Observers have difficulty detecting visual changes. However, they are unaware of this inability, suggesting that people do not have an accurate understanding of visual processes. We explored whether this error is related to participants’ beliefs about the roles of intention and scene complexity in detecting changes. In Experiment 1 participants had a higher failure rate for detecting changes in an incidental change detection task than an intentional change detection task. This effect of intention was greatest for complex scenes. However, participants (...) predicted equal levels of change detection for both types of changes across scene complexity. In Experiment 2, emphasizing the differences between intentional and incidental tasks allowed participants to make predictions that were less inaccurate. In Experiment 3, using more sensitive measures and accounting for individual differences did not further improve predictions. These findings suggest that adults do not fully understand the role of intention and scene complexity in change detection. (shrink)

Previous research demonstrates that implicitly learned probability information can guide visual attention. We examined whether the probability of an object changing can be implicitly learned and then used to improve change detection performance. In a series of six experiments, participants completed 120–130 training change detection trials. In four of the experiments the object that changed color was the same shape on every trial. Participants were not explicitly aware of this change probability manipulation and change detection performance was not improved for (...) the trained shape versus untrained shapes. In two of the experiments, the object that changed color was always in the same general location . Although participants were not explicitly aware of the change probability, implicit knowledge of it did improve change detection performance in the trained location. These results indicate that improved change detection performance through implicitly learned change probability occurs for location but not shape. (shrink)

Smilek, Eastwood, Reynolds, and Kingstone suggests that the studies reported in Beck, M. R., Levin, D. T. and Angelone, B. A. are not ecologically valid. Here, we argue that not only are change blindness and change blindness blindness studies in general ecologically valid, but that the studies we reported in Beck, Levin, and Angelone, 2007 are as well. Specifically, we suggest that many of the changes used in our study could reasonably be expected to occur in the real world. Furthermore, (...) the conclusion from Beck et al. that knowledge about the role of intention and scene complexity in change detection is not readily accessible applies not only to the laboratory studies we conducted but also to real world situations. (shrink)

This article focuses on three memoirs written by physicians who are specifically reflecting on their time in medical school to propose that the authors of these memoirs write not only to the reading audience, but also to their present and past selves. By addressing these former selves through the rhetorical figure of apostrophe, the authors write a new subjectivity into being. These memoirs serve as the material evidence of the formation what I call a bioaffective attachment, or, the way an (...) individual physician's subjectivity is affectively attached to their own sense of self and to the larger healthcare industry. (shrink)

This article analyzes discourse, narrative, and video editing to introduce the concept of ‘historical coherence’. This concept is an expansion of Alessandro Duranti’s notion of ‘existential coherence’ – the construction of an embodied narrative connecting a candidate’s past with his or her decision to run for office – from his 2006 study of a candidate’s campaign speeches. This study examines how language and communication are linked with historical narratives through the use of multimodal stories in which US political commercials link (...) candidates’ present actions with historical events, dynamics, artifacts, and/or figures. This ‘historical coherence’ is constructed through the following strategies: constructing a narrative in which popular historical figures or archetypal figures are in agreement with the candidate; preempting charges of lack of historical coherence; and presenting historical restrictions to freedom and casting the candidate, or the candidate’s party, in general, as a preventative from future calamities and transgressions to freedom. (shrink)

Parents play an integral role in the mental health service provision of children and adolescents, and they can have significant effects on the outcomes of youth. A growing body of research has linked parents’ own mental health status to numerous outcomes for their children, and recent guidelines have emerged recommending the assessment of parent psychopathology when treating child patients. However, these recommendations present a range of ethical considerations. Mental health professionals must determine if the assessment of a parent is empirically (...) supported and that an assessment procedure appropriate for parents can be feasibly implemented. They must also respect the autonomy and confidentiality of parents while ensuring that assessment findings can be translated to meaningful benefits for child patients. This article details and discusses each of these concerns within the context of the relevant principles and standards of the 2016 American Psychological Association’s Code of Ethics. Further, it provides guidelines, relevant clinical examples, and an applied model for mental health professionals to consider the ethical implications of assessing parent mental health when serving child patients. (shrink)

This edited collection uses critical theory in order to understand the rise of the Alt-Right and the election of Donald Trump—and, in doing so, to assert the necessity and value of various disciplines within the humanities. While neoliberal mainstream culture has expressed shock at the seemingly expeditious rise of the Alt-Right movement and the outcome of the 2016 United States presidential election, a rich tradition of theory may not only explain the occurrence of this “phenomenon,” but may also chart an (...) alternative understanding of the movement, revealing the persistence of right-wing populism throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Though the humanities have seen themselves undervalued and under attack in recent years, the historical and cultural contextualization of the current moment via theory is a means of reaffirming the value of the humanities in teaching the ever-important and multifaceted skill of critical literacy. This book re-affirms the humanities, particularly the study of literature, theory, and philosophy, through questions such as how the humanities can help us understand the here and now. (shrink)

Individuals typically resist changing their minds, but support for same-sex marriage increased from 35% to 61% between 2006-2016. What explains this anomaly?

Clinical trials aim to minimise participant risk and generate new clinical knowledge for the wider population. Many military agencies are now investing efforts in pushing towards developing new treatments involving Brain-Computer Interfaces, Gene Therapy and Stem Cells interventions. These trials are targeting smaller disease groups, as such they give rise to novel participant risks of harms that are largely not accommodated by existing practice. This is of most concern with irreversible harms at early trial stages, where participants may forfeit any (...) future therapy, and in personalised medicine, where the individual participant assumes all of the trial risk. Given these new experimental interventions involve high risk of irreversible harms, how much risk should patients be exposed to when participating in experimental testing of innovative technologies? Designing clinical trials which better balance risk/benefit ratios for participants is crucial. The aim of this book chapter is to suggest a new stratified risk framework aimed at minimising the risk-benefit ratio to participants in clinical trials associated with high risk of irrevocable harms. We will argue it demands a higher-level of clinical data capture at earlier trial stages than predicated by current trial doctrine; it also requires publication of all trial data to minimise risk to participants of any future trial. (shrink)

Many people are concerned about the legitimacy of digital technology companies like Meta. In this paper we show that two existing models for characterizing power – sovereign power and structural power – are inadequate when it comes to digital technology companies. This is because they fail to accommodate something crucial: the uniquely empowering nature of digital power. Companies like Meta empower users to interact by providing them with versatile systems defined by minimalist permission structures. Drawing on Searle’s theory of institutions (...) and Hart’s theory of law, we show how these permission structures facilitate the creation of new powers, as well as new institutions, through the emergence and recognition of new social norms. This means we must ask how entities that provide us with such versatile – and thus unsteerable – means of empowerment can come to be legitimate. We argue that a custodial framework for digital legitimacy can assign responsibility for the patterns of empowerment that are sustained by companies like Meta. (shrink)

Statistical properties in the visual environment can be used to improve performance on visual working memory tasks. The current study examined the ability to incidentally learn that a change is more likely to occur to a particular feature dimension and use this information to improve change detection performance for that dimension . Participants completed a change detection task in which one change type was more probable than others. Change probability effects were found for color and shape changes, but not location (...) changes, and intentional strategies did not improve the effect. Furthermore, the change probability effect developed and adapted to new probability information quickly. Finally, in some conditions, an improvement in change detection performance for a probable change led to an impairment in change detection for improbable changes. (shrink)

Recently, a number of experiments have emphasized the degree to which subjects fail to detect large changes in visual scenes. This finding, referred to as “change blindness,” is often considered surprising because many people have the intuition that such changes should be easy to detect. Levin, Momen, Drivdahl, and Simons documented this intuition by showing that the majority of subjects believe they would notice changes that are actually very rarely detected. Thus subjects exhibit a metacognitive error we refer to as (...) “change blindness blindness.” Here, we test whether CBB is caused by a misestimation of the perceptual experience associated with visual changes and show that it persists even when the pre- and postchange views are separated by long delays. In addition, subjects overestimate their change detection ability both when the relevant changes are illustrated by still pictures, and when they are illustrated using videos showing the changes occurring in real time. We conclude that CBB is a robust phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by failure to understand the specific perceptual experience associated with a change. (shrink)

Stronger collaboration between government organizations (GOs), NGOs, and rural people has long been advocated as a means of enhancing the responsiveness, efficiency, and accountability of GOs and NGOs. This paper reviews the arguments and evidence for specific types of collaboration for sustainable agricultural development, setting it into the context of Korten's (1980) concept of “learning process.” Taking recent examples from Udaipur District in India, it reviews the experiences and potential of collaboration, arguing that, while informal interaction increases and enriches the (...) fabric of pluralist development, certain strategic decisions often require a degree of formality. These include decisions on the development of human resources — here both the users and providers of services. Moreover, human resource development (HRD) must be viewed in the context of the mandates, aspirations, and systems of accountability and rewards of the institutions concerned. These determine whether institutions develop and expand their own human resources or draw upon those of others by collaborating with them. Individuals engaged in these organizations can be more effectively induced to collaborate with others by combinations of flexibility and appropriate reward systems than they can be forced to do so by instructions or commands. Several conclusions follow: decisions to act together are unlikely to progress unless translated into concrete actions; authority to take local-level decisions in GOs needs strengthening if they are to provide the necessary flexibility; and, although collaboration should in principle be built on the comparative advantage of different types of organization, in practice, each will have to incorporate the skills of the other, at least to some level, if they are to communicate effectively. NGOs and GOs must also enhance their understanding of farmers' ability to make demands on external organizations. Edging towards collaboration is a delicate and painstaking process. Only if many of the above conditions are given due priority will early examples have something to offer to the numerous NGOs, GOs and international agencies wishing to learn from them. (shrink)

Most donated organs in the United States come from brain dead donors, while a small percentage come from patients who die in “controlled,” or expected, circumstances, typically after the family or surrogate makes a decision to withdraw life support. The number of organs available for transplant could be substantially if donations were permitted in “uncontrolled” circumstances–that is, from people who die unexpectedly, often outside the hospital. According to projections from the Institute of Medicine, establishing programs permitting “uncontrolled donation after circulatory (...) determination of death,” or uDCDD, throughout the United States has the potential to provide 22,000 more donation opportunities annually. In contrast, U.S. controlled donation after circulatory determination of death, or cDCDD, cases have increased progressively over the past decade from 87 to 848 donors, but currently account for only 10.6 percent of all deceased donors. Following the IOM recommendations, several projects exploring the feasibility of uDCDD were funded by the federal government, including a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration that supported a pilot project in New York City in which the authors of this article participated.A key feature of our protocol, and indeed of many uDCDD protocols, is the initiation of preservation methods such as chest compressions and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation shortly after death in order to perfuse and preserve the donor's organs. Critics of uDCDD argue that the means of determining death deviates from generally ascribed principles. They assert that reinstituting circulation in order to preserve organs has the effect of “undoing” the prior determination of death. The result is that cDCDD is widely accepted and practiced routinely even though it only marginally increases the number of organs available for transplantation, and uDCDD is widely considered unacceptable despite being ethically embraced and proven to significantly increase organ donation opportunities in other countries. This article explores the evolution of this counterintuitive state of affairs and calls for a policy that, in line with the IOM report, allows for both cDCDD and uDCDD protocols. (shrink)

This chapter examines some of the philosophical literature on idealizations in science and the epistemic challenges idealizations potentially pose for astrophysical methodology, particularly its use of computer simulations. We begin by surveying philosophical literature on idealization connected to (1) kinds of idealizations deployed in science, (2) the aims of idealization in science, and (3) various strategies for de-idealization. Using collisional ring galaxy simulations as a case study, we examine how these three themes play out in the context of astrophysical computer (...) simulations. Ultimately, we argue that deploying deidealization strategies is central to bolstering epistemic confidence in simulations in astrophysics. We conclude with some remarks on the role of idealization in the context of astrophysical computer simulations more generally. (shrink)

Recent research suggests that selectively attending to relevant stimuli while having to ignore or resist conflicting stimuli can lead to improvements in learning. While mostly discussed within a broader “desirable difficulty” framework in the memory and education literatures, some recent work has focused on more mechanistic questions of how processing conflict (e.g., from incongruent primes) might elicit increased attention and control, producing enhanced incidental encoding of high-conflict stimuli. This encoding benefit for high-control-demand or high-difficulty situations has been broadly conceptualized as (...) a task-general property, with no strong prediction of what particular task elements should produce this effect. From stage processing models of single- and dual-task performance, we propose that memory-enhancing difficulty manipulations should strongly depend on inducing additional cognitive control at particular processing stages. Over six experiments, we show that a memory benefit is produced when increased cognitive control ( via incongruency priming) focuses additional processing on the core meaning of to-be-tested stimuli at the semantic categorization stage. In contrast, incongruency priming targeted at response selection within the same task produces similar effects on initial task performance, but gives no memory benefit for high-conflict trials. We suggest that a simple model of limited-capacity and stage-specific cognitive control allocation can account for and predict where and when conflict/difficulty encoding benefits will occur, and may serve as a model for desirable difficulty effects more broadly. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of values in strategic management. We discuss recent criticisms of the concept of strategy and argue that the concept of value helps reconcile these criticisms with traditional models of strategy. We show that Andrews' model of corporate strategy rightly takes morally significant values to be essential to effective management. We show how the notion of value can be clarified and used in research into various conceptions of corporate morality.

GILBERT JEAN FACCARELLO (Paris, 1950) is professor of economics at Université Panthéon-Assas, Paris, and a member of the Triangle research centre (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and CNRS). He is presently chair of the ESHET Council (European Society for the History of Economic Thought). He completed his doctoral research in economics at Université de Paris X Nanterre. He has previously taught at the Université de Paris-Dauphine, Université du Maine and École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay/Saint-Cloud (now École Normale Supérieure de (...) Lyon). He is a co-founder of The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, which he co-edited for 20 years with J. L. Cardoso, Heinz D. Kurz, and A. Murphy. With Alain Béraud, he edited the Nouvelle histoire de la pensée économique (La Découverte, 3 volumes, 1992-2000) and, together with Heinz D. Kurz, he is presently editing a Handbook of the History of Economic Analysis (3 volumes, forthcoming with Edward Elgar). -/- EJPE interviewed Gilbert Faccarello about his research career in the history of economic thought, where he has focused especially on old and new classical and Marxian political economy, and French political economy during the 18th and 19th centuries. G. Faccarello discusses his interest not only in the logical structure and context of the economic ideas of past thinkers but also the links between economic thought, philosophy, and religion. (shrink)

Doctoral students receive many kinds of assistance from faculty members, but much of this support falls short of mentoring. This paper takes the perspective that it is more important to find out what kinds of help students receive from faculty than to assume that students are taken care of by mentors, as distinct from advisors or role models. The findings here are based on both survey and interview data collected through the Acadia Institute’s project on Professional Values and Ethical Issues (...) in the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers. The paper describes various kinds of assistance that students receive (or do not receive) from faculty members in their roles as teacher/coach, sponsor, and counselor, It concludes with a section on advisors assigned to doctoral students, notably the extent of their contact with and influence on students. (shrink)