Does infantile amnesia exist? Can children accurately recall traumatic events? Do memory's organizing, storage, and retrieval mechanisms change during childhood development? Through a thorough examination of recent scientific evidence, The Fate of Early Memories divorces fact from fiction regarding the nature, durability, and fallibility of memory.

In this article, we focus on two issues, namely, the nature and onset of very early personal memories, especially for traumatic events, and the role of stress in long-term retention. We begin by outlining a theory of early autobiographical memory, one whose unfolding is coincident with emergence of the cognitive self. It is argued that it is not until this self emerges that personal memories will remain viable over extended periods of time. We illustrate this with 25 cases of young (...) children′s long-term retention of early traumatic events involving emergency room treatment. On the basis of both qualitative and quantitative analyses, we conclude that very young children retain limited memories for events which they commonly express behaviorally, coherent autobiographical memories are not constructed until the child develops a cognitive sense of self , autobiographical memories for traumatic events are essentially no different from those for nontraumatic events, stress is only related to long-term retention inasmuch as it is one variable that serves to make an event unique, and like nontraumatic events, traumatic memories lose peripheral details during the retention interval and retain the central components of the event. These results are discussed both in terms of their implications for theories of early autobiographical memory as well as the ways in which we might differentiate implanted memories and authentic memories for traumatic events. (shrink)

Previous research shows that manipulations (e.g. levels-of-processing) that facilitate true memory often increase susceptibility to false memory. An exception is the generation effect. Using the Deese/Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm, Soraci et al. found that generating rather than reading list items led to an increase in true but not false memories. They argued that generation led to enhanced item-distinctiveness that drove down false memory production. In the current study, we investigated the effects of generative processing on valenced stimuli and after a delayed (...) retention interval to examine factors that may lead to a generation effect that increases false memories. At the immediate test, false recognition rates for both negative and neutral valanced critical lures were similar across read and generate conditions. However, after a one-week delay, we saw a valence differentiation, with a generation effect for false recognition but only for negative stimuli. The roles of item-specific and relational processing during encoding and their interaction with long-term retention are discussed. (shrink)

In this article, we present the contemporary conceptualization of metamemory as beliefs, accurate and naive, about memory. We discuss the implications of metamemory for memory construction in general and for suggestibility and the recovery of memories in particular. We argue that beliefs about memory influence the probability that suggestions will be incorporated into memory and judgements about the veracity of subsequent recollections. Implications for research on the role of beliefs in suggestibility and memory recovery are outlined.

Children’s sociocultural experiences in their day-to-day lives markedly play a key role in learning about the world. This study investigated parent–child teaching during early childhood as it naturally occurs in the home setting. Thirty-nine families’ naturalistic interactions in the home setting were observed; 1033 teaching sequences were identified based on detailed transcriptions of verbal and non-verbal behavior. Within these sequences, three domains of learning (knowledge, skills, and dispositions) and subtopics were identified and analyzed in relation to gender, child birth order, (...) context, teaching strategies, and learner response. Findings show knowledge, skills, and dispositions were taught equally, marked by the most prominent subtopics taught within each domain, including cognitive (skill), game rule (knowledge), and social rule (disposition). Further, mothers and fathers were found to teach their children equally, however, fathers taught knowledge more than mothers, whereas mothers taught dispositions more than fathers. Differences between domains of learning and subtopics also existed between mother’s and father’s teaching based on child birth order and gender. This study also assessed the contrast between teaching knowledge, skills, and dispositions by context, parent teaching strategies, and child learner response. Results support the notion that family interactions in the home setting set a stage for children’s rich informal learning experiences. Vygotskian sociocultural conceptions underpin this research and findings are discussed using this central theoretical lens. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A History of American Music EducationSondra Wieland HoweA History of American Music Education, 3rd edition, by Michael L. Mark and Charles L. Gary. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2007, 500 pp., $95.00 cloth, $44.95 paper.Mark and Gary's editions of A History of American Music Education are indispensable reading for every music education student, practicing professional music educator, and the general reader who is interested in (...) the development of music teaching in American public schools. Based on excellent secondary sources, this history presents an overview of music education from Colonial America, through the development of textbooks in the nineteenth century and the growth of professional organizations in the early twentieth century, to the expansion of the curriculum and the role of government in education since 1950.This third edition is written by Michael L. Mark, professor emeritus at Towson University in Maryland, and dedicated to the memory of his friend and coauthor, Charles L. Gary.1 Mark has written two other books that complement the history editions. Contemporary Music Education surveys various reform projects since the 1950s, trends in the philosophy of music education, government policies, and the development of new methods.2Music Education: Source Readings includes writings about music education from both the European and American perspectives.3 There are many recent articles and dissertations on the history of music education, but the only recent book is Terese Volk's Music, Education, and Multiculturalism, which describes school programs and materials emphasizing multiculturalism in the twentieth century from a historical perspective.4 Publications in musicology add to our knowledge of the history of music in American society, but musicologists rarely write about music in public schools. Publications on the history of education are helpful in understanding trends in music education, but these publications do not discuss music.The third edition of A History of American Music Education is expanded to 500 pages from the approximately 400 pages of the earlier editions, largely because of new formatting and [End Page 115] spacing that make the third edition easier to read. Each chapter has a reference list in APA style in contrast to the Chicago Manual style of the earlier editions, with endnotes plus a bibliography at the end of each chapter. The material in Mark's third edition is basically the same as the earlier editions, with some expansion of the history of music education after 1950.This book, based on secondary sources, is an overview of the history of music in American public schools, showing the response of education to societal needs during various historical periods. There is an emphasis on the role of national music organizations, especially MENC: The National Association for Music Education (MENC), in advocating for the importance of music for every child. The historical account includes the various justifications for teaching music and discussions of the meaning of music. There were times when music educators were interested in aesthetics, but there were also many times when they were mainly interested in a practical understanding of music and extrinsic motives for including music in the school curriculum.5The first section on "The Western Heritage" (chapters 1-3) briefly covers music in Jewish traditions through the Greek and Roman cultures because the insights of these ancient thinkers influenced all Western societies. The chapter on the Middle Ages through the Reformation shows the role of music as a practical subject, part of the quadrivium with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. As music became an integral part of the church, musicians developed methods of teaching note reading. Martin Luther promoted the singing of "good music" in schools and education in the vernacular for the middle classes. With the development of Italian conservatories and the patronage of music by the elite classes of the Renaissance, music training became specialized for musicians working in the church and courts. These various conflicting European opinions of the role of music in society influenced American education.The second section on "The New World" (chapters 4-5) emphasizes the use of music as a means of praising God. Spanish musicians established successful music education programs in Peru and Mexico to promote Christianity. The French brought Christianity to... (shrink)

This study argues that to understand Socrates we must uncover and analyze his religious views, since his philosophical and religious views are part of one seamless whole. Mark McPherran provides a close analysis of the relevant Socratic texts, an analysis that yields a comprehensive and original account of Socrates' commitments to religion. McPherran finds that Socrates was not only a rational philosopher of the first rank, but a figure with a profoundly religious nature as well, believing in the existence (...) of gods vastly superior to ourselves in power and wisdom and sharing other traditional religious commitments with his contemporaries. However, Socrates was just as much a sensitive critic and rational reformer of both the religious tradition he inherited and the new cultic incursions he encountered. McPherran contends that Socrates saw his religious commitments as integral to his philosophical mission of moral examination and, in turn, used the rationally derived convictions underlying that mission to reshape the religious conventions of his time. As a result, Socrates made important contributions to the rational reformation of Greek religion, contributions that incited and informed the theology of his brilliant pupil, Plato. (shrink)

J. L. Schellenberg has constructed major arguments for atheism based on divine hiddenness in two separate works. This paper reviews these arguments and highlights how they are grounded in reflections on perfect divine love. However, Schellenberg also defends what he calls the ‘subject mode’ of religious scepticism. I argue that if one accepts Schellenberg's scepticism, then the foundation of his divine-hiddenness arguments is undermined by calling into question some of his conclusions regarding perfect divine love. In other words, if his (...) scepticism is correct, then Schellenberg's case for atheism cannot stand. Finally, I demonstrate how my argument avoids the many defences that Schellenberg has employed thus far in defending these particular atheistic arguments. (shrink)

This commentary contributes to philosophical reflection on the growing challenge of digital distraction and the value of attention in the digital age. It clarifies the nature of the problem in conceptual and historical terms; analyzes “freedom of attention” as an organizing ideal for moral and political theorizing; considers some constraints of political morality on coercive state action to bolster users’ attentional resources; comments on corporate moral responsibility; and touches on some reform ideas. In particular, the commentary develops a response to (...) an anti-paternalistic line of argument rooted in Mill’s Harm Principle that would oppose state regulation on the grounds that securing attentional capacities is a matter of personal responsibility alone. The commentary engages throughout with James Williams’s recent work on the attention economy by identifying areas of agreement and difference. (shrink)

Cultural influences are pervasive throughout human behaviour, and as human–robot interactions become more common, roboticists are increasingly focusing attention on how to build robots that are culturally competent and culturally sustainable. The current treatment of culture in robotics, however, is largely limited to the definition of culture as national culture. This is problematic for three reasons: it ignores subcultures, it loses specificity and hides the nuances in cultures, and it excludes refugees and stateless persons. We propose to shift the focus (...) of cultural robotics to redefine culture as an emergent phenomenon. We make use of three research programmes in the social and cognitive sciences to justify this definition. Consequently, cultural behaviour cannot be explicitly programmed into a robot, rather, a robot must be designed with the capability to participate in the interactions that lead to the arising of cultural behaviour. In the final part of the paper, we explore which capacities and abilities are the most salient for a robot to do this. (shrink)

Plato's Republic has proven to be of astounding influence and importance. Justly celebrated as Plato's central text, it brings together all of his prior works, unifying them into a comprehensive vision that is at once theological, philosophical, political and moral. The essays in this volume provide a picture of the most interesting aspects of the Republic, and address questions that continue to puzzle and provoke, such as: Does Plato succeed in his argument that the life of justice is the most (...) attractive one? Is his tripartite analysis of the soul coherent and plausible? Why does Plato seem to have to force his philosopher-guardians to rule when they know this is something that they ought to do? What is the point of the strange and complicated closing Myth of Er? This volume will be essential to those looking for thoughtful and detailed excursions into the problems posed by Plato's text and ideas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Piety, Justice, and the Unity of VirtueMark L. McPherranNo doubt the Socrates of the Euthyphro would be delighted to encounter many of its readers, offering as they do an audience of piety-seeking interlocutors, eager to mend the dialogical breach created by Euthyphro’s sudden departure. Socrates’ enthusiasm for this pursuit is at least as intense and comprehensible as theirs. We are told, after all, that he will never abandon his (...) quest for knowledge of “what the pious is” (15c–16a), since not only is this enterprise both pious and “inconceivably happy” (cf. Ap. 41c3–4) in itself,1 but coming to understand piety would allow one to “live better the rest of one’s life,” (15e7–16a4), especially should its continuation be threatened by a charge of impiety (3b–d, 5a–c, 12e, 15e–16a).2 My own search here is no less happy and ambitious, since I wish to uncover Socrates’ own, implicit understanding of piety and its relation to his claim elsewhere that “the virtues are one.”3 The account of this I shall provide will also touch on Platonic piety, although this notion obviously rests on a tendentious distinction. Nevertheless, there do seem to be some interesting differences between the way piety is treated in elenctic dialogues such as the Euthyphro and Protagoras, and the more explicitly theory-laden, constructive works such as the Republic and Laws. I shall later characterize [End Page 299] these differences, primarily in terms of the more carefully articulated, internalist moral psychology of the Republic.42. SOCRATIC PIETYThe distinct phenomena the term “religion” popularly designates for us were for the Greeks seamlessly integrated into everyday life. Thus, it is natural that the term “piety”—εὐσέβεια—carried a wider sense than our English equivalent commonly does: it concerned not only one’s immediate relation to the gods—emphasizing proper religious conduct and carrying a sense of respect and fear towards divinity (concomitant with a grasp of one’s own mortal limits)—but also often designated appropriate behavior towards parents, native land, and the dead.5 It is to this rough, inclusive conception of piety that Euthyphro appeals when confronted by Socrates on the Porch of the King (2a–6a). Moreover, and despite his own shockingly irreverent attempt at father-bashing and the subsequent elenctic drubbing he then receives from Socrates, toward the close of the dialogue Euthyphro still manages to envision piety in the quasi-traditionalist fashion with which he began—as “a knowledge of how to ensure the preservation of families and states by gratifying the gods through proper prayer and sacrifice” (14b; cf. 14c–15c).6 It is, however, precisely [End Page 300] at this dramatic juncture (14a–c) that we find—arguably—the final elements of a Socratically-acceptable conception of piety; one that builds upon Euthyphro’s initial concession to Socrates that piety and “human justice” are to be distinguished from one another (11e–12e). This, in turn, is a move that in principle forces Euthyphro to disengage from those aspects of the traditional conception of piety which would—from Socrates’ perspective—conflate the two.7 Recent challenges to this reading, however, have seen in Euthyphro’s initial holism not the heterogeneous presumptions of popular thought, but a semi-sophisticated grasp of the Socratic unity of the virtues.8 And since it does appear that the character Euthyphro is designed to serve not only as a hubristically-inflated, Homeric “fundamentalist,” but as an odd and Sophistically-influenced doppelgänger of Socrates as well—a lesson, that is, in what Socrates both is and is not—it now seems worthwhile to reexamine the view that Socratic piety is but a part and not the whole of justice.9Turning to our text, then, we discover that following the failure of Euthyphro’s initial definitional attempts to specify the nature of pious action and the resulting aporetic interlude, Socrates is willing to offer Euthyphro renewed assistance (11e1–4). This he does by asking whether all the just is pious, or whether justice is broader than piety such that piety is then merely a “part” (μóϱιον) of justice (11e4–12e5). Subsequent to his explanation of these alternatives, Socrates... (shrink)

Models carry the meaning of science. This puts a tremendous burden on the process of model selection. In general practice, models are selected on the basis of their relative goodness of fit to data penalized by model complexity. However, this may not be the most effective approach for selecting models to answer a specific scientific question because model fit is sensitive to all aspects of a model, not just those relevant to the question. Model Structural Adequacy analysis is proposed as (...) a means to select models based on their ability to answer specific scientific questions given the current understanding of the relevant aspects of the real world. (shrink)

Scientific concepts are defined by metaphors. These metaphors determine what attention is and what count as adequate explanations of the phenomenon. The authors analyze these metaphors within 3 types of attention theories: (a) “cause” theories, in which attention is presumed to modulate information processing (e.g., attention as a spotlight; attention as a limited resource); (b) “effect” theories, in which attention is considered to be a by-product of information processing (e.g., the competition metaphor); and (c) hybrid theories that combine cause and (...) effect aspects (e.g., biasedcompetition models). The present analysis reveals the crucial role of metaphors in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and the efforts of scientists to find a resolution to the classic problem of cause versus effect interpretations. (shrink)

The two-phase study reported here examined the content and communication function served by electronic bumper stickers. EBSs consist of the sayings that are included in an e-mail signature file following personal identifiers such as one's name, phone number, and postal address. In the first phase, 334 EBSs were gathered and content analyzed into one of five message categories. In order of frequency they were: wisdom, humor, advice, religious, and socio-political commentary. In the second phase, open-ended responses from 134 EBS users (...) were coded into one of six motives for interpersonal communication. The relationship between one's motive for using an EBS and the content of one's EBS was not statistically significant. The implications of EBSs and e-mail use for mediated communication competence are considered. (shrink)

Lying and Deception in Human Interaction provides readers with a critical understanding of deception that is necessary for evaluating the integrity of the messages they receive and send in daily life. The author's lively writing style engages the reader as a multitude of real life examples demonstrate the relevance of visual deception in human interaction. Deception, as a form of communication, is represented in the behavior of all living organisms and has been a part of human behavior for millions of (...) years. Lying and Deception in Human Interaction enables its readers to seek more accurate ways of identifying deceitful behavior and to effectively cope with it. (shrink)

Aristotle holds that it was Socrates who first made frequent, systematic use of epagôgç in his elenctic investigations of various definitions of the virtues . Plato and Xenophon also target epagôgç as an innovative, distinguishing mark of Socratic methodology when they have Socrates' interlocutors complain that Socrates prattles on far too much about "his favorite topic" —blacksmiths, cobblers, cooks, physicians, and other such tiresome craftspeople—in order to generate and test general principles concerning the alleged craft of virtue. It is (...) remarkable, then, how little secondary literature exists on this subject—moreover, several of the few accounts we do have naively assume that epagôgç is the same as modern inductive generalization. Others are in conflict as to whether, for example, we can find any legitimate instances of probabilistic inductive epagôgç in the Socratic dialogues. This paper addresses these and other issues by offering a new, critical account of Socratic epagôgç—one tied to its occurrences in several key Socratic elenchoi. (shrink)

This article explains and assesses a particular method of loving others that is espoused by Søren Kierkegaard. In his later works, Kierkegaard advocates a kind of deceptive love whereby one mystifies or deceives another person for that other person's own good. The theological underpinning of this mode of love is found in the imitation of Christ. In other words, just as Jesus adopted an incognito, so also Christians should, at times, appear different or lowlier in order to help others by (...) meeting them where they are. After explaining this form of love, I argue that there are considerable reasons not to follow Kierkegaard in his support of outright deception within personal relationships. I conclude with some brief reflections on whether the deceptive structure of Kierkegaard's own authorship is thereby condemned or whether it can be exonerated. (shrink)