An important application of cognitive architectures is to provide human performance models that capture psychological mechanisms in a form that can be “programmed” to predict task performance of human–machine system designs. Although many aspects of human performance have been successfully modeled in this approach, accounting for multitalker speech task performance is a novel problem. This article presents a model for performance in a two-talker task that incorporates concepts from psychoacoustics, in particular, masking effects and stream formation.

Visual Search without Selective Attention calls into question the necessity of a covert selective attention mechanism by implementing a formal model that includes basic visual mechanisms, saccades, and simple task strategies. Across three search tasks, the model accounts for response times as well as the proportion of errors observed in human participants, including effects of item crowding in the visual stimulus.

The field of cognitive modeling has progressed beyond modeling cognition in the context of simple laboratory tasks and begun to attack the problem of modeling it in more complex, realistic environments, such as those studied by researchers in the field of human factors. The problems that the cognitive modeling community is tackling focus on modeling certain problems of communication and control that arise when integrating with the external environment factors such as implicit and explicit knowledge, emotion, cognition, and the cognitive (...) system. These problems must be solved in order to produce integrated cognitive models of moderately complex tasks. Architectures of cognition in these tasks focus on the control of a central system, which includes control of the central processor itself, initiation of functional processes, such as visual search and memory retrieval, and harvesting the results of these functional processes. Because the control of the central system is conceptually different from the internal control required by individual functional processes, a complete architecture of cognition must incorporate two types of theories of control: Type 1 theories of the structure, functionality, and operation of the controller, and type 2 theories of the internal control of functional processes, including how and what they communicate to the controller. This book presents the current state of the art for both types of theories, as well as contrasts among current approaches to human-performance models. It will be an important resource for professional and student researchers in cognitive science, cognitive-engineering, and human-factors.Contributors: Kevin A. Gluck, Jerry T. Ball, Michael A. Krusmark, Richard W. Pew, Chris R. Sims, Vladislav D. Veksler, John R. Anderson, Ron Sun, Nicholas L. Cassimatis, Randy J. Brou, Andrew D. Egerton, Stephanie M. Doane, Christopher W. Myers, Hansjorg Neth, Jeremy M Wolfe, Marc Pomplun, Ronald A. Rensink, Hansjorg Neth, Chris R. Sims, Peter M. Todd, Lael J. Schooler, Wai-Tat Fu, Michael C. Mozer, Sachiko Kinoshita, Michael Shettel, Alex Kirlik, Vladislav D. Veksler, Michael J. Schoelles, Jerome R. Busemeyer, Eric Dimperio, Ryan K. Jessup, Jonathan Gratch, Stacy Marsella, Glenn Gunzelmann, Kevin A. Gluck, Scott Price, Hans P. A. Van Dongen, David F. Dinges, Frank E. Ritter, Andrew L. Reifers, Laura Cousino Klein, Michael J. Schoelles, Eva Hudlicka, Hansjorg Neth, Christopher W. Myers, Dana Ballard, Nathan Sprague, Laurence T. Maloney, Julia Trommershauser, Michael S. Landy, A. Hornof, Michael J. Schoelles, David Kieras, Dario D. Salvucci, Niels Taatgen, Erik M. Altmann, Richard A. Carlson, Andrew Howes, Richard L. Lewis, Alonso Vera, Richard P. Cooper, and Michael D. Byrne. (shrink)

A significant part of hegemonic masculinity is proving one’s heterosexuality though sexual experiences. Peer pressure to conform is particularly acute for adolescent boys and young men. We analyze interviews with 87 boys in middle school, high school, and college about how their masculinity goals and subsequent achievement of those goals influence their navigation of pressure to engage in sexual relations with girls and women to “prove” themselves. Our findings show that, while boys and young men recognize dominant notions of hegemonic (...) masculinity, most do not subscribe to those uncritically. Rather, they struggle to balance personal ideas about masculinity with consistent pressure from others to demonstrate their heterosexuality. As a result, they employ various strategies to negotiate such pressures, including avoidance, acceptance, and outright rejection of this particular expectation. These strategies, however, ultimately contribute to a broader gender culture among adolescents in which expectations and privileges associated with hegemonic masculinity that dominate U.S. culture remain largely unchallenged. (shrink)

There is a common view in medical ethics that the patient's right to be informed entails, as well, a correlative right not to be informed, i.e., to waive one's right to information. This paper argues, from a consideration of the concept of autonomy as the foundation for rights, that there can be no such ‘right’ to refuse relevant information, and that the claims for such a right are inconsistent with both deontological and utilitarian ethics. Further, the right to be informed (...) is shown to be a mandatory right (though not a welfare right); persons are thus seen to have both a right and a duty to be informed. Finally, the consequences of this view are addressed: since the way in which we conceptualize our problems tends to determine the actions we take to resolve them, it is important properly to conceptualize patients' requests not to be informed. There may be many reasons for acting in accord with such a request, but it is a mistake to conceptualize one's act as ‘respecting a right possessed by persons’. Keywords: medical ethics, informed consent, autonomy, information-waivers, rights, obligations CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

D E Cooper; Is Language Learned?1, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 9, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 93–104, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1975.tb.

Bernard Williams charges that the moral psychology built into R. M. Hare’s utilitarianism is incoherent in virtue of demanding a bifurcated kind of moral thinking that is possible only for agents who fail to reflect properly on their own practical decision making. I mount a qualified defence of Hare’s view by drawing on the account of the ‘reactive attitudes’ found in P. F. Strawson’s ‘Freedom and Resentment’. Against Williams, I argue that the ‘resilience’ of the reactive attitudes ensures that our (...) taking an instrumental view of our dispositions to experience guilt and compunction, as Hare calls for us to do while engaged in ‘critical’ moral thinking, will not prevent us from experiencing these feelings as people ordinarily do while we are thinking ‘intuitively’. I also consider the implications of my argument for consequentialism more generally and (briefly) Kantianism. (shrink)

Philosophers of technology are not playing the public role that our own theoretical perspectives motivate us to take. A great variety of theories and perspectives within philosophy of technology, including those of Marcuse, Feenberg, Borgmann, Ihde, Michelfelder, Bush, Winner, Latour, and Verbeek, either support or directly call for various sorts of intervention—a call that we have failed to heed adequately. Barriers to such intervention are discussed, and three proposals for reform are advanced: post-publication peer-reviewed reprinting of public philosophy, increased emphasis (...) on true open access publication, and increased efforts to publicize and adapt traditional academic research. (shrink)

Infinite time Turing machines with only one tape are in many respects fully as powerful as their multi-tape cousins. In particular, the two models of machine give rise to the same class of decidable sets, the same degree structure and, at least for partial functions f : ℝ → ℕ, the same class of computable functions. Nevertheless, there are infinite time computable functions f : ℝ → ℝ that are not one-tape computable, and so the two models of infinitary computation (...) are not equivalent. Surprisingly, the class of one-tape computable functions is not closed under composition; but closing it under composition yields the full class of all infinite time computable functions. Finally, every ordinal that is clockable by an infinite time Turing machine is clockable by a one-tape machine, except certain isolated ordinals that end gaps in the clockable ordinals. (shrink)

This book proposes a theory of reference--answering the question of whether Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures refer to the same God--within a semantic framework acceptable to atheists and fideists.

Some of the objections to life-extension stem from a concern with overpopulation. I will show that whether or not the overpopulation threat is realistic, arguments from overpopulation cannot ethically demand halting the quest for, nor access to, life-extension. The reason for this is that we have a right to life, which entitles us not to have meaningful life denied to us against our will and which does not allow discrimination solely on the grounds of age. If the threat of overpopulation (...) creates a rights conflict between the right to come into existence, the right to reproduce, the right to more opportunities and space , and the right to life, the latter ought to be given precedence. (shrink)