Numerous studies have found that selective attention affects category learning. However, previous research did not distinguish between the contribution of focusing and filtering components of selective attention. This study addresses this issue by examining how components of selective attention affect category representation. Participants first learned a rule‐plus‐similarity category structure, and then were presented with category priming followed by categorization and recognition tests. Additionally, to evaluate the involvement of focusing and filtering, we fit models with different attentional mechanisms to the data. (...) In Experiment 1, participants received rule‐based category training, with specific emphasis on a single deterministic feature (D feature). Experiment 2 added a recognition test to examine participants’ memory for features. Both experiments indicated that participants categorized items based solely on the D feature, showed greater memory for the D feature, were primed exclusively by the D feature without interference from probabilistic features (P features), and were better fit by models with focusing and at least one type of filtering mechanism. The results indicated that selective attention distorted category representation by highlighting the D feature and attenuating P features. To examine whether the distorted representation was specific to rule‐based training, Experiment 3 introduced training, emphasizing all features. Under such training, participants were no longer primed by the D feature, they remembered all features well, and they were better fit by the model assuming only focusing but no filtering process. The results coupled with modeling provide novel evidence that while both focusing and filtering contribute to category representation, filtering can also result in representational distortion. (shrink)

Hobbes Studies presents a special issue dedicated to the career and work of Professor Johann Sommerville on the occasion of his retirement. This introduction provides a brief overview of Sommerville’s professional achievements and the major themes of his scholarly work over the past forty years. It closes with a very brief summary of the contributions made in his honor.

Drawing on his past work as an interpreter of Adam Smith, Hanley offers an account of Fénelon’s social and political thought that emphasizes the role of pride and self-love in human affairs. Fénelon does not join those, like Mandeville and La Rochefoucauld, who seek to understand and possibly to control self-love. Instead, he attempts to wed a far more rigorous and classical approach to the problem of pride—namely, the refinement of self-love through virtuous practices—to a modern view of the state (...) and political economy. (shrink)

For three hundred years, Bernard Mandeville was considered the first great apologist for luxury and the unsavory dimensions of commercial society, a reputation that remains largely intact even as scholars reconsider the depth and influence of his thought. Here, I argue that Mandeville’s attitude toward luxury and material excess is far more ambivalent—indeed, highly critical—than previously thought. As societies became wealthier and more literate, Mandeville saw both individuals and societies growing increasingly susceptible to discontent—to “grumbling,” as the original title of (...) The Fable of the Bees has it. This focus on grumbling is particularly worthy of close study because Mandeville’s chief profession was medicine, and, more specifically, the treatment of hypochondria. Identifying the bourgeois lifestyle as the cause of hypochondria in both the body and the body politic led him to caution his patients against the very things with which his name is synonymous: luxury and excess. (shrink)