Participants struck 500 golf balls to a concealed target. Outcome feedback was presented at the subjective or objective threshold of awareness of each participant or at a supraliminal threshold. Participants who received fully perceptible feedback learned to strike the ball onto the target, as did participants who received feedback that was only marginally perceptible . Participants who received feedback that was not perceptible showed no learning. Upon transfer to a condition in which the target was unconcealed, performance increased in both (...) the subjective and the objective threshold condition, but decreased in the supraliminal condition. In all three conditions, participants reported minimal declarative knowledge of their movements, suggesting that deliberate hypothesis testing about how best to move in order to perform the motor task successfully was disrupted by the impoverished disposition of the visual outcome feedback. It was concluded that sub-optimally perceptible visual feedback evokes implicit processes. (shrink)

Entering graduate school -- An academic career or not? -- Being an assistant professor -- Academic midlife -- The endgame.

This study examines the relation of language use to a person’s ability to perform categorization tasks and to assess their own abilities in those categorization tasks. A silent rhyming task was used to confirm that a group of people with post-stroke aphasia (PWA) had corresponding covert language production (or “inner speech”) impairments. The performance of the PWA was then compared to that of age- and education-matched healthy controls on three kinds of categorization tasks and on metacognitive self-assessments of their performance (...) on those tasks. The PWA showed no deficits in their ability to categorize objects for any of the three trial types (visual, thematic, and categorial). However, on the categorial trials, their metacognitive assessments of whether they had categorized correctly were less reliable than those of the control group. The categorial trials were distinguished from the others by the fact that the categorization could not be based on some immediately perceptible feature or on the objects’ being found together in a type of scenario or setting. This result offers preliminary evidence for a link between covert language use and a specific form of metacognition. (shrink)

The paper discusses Dr. Floris Tomasini's paper “What Is Bioethics: Notes toward a New Approach?”. Based on Tomasini's account of methodological and ethical pluralism, the paper explores the demarcation problem of bioethics and suggests a full methodological laissez-faire.

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

A common finding is that information order influences belief revision (e.g., Hogarth & Einhorn, 1992). We tested personal experience as a possible mitigator. In three experiments participants experienced the probabilistic relationship between pieces of information and object category through a series of trials where they assigned objects (planes) into one of two possible categories (hostile or commercial), given two sequentially presented pieces of probabilistic information (route and ID), and then they had to indicate their belief about the object category before (...) feedback. The results generally confirm the predictions from the Hogarth and Einhorn model. Participants showed a recency effect in their belief revision. Extending previous model evaluations the results indicate that the model predictions also hold for classification decisions, and for pieces of information that vary in their diagnostic values. Personal experience does not appear to prevent order effects in classification decisions based on sequentially presented pieces of information and in belief revision. (shrink)

The problem of disease definition is related to theproblem of proving that a certain agent is thenecessary cause of a certain disease. Natural kindterms like ‘rheumatoid arthritis’ and ‘AIDS’ refer toessences which are discoverable rather thanpredeterminate. No statement about such diseases isa priori necessarily true. Because theories onnecessary causes involve natural kind semantics,Koch's postulates cannot be used to falsify or verifysuch theories. Instead of proving that agent A is thenecessary cause of disease D, we include A in atheoretical definition of (...) D, take this to representthe real meaning of ‘D’, and discard thepretheoretical definition. This is illustrated byKoch's own attempt to prove he had discovered thenecessary cause of tuberculosis. Methodologicalarguments about disease causation require a clear viewof our use of diagnostic terms. Medical lexicographersshould do more to provide such a view. (shrink)