We consider Sussman et al. 's suggestion that auditory biases for processing low-noise relationships among pairs of acoustic variables is a preadaptation for human speech processing. Data from other animal communication systems, especially those involving sexual selection, also suggest that neural biases in the receiver system can generate strong selection on the form of communication signals.

This study investigated the roles of problem structure and strategy use in problem encoding. Fourth‐grade students solved and explained a set of typical addition problems (e.g., 5 + 4 + 9 + 5 = _) and mathematical equivalence problems (e.g., 4 + 3 + 6 = 4 + _ or 6 + 4 + 5 = _ + 5). Next, they completed an encoding task in which they reconstructed addition and equivalence problems after viewing each for 5 s. Equivalence problems (...) of the form 4 + 3 + 6 = 4 + _ overlap with a perceptual pattern found in traditional arithmetic problems (i.e., answer blank in final position), and students' encoding was poorest on problems of this type. Individual differences in encoding the equivalence problems were related to variations in strategy use. Some students solved blank‐final equivalence problems using the standard arithmetic strategy of performing all given operations on all given numbers. These students made more errors in encoding problem structure, but fewer errors in encoding the numbers, than did students who solved the problems using correct or other incorrect strategies. Moreover, students who expressed many strategies for solving the blank‐final equivalence problems made fewer errors in encoding problem structure, but more errors in encoding the numbers, than did students who expressed only a single strategy. Results highlight that encoding is intended to guide action and that prior experience can simultaneously facilitate and interfere with accurate encoding. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S57-S59, March‐April 2022.

This paper argues that “backstage” gallows humor among clinical mentors not only affects medical students’ perceptions of what it means to be a doctor but is also symptomatic and indicative of a much larger problem in medicine—namely, the failure to attend fully to the complexity and profundity of the lived experiences of illness, suffering, and death. Reorienting the discourse surrounding gallows humor away from whether or in what context it is acceptable and toward the reasons why doctors feel the need (...) to use such humor in the first place addresses this issue in a more illuminating way. (shrink)

We examined the management of completed advance directives including why participants completed a document, what procedures and values they chose, with whom they held end-of-life conversations, and where they stored their document. Participants elected to complete a SurveyMonkey survey that was made available to individuals who wrote an advance directive through Texas-LivingWill.org; 491 individuals elected to fill out the survey, aged 19 to 94 years. The survey asked multiple questions about why participants completed an advance directive, where they would store (...) it, and with whom they had conversations about their end-oflife wishes. A list of procedures and values allowed participants to indicate what they refused or requested in their advance directive. Advance directives are most often completed to allow patients to prepare and control the healthcare they wish to receive when dying. One-half to two-thirds of individuals refuse common end-of-life medical procedures, and the rest request the procedures. We found a correlation between the choice to refuse or request a procedure and the age of the participant. Participants reported that their end-of-life conversations most often occurred with their spouse. Respondents often reported that their advance directive was stored with their physician and power of attorney for healthcare, conversations with those individuals rarely happened. Advance directives document patients’ requests for and refusals of end-of-life care. Physicians and surrogates need to be better educated so that the documents are part of a meaningful conversation with the patient. Because patients’ choices change over their lifespan, these documents need to be revisited regularly and not completed as a onetime event. (shrink)

In describing the foundations of our pedagogical approaches to service-learning, we seek to go beyond the navel-gazing—at times, paralyzing—paradoxes of neoliberal forces, which can do “good” for students and their communities, yet which also call students into further calculative frameworks for understanding the “value” of pre-health humanities education and social engagement. We discuss methods to create quiet forms of subversion that call for a moral imagination in extending an ethics of care to students as well as to the communities with (...) which they engage. While we recognize the partiality and limitations of our attempts, framing mentored service-learning in unexpected ways can help students and practitioners to understand their role within broader social, historical, cultural, and emotional contexts and encourage them to act intentionally toward the communities they seek to serve in response to this new self-knowledge. To that end, we outline an academically rigorous service-learning intervention at one of our universities. (shrink)

Recent efforts by legislative officials and public health advocates to reform the US food stamp program, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, have focused on restricting the types of foods eligible for purchase with SNAP benefits, specifically sugar-sweetened beverages. We argue that it is, in principle, permissible for the US government to enact a SNAP-specific SSB ban prohibiting the purchase of SSBs with SNAP benefits. While the government has a duty to ensure that citizens meet their nutritional needs, since SSBs provide (...) negligible nutrition, it has no obligation to subsidize them. Additionally, there is good reason to think that a SNAP-specific SSB ban would enable the government to better fulfill two other duties—improving citizens’ health and providing public services like Medicaid and Medicare in a more cost-effective manner. Still, because the costs and benefits of such a ban remain uncertain, we argue that the government should conduct well-designed pilot projects to help determine the effects of an SSB ban. (shrink)

Samuel H. LiPuma and Joseph P. DeMarco argue for a positive right to continuous sedation until death (CSD) for any patient with a life expectancy less than six months. They reject any requirement of proportionality. Their proposed guideline makes CSD an option for a decisional adult patient with an appropriate terminal diagnosis regardless of whether suffering (physical or existential) is present. This guideline purports to “empower” the patient with the ability to control the timing and manner of her death. This (...) extends even to the option to “opt out” of the awareness and experience of dying and to avoid suffering altogether, even if one’s symptoms and suffering could be effectively treated.We respond first with a critique of their terminology. We then turn to some purely practical considerations of how this guideline might be enacted in the current atmosphere of American hospice and palliative care medicine. We close with a consideration of one philosophical concern that might ground the discussion of risks, benefits, and alternatives necessary for informed consent. (shrink)

In the current U.S. context, we are facing a Constitutional crisis with frequent government shutdowns and new policy debates surrounding immigration, climate change, budgeting practices, and the balance of power. With competing interests, unclear policy, and inconsistent leadership directives, the question becomes: How do contemporary bureaucrats make sense of this ethically turbulent environment? This collection provides a lens for viewing administrative decision-making and behavior from a Constitutional basis, as contemporary bureaucrats attempt to navigate uncharted territory. Ethics for Contemporary Bureaucrats is (...) organized around three constitutional values: freedom, property, and social equity. These themes are based on emerging trends in public administration and balanced with traditional ethical models. Each chapter provides an overview of a contemporary ethical issue, identifies key actors, institutions, legal and legislative policy, and offers normative and practical recommendations to address the challenges the issue poses. Rooted in a respected and time-tested intellectual history, this volume speaks to bureaucrats in a modern era of governance. It is ideally suited to educate students, scholars, and public servants on Constitutional values and legal precedent as a basis for ethics in the public sector. (shrink)

If engaging in end of life conversations and advance care planning not only is desired by many Americans but also might significantly improve patient care at the end of life, then why was a provision that provided reimbursement for physicians to engage in end of life planning through Medicare removed from legislation? If, as some researchers have suggested, reimbursements under Medicare “would have been a start” for encouraging these conversations, then why was the Advance Care Planning Consultation provision in the (...) 2008 health reform effort so vehemently opposed by politicians and citizens alike? The heated and misleading rhetoric employed against the ACPC undoubtedly contributed to intractable polarization surrounding this portion of the health reform bill and assured its failure. But the ACPC's emphasis on “checklists” and regulation may also have served as fodder for these fiery critiques. If that's right, legislation that focuses squarely on the broader and more fundamental goals of end of life consultations and deemphasizes administrative and documentary concerns may have a greater chance for success in years to come, as health reform is implemented and the battle over the ACPC fades from memory. (shrink)

How medical education and practice can move beyond a narrow focus on biological intervention to recognize the lived experiences of illness, suffering, and death. In Afflicted, Nicole Piemonte examines the preoccupation in medicine with cure over care, arguing that the traditional focus on biological intervention keeps medicine from addressing the complex realities of patient suffering. Although many have pointed to the lack of compassion and empathy in medical practice, few have considered the deeper philosophical, psychological, and ontological reasons for (...) it. Piemonte fills that gap, examining why it is that clinicians and medical trainees largely evade issues of vulnerability and mortality and, doing so, offer patients compromised care. She argues that contemporary medical pedagogy and epistemology are not only shaped by the human tendency to flee from the reality of death and suffering but also perpetuate it. The root of the problem, she writes, is the educational and institutional culture that promotes reductionist understandings of care, illness, and suffering but avoids any authentic confrontation with human suffering and the fear and self-doubt that can come with that confrontation. Through a philosophical analysis of the patient-practitioner encounter, Piemonte argues that the doctor, in escaping from authentic engagement with a patient who is suffering, in fact “escapes from herself.” Piemonte explores the epistemology and pedagogy of medicine, examines its focus on calculative or technical thinking, and considers how “clinical detachment” diminishes physicians. She suggests ways that educators might cultivate the capacity for authentic patient care and proposes specific curricular changes to help students expand their moral imaginations. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 163-188, January 2022.

This paper makes a conceptual inquiry into the notion of ‘publics’, and forwards an understanding of this notion that allows more responsible forms of decision-making with regards to technologies that have localized impacts, such as wind parks, hydrogen stations or flood barriers. The outcome of this inquiry is that the acceptability of a decision is to be assessed by a plurality of ‘publics’, including that of a local community. Even though a plurality of ‘publics’ might create competing normative demands, its (...) acknowledgment is necessary to withstand the monopolization of the process of technology appraisal. The paper presents four ways in which such an appropriation of publicness takes place. The creation of dedicated ‘local publics’, in contrast, helps to overcome these problems and allows for more responsible forms of decision-making. We describe ‘local publics’ as those in which stakeholders from the different publics that are related to the process of technology implementation are brought together, and in which concerns and issues from these publics are deliberated upon. The paper will present eight conditions for increasing the effectiveness of such ‘local publics’. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the literature on conceptual change by engaging in direct theoretical and empirical comparison of contrasting views. We take up the question of whether naïve physical ideas are coherent or fragmented, building specifically on recent work supporting claims of coherence with respect to the concept of force by Ioannides and Vosniadou [Ioannides, C., & Vosniadou, C. (2002). The changing meanings of force. Cognitive Science Quarterly 2, 5–61]. We first engage in a theoretical inquiry on the (...) nature of coherence and fragmentation, concluding that these terms are not well‐defined, and proposing a set of issues that may be better specified. The issues have to do with contextuality, which concerns the range of contexts in which a concept (meaning, model, theory) applies, and relational structure, which is how elements of a concept (meaning, model, or theory) relate to one another. We further propose an enhanced theoretical and empirical accountability for what and how much one needs to say in order to have specified a concept. Vague specification of the meaning of a concept can lead to many kinds of difficulties.Empirically, we conducted two studies. A study patterned closely on Ioannides and Vosniadou's work (which we call a quasi‐replication) failed to confirm their operationalizations of “coherent.” An extension study, based on a more encompassing specification of the concept of force, showed three kinds of results: (1) Subjects attend to more features than mentioned by Ioannides and Vosniadou, and they changed answers systematically based on these features; (2)We found substantial differences in the way subjects thought about the new contexts we asked about, which undermined claims for homogeneity within even the category of subjects (having one particular meaning associated with “force”) that best survived our quasi‐replication; (3) We found much reasoning of subjects about forces that cannot be accounted for by the meanings specified by Ioannides and Vosniadou. All in all, we argue that, with a greater attention to contextuality and with an appropriately broad specification of the meaning of a concept like force, Ioannides and Vosniadou's claims to have demonstrated coherence seem strongly undermined. Students' ideas are not random and chaotic; but neither are they simply described and strongly systematic. (shrink)

To assess whether and how environmental values and sense of place relate to sustainable farming practices, we conducted a study in South Kona, Hawaii, addressing environmental values, sense of place, and farm sustainability in five categories: environmental health, community engagement and food security, culture and history, education and research, and economics. We found that the sense of place and environmental values indexes showed significant correlation to each category of sustainability in both independent linear regressions and multivariate regression. In total, sense (...) of place explained a larger share of the overall farm performance. However, each indicator showed relative strengths; environmental values showed significantly higher correlation to environmental and educational practices. Furthermore the scales were complimentary, and the use of both scales greatly improved prediction of good farming practices from a multiple-impact perspective. With implications for community and environmental impacts, results suggest that a more comprehensive view of farmers’ environmental values and place connections may help illuminate individual farmers’ decisions and sustainability-related practices. (shrink)

The effects of parent rewards on youth outcomes have been studied extensively; however, research has not systematically categorized parent rewards. Centralizing the analysis of rewards within a given study would help compare the prevalence of reward types at superordinate and subordinate levels. Moreover, it could reveal which level is the most effective for assessing cultural group similarities and differences in a globalizing world. Mother-child conversations between European-American (n = 51) and Hispanic-American (n = 44) dyads were transcribed. A content analysis (...) assessed material and social reward talk themes and created new subthemes. A series of 2 (culture) × 2 (gender) ANCOVAs assessed cultural differences in reward talk themes and subthemes. Results revealed the prevalence of certain reward subthemes, like praise, significantly differed by cultural group. In conclusion, investigations with different cultural groups should consider reward talk on a subordinate level rather than superordinate. (shrink)

This paper examines the effects of a decrease in auditor litigation risk in a setting that isolates a change in auditor litigation risk from changes in auditor reputation. _StoneRidge Investment Partners v. Scientific Atlanta_ is a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that restricted secondary actor liability in class action suits, resulting in a decrease in class actions that listed auditors as defendants. We document that the _StoneRidge_ decision is associated with a negative CAR for clients of Big 4 auditors and (...) industry specialist auditors, in particular those associated with high-litigation risk, low cash, and past incidences of modified going concern opinions. These findings are consistent with investor perception of lower potential payoffs from secondary defendants in class action suits, in particular auditors, following the _StoneRidge_ decision. We also document that auditors are more (less) likely to accept (reject) risky clients and charge lower audit fees to risky clients after _StoneRidge_, consistent with a decrease in auditor litigation risk that increases auditor risk tolerance. Finally, we provide evidence that audit firms issue fewer going concern opinions following _StoneRidge_, consistent with a decrease in litigation risk leading to lower audit quality_._ Our results are relevant to policy makers as they consider the disciplinary role of litigation on audit markets. (shrink)

Mathematics word problems provide students with an opportunity to apply what they are learning in their mathematics classes to the world around them. However, students often neglect their knowledge of the world and provide nonsensical responses (e.g., they may answer that a school needs 12.5 buses for a field trip). This study examined if the question design of word problems affects students' mindset in ways that affect subsequent sense‐making. The hypothesis was that rewriting standard word problems to introduce inherent uncertainty (...) about the result would be beneficial to student performance and sense‐making because it requires students to reason explicitly about the context described in the problem. Middle school students (N = 229) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. In the standard textbook condition, students solved a set of six word problems taken from current textbooks. In the modified yes/no condition, students solved the same six problems rewritten so the solution helped answer a “yes” or “no” question. In the disfluency control condition, students solved the standard problems each rewritten in a variety of fonts to make them look unusual. After solving the six problems in their assigned condition, all students solved the same three “problematic” problems designed to assess sense‐making. Contrary to predictions, results showed that students in the modified yes/no condition solved the fewest problems correctly in their assigned condition problem set. However, consistent with predictions, they subsequently demonstrated more sense‐making on the three problematic problems. Results suggest that standard textbook word problems may be able to be rewritten in ways that mitigate a “senseless” mindset. (shrink)

The mining and energy industries present unique challenges to engineers, who must navigate sometimes competing responsibilities and codes of conduct, such as personal senses of right and wrong, professional ethics codes, and their employers’ corporate social responsibility policies. Corporate social responsibility is the current dominant framework used by industry to conceptualize firms’ responsibilities to their stakeholders, yet has it plays a relatively minor role in engineering ethics education. In this article, we report on an interdisciplinary pedagogical intervention in a petroleum (...) engineering seminar that sought to better prepare engineering undergraduate students to critically appraise the strengths and limitations of CSR as an approach to reconciling the interests of industry and communities. We find that as a result of the curricular interventions, engineering students were able to expand their knowledge of the social, rather than simply environmental and economic dimensions of CSR. They remained hesitant, however, in identifying the links between those social aspects of CSR and their actual engineering work. The study suggests that CSR may be a fruitful arena from which to illustrate the profoundly sociotechnical dimensions of the engineering challenges relevant to students’ future careers. (shrink)

Research in basic and clinical neuroscience of music conducted over the past decades has begun to uncover music’s high potential as a tool for rehabilitation. Advances in our understanding of how music engages parallel brain networks underpinning sensory and motor processes, arousal, reward, and affective regulation, have laid a sound neuroscientific foundation for the development of theory-driven music interventions that have been systematically tested in clinical settings. Of particular significance in the context of motor rehabilitation is the notion that musical (...) rhythms can entrain movement patterns in patients with movement-related disorders, serving as a continuous time reference that can help regulate movement timing and pace. To date, a significant number of clinical and experimental studies have tested the application of rhythm- and music-based interventions to improve motor functions following central nervous injury and/or degeneration. The goal of this review is to appraise the current state of knowledge on the effectiveness of music and rhythm to modulate movement spatiotemporal patterns and restore motor function. By organizing and providing a critical appraisal of a large body of research, we hope to provide a revised framework for future research on the effectiveness of rhythm- and music-based interventions to restore and train motor function. (shrink)

Engineering ethics calls the attention of engineers to professional codes of ethical responsibility and personal values, but the practice of ethics in corporate settings can be more complex than either of these. Corporations too have cultures that often include corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and policies, but few discussions of engineering ethics make any explicit reference to CSR. This article proposes critical attention to CSR and role ethics as an opportunity to help prepare engineers to think through the ethics of (...) their professional practice. After a brief overview of the evolution of social responsibility within engineering ethics in the United States, this article shares empirical research with practicing engineers in the mining and energy industries to explore how their formal ethics training did and did not prepare them to grapple with the ethical dimensions of their professional practice. It then illustrates the ways in which these dilemmas and the strategies employed for navigating them are framed within CSR policies and practices and resonate more strongly with role ethics rather than ethical theory as currently taught in most US engineering programs. The article concludes that engineering ethics teaching and learning would benefit from explicitly incorporating critical discussions of role ethics and CSR. (shrink)

Weiss, Propen, and Reid gather a diverse group of scholars to analyze the growing obsolescence of the human-object dichotomy in today's world. In doing so, Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman brings together diverse disciplines to foster a dialog on significant technological issues pertinent to philosophy, rhetoric, aesthetics, and science.

Using a multidisciplinary framework, this article examines the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s (ORR) policy decision to prohibit teens in federal immigration custody from obtaining abortions. As we argue, this appropriation of decisional authority over their reproductive bodies discursively cast them as doubly subversive for first breaching the southern border of the United States and then insisting upon the right to ‘abortion on demand’. Mapping these twinned agendas onto their bodies, these teens were configured as a threat to the racialised national (...) order during the Trump era. Centring our analysis on the much publicised constitutional challenge to ORR’s abortion ban in Garza v. Hargan, we interrogate this policy as a powerful expression of legal duplicity, the spatial and bodily containment of those deemed other, and the privileging of the citizen-foetus over their undocumented mothers. (shrink)

Applying machine learning algorithms to automatically infer relationships between concepts from large-scale collections of documents presents a unique opportunity to investigate at scale how human semantic knowledge is organized, how people use it to make fundamental judgments (“How similar are cats and bears?”), and how these judgments depend on the features that describe concepts (e.g., size, furriness). However, efforts to date have exhibited a substantial discrepancy between algorithm predictions and human empirical judgments. Here, we introduce a novel approach to generating (...) embeddings for this purpose motivated by the idea that semantic context plays a critical role in human judgment. We leverage this idea by constraining the topic or domain from which documents used for generating embeddings are drawn (e.g., referring to the natural world vs. transportation apparatus). Specifically, we trained state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms using contextually-constrained text corpora (domain-specific subsets of Wikipedia articles, 50+ million words each) and showed that this procedure greatly improved predictions of empirical similarity judgments and feature ratings of contextually relevant concepts. Furthermore, we describe a novel, computationally tractable method for improving predictions of contextually-unconstrained embedding models based on dimensionality reduction of their internal representation to a small number of contextually relevant semantic features. By improving the correspondence between predictions derived automatically by machine learning methods using vast amounts of data and more limited, but direct empirical measurements of human judgments, our approach may help leverage the availability of online corpora to better understand the structure of human semantic representations and how people make judgments based on those. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.