Noise in behavior is often viewed as a nuisance: while the mind aims to take the best possible action, it is let down by unreliability in the sensory and response systems. How researchers study cognition reflects this viewpoint – averaging over trials and participants to discover the deterministic relationships between experimental manipulations and their behavioral consequences, with noise represented as additive, often Gaussian, and independent. Yet a careful look at behavioral noise reveals rich structure that defies easy explanation. First, both (...) perceptual and preferential judgments show that sensory and response noise may potentially only play minor roles, with most noise arising in the cognitive computations. Second, the functional form of the noise is both non-Gaussian and non-independent, with the distribution of noise being better characterized as heavy-tailed and as having substantial long-range autocorrelations. It is possible that this structure results from brains that are, for some reason, bedeviled by a fundamental design flaw, albeit one with intriguingly distinctive characteristics. Alternatively, noise might not be a bug but a feature: indeed, we suggest that noise is fundamental to how cognition works. Specifically, we propose that the brain approximates probabilistic inference with a local sampling algorithm, one that uses randomness to drive its exploration of alternative hypotheses. Reframing cognition in this way explains the rich structure of noise and leads to a surprising conclusion: that noise is not a symptom of cognitive malfunction but plays a central role in underpinning human intelligence. (shrink)

Obstetrics and gynaecology always has reputation for being a highly litigious. The field of obstetrics and gynaecology is surrounded by different circumstances that stimulate the doctors to practice defensive..

While education in ethics and the responsible conduct of research is widely acknowledged as an essential component of graduate education, particularly in the STEM disciplines, little consensus exists on how best to accomplish this goal. Recent years have witnessed a turn toward the use of games in this context. Drawing from two NSF-funded grants, this paper takes a critical look at the use of games in ethics and RCR education. It does so by: setting the development of research and engineering (...) ethics games in wider historical and theoretical contexts, which highlights their promise to solve important pedagogical problems; reporting on some initial results from our own efforts to develop a game; and reflecting on the challenges that arise in using games for ethics education. In our discussion of the challenges, we draw out lessons to improve this nascent approach to ethics education in the STEM disciplines. (shrink)

The appeal to expert opinion is an argument form that uses the verdict of an expert to support a position or hypothesis. A previous scheme-based treatment of the argument form is formalized within a Bayesian network that is able to capture the critical aspects of the argument form, including the central considerations of the expert's expertise and trustworthiness. We propose this as an appropriate normative framework for the argument form, enabling the development and testing of quantitative predictions as to how (...) people evaluate this argument, suggesting that such an approach might be beneficial to argumentation research generally. We subsequently present two experiments as an example of the potential for future research in this vein, demonstrating that participants' quantitative ratings of the convincingness of a proposition that has been supported with an appeal to expert opinion were broadly consistent with the predictions of the Bayesian model. (shrink)

Bayesian probability has recently been proposed as a normative theory of argumentation. In this article, we provide a Bayesian formalisation of the ad Hitlerum argument, as a special case of the ad hominem argument. Across three experiments, we demonstrate that people's evaluation of the argument is sensitive to probabilistic factors deemed relevant on a Bayesian formalisation. Moreover, we provide the first parameter-free quantitative evidence in favour of the Bayesian approach to argumentation. Quantitative Bayesian prescriptions were derived from participants' stated subjective (...) probabilities (Experiments 1 and 2), as well as from frequency information explicitly provided in the experiment (Experiment 3). Participants' stated evaluations of the convincingness of the argument were well matched to these prescriptions. (shrink)

In this paper, I compare the methodology of the Austrian school to two alternative methodologies from the economic mainstream: the ‘orthodox’ and revealed preference methodologies. I argue that Austrian school theorists should stop describing themselves as ‘extreme apriorists’ (or writing suggestively to that effect), and should start giving greater acknowledgement to the importance of empirical work within their research program. The motivation for this dialectical shift is threefold: the approach is more faithful to their actual practices, it better illustrates the (...) underlying similarities between the mainstream and Austrian research paradigms, and it provides a philosophical foundation that is much more plausible in itself. (shrink)

What is the primary function of consciousness in the nervous system? The answer to this question remains enigmatic, not so much because of a lack of relevant data, but because of the lack of a conceptual framework with which to interpret the data. To this end, we have developed Passive Frame Theory, an internally coherent framework that, from an action-based perspective, synthesizes empirically supported hypotheses from diverse fields of investigation. The theory proposes that the primary function of consciousness is well-circumscribed, (...) serving the 'somatic nervous system[. For this system, consciousness serves as a frame that constrains and directs skeletal muscle output, thereby yielding adaptive behavior. The mechanism by which consciousness achieves this is more counterintuitive, passive, and “low level” than the kinds of functions that theorists have previously attributed to consciousness. Passive frame theory begins to illuminate (a) what consciousness contributes to nervous function, (b) how consciousness achieves this function, and (c) the neuroanatomical substrates of conscious processes. Our untraditional, action-based perspective focuses on olfaction instead of on vision and is 'descriptive' (describing the products of nature as they evolved to be) rather than 'normative' (construing processes in terms of how they should function). Passive frame theory begins to isolate the neuroanatomical, cognitive-mechanistic, and representational (e.g., conscious contents) processes associated with consciousness. (shrink)

This article contributes to work on temporality in education. Challenging the future-oriented focus in contemporary education, the authors question how ideas and assumptions regarding the future—centred on the Child—can set narrow boundaries around children in schools. In carrying out this task, we employ the work of Lee Edelman and John Dewey to examine the educational ramifications of the focus on the future, which we call ‘educational futurism’. The argument seeks specifically to explore how educational futurism imposes limits on educational discourse (...) and privileges a certain future—making it unthinkable to imagine ways outside of such a privileged future. Juxtaposing Lee Edelman and John Dewey, we draw out connections and disconnections between their disparate philosophies, illustrating the ways in which educational futurism ignores or overlooks the lived experiences of children. We conclude by briefly noting the queerness of children and the impact of such queerness on broadening discussions of the future of children and their educations. (shrink)

We applaud the goals and execution of the target article, but note that individual differences do not receive much attention. This is a shortcoming because individual differences can play a vital role in theory testing. In our commentary, we describe programs of research of this type and also apply similar thinking to the mechanisms proposed in the target article.

Medical coverage often stops at borders, for both travellers and long-term migrants. Such patchiness imposes a de facto limit on free movement. This article considers this phenomenon not as a mere policy choice or technical matter, but as a form of territorial discrimination that is incoherent and even unjust. This legacy of nationally bounded social citizenship rests on a mistaken version of solidarity. Moreover, with growing mobility and rising expectations of medical coverage around the world, the fragmenting of safety nets (...) by the political honeycomb of statehood will become a vexing problem in coming decades. A proper understanding of the health sphere not only can justify incremental reforms that lessen territorial discrimination, without impairing either solidarity or sustainability. It also foreshadows a radically different vision of how social provision might work in a future global space beyond the nation-state. (shrink)

Climatologists have a unique role in providing various stakeholders and public data users with weather and climate information. In the north central region of the United States, farmers, the agricultural sector, and policy makers are important audiences for climate science. As local and global climate conditions continue to shift and affect agricultural productivity, it is useful to understand how climatologists view their role as scientists, and how this influences their communication of climate science to agricultural stakeholders. In this study, data (...) from interviews and surveys of state and extension climatologists in the NCR are analyzed to identify perceived roles and responsibilities as scientists and communicators. Pielke’s framework of the idealized roles of scientists and their communication patterns are used to develop a typology of climate science communication. Findings reveal that more than half of climatologists perceive their role to provide information as pure scientists, while some engage in an arbiter role when requested. Fewer climatologists view their role as not only producing new knowledge, but also relating it to society and providing an expanded variety of alternative applications. Climatologists who perceive their role as simply providing information and letting data users interpret its application are missing an opportunity to reduce the gap between what scientists know and farmers believe. This suggests that if climatologists would frame their climate science message in terms of agricultural impacts, hazard mitigation and risk management alternatives they could help the agricultural sector adapt to and mitigate environmental risks from a changing climate. (shrink)

The Birkhoff-Maltsev problem asks for a characterization of those lattices each of which is isomorphic to the lattice L(K) of all subquasivarieties for some quasivariety K of algebraic systems. The current status of this problem, which is still open, is discussed. Various unsolved questions that are related to the Birkhoff-Maltsev problem are also considered, including ones that stem from the theory of propositional logics.

Emotionally arousing events reach awareness more easily and evoke greater visual cortex activation than more mundane events. Recent studies have shown that they are also perceived more vividly and that emotionally enhanced perceptual vividness predicts memory vividness. We propose that affect-biased attention (ABA) – selective attention to emotionally salient events – is an endogenous attentional system tuned by an individual's history of reward and punishment. We present the Biased Attention via Norepinephrine (BANE) model, which unifies genetic, neuromodulatory, neural and behavioural (...) evidence to account for ABA. We review evidence supporting BANE's proposal that a key mechanism of ABA is locus coeruleus–norepinephrine (LC–NE) activity, which interacts with activity in hubs of affective salience networks to modulate visual cortex activation and heighten the subjective vividness of emotionally salient stimuli. We further review literature on biased competition and look at initial evidence for its potential as a neural mechanism behind ABA. We also review evidence supporting the role of the LC–NE system as a driving force of ABA. Finally, we review individual differences in ABA and memory including differences in sensitivity to stimulus category and valence. We focus on differences arising from a variant of the ADRA2b gene, which codes for the alpha2b adrenoreceptor as a way of investigating influences of NE availability on ABA in humans. (shrink)

The contents of our conscious mind can seem unpredictable, whimsical, and free from external control. When instructed to attend to a stimulus in a work setting, for example, one might find oneself thinking about household chores. Conscious content thus appears different in nature from reflex action. Under the appropriate conditions, reflexes occur predictably, reliably, and via external control. Despite these intuitions, theorists have proposed that, under certain conditions, conscious content resembles reflexes and arises reliably via external control. We introduce the (...) Reflexive Imagery Task, a paradigm in which, as a function of external control, conscious content is triggered reliably and unintentionally: When instructed to not subvocalize the name of a stimulus object, participants reliably failed to suppress the set-related imagery. This stimulus-elicited content is considered ‘high-level’ content and, in terms of stages of processing, occurs late in the processing stream. We discuss the implications of this paradigm for consciousness research. (shrink)

The use of targets to direct public health programmes, particularly in global initiatives, has become widely accepted and commonplace. This paper is an ethical analysis of the utilisation of targets in global public health using our fieldwork on and experiences with voluntary medical male circumcision initiatives in Kenya. Among the many countries involved in VMMC for HIV prevention, Kenya is considered a success story, its programmes having medically circumcised nearly 2 million men since 2007. We describe ethically problematic practices in (...) Kenyan VMMC programmes revealed by our fieldwork, how the problems are related to the pursuit of targets and discuss possible approaches to their management. Although the establishment and pursuit of targets in public health can have many benefits, assessments of target-driven programmes tend to focus on quantifiable outcomes rather than the processes by which the outcomes are obtained. However, in order to speak more robustly about programmatic ‘success’, and to maintain community trust, it is vital to ethically evaluate how a public health initiative is actually implemented in the pursuit of its targets. (shrink)

Summary: A review of the cognitivist/extended cognition and extended mind landscape.

Royzman and Kurzban suggest that disgust-related facial activity in response to unfairness may reflect a metaphorical communication rather than genuine feelings of disgust. We argue that this is a partial reading of our findings and that our experimental data, and those of others, are inconsistent with a social metaphor interpretation.

The most recent global refugee figures are staggering, with over 82.4 million people forcibly displaced and 26.4 million registered refugees. The ongoing conflict in Syria is a major contributor. After a decade of violence and destabilization, over 13.4million Syrians have been displaced, including 6.7 million internally displaced persons and 6.7 million refugees registered in other countries. Beyond the immediate political and economic challenges, an essential component of any response to this humanitarian crisis must be health-related, including policies and interventions specific (...) to mental health. This policy and practice review addresses refugee mental health in the context of the Syrian crisis, providing an update and overview of the current situation while exploring new initiatives in mental health research and global health policy that can help strengthen and expand services. Relevant global health policy frameworks are first briefly introduced, followed by a short summary of recent research on refugee mental health. We then provide an update on the current status of research, service provision, and health policy in the leading destinations for Syrians who have been forcibly displaced. This starts within Syria and then turns to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Germany. Finally, several general recommendations are discussed, including the pressing need for more data at each phase of migration, the expansion of integrated mental health services, and the explicit inclusion and prioritization of refugee mental health in national and global health policy. (shrink)

We review an argument that proposes two moralities—“everyday” moral norms and “adversarial” moral norms—are required for business contexts. We take issue with an implication of this idea, namely that competitive actions do not need to be in accord with “everyday” moral norms. After showing that the argument for two moralities in business does not succeed, we propose a distinction between two types of competitive actions: principled, those actions which comport with every day morality, and merely self-interested, those actions that do (...) not comport with every day morality. The merits of this distinction are discussed. (shrink)

I argue that popular understandings of white nationalist double speak strategies do not fully represent the practice of these strategies, and identify a linguistic tactic used by white nationalists that I call sugar-coating. Sugar-coating works by packing an otherwise unacceptable utterance together with some kind of reward, thereby promoting uptake. I contrast this with existing notions of double speak, such as figleaves (Saul 2017, 2021), dogwhistles (Haney-López 2014), and bullshit (Kenyon and Saul 2022). I argue that sugar-coating more accurately reflects (...) the practice of white nationalist recruitment rhetoric, as described in the Daily Stormer Style Guide. (shrink)

Although much research on emotion and morality has treated emotion as a relatively undifferentiated construct, recent work shows that moral transgressions can evoke a variety of distinct emotions. To accommodate these results, we propose a multiple-appraisal model in which distinct appraisals lead to different moral emotions. The implications of this model for our understanding of the relationship between appraisals, emotions and judgments are discussed. The complexity of moral emotional experience presents a methodological challenge to researchers, but we submit that a (...) complete understanding of human morality must acknowledge the differentiated nature of moral emotions. (shrink)

In the context of the blurring of boundaries between club and theatre, game and theatre, and party and theatre, experiential spectatorship is spilling into the mainstream. This article starts from the recognition of the rapid rise of the experience economy as a turning point in consumer culture towards a specific appeal to the sensory body. The definition of experience in this analysis is key and a distinction is made between experience as it passes moment by moment, erlebnis, and experience as (...) something that is cumulatively built up over time, erfahrung. This paper asks, in a society defined by the crisis of experience, does this rise of the experiential in theatre simply reflect the reduction of experience to a series of consumable sensory moments or is there a mode of experience modelled through performance interaction which moves both beyond this established mode of experience and also beyond the notion of experience as cumulatively formed wisdom? Drawing a parallel between established popular cultural practices of the body and those of the spectator in spectacular promenade performance, Fuerzabruta is used as an illustrative example of popular experiential performance and Hwang’s The Road as an example of experiential performance in which a transformative aesthetic is made possible. (shrink)

Questions have been raised over the acceptability of conducting human challenge studies in low and middle income countries. Most of these concerns are based on theoretical considerations and there exists little data on the attitudes of stakeholders in these countries. This study examines the view of researchers and REC members in Thailand regarding the design and conduct of challenge studies in the country. A questionnaire was developed based on ethical frameworks for human challenge studies. The target respondents included those who (...) had experience with health-related research at universities, non-university hospitals, and research institutes. A total of 240 respondents completed the on-line survey. In general, the respondents felt that the ethical issues raised by human challenge studies in LMICS do not differ significantly from those in high income countries, including: scientific rationale, safety, appropriate risks, and robust informed consent process. In contrast, issues that have been described as important for human challenge studies in LMICs were rated as having lower importance, including: a publicly available rationale, national priority, and community engagement. Responses did not vary significantly between researchers in different fields, nor between researchers and REC members. These findings provide an important perspective for assessing existing frameworks for human challenges studies in LMICs. (shrink)

This manuscript examines argument engagement in close relationships. Two pilot studies were conducted to identify what factors naïve actors report matter to them when considering whether to engage in an interpersonal argument, and to develop and pre-test measurement scales for these factors. The main study examined which of these factors predicted participants’ behavioral intent to engage in an argument about different topics and with different partners. Results indicated intent to engage was predicted by five factors: one’s orientation to the topic, (...) one’s preparedness for an argument, the costs of arguing, the effort involved in arguing, and one’s right to speak one’s mind. Several of these factors are new contributions to argument engagement research. A discussion of these results and their implications are presented. (shrink)

Ongoing global efforts to circumcise adolescent and adult males to reduce their risk of acquiring HIV constitute the largest public health prevention initiative, using surgical means, in human history. Voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) programs in Africa have significantly altered social norms related to male circumcision among previously non-circumcising groups and groups that have practiced traditional (non-medical) circumcision. One consequence of this change is the stigmatization of males who, for whatever reason, remain uncircumcised. This paper discusses the ethics of stigma (...) with regard to uncircumcised adolescent males in global VMMC programs, particularly in certain recruitment, demand creation and social norm interventions. Grounded in our own experiences gained while conducting HIV-related ethics research with adolescents in Kenya, we argue that use of explicit or implicit stigma to increase the number of VMMC volunteers is unethical from a public health ethics perspective, particularly in campaigns that leverage social norms of masculinity. Ongoing global efforts to circumcise adolescent and adult males to reduce their risk of acquiring HIV constitute the largest public health prevention initiative, using surgical means, in human history. VMMC programs in Africa have significantly altered social norms related to male circumcision among previously non-circumcising groups and groups that have practiced traditional (non-medical) circumcision. One consequence of this change is the stigmatization of males who, for whatever reason, remain uncircumcised. This paper discusses the ethics of stigma with regard to uncircumcised adolescent males in global VMMC programs, particularly in certain recruitment, demand creation and social norm interventions. Grounded in our own experiences gained while conducting HIV-related ethics research with adolescents in Kenya, we argue that use of explicit or implicit stigma to increase the number of VMMC volunteers is unethical from a public health ethics perspective, particularly in campaigns that leverage social norms of masculinity. (shrink)

Explains what lying is and why people do it; then discusses trust, living responsibly, and the value of telling the truth.