our results show that the influence of spatial context in the periphery is mandatory but task dependent. (shrink)

Multiple acoustic dimensions signal speech categories. However, dimensions vary in their informativeness; some are more diagnostic of category membership than others. Speech categorization reflects these dimensional regularities such that diagnostic dimensions carry more “perceptual weight” and more effectively signal category membership to native listeners. Yet perceptual weights are malleable. When short-term experience deviates from long-term language norms, such as in a foreign accent, the perceptual weight of acoustic dimensions in signaling speech category membership rapidly adjusts. The present study (...) investigated whether rapid adjustments in listeners’ perceptual weights in response to speech that deviates from the norms also affects listeners’ own speech productions. In a word recognition task, the correlation between two acoustic dimensions signaling consonant categories, fundamental frequency and voice onset time, matched the correlation typical of English, and then shifted to an “artificial accent” that reversed the relationship, and then shifted back. Brief, incidental exposure to the artificial accent caused participants to down-weight perceptual reliance on F0, consistent with previous research. Throughout the task, participants were intermittently prompted with pictures to produce these same words. In the block in which listeners heard the artificial accent with a reversed F0 × VOT correlation, F0 was a less robust cue to voicing in listeners’ own speech productions. The statistical regularities of short-term speech input affect both speech perception and production, as evidenced via shifts in how acoustic dimensions are weighted. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to determine the variables influencing college students' engagement in swimming activities, as well as the significant themes that often appear in these occurrences. A descriptive research design was used to identify the factors influencing college students' perception of participating in swimming activities. Descriptive research is a type of nonexperimental study that aims to describe the features of phenomena as it occurs. It was found out that participating in swimming activities provides various benefits, some (...) of these include helping build endurance, muscle strength, and cardiovascular fitness, enhanced swimming skills, and maintaining a healthy weight. As a result, the implementation of active recreational activities in schools must be reinforced, not simply for the purpose of participation, but also because students are driven to do so. And these activities must be carried out not just on school grounds, but also at home and in the community. (shrink)

Despite the growing literature on childhood obesity and lifestyle intervention programmes focusing on weight loss, few studies have examined young persons’ experiences of being identified as candidates for such programmes and of participating in them. This paper does so. Juxtaposing insights from phenomenology with an approach inspired by Foucault, the paper shows how teenage girls’ bodily self-perception and bodily self-awareness are shaped in intercorporeal assemblages comprising other people and specific features or elements of the lifestyle programme. Inspired by (...) van Manen’s hermeneutic-phenomenological approach, with its point of departure in lived experience, this paper draws on interviews with Norwegian teenage girls participating in the same lifestyle programme and identifies three core thematic aspects of the girls’ experiences: being identified as a candidate for a lifestyle programme and not wanting this; negotiating the lack of weight loss and the scales; and bodily situated agency – feeling good and being able. Permeating all three themes are two central, interrelated phenomena: agency and resistance. Furthermore, the paper shows how a combination of Foucauldian insights and a phenomenological understanding of intercorporeality can help to shed light on the power, affective, material and temporal dimensions of dys-appearance, as well as those of eu-appearance, and thus contribute to the understanding of the girls’ narrated lived experiences. On the basis of these findings, we argue that weight-related treatment goals are not necessarily compatible with the strengthening of adolescents’ body images and self-esteem. However, whilst being obliged to attend to their bodies while in the programme, the girls also encountered unexpected, positive bodily feelings and experiences. Such events, we suggest, offer a means of resisting the more troubling dys-appearing bodily situations our participants described so powerfully. (shrink)

This is a linguistic study of two primary metaphors with the same target-domain concept, “IMPORTANCE IS SIZE” and “IMPORTANCE IS WEIGHT,” in English and Chinese. It is suggested that these two primary metaphors are derived from the OBJECT image schema, abstracted from our embodied, sensorimotor experience, especially our visual and tactile perception, in dealing with physical objects in everyday life. The study focuses on size and weight adjectives in both languages and on linguistic evidence in two areas: (...) their lexicalizations of the importance senses as found in the dictionaries, and their roles in the instantiation of the two primary metaphors in natural discourse as found in the corpora. Our further analysis also shows that the primary metaphors can be manifested without explicit use of size and weight words when relevant conceptual frames in the source, evoked by other words or images, are mapped onto the target domain, thus activating the relevant region of our encyclopedic knowledge and triggering off the primary metaphors in our conceptual system. We also construct a hypothetical mapping scheme for primary metaphors based on the OBJECT image schema, in which OBJECT is mapped onto its target via three of its fundamental dimensions: SIZE, WEIGHT, and SOLIDITY. It is hoped that this mapping scheme will benefit future comparative studies of primary metaphors across languages and cultures in a more systematic way. (shrink)

Food choices are a key determinant of dietary intake, with brain regions, such as the mesolimbic and prefrontal cortex maturing at differential rates into adulthood. More needs to be understood about developmental changes in healthy and unhealthy food perceptions and preference. We investigated how food perceptions and preference vary as a function of age and how food attributes impact age-related changes. One hundred thirty-nine participants completed computerized tasks to rate high-calorie and low-calorie food cues for taste, health, and liking, followed (...) by 100 binary food choices based on each participant’s ratings. Dietary self-control was considered successful when the healthier food was chosen. Self-control success ratio was the proportion of success trials over total number of choices. Beta-weights for health and taste were calculated as each attribute’s influence on food preference. Adiposity measurements included BMI z-score and waist-to-height ratio. High-calorie foods were rated more tasty and less healthy with increasing age. Older participants liked high-calorie foods more, and β-taste was associated with age. Significant age-by-WHtR interactions were observed for health and taste ratings of high-calorie foods, β-taste, and marginally for preference of high-calorie foods. Stratifying by WHtR, we found age-related increases in taste and preference ratings of high-calorie foods in the high WHtR group alone. In contrast, age-related decreases in health ratings of high-calorie foods were significant in the low WHtR group alone. Age and β-taste were significantly associated in the high WHtR group and only marginally significant with low WHtR. Although participants rated low-calorie foods as less tasty and less healthy with increasing age, there was no association between age and preference for low-calorie foods. Participants made faster food choices with increasing age regardless of WHtR, with a significant age-by-WHtR interaction on reaction time. There were no age-related effects in self-control success ratio and β-health. These results suggest that individual differences in age and central adiposity play an important role in preference for high-calorie foods, and a higher importance of food tastiness in food choice may contribute to greater preference for high-calorie foods with increasing age. (shrink)

Research in the fields of pragmatics has highlighted important differences in speech act realisation strategies and the perception of contextual variables across lingua-cultures. This particularly applies for requests, which are potentially face-threating acts and important expressions of cultural behaviour, as their performance is influenced by culturally-embedded perspectives on rights and obligations. Although some languages have been widely investigated in terms of request realisation, such as English, little research has been done on Italian. This study examines request realisation strategies in (...) Italian, in terms of Head Acts and request perspective, and the impact of the sociopragmatic factors of social distance and weight of imposition of the request on strategy choice amongst eight Italian speakers, by means of open-ended roleplays. The data was analysed by using a coding scheme based on Blum-Kulka and Olshtain and revealed that the Italian speakers where more influenced by social distance, which in turn impacted on the choice of request perspective. They were shown to prefer using hearer-orientation, which reflected in the verb conjugation of the Head Acts, since this perspective allows them to do relational work with the hearer, by either addressing the recipient with the familiar tu or with the formal lei. (shrink)

At 14 months, children appear to struggle to apply their fairly well-developed speech perception abilities to learning similar sounding words (e.g., bih/dih; Stager & Werker, 1997). However, variability in nonphonetic aspects of the training stimuli seems to aid word learning at this age. Extant theories of early word learning cannot account for this benefit of variability. We offer a simple explanation for this range of effects based on associative learning. Simulations suggest that if infants encode both noncontrastive information (e.g., (...) cues to speaker voice) and meaningful linguistic cues (e.g., place of articulation or voicing), then associative learning mechanisms predict these variability effects in early word learning. Crucially, this means that despite the importance of task variables in predicting performance, this body of work shows that phonological categories are still developing at this age, and that the structure of noninformative cues has critical influences on word learning abilities. (shrink)

Results of two survey studies are presented. It is shown that attitudes of the public about "technology in general" are not stable and can easily be affected by how the subject is introduced. Eight areas of technology are compared on the basis of empirical relations in attitudinal judgments, in attribute ratings, in self- assigned importance weights of attributes, and in importance of reference groups and persons. On the basis of similarities in these four kinds of judgments, three clusters of technology (...) areas were identified: a cluster of modern reproductive technologies, an information cluster containing automation, computer, and communication technologies, and a cluster containing nuclear energy and military technology. The attitude toward "technology in general" can not be considered as an aggregation of attitudes toward these areas of technology: The relations between general attitude and specific attitudes are only moderate to negligible. (shrink)

Resource rationality may explain suboptimal patterns of reasoning; but what of “anti-Bayesian” effects where the mind updates in a direction opposite the one it should? We present two phenomena — belief polarization and the size-weight illusion — that are not obviously explained by performance- or resource-based constraints, nor by the authors’ brief discussion of reference repulsion. Can resource rationality accommodate them?

Despite the immense societal importance of ethically designing artificial intelligence, little research on the public perceptions of ethical artificial intelligence principles exists. This becomes even more striking when considering that ethical artificial intelligence development has the aim to be human-centric and of benefit for the whole society. In this study, we investigate how ethical principles are weighted in comparison to each other. This is especially important, since simultaneously considering ethical principles is not only costly, but sometimes even impossible, as developers (...) must make specific trade-off decisions. In this paper, we give first answers on the relative importance of ethical principles given a specific use case—the use of artificial intelligence in tax fraud detection. The results of a large conjoint survey suggest that, by and large, German respondents evaluate the ethical principles as equally important. However, subsequent cluster analysis shows that different preference models for ethically designed systems exist among the German population. These clusters substantially differ not only in the preferred ethical principles but also in the importance levels of the principles themselves. We further describe how these groups are constituted in terms of sociodemographics as well as opinions on artificial intelligence. Societal implications, as well as design challenges, are discussed. (shrink)

Successfully navigating the norms of a society is a complex task that involves recognizing diverse kinds of rules as well as the relative weight attached to them. In the United States, different kinds of rules—federal statutes and regulations, scientific norms, and professional ideals—guide the work of researchers. Penalties for violating these different kinds of rules and norms can range from the displeasure of peers to criminal sanctions. We proposed that it would be more difficult for researchers working in the (...) U.S. who were born in other nations to distinguish the seriousness of violating rules across diverse domains. We administered a new measure, the evaluating rules in science task, to National Institutes of Health-funded investigators. The ERST assessed perceptions of the seriousness of violating research regulations, norms, and ideals, and allowed us to calculate the degree to which researchers distinguished between the seriousness of each rule category. The ERST also assessed researchers’ predictions of the seriousness that research integrity officers would assign to the rules. We compared researchers’ predictions to the seriousness ratings of 112 RIOs working at U.S. research-intensive universities. U.S.-born researchers were significantly better at distinguishing between the seriousness of violating federal research regulations and violating ideals of science, and they were more accurate in their predictions of the views of RIOs. Acculturation to the U.S. moderated the effects of nationality on accuracy. We discuss the implications of these findings in terms of future research and education. (shrink)

Schizophrenia is associated with a series of visual perception impairments, which might impact on the patients’ every day life and be related to clinical symptoms. However, the heterogeneity of the visual disorders make it a challenge to understand both the mechanisms and the consequences of these impairments, i.e., the way patients experience the outer world. Based on earlier psychiatry literature, we argue that issues regarding time might shed a new light on the disorders observed in patients with schizophrenia.We will (...) briefly review the mechanisms involved in the sense of time continuity and clinical evidence that they are impaired in patients with schizophrenia.We will then summarize a recent experimental approach regarding the coding of time-event structure in time, namely the ability to discriminate between simultaneous and asynchronous events. The use of an original method of analysis allowed us to distinguish between explicit and implicit judgments of synchrony.We showed that for SOAs below 20ms neither patients nor controls fuse events in time. On the contrary subjects distinguish events at an implicit level even when judging them as synchronous. In addition, the implicit responses of patients and controls differ qualitatively. It is as if controls always put more weight on the last occurred event, whereas patients have a difficulty to follow events in time at an implicit level. In patients, there is a clear dissociation between results at short and large asynchronies, that suggest selective mechanisms for the implicit coding of time-event structure. These results might explain the disruption of the sense of time continuity in patients.We argue that this line of research might also help us to better understand the mechanisms of the visual impairments in patients and how they see their environment. (shrink)

Multimodal integration is the formation of a coherent percept from different sensory inputs such as vision, audition, and somatosensation. Most research on multimodal integration in speech perception has focused on audio-visual integration. In recent years, audio-tactile integration has also been investigated, and it has been established that puffs of air applied to the skin and timed with listening tasks shift the perception of voicing by naive listeners. The current study has replicated and extended these findings by testing the (...) effect of air puffs on gradations of voice onset time along a continuum rather than the voiced and voiceless endpoints of the original work. Three continua were tested: bilabial (“pa/ba”), velar (“ka/ga”), and a vowel continuum (“head/hid”) used as a control. The presence of air puffs was found to significantly increase the likelihood of choosing voiceless responses for the two VOT continua but had no effect on choices for the vowel continuum. Analysis of response times revealed that the presence of air puffs lengthened responses for intermediate (ambiguous) stimuli and shortened them for endpoint (non-ambiguous) stimuli. The slowest response times were observed for the intermediate steps for all three continua, but for the bilabial continuum this effect interacted with the presence of air puffs: responses were slower in the presence of air puffs, and faster in their absence. This suggests that during integration auditory and aero-tactile inputs are weighted differently by the perceptual system, with the latter exerting greater influence in those cases where the auditory cues for voicing are ambiguous. (shrink)

Whereas scholars often look to De Anima 2.5 to support one or another understanding of the sense in which perception, for Aristotle, qualifies as an alteration and qualitative assimilation to the sense-object, I ask the more basic question of what the chapter is meant to establish or accomplish with respect to the question whether perception is an alteration. I argue that the chapter does not presuppose or legitimate the view that perception is an alteration where it is (...) thought to, and that it is meant rather to challenge that view, most importantly, by putting its argumentative weight behind a different model of perception, leading to a kind of antinomy. What stands in the way of understanding perception as an alteration (and assimilation to the sense-object), in this chapter, is ultimately the lack of an account of perceiving a quality as having that quality. (shrink)

We present a new account of perceptual consciousness, one which gives due weight to the epistemic commitment of normal perception in familiar circumstances. The account is given in terms of a higher-order attitude for which the subject has an immediate perceptual epistemic warrant in the form of an appropriate first-order perception. We develop our account in contrast to Rosenthal's higher-order account, rejecting his view of consciousness in virtue of so-called ‘targetless’ higher-order states. We explain the key notion (...) of an immediate perceptual warrant and show both that it requires the content of the higher-order attitude to match that of the first-order perception, and also that it gives a new perspective on the intimate relationship, rightly emphasised by Rosenthal, between consciousness and a subject's testimony as to ‘how it is with her’. (shrink)

We can make a good prima facie case for the inconsistency of Reid's theory of perception with his rejection of the Ideal Theory. Most scholars believe Reid adopts a theory on which the immediate object of perception is a physical body. Reid is thought to do this in order to avoid problems generated by the veil of perception in the Ideal Theory, a conjunction of commitments Reid closely associates with Hume and Locke. Reid explains that the Ideal (...) Theory "leans with its whole weight upon a hypothesis...[t]hat nothing is perceived but what is in the mind which perceives it". Reid attributes to the Ideal Theory thesis. (shrink)