Previous accounts of how people develop expertise have focused on how deliberate practice transforms the cognitive and perceptual representations and processes that give rise to expertise. However, the likelihood of developing expertise with a particular tool may also depend on the degree to which that tool fits pre‐existing perceptual and cognitive abilities. The present studies explored whether the abacus—a descendent of the first human computing devices—may have evolved to exploit general biases in human visual attention, or whether developing expertise with (...) the abacus requires learning special strategies for allocating visual attention to the abacus. To address this question, we administered a series of visual search tasks to abacus experts and subjects who had little to no abacus experience, in which search targets and distractors were overlaid atop abacus “beads.” Across three studies, we found that both experts and naïve subjects were faster to detect targets in semantically relevant components of the abacus, suggesting that abacus training is not required to exhibit attentional biases toward these components of the abacus. This finding suggests that the attentional biases that scaffold numerical processing of the abacus may emerge from general properties of visual attention that are exploited by the design of the abacus itself. (shrink)

It is traditionally believed that cerebral activation (the presence of low voltage fast electrical activity in the neocortex and rhythmical slow activity in the hippocampus) is correlated with arousal, while deactivation (the presence of large amplitude irregular slow waves or spindles in both the neocortex and the hippocampus) is correlated with sleep or coma. However, since there are many exceptions, these generalizations have only limited validity. Activated patterns occur in normal sleep (active or paradoxical sleep) and during states of anesthesia (...) and coma. Deactivated patterns occur, at times, during normal waking, or during behavior in awake animals treated with atropinic drugs. Also, the fact that patterns characteristic of sleep, arousal, and waking behavior continue in decorticate animals indicates that reticulo-cortical mechanisms are not essential for these aspects of behavior. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

With the increasing prices of newly approved anti-cancer treatments contributing to rising healthcare costs, healthcare systems are facing complex economic and ethical dilemmas. Especially in countries with universal access and mandatory health insurance, including many European countries, the organizing of funding or reimbursement of expensive new treatments can be challenging. When expensive anti-cancer treatments are deemed safe and effective, but are not (yet) reimbursed, ethical dilemmas arise. In countries with universal healthcare systems, such as the Netherlands, this gives rise to (...) a rather new ethical dilemma: should patients be allowed to pay out of pocket, using private funds, for medical treatments? On the one hand, to allow patients to pay for treatments out of pocket would be in line with the medical-ethical principles of beneficence and autonomy. On the other hand, allowing patients to pay out of pocket for anti-cancer treatments may lead to unequal access to medical treatments and could be considered unfair to patients who are less well-off. Thus, it could undermine the values of equality and solidarity, on which the Dutch healthcare system is built. Furthermore, out-of-pocket payments could potentially lead to financial hardship and distress for patients, which would conflict with the principle of non-maleficence. Does this mean that patients can rightfully be denied access to approved but not (yet) reimbursed anti-cancer treatments? In this article, we will use the Dutch healthcare system, which is based on equal access and solidarity, as a case study to draw attention to this—currently relatively unknown and unresolved—dilemma and to clarify the values at stake. This article contributes to current discussions about the societal problem of rising healthcare costs by informing policymakers, healthcare professionals, and ethicists about the ethical dilemma of out-of-pocket payments in universal healthcare systems, and aims to support health authorities, policymakers and health professionals in developing policy for whether to allow out-of-pocket payment-based access to newly approved but (too) expensive anti-cancer treatments. (shrink)

In orthodox quantum mechanics, it has virtually become the custom to identify properties of a physical system with operationally testable propositions about the system. The causes and consequences of this practice are explored mathematically in this paper. Among other things, it is found that such an identification imposes severe constraints on the admissible states of the physical system.

C. H. Whiteley; I—The Presidential Address*: Confirmation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 June 1974, Pages 1–14, https://doi.org.

Recent scholarship, focusing on the rapid decline of microscopy after the late 1680's, has shown that the limitations of microscopy and the ambivalent meaning of its findings led to a wide-spread sense of frustration with the new instrument. The present article tries to connect this fall from favor with the microscope's equally surprising but hitherto little noticed late rise to prominence. The crucial point is that when the microscope, more than a decade after the telescope, finally managed to arouse the (...) interest of natural philosophers, it did so as a corpuscularian tool, and as such it came to share the difficult fate of seventeenth-century corpuscularianism. The essay ends with the claim that the fall of microscopy was not only due to the failure of microscopy to corroborate corpuscularianism, but also to the changing definition of natural philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and to the separation of the domains of living matter from a physica whose recent mathematical framework excluded the organic world. (shrink)