Encyclopedia of The Mind
Encyclopedia of The Mind
Encyclopedia of The Mind
MIND
Editorial Board
Editor-in-Chief
Harold Pashler
University of California, San Diego
Associate Editor
Emily Goldknopf
University of California, Los Angeles
Editorial Board
Tim Crane
University of Cambridge
Fernanda Ferreira
University of Edinburgh
Marcel Kinsbourne
New School for Social Research
Richard Zemel
University of Toronto
Editorial Assistant
Ruth Hsiao
University of Illinois College of Medicine
ENCYCLOPEDIA of the
MIND
Volume
ONE
Editor-in-Chief
Harold Pashler
University of California, San Diego
Copyright 2013 by SAGE Publications, Inc.
FOR INFORMATION: All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
SAGE Publications, Inc. photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
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Printed in the United States of America.
E-mail: [email protected]
Volume 1
Entries
A 1 F 343
B 105 G 369
C 127 H 379
D 207 I 397
E 273
Volume 2
Entries
J 441 R 627
K 447 S 663
L 455 T 731
M 477 U 749
N 553 V 757
O 569 W 775
P 577
Index 797
List of Entries
vii
viii List of Entries
xi
xii Readers Guide
Harold Pashler is Distinguished Professor of based) techniques for analyzing the attentional
Psychology at the University of California, San bottlenecks that arise when people try to perform
Diego, where he heads the Learning, Attention, different tasks at the same time. Pashler showed that
and Perception Lab and serves on the faculty of different bottleneck models make distinctive and
the Cognitive Science Interdisciplinary Program. In precise predictions for the effects of experimental
1999, Pashler received the Troland Award from the manipulations targeted at different stages of mul-
National Academy of Sciences. The Academy cited tiple tasks being performed concurrently. The results
Pashlers many experimental breakthroughs in the indicated that the brains key processing bottleneck
study of spatial attention and executive control, is in decision making and the selection of responses
and . . . his insightful analysis of human cognitive (whereas other mental operations like perception
architecture. He is also a Fellow of the Society and actually executing motor actions are not subject
of Experimental Psychologists (SEP) and of the to the bottleneck). He also conducted research using
Association for Psychological Science (APS). driving simulators to show that these findings gener-
Pashler authored and edited two highly cited alize to cases where drivers engage in unrelated tasks
classics in the field of attention (The Psychology of while following another car that slows from time to
Attention and Attentionboth published in 1998). time (here the bottleneck resulted in delays in the
He was also the general editor of the third edition of application of the brakes).
the four-volume, influential Stevens Handbook of In the past few years, Pashler has embarked on a
Experimental Psychology. vigorous analysis of the factors that affect the effi-
Pashlers research accomplishments span many ciency of human learning, seeking to find concrete
areas of cognitive psychology. In 1988 he was the methods of instruction and training that enhance
first to report a phenomenon that has come to be the efficiency and durability of learning. The U.S.
called change blindness (an observers inability to Department of Education commissioned Pashler
detect even major changes in displays that flicker off to chair an expert panel that produced a practice
and on again while the observer is staring intently guide for educators, textbook authors, and educa-
at the display). A large literature has sprung up that tional software developers (Organizing Instruction
explores the philosophical and psychological impli- and Study to Improve Student Learning, published
cations of this phenomenon. in 2007). The practice guide and an accompanying
Pashlers interest in the nature of visual aware- website have been consulted by many thousands of
ness also helped spark the development (jointly with educators. In 2009, Pashler also chaired a review
Liqiang Huang, now at the Chinese University of commissioned by Psychological Science in the Public
Hong Kong) of the Boolean maps theory of visual Interest that drew considerable press attention for
attention, published in Science and Psychological its highly critical conclusions about some commonly
Review. The theory seeks to characterize the logical accepted ideas about learning styles.
limitations of human visual awareness. In recent years, Pashler has collaborated with
Pashlers most sustained research efforts, how- researchers from machine learning (chiefly Michael
ever, have focused on a different aspect of attention. Mozer from the University of Colorado Department
In a long series of influential papers published in of Computer Science) to explore the neuro-compu-
the 1980s and 1990s, he and his students and col- tational basis of learning enhancement. Finally, in
laborators developed chronometric (reaction-time collaboration with Edward Vul, Pashler uncovered
xix
xx About the Editor-in-Chief
what has come to be called the wisdom of inner Visual Cognition, and other major journals in the
crowds effect in the field of judgment and decision field. Together with several colleagues, in 2012 he
makinghelping trigger research efforts in multiple co-founded the website PsychFileDrawer.org to
centers to develop new strategies for enhancing real- promote replication attempts in psychology and to
world skills in estimation and other tasks requiring combat the file drawer problem that has drawn
accurate judgment. increasing concern in recent years.
Pashler has also served as an associate editor Pashler received undergraduate degrees in psy-
of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review and is on the chology and in logic and philosophy of science with
editorial board of the Journal of Experimental honors from Brown University and a PhD in psy-
Psychology, the American Journal of Psychology, chology from the University of Pennsylvania (1985).
Contributors
xxi
xxii Contributors
The study of the mind, at least in the West, was entries on topics ranging across the entire landscape
begun by philosophers several thousand years ago just described. The encyclopedia covers topics and
and to this day continues to be a major focus of perspectives from all the major contemporary disci-
work in philosophy. Over the past several centu- plines concerned with the study of the mind. Not
ries, however, this study has come to occupy an surprisingly, psychologyoften defined as the study
increasing amount of human intellectual activity of the mind and behaviorlooms large here. The
in many disciplines and to attract increasing pub- coverage of psychology in the encyclopedia includes
lic attention. In the 19th century, the discipline of not only cognitive psychology but also other major
experimental psychology emerged in Germany areas such as social psychology, developmental psy-
with an initial focus on memory. In the 20th cen- chology, cognitive neuropsychology (the study of
tury, the study of mind became one of the most how brain damage affects cognitive processes), and
important (and, in some circles, fashionable) intel- the psychology of perception. The psychology of
lectual pursuits of the era as ambitious (some language (including psycholinguistics) and the field
would say, overweening) movements stepped for- of linguistics, insofar as it bears on the mind gener-
ward with claims of understanding the fundamen- ally, are also well represented. Philosophy continues
tal nature of the human psyche: psychoanalysis to play a pivotal role in this encyclopedia, reflecting
(which emerged from psychiatry) and behaviorism the fascinating and often provocative scholarship
(which emerged from academic experimental taking place in the philosophy of mind and meta-
psychology). physics, with entries on topics such as the mind-body
Near the end of the 20th century, psychologists problem, personal identity, and the relationship
theoretical ambitions retreated as the field became between human action and underlying physical
devoted to more highly focused empirical and ana- states.
lytical research. New ventures addressing the nature A unique feature of the encyclopedia is its cov-
of thought (cognitive science) and the links between erage of computational perspectives on the mind.
the mind and the brain (cognitive neuroscience) Beginning in the 1960s, it became clear that a full
gathered force, propelled by the emergence of com- understanding of mental life would need to include
puting technologies as well as by new methods for a mechanistic understanding of the kinds of infor-
investigating brain activity. As we enter the 21st cen- mation processing operations that allow intelligent
tury, interest in mental life continues to grow across behavior to emerge. The field of artificial intelligence
many disciplines, with computational approaches thus bloomed, focused on building artificial minds.
attracting ever greater interest, powered by the suc- In its initial efforts, artificial intelligence focused
cesses of contemporary computer scientists in pro- on high-level symbolic processing approaches.
ducing striking feats of intelligence (or at least the However, in the past 10 years or so, much activity
appearance of intelligence) through reliance upon in this area shifted to the banner of machine learn-
large-scale statistical computation. ing, a discipline with strong connections to statis-
tics. Computational approaches are well covered in
the Encyclopedia of the Mind.
Scope
The editors of the encyclopedia decided at the
The Encyclopedia of the Mind is unique in its outset that, although the volumes would cover the
breadth and scope, providing brief but authoritative brain bases of mental activity to the extent that this
xxix
xxx Introduction
work sheds light on the mind, the Encyclopedia of most distinguished contemporary philosophers of
the Mind would not aspire to be a reference work on mind.
the biology of the brain per se.
Step 2. The editor-in-chief, together with the
editorial board, met and decided upon the basic
Organization structure for the encyclopedia, as discussed above
The Encyclopedia of the Mind contains 293 entries and as reflected in the Readers Guide.
that fall under the following broad topics: Action Step 3. Working together, the editorial team
and Motor Control, Attention, Concepts and identified potential contributors to write entries
Categories, Consciousness, Decision Making, and explored the availability of these contributors.
Disorders and Pathology, Emotion, Epistemology, Many of the suggestions for contributors came
Genetics, Groups, Intelligence, Language and from the editorial board, but others emerged from
Communication, Learning, Memory, Metaphysics, a literature review conducted by the editor-in-chief
Methodology, Mind/Body Problem, Morality/Ethics, in consultation with colleagues around the globe.
Perception, Personality, The Social Mind, and The focus was on identifying potential authors
Thinking and Reasoning. with a broad command of the subject matter and
Under each of these broad topics, there are a its context. The entry authors include many up-
number of general approaches that recur, including and-coming junior scholars (typically assistant
Computational Perspectives, Cultural Perspectives, professors or equivalent) but also many highly
Development, Evolutionary Perspectives, Neural respected senior figures.
Basis, Philosophical Perspectives, Practical
Applications, and Psychological Research. Step 4. When the first draft of each entry
This structurebroad topics with cross-cutting arrived, it was reviewed and suggestions for revi-
research approachesis reflected in the Readers sions were made. The typical entry was revised and
Guide, which provides a convenient way for readers then accepted. Associate Editor Emily Goldknopf,
to find entries on a particular topic. Reflecting the PhD, was crucially involved in this editorial review,
interdisciplinary nature of the encyclopedia, many under the guidance of the editor-in-chief.
entries discuss more than one topic or discuss topics Step 5. In the final step of the process, the ency-
from more than one perspective. In addition, each clopedia underwent further editorial review and
entry is followed by cross-references to other entries copy editing by SAGE Publications, and additional
in the encyclopedia. rounds of review by the editors and SAGE proof-
readers prior to publication.
How the Encyclopedia Was Created
The preparation of this encyclopedia (which began in Intended Audience
2007) has been a long process involving a great deal
Our goal in commissioning and editing articles for
of work by many people. There were five basic steps
this work was to emphasize accessibility for an edu-
to its creation:
cated readership. Authors were instructed to make
Step 1. In consultation with SAGE, the editor- their work understandable to college and university
in-chief appointed four highly distinguished schol- students in cognitive science and related fields such as
ars to the editorial board. The board consisted of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, and math-
professors Fernanda Ferreira (University of ematical formulas were kept to a minimum.
Edinburgh), an internationally recognized expert
in the psychology of language and linguistics;
Acknowledgments
Richard Zemel (University of Toronto Department
of Computer Science), an expert in artificial intel- A number of individuals played key roles in the cre-
ligence and machine learning; Marcel Kinsbourne ation of the Encyclopedia of the Mind. Jim Brace-
(New School for Social Research), a world- Thompson of SAGE Publications helped formulate
renowned neurologist and neuropsychologist; and the concept of the encyclopedia in early discussions
Tim Crane (University of Cambridge), one of the with the editor-in-chief. Diana Axelsen of SAGE was
Introduction xxxi
the lead developmental editor for the great majority and editing articles. The quality of the encyclopedia
of the development process. She provided advice and owes a great deal to Dr. Goldknopfs broad knowl-
encouragement at all stages along the way. Also at edge of cognitive science as well as her editorial skills
SAGE, Jane Haenel played an important role as pro- and persistence.
duction editor. Bringing an encyclopedia of this scope to comple-
Working closely with the editor-in-chief at the tion has been a challenge for all of us, but it is hoped
University of California, San Diego, Editorial that the results will prove useful and illuminating to
Assistant Ruth Hsiao (currently a medical student at a wide variety of students of the mind.
the University of Illinois) was responsible for com-
Hal Pashler
municating with authors and keeping the entire pro-
cess running smoothly. University of California, San Diego
In the editorial review process, Associate Editor La Jolla, CA
Emmy Goldknopf played a key role in reviewing
A
thought and action for that organism. More for-
ACCESS CONSCIOUSNESS mally, A-consciousness consists in the broadcasting
of representations for free use in reasoning and for
Consciousness, according to the American philoso- direct rational control of action of the agent (with
pher Ned Block, is a mongrel concepta con- rational understood in a broad enough sense to
glomeration that picks out a number of very different include poor reasoning).
mental properties that are nevertheless treated as The notion of A-consciousness belongs to the
undivided and denoted by a univocal concept. Access family of information processing or functional
consciousness is one of these kinds of consciousness. theories of consciousnessbut according to Blocks
This entry will (a) discuss the notion of access distinctive account, this is only part of the story.
consciousnessas distinguished from phenomenal The other main part is phenomenal consciousness
consciousnessin the work of Block; (b) consider (P-consciousness)the experiential dimension of
the introspective, experimental, and conceptual sup- conscious experience itself, that is, what it is like
port for this distinction; (c) briefly consider Blocks to experience pain, to see a building, to hear a bell,
contention that much current work on conscious- to smell a flower, and so forth. According to Block,
ness conflates these two kinds of consciousness; and it is not A-consciousness, but P-consciousness that
(d) conclude with a consideration of some criticism seems to be a scientific mystery. In the vast major-
that may be directed at Blocks approach. ity of cases, A-consciousness and P-consciousness
To see what Block means by access consciousness are coextensivesuch as in the example of seeing
(A-consciousness), consider the example of driv- the car ahead on the road, where one has both the
ing and being in the cognitive state of perceiving a content available to A-conscious control of thought
stationary car on the road ahead of you. This is an and action and the P-conscious experience of seeing
A-conscious state inasmuch as its content (that there a large, stationary object ahead. In certain instances,
is a stationary car ahead) is freely available to your however, a breakup, or disassociation, is thought to
cognitive and action-regulating resourceswhich appear between the two types of consciousness. We
you may, in this instance, decide to employ in press- shall consider such cases in more detail later.
ing the brake pedal of your own car, planning what In general, Blocks theory of A-consciousness
to do next, and so on. Characteristically, A-conscious should be viewed as an integral part of a compro-
content is linguistically reportable (e.g., I see that mise position designed to accommodate both an
the car ahead of me isnt moving), but is also attrib- information processing and a phenomenal view
utable to the lower animals by virtue of their ability of consciousness. The main thrust of Blocks work
to use perceptual content to guide action. has thus been to emphasize the distinction between
To put it simply, an organism is in an A-conscious A-consciousness and P-consciousness and to argue
state if that state is poised for free use in controlling that some current work in psychology, philosophy,
1
2 Access Consciousness
cognitive science, and neuroscience is subject to fal- consciousness; if we take his word for it, he has no
lacious inferences deriving from the failure to distin- experience of the stimulus. Like the prosopagnosic
guish all the relevant meanings of consciousness. patient, the blindsight patient thus lacks both the
relevant A- and P-consciousness of the stimulus. To
Introspective, Experimental, get a complete disassociation between the two types
and Conceptual Support of consciousness, Block therefore introduces a con-
ceptual maneuver that will be discussed shortly.
The first type of data that Block enlists in support
The third type of data employed by Block is
of his account is introspective data, in the sense of
entirely imaginary in nature (in a strict sense) and
our impressions of how things seem to us. An
derives from philosophical thought experiments
example of this is the experience of suddenly notic-
that are assumed to provide conceptually possible
ing a sound (of, say, an electrical appliance or a dis-
cases. One thought experiment is that of superblind-
tant jackhammer) and realizing that this has been
sight. Here we imagine a blindsight patient with the
going on for a while without one attending to it.
counterfactual ability to prompt himself at will to
Once the sound has been noticed, one is A-conscious
guess reliably what is in his blind field. As a result of
of it, but it seems that there was a period before that
this remarkable auto-prompting, visual information
point where one was in a state of P-consciousness
from the blind field simply pops into his thoughts
with no additional A-consciousness of the sound. If
without any corresponding visual experience of
this is the right way to interpret what happens, it
the stimuli. In such a case, the patient would have
seems that we have a simple disassociation between
A-consciousness without the P-conscious visual
A-consciousness and P-consciousness.
experienceand we thus have a clear disassociation
A second type of data derives from experimen-
between the two types of consciousness.
tal studies and clinical cases, including those of the
attentional blink, binocular rivalry, blindsight, the
Conceptual Conflation of A-Consciousness
Capgras delusion, Cotards syndrome, prosopagno-
and P-Consciousness
sia, and visual neglect. Prosopagnosia (also known as
face blindness or facial agnosia) is a neurological Relying on the distinction between A-consciousness
disorder characterized by the inability to recognize and P-consciousness, Block has criticized contem-
faces. Yet, under certain experimental conditions, porary work on consciousnessincluding that of
it appears that prosopagnosics have some informa- Francis Crick and Christof Koch, Daniel Dennett,
tion about the faces they are seeing, even though this John Searle, and othersfor fallaciously conflat-
information is A-unconscious. According to Block, ing the two notions. One conflation is to analyze
it is thus the lack of A-consciousness of the informa- P-consciousness in terms of information processing
tion, rather than the P-conscious lack of the famil- (i.e., A-consciousness); the directly opposite confla-
iarity of the face, that defines the disorderand tion is to analyze A-consciousness in terms of expe-
attention thus needs to be paid to both dimensions rience (i.e., P-consciousness). Finally, an even more
of the condition. Now consider the much-discussed basic confusion occurs if one is operating with an
phenomenon of blindsight, a clinical condition unanalyzed notion of consciousness to which neither
associated with brain damage to the visual cortex in A- nor P-consciousness properly applies.
which the subject responds to visual stimuli without Consider Blocks criticism of Dennetts hypothesis
consciously perceiving them. Specifically, if a stimu- that human consciousness is largely a product of
lus is flashed in a patients blind area, he will be cultural evolution that is working on our basic bio-
able to guess (with much higher than chance out- logical hardware, a product that becomes imparted
come) certain simple features of the stimulus, given to human brains in early developmental training.
highly limited forced choice conditions. Clearly, the P-consciousness, Block first points out, cannot be a
patient is unable to use the visual information from cultural construction in the way that Dennett sug-
the blind area in the access sense of consciousness gests. After all, human P-consciousness pertains to
because he has no ability to deploy the informa- the way that things look, sound, and smell to human
tion in reasoning or the rational control of action. beingsand this clearly is a basic biological feature
Neither, however, does the patient appear to be con- of beings like us, not a cultural construction that
scious of the stimulus in the phenomenal sense of children have to learn as they grow up. Culture may
Access Consciousness 3
have an impact on P-consciousness, but it does not Another line of criticism pertains to the ultimate
create it. Analogously, culture has an impact on feet status of Blocks distinction. The problem is that
(e.g., by making it fashionable to wear constricting A- and P-consciousness, as Block presents it, never
shoes), but culture does not create feet. Consider, actually come cleanly apart. In prosopagnosia, after
now, A-consciousness. It, similarly, cannot be a cul- all, the subject lacks both the experience of know-
tural construction because, according to Block, it is ing a face and the relevant information about the
a basic biological feature of human beings that we person. The same is true of blindsight. The blind
are capable of having states that are poised for free field information is elicited under forced choice
use in controlling thought and action. Culture may conditions, and the subject has no access to the
influence the kind of content that characteristically information in the sense of having it available for
becomes A-conscious among a group of people, but free use in controlling thought and action. In neither
it does not create the basic biological ability to make case do A-consciousness and P-consciousness actu-
cognitive content available for the control of thought ally disunite. The jackhammer example is nebulous;
and action. In Blocks analysis, then, Dennetts claim attention in some sense is involved here, but it is
about the cultural construction of consciousness is not at all clear that this phenomenon is best cap-
shown to be untenableand this is because Dennett tured by Blocks notion of A-consciousness. Indeed,
has confused himself by applying an unanalyzed Block grants that there may be no actual cases of
notion of consciousness rather than the specific con- A-consciousness without P-consciousness. This still
cepts of A-consciousness and P-consciousness. leaves the purely conceptual scenarios with A and P
disassociation, but here one needs to be very wary.
Criticism of the Two Concepts Approach As with the superblind patient case, one can certainly
imagine, say, that it really is the gravitational pull of
Blocks theory of A-consciousnessand, more
the moon, not the action of the heart, that drives the
broadly, his two-concept distinctionhas been sub-
circulation of the bloodand this might lead one
jected to a wide range of criticism from thinkers such
to make the conceptual distinction between (a) the
as Bernard Baars, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett,
rhythmic contractions of the heart and (b) the circu-
David Rosenthal, and many others.
latory pumping of the blood. However, this clearly
One line of criticism advanced by Dennett is that
is neither an evidentially warranted nor a clinically
Block mistakenly inflates a mere difference in degree
fruitful distinction for scientific medicine to adopt.
between A-consciousness and (what Block calls)
Finally, as a compromise position, Blocks account
P-consciousness into a difference in kind. According
is open both to general criticism of information pro-
to Dennett, Blocks distinction can be wholly
cessing accounts of consciousness and to general
accommodated in terms of richness of content and
criticism of phenomenal accounts of consciousness.
degrees of influencethat is, in purely quantita-
tive, A-consciousness terms. Everyday instances of Christian Beenfeldt
conscious awareness have an immense richness of
information, whereas unusual cases, such as the See also Attention and Consciousness; Blindsight;
blind field perception of blindsight patients, have a Consciousness and the Unconscious; Mind-Body
paucity of information. This is simply a difference Problem; Neural Correlates of Consciousness;
Perceptual Consciousness and Attention
of quantity, however, not of quality, and it explains
the highly delimited but still statistically significant
success of blindsight patient guesses. According Further Readings
to Dennett, if a blindsight patient achieves the super- Block, N. J. (2007). Concepts of consciousness.
blindsight ability to prompt himself at will to guess Consciousness, function, and representation. Collected
reliably what is in his blind field, this amounts to the papers (Vol. 1, pp. 275296). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
full restoration of that patients visual consciousness, Block, N. J. (2007). How many concepts of consciousness?
and that, in turn, impugns Blocks strongest case of Consciousness, function, and representation. Collected
an A- and P-consciousness split. Rosenthal similarly papers (Vol. 1, pp. 215248). Cambridge, MA: MIT
rejects Blocks distinction and proposes to account Press.
for the data in terms of higher order thoughts rather Block, N. J. (2007). On a confusion about a function of
than in terms of quantitative differences in degree. consciousness. Consciousness, function, and
4 Action and Bodily Movement
representation. Collected papers (Vol. 1, pp. 159214). of the view that they are causings of events but not
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. themselves events.
Block, N. J. (2007). What is Dennetts theory a theory of?
Consciousness, function, and representation. Collected Basic Actions and Bodily Movements
papers (Vol. 1, pp. 141158). Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press. Many of the events we cause we cause by moving
Dennett, D. C. (1995). The path not taken. Behavioral and our bodies. True, we can cause events without mov-
Brain Sciences, 18(2), 252253. ing our bodies at all; for example, one can cause
Rosenthal, D. M. (2002). How many kinds of an offense by not acknowledging an acquaintance
consciousness? Consciousness and Cognition, 11(4), in public, or one can cause the death of a plant by
653665. neglecting to water it. Nonetheless, all the events we
cause by acting (as opposed to by failing to act, as
in the examples just given), we cause by moving our
ACTION AND BODILY MOVEMENT bodies: We build bridges, drive cars, catch balls, and
paint walls by moving our bodies in ways designed
to achieve certain outcomes. This does not imply
Human beings are agents: We have the capacity
that all we ever do is move our bodies, as, for exam-
to act, which involves the capacity to cause and to
ple, Donald Davidson claims in his paper Agency,
prevent events. Indeed, to perform an action of a
for we do many more things than that. But it does
particular kind is to cause (or prevent) an event of
imply that actions that involve movements of ones
a particular kind: To kill someone is to cause their
body have a core role in agency.
death, and to save their life is to prevent it. Actions
In general, moving our bodies is something we
are attributed to us as agents on the grounds of the
can do directly. That is, although one can move
events we cause (or prevent); so an action of killing
a part of ones body by moving another, as when I
requires that the agent cause a death, an action of
raise my left arm with my right arm, we have the
breaking a window requires that the agent cause an
more basic capacity to move our bodies not by doing
event of a windows breaking, and so on.
anything else, that is, to move our bodies directly.
It may be thought that the capacity to act goes
For example, I can raise my left arm directly. This
beyond the capacity to cause or prevent events, for
capacity to perform what might be called basic
acting is sometimes causing or preventing processes
actions is fundamental to agency.
or states of affairs or bringing objects into existence;
Now, since moving ones body is acting, and
for example, bringing it about that a top is spinning
since acting is causing an event, then it would seem
or that a door is closed, or bringing a painting into
that moving ones body is causing an eventan
existence. Even in such cases, however, the initia-
event that consists in ones bodys moving, just as
tion of the process, the coming about of the state of
opening a door is causing an event that consists in
affairs, and the objects coming into existence are
a doors opening. Consider the example of turning
events that one causes (or prevents). Therefore, we
ones head. If I turn my head sideways, it seems
can broadly characterize our capacity to act as the
that I cause an event: the event of my head turn-
capacity we have to cause or prevent events. (In what
ing sideways (i.e., the event that is the change from
follows, and for ease of exposition, the entry shall
my head facing forward to its facing sideways). This
talk mainly about causing events, although most of
is exactly parallel to my turning a statue sideways:
what is said applies to preventing events also.)
This action is my causing the event of the statues
This entry explores actions that involve bodily
turning sideways.
movements. It asks whether the relationship between
an action that involves a motion of the body and
Actions as Events?
that motion of the body is one of identity, cause and
effect, or something else. It explores the different Many philosophers have thought that actions, as
problems that arise for those various answers if one well as being causings of events, are themselves
conceives of actions themselves as events, and sug- events, and that the relationship between an action
gests that one solution is to abandon the view that and the event that is caused through that action is
actions are events that cause other events in favor one of cause and effect. Thus, they think that, if I
Action Slips 5
open a door by moving my arm, my action of open- armit is the causing of that motion. On this view,
ing the door is an event that causes the event of the although to act is to cause an event, an action is not
doors opening; my action is the motion of my arm itself an event that causes other events but rather the
and its effect is the motion of the door. causing of an event by an agentagain as argued by
This view, however, is problematic when applied Alvarez and Hyman in their 1998 paper.
to basic actions. For, if my action of raising my arm
Maria Alvarez
is an event that has the event of my arms rising as
an effect, then the question arises: Which event is See also Explanation of Action; Freedom of Action;
my (basic) action? Some, for example, Davidson Mental Action; Phenomenology of Action; Philosophy
as cited earlier, have argued that, when it comes to of Action
basic actions such as the one just mentioned, the
event that is the rising of my arm is my action. So
Further Readings
he thinks that, although when I open a door there
are two events (the doors opening and a motion Alvarez, M., & Hyman, J. (1998). Agents and their actions.
of my arm), when I merely raise my arm (directly) Philosophy, 73, 218245.
there is only one event. However, because raising my Coope, U. (2007). Aristotle on action. Aristotelian Society
arm is causing a rising of my arm, this view has the Supplementary, 81(1), 109138.
implausible consequence that sometimes our causing Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on actions and events. Oxford,
an event and the event thus caused is one and the UK: Oxford University Press.
same, as argued by Maria Alvarez and John Hyman Hornsby, J. (1980). Actions. London, UK: Routledge &
in their 1998 paper Agents and Their Actions. Kegan Paul.
Others have suggested that, when I raise my arm, Hornsby, J. (2004). Agency and actions. In J. Hyman & H.
Steward (Eds.), Agency and action (pp. 123).
my action is an event that causes, but is distinct
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
from, the event of my arms rising. Again, this view
Von Wright, G. H. (1963). Norm and action. London, UK:
generates difficulties: It implies that my actions are
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
either neurophysiological events that happen inside
my body and that, for example, cannot be observed
without the help of a special instrument or nonphys-
iological events (perhaps merely mental events) ACTION SLIPS
that cause motions of my body, such as an arms ris-
ing. This latter suggestion brings with it difficulties The term action slip refers to an action made in error
about psychophysical causal interaction, as well as that conflicts with ones will or conscious intentions.
the danger of overdetermination, for it would seem For example, suppose you are arriving at work con-
that the bodily motions at issue are certainly also templating the days tasks. As you approach your
caused by neurophysiological events. office, you reach for your keys. Only when you
There are other ways of avoiding these difficul- are about to insert the key into the lock of your office
ties. One is to deny that, when one moves ones door do you realize that you have selected your house
body, one causes ones body to move. This view is key and not your office key. As a second example,
encouraged by the thought that when we move, for suppose you normally take two sugars in your coffee.
example, other objects, we do so by moving our While adding sugar, you become engrossed in con-
bodies, whereas when we move our bodies, we do versation with a colleague. A moment later, you real-
it directly. But it is difficult to see why this should ize that you have no idea how many sugars you have
imply that moving a book is causing it to move, addedmaybe two, maybe more. Slips such as these
whereas moving ones arm is not causing ones arm seem to occur on a daily basis in the actions of nor-
to moverather than that the first is causing the mal adults, particularly when performing habitual or
book to move indirectly whereas the second is routine tasks such as dressing/grooming, preparing/
causing ones arm to move directly. eating meals, or commuting, and particularly when
A final option is to abandon the view that actions distracted or interrupted or attention is otherwise
are themselves events; so my action of moving my occupied. This entry begins by describing behav-
arm is not an event that causes the motion of my ioral studies and taxonomies of action slips. This is
6 Action Slips
followed by a review of theoretical and computa- theoretical accounts of action selection is that of
tional accounts of the cognitive processes underly- object substitution. In such errors, the correct action
ing such slips. The final section discusses the relation is performed but in association with the wrong
between action slips and the errors made by patients object. The example earlier of the office key can be
with neurological damage. seen as an example of such an error, but a clearer
example provided by Reason is of someone who
put the butter on the draining board and two dirty
Behavioral Studies of Action Slips
plates in the fridge, instead of the other way round
Action slips were first noted in the psychological (Reason, 1979, p. 72).
literature by William James at the end of the 19th The main result of Reasons diary studies was that
century, but they were not systematically investi- action slips tend to arise when one is distracted, per-
gated until the pioneering diary studies of James forming a routine task, or both. Attempts to elabo-
Reason in the late 1970s. Reason asked partici- rate on these findings have, however, been beset by
pants to record details of all of their action slips methodological difficulties. Thus, although action
over periods of a week or two. These studies, slips are relatively common in everyday behavior,
together with work shortly after by Don Norman, they are not sufficiently frequent to support direct
provided a corpus of action errors that has allowed observational studiesReason found in his diary
researchers to categorize action slips into a number studies that participants recorded, on average, less
of classes or types. than one action slip per day. Moreover, action slips
One frequent type of slip is the capture error, are difficult to elicit in the laboratory, and although
where actions directed toward an intended goal are some laboratory studies have attempted to test
captured either by a superficially similar sequence hypotheses concerning the origins of slips, interpre-
of actions with a different goal or by relevant objects tation of those studies is compromised because it
in the immediate environment. Reason gives the is unclear whether the action errors resulting from
following example from his study: I meant to get experimental manipulations are true action slips. For
my car out, but as I passed through the back porch example, several laboratory studies have sought to
on my way to the garage I stopped to put on my elicit action slips by placing participants under atten-
Wellington boots and gardening jacket as if to work tionally demanding conditions by requiring them to
in the garden (Reason, 1979, p. 73). The earlier complete two tasks simultaneously or by interrupt-
example concerning the office key might also be seen ing them at various points within a task. Such stud-
as an example of a capture error, where the opera- ies have confirmed that errors in action selection are
tion of selecting a key is captured by the routine or more frequent when participants are attempting two
habit of selecting ones house key. tasks simultaneously than when attempting either
Further types of error concern the ordering of task individually, but it is unclear whether the errors
individual actions within a longer sequence. Thus, are comparable to action slips as seen in everyday
an action might be performed before it is appropri- action because the experimental tasks necessarily
ate, resulting in an anticipation error. Alternatively, differ from the idiosyncratic everyday routines of the
an action might be unnecessarily repeated (a perse- participants. Even if this point is ignored, the studies
verative error, as in the coffee and sugar example have also failed to clarify whether different kinds of
earlier) or left out (an omission error). One form of cognitive failure might be behind the different types
omission error that is particular prevalent is the post of slips.
completion error. This is an error where the omitted
step occurs after successful completion of a tasks
Theoretical Accounts of the
goal. Common examples include leaving the origi-
Causes of Action Slips
nal documents in the photocopier after successfully
making the necessary copies, or leaving the goods on In everyday discourse, action slips are typically
the counter of a shop after paying and collecting the attributed to absent-mindedness. However, William
change. James noted their significance for psychological the-
Many other types of action slips may be identi- ories of the control of behavior in his first discus-
fied, but a final category that is of importance to sion of errors of action. James distinguished between
Action Slips 7
habit and willed or voluntary movement. He noted its threshold for selection is low), and (c) activation
that without habit we would be reduced to the level of the intended schema is not sufficiently maintained
of a child performing each action for the first time. (e.g., due to distraction). Similarly, omission and
Habits thus allow us to direct mental processing anticipation errors arise because of faulty activation
to less mundane tasks. But there is a cost to this of child schemas from the parent schema, leading to
actions may at times be inappropriately controlled a schemas activation failing to reach threshold or
by habit. At least some action slips (e.g., capture reaching threshold too soon.
errors) may be argued to be a result of this inappro-
priate control.
Computational Accounts of Action Slips
Modern accounts of action slips generally retain
the distinction between a system for the control of Norman and Shallice developed ATS theory into a
routine behavior (Jamess habits) and one for the fuller account of the functional structure of mind
control of nonroutine behavior. Action slips then the contention scheduling/supervisory attentional
arise when the routine system operates without system theory. Within that theory, routine action
monitoring or feedback from the nonroutine sys- is held to be the product of contention schedul-
tem, as might occur when the nonroutine system ing, a system based on ATS theory. In nonroutine
is engaged in some attentionally demanding task. situations, the supervisory attentional system may
Action slips thus provide insight into the operation bias contention scheduling by activating appropri-
of the routine system. ate schemas or inhibiting inappropriate ones. Two
One of the most influential accounts of that computational accounts of contention scheduling
routine system is due to Norman who, in collabo- have since been developed and shown to be capa-
ration with Tim Shallice, introduced the idea of an ble, under nonideal conditions, of simulating action
action schemaan organized memory unit for the slips in routine behavior. Both accounts assume that
control of a sequence of actions. Within Normans action slips can be explained without a full theory of
activation-trigger-schema (ATS) system, action sche- the supervisory attentional system.
mas are held to be hierarchically organized, to have One computational account implements ATS
triggering conditions that specify when they might theory by using a hierarchically structured interac-
apply, and to have associated activation values that tive activation network. The network consists of
may be affected by several factors, including con- schema control nodes that have associated activa-
scious intention, other schemas, and features of the tion values and that compete for activation through
environment. The hierarchical organization of sche- mechanisms standard within the interactive activa-
mas means that one action schema (e.g., for opening tion framework. Schema control nodes may be
your office door) may have several so-called child excited by top-down influences (from higher level
schemas (e.g., reaching for keys, selecting a key, schemas or the supervisory attentional system) and
placing the key in the lock, and turning the key). bottom-up influences (the representation of the
Triggering conditions place loose temporal ordering environment), and inhibited by the control nodes of
constraints on schemas by specifying the physical competing schemas, that is, alternative schemas that
situations in which a schema may be selected. Thus, achieve the same purpose or that require overlap-
a key cannot be placed in the lock if a key has not ping cognitive resources. The account extends ATS
already been chosen. Finally, activation values deter- theory by explicitly incorporating a further inter-
mine which schema or schemas are selected, and active activation network whose nodes represent
hence control behavior, at any point in time. objects on which schemas may act. For example,
According to ATS theory, action slips may result a schema for choosing a key needs to be related to
either from errors during the formation of an inten- a set of potential keys. Simulation studies have dem-
tion or from faulty activation of a schema. Thus, onstrated that the interactive activation account
a capture error will arise if three conditions are of contention scheduling can generate both well-
met: (a) The environment closely resembles that in structured error-free routine action and, if activation
which the incorrect schema is normally performed flow is disturbed through the addition of noise to
(and so the environment activates the schema), schema control units or object representation units,
(b) the incorrect schema is very well learned (and so action slips of each of the types discussed earlier.
8 Addiction
legal problems. Only one of those symptoms must abuse to be 1.4% and 7.7%, with drug dependence
be present within a 12-month period to war- being less frequent in 12-month and lifetime esti-
rant the diagnosis of substance abuse. Substance mates at 0.6% and 2.6%, respectively. Results con-
dependence, however, is typically conceptualized sistently demonstrate that SUDs are highly comorbid
as a more severe substance use disorder, which is, with one another and with other forms of psycho-
in turn, more commonly associated with the term pathology, particularly mood, anxiety, and personal-
addiction. Substance dependence is marked by the ity disorders. Recent research has also shown that
presence of at least three of the following symp- despite the debilitating nature of SUDs only a small
toms occurring together within a 12-month period: proportion of individuals with drug abuse and less
(a) tolerance (i.e., the need for greater amounts of the than half of patients with drug dependence ever seek
substance to achieve the same effect); (b) withdrawal treatment. A similar pattern of infrequent treatment
(i.e., a group of symptoms that occurs when the sub- seeking is seen for alcohol dependence, as only a
stance is abruptly discontinued or taken in reduced quarter of individuals diagnosed with this disorder
amounts); (c) taking the substance in larger amounts report seeking help. Together, these results suggest
or over longer periods of time than intended; that substance use disorders (a) are highly prevalent;
(d) persistent desire or unsuccessful effort to stop (b) are debilitating and often comorbid with other
or cut down substance use; (e) a great deal of time forms of psychopathology; and (c) despite their high
spent in obtaining, using, and recovering from the frequency and associated impairments, treatment
effects of a substance; (f) giving up important activi- seeking for these disorders remains uncommon.
ties because of substance use; and (g) use despite
physical or psychological problems caused or exac-
Etiology
erbated by the substance. Revisions to the DSM-IV
are under way, and the proposed changes include a The etiology of SUDs is inherently complex and
single disorder category, namely, substance use dis- likely involves the interplay between biological and
order specified as moderate or severe. In light of the psychosocial factors. At the biological level, two fac-
DSM-IV revisions, there continues to be consider- tors that modulate behavior, reinforcement and neu-
able debate in the field as to the best terminology roadaptation, are implicated in the addictive process.
for substance use disorders and whether they should Traditionally, it was assumed that addicts are moti-
be collectively referred to as addiction, dependence, vated to take drugs either for the pleasure induced
or an alternative term. Nevertheless, there is clear by the drug (positive reinforcement model) or to
recognition that addiction represents a chronic and avoid the unpleasant consequences of withdrawal
debilitating disorder with enormous costs to the (negative reinforcement model). Drugs of abuse
affected individuals, their families, and society. possess acute positive reinforcing effects because of
In this entry, the epidemiology, etiology, and treat- their interactions with specific neurotransmitter sys-
ment of addiction will be briefly summarized, with tems within the mesolimbic reward circuitry. This
important theories and future directions highlighted. circuitry, which encompasses connections between
the ventral tegmental area and the basal forebrain
(including the nucleus accumbens, olfactory tuber-
Epidemiology
cle, frontal cortex, and amygdala), is known to be
Substance use disorders, as currently defined in the involved in modulating behavioral responses to
DSM-IV, represent highly prevalent mental disorders. stimuli that activate feelings of motivation (reward)
Based on results from the National Epidemiologic and reinforcement through the neurotransmitter
Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions in 2007, dopamine, among other neurotransmitter systems
prevalence, or the total number of individuals diag- (e.g., opioid peptides). Dopamines role in the meso-
nosed with alcohol abuse within their lifetime and limbic reward system is widely believed to be crucial
the past 12 months, is estimated at 17.8% and 4.7%, for mediating the rewarding effects of drugs, as most
respectively, while the prevalence of lifetime and drugs of abuse have been found to increase dopa-
12-month alcohol dependence is 12.5% and 3.8%, mine within the nucleus accumbens.
respectively. Epidemiological data for drug abuse Recently, however, the positive and negative
suggest the prevalence of 12-month and lifetime drug reinforcement models have been criticized as being
10 Addiction
neither necessary nor sufficient for the development 50% and 85% of the vulnerability to drug use is
of SUDs. The lack of strong withdrawal syndromes common across different categories of illicit drugs.
present in some common drugs of abuse and the Common genetic and environment risk factors may
dissociation between subjective levels of pleasure also underlie the comorbidity between substance
and compulsive drug-taking behavior have been use disorders and other psychiatric illnesses such as
proposed as examples of the limitations inherent in mood and anxiety disorders. In short, genetic factors
these models of addiction etiology. The incentive- account for a substantial portion of the liability to
sensitization model of drug addiction, which was substance use disorders, although these factors are
developed by Terry Robinson and Kent Berridge in less specific to drug classes and even to psychiatric
response to these limitations, posits that repeated disorders than originally thought. Although con-
administration of potential drugs of abuse cause siderable progress has been made in elucidating the
long-lasting neural adaptations in the mesolimbic relative contribution of genetic and environmental
reward circuitry, which renders the brain reward factors to addiction, the identification of specific risk
systems sensitized to drugs and drug-associated genes remains elusive.
stimuli. Thus, although the acute reward and ini-
tiation of addiction appear to be dependent on
Treatment
dopamines involvement in the mesolimbic reward
system, the sensitized brain regions in this model Given the complexity of addiction phenomenology,
are thought to mediate a subcomponent of reward the available treatment approaches are only mod-
termed the incentive salience, or craving, rather than estly effective. The standard of care for addiction
the pleasurable effects of drugs per se. Studies have consists of initial detoxification for cases in which
convincingly demonstrated that, with repeated drug withdrawal symptoms must be medically managed.
exposure, the dopaminergic response becomes trig- Following detoxification, intensive inpatient or out-
gered by the presentation of drug cues (e.g., the sight patient programs are typically recommended. A
of a needle to an individual addicted to heroin or the combination of psychotherapy and pharmacother-
smell of tobacco smoke to a smoker) as opposed to apy is likely to give patients the best chance of recov-
the administration of the drug itself, which is con- ery. In terms of psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral
sistent with the proposed associative learning pro- approaches have received the most empirical sup-
cesses in addiction. In particular, end-stage addiction port for their efficacy. A large multisite treatment
has been hypothesized to result primarily from the study called Project MATCH (1997) has also found
gradual recruitment of the prefrontal cortex and its support for 12-step facilitation and motivation
glutamatergic projections to the nucleus accumbens. enhancement for the treatment of alcoholism.
This pathological form of neuroplasticity in excit- Numerous pharmacological treatments have
atory transmission is hypothesized to promote the been proposed for the treatment of substance use
compulsive nature of drug seeking by decreasing the disorders, yet few have proven effective at maintain-
value of natural rewards, reducing cognitive control ing long-term abstinence. Substitution therapies that
over drug-related behavior, and enhancing glutama- replace the addictive substance with another, less
tergic response to drug-associated stimuli. detrimental substance have been proven to be effica-
Genetic factors are widely accepted as determi- cious for the treatment of opiate addiction; however,
nants of the risk for substance use disorders. Twin these opioid receptor agonists (e.g., methadone) only
and adoption studies have estimated that approxi- manage the disorder and may themselves promote
mately 50% of the variance in risk for developing the same neuroadaptive processes as the originally
alcoholism is due to genetic factors, while the genetic abused drug, thereby maintaining the strength of the
contribution to drug use disorders ranges between addiction rather than treating it. The opioid recep-
60% and 80%. Studies have also shown that com- tor partial agonist, buprenorphine, has shown greater
mon genetic and environmental factors that influ- efficacy for the treatment of opiate dependence and
ence the vulnerability to substance use disorders are can be administered on an outpatient basis. The Food
largely, or entirely, nonspecific to any particular drug and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved three
class. For example, results from the Harvard Twin medications for the indication of alcoholism, namely,
Study of Substance Abuse revealed that between naltrexone, acamprosate, and disulfiram. The opioid
Affective Forecasting 11
antagonist naltrexone and the partial glutamate co- See also Behavioral Therapy; Reinforcement Learning,
agonist acamprosate target the state of craving by Psychological Perspectives
blocking the opioid receptors and NMDA glutamate
receptors within the reward circuit, respectively. Further Readings
Additionally, a variety of antidepressants have been
Compton, W. M., Thomas, Y. F., Stinson, F. S., & Grant, B.
used in the treatment of addiction, based in part on the
F. (2007). Prevalence, correlates, disability, and
assumption that they will alleviate some of the anhe-
comorbidity of DSM-IV drug abuse and dependence in
donia, or inability to experience pleasure, reported by
the United States: Results from the National
patients during protracted withdrawal. Bupropion Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related
is one such antidepressant that has been reported Conditions. Archives of General Psychiatry, 64, 566576.
to increase abstinence from cigarettes in smokers. Hasin, D. S., Stinson, F. S., Ogburn, E., & Grant, B. F.
More recently, immunotherapies (i.e., vaccines) are (2007). Prevalence, correlates, disability, and comorbidity
being developed for the treatment of cocaine abuse, of DSM-IV alcohol abuse and dependence in the United
which stimulate the bodys own immune system to States: Results from the National Epidemiologic Survey
attack the substance, thereby reducing the amount of on Alcohol and Related Conditions. Archives of General
cocaine that reaches the brain. Although promising, Psychiatry, 64, 830842.
these immunotherapies fail to reverse the neuro- Kalivas, P. W., & Volkow, N. D. (2005). The neural basis
adaptive processes responsible for addiction, and thus of addiction: A pathology of motivation and choice.
craving for the drug may remain despite treatment. American Journal of Psychiatry, 162,14031413.
Koob, G. F., & Le Moal, M. (2001). Drug addiction,
Summary dysregulation of reward, and allostasis.
Neuropsychopharmacology, 24,97129.
Addiction is a chronic and relapsing condition
Magill, M., & Ray, L. A. (2009). Cognitive-behavioral
caused by the interplay between genetic and envi-
treatment with adult alcohol and illicit drug users: A
ronmental factors. Research on the neurobiologi- meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Journal of
cal bases of addiction has consistently highlighted Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 70, 516527.
the ability of drugs of abuse to potently activate the OBrien, C. P., Volkow, N., & Li, T. K. (2006). Whats in a
mesolimbic dopamine system, producing an intense word? Addiction versus dependence in DSM-V.
subjective feeling of reward. Although various drugs American Journal of Psychiatry, 163, 764765.
of abuse have different pharmacological properties Robinson, T. E., & Berridge, K. C. (2000). The psychology
and associated intoxication effects, their common and neurobiology of addiction: An incentive
activation of this reward circuitry subsequently pro- sensitization view. Addiction, 95,91117.
duces the compulsive drug seeking that characterizes Tsuang, M. T., Bar, J. L., Harley, R. M., & Lyons, M. J.
this disorder. Addictive disorders are highly frequent (2001). The Harvard Twin Study of Substance Abuse:
in modern society and associated with devastating What we have learned. Harvard Review of Psychiatry,
psychosocial and health consequences. These dis- 9, 267279.
orders often co-occur with other psychiatric illness,
such as mood, anxiety, and personality disorders.
The currently available treatments for addiction are AFFECTIVE FORECASTING
only moderately effective, and the combination of
pharmacotherapy with behavioral therapy is often
recommended. Nevertheless, the pharmacological When deciding whether to order a pizza or a cheese-
treatment options for various substance use disor- burger, to live in California or Winnipeg, or to make
ders are scarce relative to other psychological dis- the big leap to have children, people may spontane-
orders, and there is a strong need to develop more ously envision the emotions that each possible future
effective medications as well as to identify the bio- would evoke. The capacity to make such affective
logical and psychological factors within patients forecasts stems from humans exceptional ability to
that can guide the selection of effective treatment step back from their present experience and men-
approaches at the individual level. tally travel through time to re-live or pre-live per-
sonal events. However, our emotional projections
Lara A. Ray and Kelly E. Courtney can often be biased. This entry introduces the notion
12 Affective Forecasting
of forecasting errors and the two main reasons system, that is, the array of defense mechanisms
behind them. and emotion regulation strategies that help them
Affective forecasts have been shown to predict a adapt quickly and effectively to upsetting events (an
variety of decisions, from whether to comply with oversight labeled immune neglect). People also tend
a persuasion attempt to whether to get a flu shot. to overlook the extent to which they will make sense
These decisions may be flawed, however, given that of extraordinary events, such that the events come to
a large body of evidence shows that individuals seem ordinary and unremarkable. This sense-making
often stumble in predicting their affective reactions process can deprive both positive and negative events
to future events. People frequently overestimate how of their emotional powerto a degree that most
happy they will be after positive events, such as get- people seem unable to anticipate ahead of time.
ting promoted, and how sad they will feel after nega- Whereas overlooking the existence of hedonic
tive events, such as the loss of a favorite sports team adaptation consistently leads people to make exces-
or political candidate. This tendency to overestimate sively extreme affective forecasts, overlooking the
the intensity and duration of emotional responses factors that speed up or short-circuit adaptation
(termed the impact bias) is perhaps the most com- can beget a variety of other forecasting errors. For
monly observed forecasting error. Yet, there are example, punishing a free rider may prevent people
also important cases in which people underestimate from moving on, thereby interrupting the adapta-
their emotional responses to events. For example, tion process, such that negative feelings are actually
individuals in committed romantic relationships more powerful than expected. Adaptation may also
have been shown to underestimate the pleasure they be short-circuited by uncertainty; when people are
would derive from interacting with a stranger of the uncertain why a positive event occurred, they have
opposite sex. Finally, in some cases, people may even trouble making sense of it and tend to experience
mispredict whether the emotional consequences of more lasting pleasure. Yet, because people fail to
an event will be positive or negative; as one exam- appreciate the dynamics of adaptation, they may
ple, most people expect that they would feel better if seek to eliminate uncertainty, thereby eliminating an
they had the opportunity to punish a free rider, even important source of lasting pleasure.
when exacting revenge accentuates distress.
Although forecasting errors can assume a wide Context
variety of forms, most of these errors stem from the A second fundamental source of forecasting error
failure to fully appreciate two fundamental principles lies in the failure to appreciate the power of con-
of emotion. First, emotions are transient; although text. When imagining a future situation, people
a given event may provoke a strong emotional tend to pay too much attention to the central event,
response at first, even powerful emotions are likely such as the victory of their favorite football team,
to fade away quickly under most circumstances. while overlooking other situational factors that will
Some of the most common forecasting errors spring moderate its impact, such as traffic jams, mosqui-
from the failure to appreciate the power and dynam- toes, and phone calls from chatty relatives (a phe-
ics of such hedonic adaptation. Second, context nomenon termed focalism). The broad tendency to
matters; both the emotions we experience and those neglect the power of context becomes particularly
we imagine depend on the context in which the problematic when emotions are imagined and expe-
experiencing and the imagining occur. Overlooking rienced in very different psychological contexts.
the importance of context can unleash a host of People are often in a different state of physiological
forecasting errorsparticularly when emotions are arousal when they make their forecast than when
imagined and experienced in very different contexts. they experience the event, laying the ground for pro-
jection biases (or empathy gaps). That is, individuals
Hedonic Adaptation
in a cold state (e.g., unaroused, sated, or bored)
An important early discovery in the study of affec- have considerable difficulty predicting how they will
tive forecasting was that people show a striking blind feel when they are in a hot state (e.g., aroused,
spot for their capacity to adapt to negative events. hungry, or curious).
Specifically, individuals often fail to appreciate Even in the absence of such hot state/cold state
the effectiveness of their psychological immune differences, people often find themselves making
Aging, Memory, and Information Processing Speed 13
choicesand affective forecastsin a context that memory efficiency and the rates at which they change
differs from the context in which they will actually with age are very strongly correlated. This once pro-
experience the outcome of their choice; affective moted the hypothesis that age changes in all or most
forecasts are commonly made in a joint-evaluation abilities are driven by general slowing of informa-
mode, in which people compare multiple options tion processing, possibly due to changes in efficiency
in parallel, whereas the outcome of the decision is of neurons and their ability to interact with each other.
usually appraised in a single-evaluation mode, in The entry then considers how information received
which only the chosen option is available (creating by the sense organs is, in turn, recorded and trans-
a distinction bias). When choosing a television, for formed in successive stages of the memory system
example, one is faced with a wide array of options, (i.e., immediate memory, working memory, and long-
potentially magnifying the minor differences between term memory). The entry also discusses the extent to
them, but those differences are unlikely to remain which each stage depends on information processing.
salient while enjoying the selected television in ones Long-term memory for past life events is addressed,
home, where the chosen TV is removed from its for- as well as how intentions and plans are held in pro-
mer competitors. This difference in evaluation modes spective memory, to be evoked and implemented
is particularly problematic as people tend to focus when necessary. Finally, the entry discusses how new
on the differences between options and ignore their information from brain imaging allows us to disas-
common features when forecasting, even when these sociate the effects of gross brain changes on deci-
features are key elements for enjoyment when expe- sion speed, on memory, and on the formation and
riencing. Thus, the broad tendency to overlook the execution of intentions and plans, suggesting a new
power of contextand the ways in which the context interpretation for the apparent strong dependency of
will differ when emotions are imagined versus experi- memory efficiency on information processing speed.
encedprovides the wellspring for a host of forecast-
ing errors. Even if we are looking at the stars, then, Measures Sensitive to Aging
the fact that we are lying in the gutter may impair our The behavioral measurements that are most sensi-
mental time travel machines from taking flight. tive to changes in aging brains are memory failures
Jordi Quoidbach and Elizabeth W. Dunn and slowing of the speed with which we can make
simple decisions. Slowing seems to reflect a basic
See also Emotion Regulation; Self-Consciousness change in brain efficiency rather than loss of motiva-
tion or greater caution, because the limiting speed
Further Readings at which accurate decisions can be made becomes
longer as brain aging progresses.
Carlsmith, K. M., Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2008). Until the 1980s, when brain imaging began
The paradoxical consequences of revenge. Journal of to provide direct measures of neurophysiological
Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 13161324. changes in living and functioning brains, specula-
Gilbert, D. (2006). Stumbling on happiness. New York,
tive models for cognitive aging could be derived
NY: Knopf.
only by comparing different groups of older and
Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2003). Affective
younger people or by repeatedly testing the same
forecasting. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in
people, as they aged, on the same behavioral tasks.
experimental social psychology (Vol. 35, pp. 345411).
New York, NY: Elsevier.
Unfortunately, any behavioral task can give us only
two different measures of performance: how fast
and how accurately we can perform it. These two
AGING, MEMORY, AND measures trade off against each other, as in memory
tasks, where, although the immediate measure of
INFORMATION PROCESSING SPEED performance is the number of errors made, shorten-
ing the time that we are allowed to inspect items
This entry describes how the speed with which peo- impairs our ability to remember them. Fergus Craiks
ple can make decisions and their ability to remember excellent metaphor is that we increase the reliability
events change with age. These abilities are discussed of our memory in proportion to the depth of pro-
together because behavioral measures of speed and cessing that we can achieve by making connections
14 Aging, Memory, and Information Processing Speed
with other material that we already know. Deeper unreliable are second only to their complaints of
processing takes longer and, because they process arthritis. This worry is partly misplaced. People tend
information more slowly, older people are at a pro- to overestimate the changes that they experience
portional disadvantage. because they often lack objective external standards
For this reason, slowing of information process- of comparison for their own mental abilities. Their
ing speed must, inevitably, appear a sensitive mas- subjective impressions tend to overestimate the true
ter index of age-related change in all tasks. Because extent of the changes that actually occur.
people can maintain accuracy by responding more To guide their interpretations of data from behav-
slowly, changes in speed are usually detectable ioral tasks, psychologists have adopted a working
before changes in accuracy are observed. Thus, to assumption that types of activity that must logically
be detectable, any observed changes in task perfor- occur in temporal sequence are probably supported
mance with age must involve changes in speed. The by separate functional systems. So, tracking the pas-
deeper question is whether, apart from being the sage of information from our sense organs to our
critical one of the only two task performance indices long-term memories, we can consider the first stage
that we can measure, speed is also the predominant of iconic memory, a term for the retention of com-
performance characteristic of our cognitive systems. plete images received by the eye that remain available
That is, whether slowing of decision speed is the for 50 milliseconds or so until obliterated by new
functional cause of changes in all or most other men- visual events. After this stage, which seems not to be
tal abilities. If it is, we may hope that, by comparing impaired by increasing age, we process information
the relative sizes of differences in speed between from these iconic images to extract relevant from irrel-
older and younger people across a variety of tasks, evant details. Our resulting perceptions must then be
we may be able to use behavioral evidence alone to briefly held for assessment against previously acquired
frame useful hypotheses as to whether aging affects expectations or intentions, or against further new
some functional systems earlier and more than oth- information, and possibly internally played back (or
ers. For example, we might suppose, with the earli- rehearsed) and then stored for periods varying from
est investigators of human behavior such as Wilhelm seconds to decades and finally retrieved and reinter-
Wundt and Franciscus Donders, that loss of speed preted. Working within the assumption of functional
may directly reflect changes in the basic neurophysi- differences between temporally successive processes,
ological performance characteristics of our brains it has been natural to design behavioral experiments
and central nervous systems. Until the late 20th cen- to test whether old age affects some of these hypo-
tury, investigators such as Hans Eysenck, Art Jensen, thetically entrained processes of input, brief retention,
Tim Salthouse, and others suggested that speed on longer term storage, and retrieval more than others.
simple tasks directly mirrors elementary biological To find the limits of immediate storage of per-
properties of our nervous systems such as synaptic ceived information, investigators first measured the
conduction times, rates of neural transmission, or number of items, such as decimal digits, letters, or
the degree of degradation of connectivity in neural words, presented at measured rates and recalled by
networks; discussions in cognitive gerontology over study participants in the exact order in which they
the past 50 years have been dominated by this point were heard or read. George Miller first pointed out
of view. More recent evidence suggests that declines that such immediate memory spans for differ-
in maximum information processing speed limit ent kinds of material (e.g., digits, words, or letters)
memory efficiency not only by restricting the depth seemed to vary within a narrow range of 7 2 (seven
to which we can process information or affecting the plus or minus two) depending on item information
maximum rate of rehearsal but also because slowing load of items computed as the binary logarithm of
is a marker for basic neuronal changes in the entire the number of possible alternatives from which they
brain that affect all cognitive abilities. were drawn. So, because there are fewer possible dig-
its and letters of the alphabet than words, spans for
lists of random digits or letters are proportionately
Memory Stages and Aging
longer than spans for random words. The ratios of
The frequency and alarm with which elderly people possible alternative items to those actually presented
insist that their memories are becoming increasingly is not the whole story because, as Alan Baddeley
Aging, Memory, and Information Processing Speed 15
and Graham Hitch showed, the numbers of syl- To actively select, reorganize, or interpret infor-
lables that words contain set limits on our capacity: mation briefly held in working memory, we must
We can immediately play back fewer long than be guided by some plan or intention as to what to
short words. The particular physical properties of do with it. The formulation, comparison, adoption,
the sounds we try to remember are also important. and maintenance of goals and plans to guide interac-
Reuben Conrad showed that similar sounding let- tions with the world are termed central executive
ters such as S and F or A and K are confused in processes and are known to depend on integrity
sequences, so that spans for acoustically confusable of the prefrontal cortex in which gross age-related
items are shorter than for different sounding items. changes indexed by cell loss and white matter lesions
Immediate memory spans seem almost unaffected appear earlier and are greater than in other cortical
by healthy old age, but they are reduced by patholo- structures. Growing evidence shows that normal
gies such as dementias. They can be extended by brain aging affects these higher order processes of
familiarity with material, such as telephone dialing attention, intention, and planning in specific ways
codes or license plates; individuals who master inge- that are independent of its effects on information
nious mnemonic coding strategies are able to achieve processing speed.
indefinitely long spans. Thus, actual age changes The amount of information that can be held in
in the limits of immediate memory capacity can be dynamic working memory is reduced by slowing
masked by practice with particular kinds of material of information processing. Also, because working
and by use of mnemonic strategies. However, age memory has limited capacity, it must be continually
also markedly reduces the speed and efficiency with updated by new events in our rapidly changing envi-
which mnemonic strategies can be implemented. ronments. The outcomes of earlier analyses must
At all ages, memory spans are reduced if the items be transferred to some other system. Early work
retained are not simply given back in the order in assumed that storage is passive rather than active,
which they were presented but must be reorganized but later studies showed that remembered informa-
or transformed, as when reported in reverse order tion is continuously and radically integrated with,
(backward memory span). The number of items that and thus altered by, previously acquired knowledge
we can reorganize or otherwise transform before of the world and also by new information. It is still
recalling them declines sharply as we grow older. unclear whether information stored in long-term
The insight that items held in immediate memory memory remains unaltered until it is retrieved for
are typically not just passively stored for subse- further use (recalled) or whether the long-term stor-
quent readout but, rather, dynamically and selec- age systems are not just passive repositories but
tively rehearsed and restructured was captured by continuously self-reorganize their contents, even
Alan Baddeley as the concept of working memory. without conscious sifting and updating. The second
Baddeley showed that these dynamic processes hypothesis is currently preferred. For interpretations
make demands on information processing speed and of age-related changes, two connected issues are the
on the ability to relate current to past information. rates of progressive loss of once accurately stored
He also found that limits to working memory are memories and the consequently increasing failure to
determined by a trade-off between the rate at which distinguish between inferred and remembered infor-
traces of the immediate physical characteristics of mation. As far as we know, the limits to long-term
sensory input decay and the speed with which they memory capacity are so large that we do not run
can be read off and converted into other forms the risk of running out of memory storage space
of mnemonic representations. There is also evidence during our lifetimes. However, it is clear that, for
that functionally separate systems of transient, people of all ages, the longer information is stored
dynamic storage are used for acoustic representa- without being refreshed by reuse, the less accurately
tions of words or syllables (the articulatory loop) it can be retrieved. As years pass and we grow older,
and for visual information (the scratch pad). It is we become increasingly aware of gaps in knowledge
confidently known that age-related slowing impairs that was once perfectly recalled. Knowledge inten-
read-off and rehearsal of input, but not yet whether sively studied in youth, such as high school Spanish
it affects one hypothetical sense-organ-specific sys- or university psychology, becomes increasingly irre-
tem more than another. trievable over periods of a decade or longer, perhaps
16 Aging, Memory, and Information Processing Speed
eventually leaving a minimal residue of information of vividness, reliability, and detail is not in question,
that H. P. Bahrick, who initiated these studies, pic- but the idea that these recollections, picturesquely
turesquely calls the permastore. termed flashbulb memories, are exceptionally
The durability of long-term memories has been veridical, detailed, and durable is mistaken. When
examined in experiments in which people are asked respondents are asked repeatedly to recall striking
to remember events from all periods of their lives, moments over long intervals, losses and distortions
either spontaneously or when cued by random become increasingly evident at any age and seem to
words. Such studies find a regular, almost linear become more frequent as old age progresses.
increase in the numbers of recalled events from Age impairs the ability to recall information:
childhood through young adult life and maturity that is, to have a conscious and reliable conviction
into old age. In extreme old age, or in pathologies of accurate detailed recall of an experience or item
such as dementias, the recent past may be relatively of information and, most particularly, to be able
poorly recalled. This relationship is not quite linear: to correctly provide some context in which it was
Particular periods of life, such as early adulthood, experienced. In contrast, recognition of previously
are marked by a reminiscence bump and yield encountered information is necessarily easier because
more memories than earlier or later ages. A possible it does not demand accurate reconstruction of all
explanation is that in early adult life we may have of the information originally presented or of the
a larger number of significant experiences, many context in which it was encountered. Because rec-
of which are novel and important and thus also ognition requires less information to be stored than
emotionally charged, striking, and entertaining. does complete detailed recall, it is understandable
This idea is supported by findings that memories that it should be less affected by aging. However,
from particularly significant and striking historical differences in accuracy of recall and recognition also
periods, such as wars or periods of marked change, seem to reflect deeper differences in underlying func-
provide a profusion of memories irrespective of the tion. Old age reduces the probability of confident
ages at which they were experienced. Of course, conscious recall both of items of information and,
we cannot be sure that the vividness and emotional more particularly, of the contexts in which they were
impact of events when they were first experienced first encountered (explicit memory). But, as Larry
are the sole effective reason for their longer survival Jacoby and Alan Parkin have shown, age seems to
in the permastore. Striking events are frequently dis- have little or no effect on the ability to recognize an
cussed, and ruminated, so that what may remain is item as familiar, without conscious and explicit
grossly modified by replays, with elaboration and knowledge of specifically when and where it was
elision of detail. How people use their replays of last encountered (implicit memory).
remembered events to shape the stories that they Loss of accuracy in recalling incidental informa-
construct and use to make sense of their lives and tion about events or statements, such as where they
to interpret their current experiences is an engag- occurred or who uttered them, is a frequent incon-
ing topic of recent research by David Rubin and his venience in everyday life. This becomes increasingly
associates. troublesome in old age. Elderly persons are less
One way to test the idea that emotionally vivid able to retain source memory, recalling whether
events are exceptionally well recalled is to study words were spoken by one of two experimenters,
individuals recall of details of occasions on which or whether they had themselves thought of them;
they first heard of notable and emotionally strik- whether they had actually performed, or had only
ing public events, such as the unexpected deaths imagined performing, actions or had watched oth-
of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Diana, ers performing them. Experimenters asking older
Princess of Wales, or the 9/11 attacks on U.S. tar- and younger adults to learn lists of names of actual
gets. People invariably claim that their memories and fictitious celebrities found that, when these were
of their situations at the moment when they first recalled, the old more often than the young confused
heard of such events are exceptionally vivid and real with imaginary persons. Impairment of
detailed. Impressions of vividness and completeness the ability to retain the extra information needed to
seem relatively unaffected by the age at which the establish the context and source in which informa-
notable events were experienced or later recalled. tion is encountered evidently reduces the reliability
The honesty of individuals subjective impressions of eyewitness testimony of events.
Aging, Memory, and Information Processing Speed 17
A key theme of research has been whether the speed with which we can make very simple deci-
age changes in memory are entirely or only partly sions (reaction time [RT] tasks) have probably been
associated with slowing of information processing the most intensively studied. Consequently, nearly
speed that affects efficiency of input, encoding, and all experimental methodologies and theoretical ques-
retrieval. A different issue is the question of whether tions used to study RTs in young adults have been
or not memory traces of different kinds of informa- extended for age comparisons. In general, older peo-
tion, such as images, spatial relationships, words, ple are slower at decisions of all kinds and are more
actions, and events, have different and separate affected by any factors that make tasks harder. So, in
representations in the brain and are also differently absolute terms, older participants are more affected
affected by increasing age. Allowing for the diffi- by increases in task information load, as assessed
culties in computing differences in the information from the number of alternative signals and responses
load and complexity of different kinds of material, among which they have to choose; by reduced sig-
it seems that, in old age, memory for visual images nal brightness or loudness; by greater complexity in
is less impaired than is memory for words. Perhaps mapping signals on to responses; and by the size and
this is partly because recall of visual information has complexity of sets of signals that have to be discrimi-
typically been assessed by recognition, because older nated from each other. In all of these situations, the
people have particular problems in drawing or other- more demanding the task, the greater, in absolute
wise reproducing or describing pictures. Differences terms, is the difference between the average RTs of
in accuracy of recall of other, different kinds of infor- groups of old and young adults. In absolute terms,
mation have not yet been thoroughly studied. older people benefit more than young adults when
For humans, as for other animals, the most successive signals require the same responses (the
important evolutionary benefit gained from a capa- signal and response repetition effect). They also need
cious and exact memory is not the Proustian luxury longer to prepare to identify signals and program
of detailed and sensual recollection of the past but responses to them, and are less efficient at recogniz-
the ability to use previous experiences to predict the ing and using the statistical structure of the distri-
immediate future and provide appropriate plans butions of relative probabilities of the moments of
and procedures to deal with it. The evidence on age appearance of signals to maximize their readiness to
changes in the use of prospective memory to plan and cope with them.
guide future actions is still incomplete. Older adults The general findings that age slows harder deci-
seem to fail no more often than the young in situ- sions more than easier decisions led to hope that
ations in which there is no direct cue to implement this information could tell us why some cognitive
an instruction, such as when they are asked to press processes are more age sensitive than others. This
a key every 10 minutes, or to regularly turn away was undermined by a finding by Joseph Brinley, con-
from a different, engrossing task to check a clock. firmed by John Cerella. Across a wide range of very
The old are also no worse in obeying an instruction different experimental tasks, average RTs for groups
to respond to predesignated targets as soon as they of older individuals can be accurately derived by
appear. In sum, the more an activity is supported by multiplying average RTs for groups of young adults
cues available in the immediate environment, the by a simple constant in the range 1.2 to 1.7 (depend-
smaller are age differences. Elizabeth Maylor found ing on the average age difference between the groups
that when appropriate environmental cues were not compared). Later studies found that on nearly all
available, her older respondents tended to cope by tasks so far examined, distributions of RTs for
deliberately structuring their lives, even arbitrarily, by groups of older people can also be precisely matched
rearranging furniture, to remind them of actions that by multiplying distributions for groups of younger
she asked them to remember to carry out. people by the same simple constants between 1.2
and 1.7 (depending on differences in their average
ages and conditions). This is vexing because, if some
Evidence From Reaction Times
kinds of decisions were slowed more than others, we
We have noted that limitations of behavioral mea- could argue that the particular processes they involve
surement imply that measurements of age changes in are particularly vulnerable to aging. Consequently,
memory are inevitably confounded with losses in infor- the generality and theoretical interpretation of this
mation processing speed. Of all behavioral indices, striking regularity have been vigorously questioned.
18 Aging, Memory, and Information Processing Speed
However, its pervasiveness has led to the suggestion speed, behavioral data alone do not yet confirm
that age-related changes in the brain lead to gen- this hypothesis. For example, scores on widely used
eral slowing that affects all cognitive functions in behavioral diagnostic tests for frontal damage such
the same proportion; thus, it may be regarded as the the Stroop or Trails tests are, actually, RTs to unusual
prime functional driver, rather than just a symptom stimuli, and the proportions by which these RTs are
or biological marker, for all age-related changes slowed by age differ only barely detectably (Paul
in mental abilities. Evidence from brain imaging, dis- Verhaegen) or not at all (Tim Salthouse, Patrick
cussed in the next section, now shows this to have Rabbitt) from those observed in other, simpler tasks.
been a premature judgment. To the extent that the relative (rather than absolute)
RT tasks make a different and possibly more inter- extent of age differences in speed of performance are
esting point about age differences. The old are not unaffected by the diverse demands of diagnostic tests
just slower on average but also more variable from of local brain damage, these tests cannot distinguish
trial to trial. It follows that, because RTs obtained local from global age changes in brain function. For
from the same person on different occasions can be this, we need to examine relationships between age-
regarded as samples drawn from a distribution of all related changes in behavior and in neurophysiology
of the RTs that the person has made, any increases rather than simply between calendar age and behav-
in the standard error of RT distributions obtained ior. For example, without direct neurophysiological
on any single session must mirror a corresponding information from methodologies such as brain imag-
increase in the standard errors of the means of these ing, behavioral comparisons do not provide unam-
different samples of RTs obtained on different occa- biguous evidence for the reasonable assumption that,
sions. In other words, linear age-scaling of RTs also because age affects the frontal lobes earlier than other
means increases in variability of RTs from moment to parts of the cortex, frontal abilities such as the set-
moment and also in variability of mean RTs obtained ting of goals and the development and prosecution of
at different times. Further, because each older per- plans to achieve them, suffer correspondingly early
sons mean RTs vary more from session to session, impairments. A possible exception to the ambiguity
older individuals will necessarily appear to vary more of the behavioral evidence for frontal aging is the
with respect to each other than do the young when finding that the elderly are slowed disproportionately
compared on any particular occasion. This change more than young adults when abruptly switching
in performance cannot be interpreted as another between different subtasks or when attempting to do
example of general slowing and must reflect some two things at once. The fact that task switching and
other functional change that occurs in aging brains. multitasking depend on the integrity of the frontal
A different reason why slowing of information lobes supports theories of frontal aging. Further sup-
processing has been a central topic in cognitive geron- port for the frontal aging theory is Lynn Hasher and
tology over the past 30 years derives from discoveries Rose Zacks evidence that tasks demanding continu-
that variance between older and younger individuals ous control of information held and transformed in
RTs on simple laboratory tasks typically accounts for working memory show more marked age-related
all, or most, of the variance between them on other decrements than can be explained by global slowing
cognitive tasks, especially simple memory tasks. This alone.
motivated Tim Salthouse and Jim Birrens differently
formulated suggestions that general slowing is not
Evidence From Brain Imaging
just a sensitive marker of changes in all other mental
abilities but is actually the principal driver of declines Improvements in brain imaging now allow us to
in intelligence and memory. directly relate the amounts of observed behavioral
Cognitive gerontologists hope not only to describe changes to individual differences in patterns of
changes in abilities that occur in old age but also local brain changes. We can also test whether brain
to understand how aging of the brain causes them. changes underlying changes in behavioral perfor-
Because all laboratory tasks, including those designed mance are local as well as general and diffuse.
to diagnose local brain damage are, directly or Brain scanning has also clarified that slowing of
indirectly, also measures of information processing information processing drives age-related changes
Allais Paradox 19
in different cognitive functions to different extents. because, within any older sample, the particular
Gross brain changes, especially the increase in brain changes whose effects are under investigation
incidence of white matter lesions and global losses may be present in increasing numbers of individuals
in cortical volume, affect information processing but not in all or even in most. Individual differences
speed much more than other abilities, such as per- in patterns of age-related brain changes observed in
formance on intelligence tests. However, statisti- any group are now known to be considerable and to
cal methods such as structural equation modeling become more marked as the group ages. Because of
show that, although the effects of these gross brain the variability of brain changes, variability between
changes on memory are indeed mainly accounted individuals behavioral data are certain to be incon-
for by concomitant slowing of information process- clusive when, as has been the norm over the past
ing speed, this is much less true of scores on frontal 75 years, comparisons involve small groups of only
tests and not at all true of scores on tests of fluid 15 to 50 elderly individuals. Scanning data now
intelligence. This provokes a new interpretation of allows behavioral changes to be related to different
the very strong relationships between scores on tests amounts and patterns of age-related brain changes
of information processing speed and on tests of all rather than to the differences in calendar age,
other cognitive abilities. Scores on tests of speed are which, as we now know, is an imprecise guide to the
clearly exceptionally sensitive indices of the extent, extent and nature of individual changes in cognitive
and progress, of gross changes in the entire brain. In function.
this sense, they are also, inevitably, sensitive markers
Patrick Michael Rabbitt
for the amounts and progress of all of the changes in
the brain that bring about losses of all other mental
See also Intelligence, Neural Basis; Intelligence and
abilities. This proposition that slowing of informa-
Working Memory; Memory, Neural Basis; Reaction
tion processing speed is a marker for brain changes
Time; Working Memory
that affect all tasks is clearly logically distinct from
the Birren and Salthouse speculation that changes
in information processing speed are functional driv- Further Readings
ers for corresponding changes in performance of all Craik, F. I. M., & Salthouse, T. A. (2000). The handbook
other tasks. This allows reconciliation rather than of age and cognition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
eliminative confrontation between views. Both per- Rabbitt, P. M. A. (2002). Cognitive gerontology.
spectives are useful. Specific functional dependen- In H. Pashler & J. Wixted (Eds.), Stevens handbook
cies between information processing speed and, for of experimental psychology (Vol. 4, pp. 203254).
example, working memory efficiency or improve- Chichester, UK: Wiley.
ment due to depth of processing are unchallenged. Salthouse, T. A. (1991). Theoretical perspectives in
But we must also bear in mind that information cognitive aging. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
processing speed is a strong symptom and thus
an accurate marker for gross brain efficiency. The
relative amounts of variance in performance due to
direct and merely symptomatic status of information ALLAIS PARADOX
processing speed is a new and basic question that
remains to be investigated. The Allais paradox is a paradox in risky choice first
The increasing availability of brain imaging proposed by Maurice Allais in the 1950s to chal-
is helpful for investigators attempting to resolve lenge the then-dominant view that humans are ratio-
another key methodological problem in studying nal economic actors. According to expected utility
how age affects cognition. It has long been recog- theory, a widely used economic theory of choice,
nized that, because individuals age at very different humans make decisions between options with uncer-
rates, calendar age is a relatively weak predictor tain outcomes by considering the probability and
of cognitive abilities. This raises obvious problems value of each possible outcome. Decision makers
for attempts to study age-related changes by com- who choose according to expected utility theory are
paring small groups of older and younger people economically rational: They will display consistent
20 Allais Paradox
preferences, and their choices will maximize their Rome or Paris. According to the independence
own self-interest. axiom, how the decision maker feels about New
The Allais paradox was one of the first demon- York is irrelevant, because he or she will win a trip
strations that human decision making systematically to New York if the coin flip is tails regardless of
violates expected utility theory, suggesting that stan- which lottery is chosen. Because of this, any prize
dard models of economic rationality may not be suf- could be substituted for the trip to New York with-
ficient to explain actual decision behavior. Multiple out changing the decision.
theories have been put forward to account for the
Allais paradox, including theories about the way The Allais Paradox
probability is used in decisions and theories about
the role of emotions in decisions. As one of the earli- The Allais paradox is a violation of the indepen-
est demonstrations of the limits of the rational actor dence axiom. Although the paradox can be demon-
hypothesis, the Allais paradox helped motivate the strated with a variety of payouts and probabilities,
psychological study of decision making. the following is one of the most commonly seen pre-
sentations. Consider the following two gambles:
Ticket A Ticket B
The Independence Axiom
10% probability of 11% probability of
One of the axioms from which expected utility the- $5 million $1 million
ory is derived is the independence axiom, which says
90% probability of $0 89% probability of $0
that any outcome common to two options is irrel-
evant when choosing between them. For example,
consider the following gambles: In this pair of gambles, decision makers generally
prefer Ticket A, a 10% chance of $5 million.
Ticket A Ticket B Expected utility theory says that decision makers
Heads: a trip to Rome Heads: a trip to Paris should choose the same ticket in both pairs of gam-
bles. Pair Two is obtained from Pair One by chang-
Tails: a trip to New York Tails: a trip to New ing an 89% chance of $1 million to an 89% chance
York
of $0 in both gambles. By reversing their preferences
between the two pairs, decision makers are violating
When choosing between ticket A and ticket B, all the independence axiom. To see why, suppose the
that matters is whether the decision maker prefers gambles are resolved by drawing balls from an urn:
Allais Paradox 21
Just as New York was irrelevant to the choice makers may anticipate the regret they would feel if
between the vacation gambles, the outcome of draw- they took a chance on the risky Ticket A and lost.
ing balls 12 through 100 is irrelevant to the choice Decision affect theories propose that decision mak-
between the Allais paradox gambles. Within each ers choose certain outcomes to avoid the risk of
pair, decision makers who draw balls 12 through regretting their decision. In Pair One, decision mak-
100 will receive the same outcome regardless of ers who choose Ticket A and lose know they would
whether they chose Ticket A or Ticket B. Thus, only have won had they chosen the certain Ticket B, but
the outcomes of drawing balls 1 through 11 are rel- those who choose Ticket B will not know what the
evant to the decision. Because these are the same in result of choosing risky Ticket A would have been.
both pairs of choices, decision makers should choose However, in Pair Two, decision makers who choose
the same ticket in both pairs. Ticket A and lose know they would probably still
have lost had they chosen Ticket B. Because they do
not anticipate regretting choosing Ticket A in Pair
Explanations for the Allais Paradox
Two, they are more likely to choose Ticket A in Pair
The Allais paradox is generally considered a form Two than in Pair One.
of the certainty effect, in which decision makers
Bethany Weber
overweight certain outcomes (i.e., outcomes that
are certain) when making decisions. In Pair One,
the decision maker is drawn to the certain payout See also Decision Making, Neural Underpinnings;
offered by Ticket B. In Pair Two, neither ticket offers Decision Theory, Philosophical Perspectives;
a certain outcome, so the decision maker chooses Neuroeconomics
the higher payout Ticket A.
Prospect theory is the most common theory put
forward to explain the Allais paradox and other Further Readings
violations of expected utility theory. Prospect theory
Allais, M. (1979). The foundations of the positive theory
explains the Allais paradox, and the certainty effect
choice involving risk and a criticism of the postulates
more generally, via a probability weighting func- and axioms of the American school. In M. Allais & O.
tion. Because this probability weighting function is Hagan (Eds.), Expected utility hypotheses and the Allais
steeper near the ends than in the middle, decision paradox: Contemporary discussions of decisions under
makers treat the difference between 0% and 1% as uncertainty with Allais rejoinder (pp. 27145).
if it were much larger than the difference between Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel. (Original work
89% and 90%. Thus, a 1% difference in the prob- published 1952)
ability of winning nothing has a much bigger impact Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory:
in Pair One than it does in Pair Two. An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47,
Another common explanation for the Allais 263291.
paradox is that it is driven by emotion. When choos- Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (1974). Who accepts Savages
ing between the gambles in Pair One, the decision axiom? Behavioral Science, 19, 368373.
22 Amnesia
tend to have deficits primarily in verbal memory, amnesia. In addition to having memory problems,
and patients with damage focused in the right tem- patients with posterior cerebral artery lesions often
poral region tend to have deficits primarily in visual/ have reading and visual naming impairments. This
nonverbal memory. pattern of deficit is thought to be due to damage
extending to the posterior parahippocampus and
Anoxia: A Reduction in Oxygen Supply the collateral isthmus (a pathway that connects the
Anoxia can result from cardiac arrest, respiratory posterior parahippocampus to association cortex).
distress, or carbon monoxide poisoning. Although Thalamic strokes that impact the anterior tha-
some patients with anoxic injury present with gen- lamic nuclei, dorsomedial thalamic nuclei, or the
eralized cognitive impairment, a subset of patients mammillo-thalamic tract also can result in signifi-
present with selective amnesia. The degree of both cant memory loss. Severity of anterograde and ret-
anterograde and retrograde amnesia is variable, rograde amnesia vary depending on lesion location.
sometimes with retrograde loss spanning years Unilateral lesions lead to material-specific amnesia.
prior to injury. Typically, the severity of memory Executive dysfunction is often observed as well.
loss is determined by the extent of MTL damage.
The MTL is only one of several brain regions that Anterior Communicating Artery Aneurysms
are particularly susceptible to oxygen deprivation. In the acute phase of anterior communicating
As a result of reduced oxygen supply, other areas, artery aneurysm, patients appear confused and dis-
including the basal ganglia, thalamus, and diffuse oriented, and confabulation often co-occurs. In the
cortical areas, may also suffer damage. In the case chronic phase, patients tend to have severe recall
of more extensive damage, patients tend to present deficits, although recognition may be preserved in
with more generalized cognitive impairments. some cases. The amnesia is due to damage to the
basal forebrain, which provides important choliner-
Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome (WKS) gic inputs to the MTL. Frontal lesions are also com-
In the acute phase, patients with WKS present mon and may lead to executive dysfunction.
with confusion, occulomotor abnormalities, and
ataxia. Once the confusion clears, patients are left Anterograde Amnesia
with a severe amnesia and poor insight into their One of the hallmark features of the amnesic syn-
memory problems. The main cause of WKS is chronic drome is the patients inability to consciously rec-
alcohol abuse, and resultant thiamine deficiency, ollect information that they have encountered after
although other causes of malnutrition have also been illness onset, and this includes both personally expe-
observed. Anterograde amnesia is characterized by a rienced events (i.e., episodic memory) and generic
high sensitivity to proactive interference, leading to information about the world (i.e., semantic mem-
intrusions from previously encountered (yet currently ory). These types of memory are known collectively
irrelevant) information. Retrograde memory loss is as declarative memory because they require con-
also common and can extend for decades, although scious recounting of information. Many studies of
recent memories are typically more affected than amnesic patients focus on uncovering the processes
are remote ones. The dense amnesia experienced by that underlie this declarative memory impairment.
these patients is often exacerbated by executive dys- Traditionally, researchers have conceived of
function (i.e., problems in the areas of attention and memory in terms of three key elements: encoding
cognitive control). WKS amnesia is thought to be due (processing of input), storage (consolidating incom-
to damage to the anterior and dorsomedial thalamic ing material for long-term storage), and retrieval
nuclei and the mammillary bodies. Additional frontal (reactivating previously stored information). It is
damage is responsible for the executive deficit. unlikely that amnesics memory deficit is due to
impaired encoding, as patients are able to maintain
Cerebral Vascular Accidents
information in short-term memory. Because amne-
Infarction of the posterior cerebral artery, which sics are able to recall some memories acquired years
perfuses the MTL, is another common cause of before amnesia onset (e.g., childhood memories),
24 Amnesia
it seems implausible that their impairments lie access to stored information (i.e., nondeclarative
entirely in the retrieval process. Thus, it has been memory). For instance, amnesic patients show intact
suggested that amnesics memory problems are due procedural memory (i.e., learning new motor skills
to an inability to consolidate information for long- across multiple learning opportunities), eyeblink
term storage. Both human and animal research has conditioning (i.e., learning to associate a tone with
highlighted the crucial role the MTL plays in this an air puff to the eye), and repetition priming (i.e.,
process of consolidation. The MTL is not the site of increased efficiency at stimulus processing as a result
permanent storage of long-term memory (as previ- of single prior exposure). These observations suggest
ously formed memories can still be retrieved), but that nondeclarative memory is independent of MTL
rather binds together into coherent representations or diencephalic regions.
different elements of an event that are processed and
stored in the neocortex.
Retrograde Amnesia
Even among patients with MTL damage, there
is considerable heterogeneity in performance, Retrograde amnesia can encompass deficits in
which has been linked to extent of lesion. Patients memory for personally experienced events (autobi-
with extensive lesions involving the hippocampus ographical memory) as well as generic facts about
and surrounding subhippocampal cortices perform the world (semantic memory) and oneself (personal
poorly on both recall and recognition tasks, but semantics). As described earlier, a temporal gradient
some patients with damage limited to the hippocam- in retrograde memory loss is frequently observed,
pus proper have been described as having impaired with remote memories being better preserved than
recall only. This dissociation can be understood memories acquired shortly before the time of injury.
with reference to two cognitive processes that can The temporal gradient for semantic memory typi-
support declarative memory: recollection, an effort- cally is time limited, but the temporal gradient for
ful process involved in the recovery of episodic autobiographical memory is more variable. In some
information; and familiarity, a subjective feeling cases, it extends a few years (e.g., anoxic patients),
that results when information is processed fluently. whereas in other cases it extends several decades
Recollection is critical for recall, but recognition can (e.g., WKS patients). The observation of relatively
be supported by either recollection or familiarity. limited retrograde memory loss (i.e., years) is gen-
Thus, impairment in recall but not in recognition erally consistent with the consolidation view of the
is thought to reflect selective impairment in recol- MTL, which states that the role of the hippocam-
lection. Both human and animal research suggests pus in memory is time limited: The hippocampus
that the hippocampus proper may mediate recollec- is important for the initial binding of event features
tion, whereas extra-hippocampal MTL regions such that are stored neocortically, but over time, direct
as perirhinal cortex may mediate familiarity. This neocortical connections are formed and memories
claim remains controversial, however, because some can be accessed without hippocampal involvement.
amnesic patients with damage limited to the hippo- The finding of extensive autobiographical mem-
campus have shown impairments in both recall and ory loss (i.e., decades) challenges that notion, as that
recognition. time frame extends consolidation beyond what is
In patients with frontal damage in addition to biologically plausible. This has led to an alternative
MTL damage, compromised encoding and retrieval view, called multiple trace theory, which suggests
strategies as a result of executive dysfunction fur- that retrieval of event-specific details continues to
ther compound the memory impairment. Executive be hippocampal dependent, no matter the age of the
dysfunction may lead to poor elaboration and orga- memory. According to multiple trace theory, each
nization of incoming information and impoverished retrieval of a memory leads to the formation of a
memory search and monitoring strategies. The latter new hippocampal trace. The relative preservation
may manifest behaviorally as high levels of intrusion of remote compared to recent memories reflects the
errors in recall and false alarms in recognition. fact that remote memories, which presumably are
Despite their profound impairment in forming retrieved more frequently, are represented by more
declarative memories, amnesic patients are able to hippocampal traces and thus more resistant to par-
form new memories that do not require conscious tial hippocampal damage.
Analogical Mapping and Reasoning 25
In patients with lesions that include the anterolat- relationships shared by the two knowledge areas.
eral temporal cortex (e.g., HSE patients), extensive For example, researcher Dedre Gentner describes a
retrograde memory loss without a temporal gradi- scientific analogy in which the structure of an atom
ent can be observed. This pattern is thought to be can be better understood if one understands how it
the result of damage directly to the neocortical sites relates to aspects of the solar system. In this case, the
where event features are stored. nucleus of the atom can be mapped onto the sun, as a
central object, and the electrons can be mapped onto
Summary the planets, as orbiting satellite objects. Analogies
Memory impairments are commonly observed in have been used to generate new knowledge and
patients with neurological insults, and these deficits understand novel situations based on what is known
can affect new learning as well as the retrieval of pre- about past situations. Successful use of an analogy
existing memories. Studies of amnesia have provided requires several steps. These steps include retriev-
tremendous insight into the cognitive and neural ing a source analog (the area of knowledge that is
architecture of memory. Theoretical advances into known), mapping this onto a target analog (the new
the nature of impaired and preserved memory pro- area of knowledge), and inferring new information
cesses in amnesia can guide development of theory- about the target analog based on what is known
driven rehabilitation, which may lead to improved about the source analog. There are various special
quality of life for individuals with memory disorders. requirements, called constraints, which must be
placed on analogies in order for them to be used suc-
Irene P. Kan and Mieke Verfaellie cessfully. Several researchers have developed com-
putational models to better understand analogical
See also Memory, Neural Basis; Semantic Dementia mapping and inference processes. Recent research
has also focused on understanding how analogical
Further Readings thinking operates in the human brain.
Baddeley, A. D., Kopelman, M. D., & Wilson, B. A.
(2002). The handbook of memory disorders (2nd ed.). Steps in Using an Analogy
Chichester, UK: Wiley. Analogies range from relatively simple four-term
Eichenbaum, H., Yonelinas, A. R., & Ranganath, C. cases (of the form A is to B as C is to D) to very com-
(2007). The medial temporal lobe and recognition plex analogies, such as those about political strate-
memory. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 30, 123152.
gies, historical periods, or wars. Regardless of the
Nadel, L., & Moscovitch, M. (1997). Memory
complexity of the analogy, there are three steps that
consolidation, retrograde amnesia and the hippocampal
must occur: retrieval, mapping, and inference.
complex. Current Opinions in Neurobiology, 7,
217227.
Analogical Retrieval
Squire, L. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2003). Neuropsychology
of memory (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Retrieval of a source analog is the first step neces-
Squire, L. R., Wixted, J. T., & Clark, R. E. (2007). sary to make use of prior information in an analogy.
Recognition memory and the medial temporal lobe: This step occurs when an individual encounters a
A new perspective. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8, new situation and wishes to predict unknown infor-
872883. mation about how it behaves or operates. The new
situation may be similar to some event or situation
that has been encountered and understood previ-
ANALOGICAL MAPPING AND ously. The ability to retrieve or access a relevant
prior situation, or source analog, from memory is
REASONING determined primarily by its similarity to the new sit-
uation, the target analog. For successful retrieval, the
Reasoning by analogy is regarded as one of the basis for the similarity should be relational, mean-
most sophisticated aspects of abstract thinking. ing that relationships among elements should be
Analogies are systematic matches between two sep- similar across the situations. This can be contrasted
arate areas of knowledge that are based on common with featural similarity, in which the situations look
26 Analogical Reasoning, Models of Development
perceptually similar but operate differently at a rela- about analogical reasoning that can then be tested
tional level. Featural similarity can be distracting with human subjects in the laboratory setting.
when one attempts to retrieve a source analog, as
possible source analogs may initially appear appro- Analogy and the Brain
priate but ultimately, on closer inspection, share little Recent research on analogy has focused on gaining
relational similarity. a better understanding of how analogical reason-
ing occurs in the brain. Some of these studies have
Analogical Mapping
focused on understanding how damage to brain
The mapping process occurs when the source and areas affects analogical reasoning. Studies of patients
target analogs are aligned and compared. Similar with frontal lobe damage have demonstrated that
relations are matched between the two domains, and this area of the brain is important in analogical
shared relations are paired together. For example, in mapping and in appropriately discounting inap-
the solar system-to-atom analogy, relations such as propriate possible matches that share only featural
revolves around will be paired together so that similarity with the target analog. Other studies have
the satellite objects (planets and electrons) and cen- used brain imaging methods to demonstrate that
tral objects (sun and nucleus) will be placed in corre- the frontal cortex becomes active during analogical
spondence. Once the mapping process is completed, mapping compared to other types of comparisons.
the individual will have generated an understanding This area of research indicates that the frontal lobes
of the overlap that exists between the two domains. are important for analogical mapping and inference.
The final step in the analogy is to generate possi- See also Analogical Reasoning, Models of Development;
ble inferences about the new target analog based on Similarity
what is known about the prior source analog. For
example, the knowledge that the planets follow their Further Readings
own paths around the sun may lead to the inference
that electrons will follow their own paths around the Gentner, D. (1983). Structure mapping: A theoretical
nucleus. Analogical inferences can then be tested for framework for analogy. Cognitive Science, 7, 155170.
validity with further analysis of the target domain. It Holyoak, K. J., & Thagard, P. (1995). Mental leaps:
is not guaranteed that analogical inferences will be Analogy in creative thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT
correct, as their validity depends on the quality of fit Press.
Krawczyk, D. C., Morrison, R. G., Viskontas, I. V.,
between the two domains involved in the analogy.
Holyoak, K. J., Chow, T. W., Mendez, M., . . .
Knowlton, B. J. (2008). Distraction during relational
Models of Analogy
reasoning: The role of prefrontal cortex in interference
Research on analogical thinking has focused on bet- control. Neuropsychologia, 46, 20202032.
ter understanding the process through building theo- Spellman, B. A., & Holyoak, K. J. (1992). If Saddam is
retical models. These models may then be simulated Hitler then who is George Bush? Analogical mapping
using computer programs to see how they would between systems of social roles. Journal of Personality
solve analogy problems. Most of these models have and Social Psychology, 62, 913933.
required that constraints be applied to analogies to
enable successful computer simulations. Constraints
are pressures that are applied to ensure that valid
inferences are drawn. Analogical constraints include
ANALOGICAL REASONING, MODELS
the idea that analogies should be based on relations OF DEVELOPMENT
among items in the two domains rather than simi-
lar featural appearance. Another useful constraint Analogical reasoning involves a structured compari-
is that one element in a target analog should match son, or mapping, between one situation (source) and
only one element in a source analog. Modeling another (target). Analogy is a powerful means for
efforts have been useful in generating predictions people to learn about new situations based on their
Analogical Reasoning, Models of Development 27
prior understanding of the world. Central in adult on average, childrens working-memory capacity is
cognition, analogy is also important for childrens such that after age 2, children can process binary
capacity to transfer learning across domains and for relations, and after age 5, they can process ternary
schema abstraction. Whereas there is general agree- relations. Thus, children of age 2 can perform very
ment that analogy is important for cognitive devel- simple analogy problems but not problems that
opment, there is considerable disagreement on the require integrating multiple relations.
mechanisms underlying childrens development of
mature, adult-like analogical reasoning. This entry Computational Models of Analogy
briefly surveys the dominant theories of the develop- Over the past 40 years, many computational models
ment of analogy and then discusses computational of analogical reasoning have emerged but relatively
models attempting to test these theories. few attempts have been made to use these models
to describe the development of analogy. Efforts to
Developmental Change in Analogy
do this can essentially be divided into two branches:
Whereas older children frequently use relational (a) efforts to model how children develop relational
similarity in the service of solving problems, young representations of knowledge, and (b) efforts to
children typically favor concrete, less relationally model how children use those representations in the
complex analogies based on featural similarity. service of analogy.
Hypotheses for explaining these differences have
centered on changes in relational knowledge and Building Relational Representations
maturation of executive functions. All successful models of analogical reasoning
operate on structured representations in long-term
Relational Knowledge
memory; however, until recently, no explanation
Usha Goswami has argued that children are able existed for how these structured representations
to map relations in a rudimentary manner from might arise. The lack of an account of where rela-
early infancy, but their later analogical reason- tional representations come from has led Robert
ing skills build on prerequisite content knowledge. Leech and colleagues to postulate that analogy might
Thus, childrens analogical reasoning becomes more not rely on structured representations but rather on
and more adult-like on a domain-by-domain basis simple associations. However, these approaches have
as knowledge develops. failed to provide an explanation of how children can
Similarly, Dedre Gentner and colleagues hypoth- process progressively more relationally complex
esized a relational shift during cognitive devel- analogies or exhibit the flexibility in relational think-
opment such that, as children build knowledge in ing characteristic of adults. A more viable option is
a domain, they move from attending to similarity that humans can learn structured relational repre-
based on object features to relational similarity. sentations from unstructured examples. These repre-
These authors postulate this process is not an age- sentations might then be used in traditional symbolic
related phenomenon but rather is tied to knowledge or symbolic-connectionist models to perform ana-
acquisition. Robert Morrison and colleagues have logical reasoning. Leonidas Doumas and colleagues
alternatively argued that the relational shift can be recently described one such approach that uses com-
understood as a deficit in inhibitory control in work- parison to bootstrap learning structured relational
ing memory, one aspect of executive functions. representations starting with simple distributed rep-
resentations of objects as feature vectors.
Executive Functions
Developing Analogical Reasoning
Even when young children can demonstrate rela-
tional knowledge in a domain, they frequently have Assuming a mechanism to learn relational knowl-
difficulty using analogies requiring integration of edge, a computational model of the development of
multiple relations. Graeme Halford has proposed a analogical reasoning must account for why children
theory of relational complexity to categorize rela- show a relational shift, why the relational shift is
tions by the number of sources of variation that domain specific, and why children initially have dif-
must be processed in parallel. Halford suggested that ficulty processing relationally complex analogies. In
28 Anchoring
an effort to capture the relational shift, Gentner and (Eds.), Developing cognitive competence: New
colleagues hand-coded different relational represen- approaches to process modeling (pp. 263313).
tations in the structure-mapping engine (SME). SME Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
showed a mapping advantage for the representation Goswami, U. (2001). Analogical reasoning in children.
containing higher order relations similar to that In D. Gentner, K. J. Holyoak, & B. N. Kokinov (Eds.),
observed in older versus younger children. The analogical mind: Perspectives from cognitive science
An alternative solution to this problem involves (pp. 437470). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
assuming that the development of analogy is at least Hummel, J. E., & Holyoak, K. J. (1997). Distributed
representations of structure: A theory of analogical
partly tied to maturation of brain systems, particu-
access and mapping. Psychological Review, 104,
larly areas of the prefrontal cortex known to develop
427466.
well into adolescence. Previous neuropsychological
Leech, R., Mareschal, D., & Cooper, R. P. (2008). Analogy
and neuroimaging analogy studies in both children
as relational priming: A developmental and
and adults have shown these areas of the brain to computational perspective on the origins of a complex
be critical for analogy performance. Working under cognitive skill. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31,
this assumption, Morrison and colleagues used John 357414.
Hummel and Keith Holyoaks LISA (learning and Morrison, R. G., Doumas, L. A. A., & Richland, L. E.
inference with schemas and analogies), a symbolic (2006). The development of analogical reasoning in
connectionist model of analogy, to successfully children: A computational account. Proceedings of the
simulate both the relational shift as well as relational twenty-eighth annual conference of the Cognitive
complexity effects in children from the age of 3 to Science Society (pp. 603608). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
13. All that was necessary to capture these phenom-
ena was a change in LISAs inhibition parameter, a
parameter closely tied to one likely role of the pre-
frontal cortex. This approach can also benefit from
ANCHORING
domain-specific changes in representation, when
relational representations are chunked presumably The last two digits of your telephone number have
as a result of knowledge accretion or expertise. Thus, absolutely nothing to do with your life expectancy.
as relational knowledge develops in a domain, pro- And yet, thinking about those two digits may influ-
cessing can become easier for LISA. This approach ence your estimates of the amount of time you have
provides an explanation for both quick changes in to live. First consider, for instance, whether your life
analogy performance as a result of learning and also expectancy is longer or shorter than those last two
slower maturational changes as a result of changes digits, and now estimate your actual life expectancy.
in biology. If your last two digits are small numbers (e.g., 11),
you are likely to estimate that your life expectancy
Robert G. Morrison is shorter than if those two digits are large numbers
(e.g., 99). This is an example of anchoring, a general
See also Analogical Mapping and Reasoning; Similarity term used to describe cases in which a persons judg-
ment or evaluation is influenced byor anchored
Further Readings onsalient information in ones environment. In
most cases, anchors exert a drag on the judgment
Andrews, G., & Halford, G. S. (2002). A cognitive
and render final estimates biased in the direction of
complexity metric applied to cognitive development.
Cognitive Psychology, 45, 153219.
the original anchor value, whether those anchor val-
Doumas, L. A. A., Hummel, J. E., & Sandhofer, C. M. ues are relevant to the judgment at hand or not.
(2008). A theory of the discovery and prediction of Anchoring has been used to describe two very dif-
relational concepts. Psychological Review, 115, 143. ferent aspects of judgment and evaluation. The first
French, R. M. (2002). The computational modeling of is as a phenomenon, to describe cases in which a
analogy-making. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, persons judgment or evaluation is influenced by an
200205. anchor value. The second is as a process, to describe
Gentner, D., Rattermann, M. J., Markman, A. B., & the psychological mechanisms that enable people to
Kotovsky, L. (1995). Two forces in the development of make judgments and evaluations under conditions
relational similarity. In T. J. Simon & G. S. Halford of uncertainty.
Anchoring 29
In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman (Eds.), sufentanil or propofol. Muscle relaxation is typically
Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive achieved with a drug such as tubocurarine. Because
judgment (pp. 120138). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge the neuromuscular blockade induces a total paraly-
University Press. sis of the skeletal musculature, the patient must be
Epley, N. (2004). A tale of tuned decks? Anchoring as artificially respirated during the procedure, until the
adjustment and anchoring as activation. In D. J. Koehler blockade is reversed by a drug such as neostigmine.
& N. Harvey (Eds.), The Blackwell handbook of For the same reason, the patient is unable to com-
judgment and decision making (pp. 240256). Oxford, municate with the surgical team or respond behav-
UK: Blackwell.
iorally to requests; this situation raises the question
Strack, F., & Mussweiler, T. (1997). Explaining the
of how anyone knows that the patient is really
enigmatic anchoring effect: Mechanisms of selective
unconscious.
accessibility. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 73, 437446.
Monitoring Anesthetic Depth
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under
uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, Clinically, the success of general anesthesia is shown
11241131. by the patients lack of response to verbal commands
or to what is euphemistically referred to as surgical
stimulation. Moreover, postoperatively, the patient
ANESTHESIA AND AWARENESS will report no sensation of pain during the operation;
nor will the patient recall any events that took place
during the operation. By these standards, far less than
The purpose of anesthesia is to render a surgical 1% of surgical patients report any surgical aware-
patient insensitive to pain. Regional and local anes- ness. Still, a postoperative interview is a little late to
thesia act on the specific sensory nerves and tracts of determine that a patient was not adequately anes-
the skeletal nervous system and spinal cord, leaving thetized, and so considerable effort has been made
the patient conscious and able to communicate and to develop means of monitoring the patients state of
cooperate with the surgical team. General anesthe- consciousness, as well as vital functions, during anes-
sia, by contrast, operates at the level of the central thesia. One on line measure, based on presumed
nervous system, abolishing pain by rendering the autonomic signs of conscious awareness, is the PRST
patient totally unconscious, in a sort of controlled score, which takes into account the patients blood
coma. For this reason, research on general anesthe- pressure, heart rate, sweating, and secretion of tears.
sia provides an avenue for investigating fundamental Another standard simply relies on biochemical
aspects of consciousness. This entry provides a brief measures of anesthetic concentration in the lungs or
overview of modern anesthetic technique and the bloodstream. A common measure is MAC, which
monitoring of anesthetic depth, and discusses issues is the minimum alveolar concentration of inhalant
pertaining to surgical awareness and memory. anesthetic, measured through the respirator, which
eliminates motor response to surgical stimulation
Anesthetic Technique
in 50% of patients. A weaker concentration, MAC-
The first successful use of ether by William Morton aware, also known as MAC-awake, typically about
on October 16, 1846, is still celebrated as Ether 0.3 to 0.5 MAC, is sufficient to eliminate aware-
Day by anesthesiologists worldwide. Chloroform ness (measured by response to a verbal request),
was introduced in 1847 and gained popularity when without necessarily eliminating all reflexive motor
used by Queen Victoria during the birth of her responses. A stronger concentration, MAC-BAR
eighth child. Modern anesthetic practice, known as (1.72.0 MAC) is required to block autonomic as
balanced anesthesia, employs a cocktail of differ- well as skeletal reflexes. Including muscle relaxants
ent drugs to achieve three different end points: seda- in balanced anesthesia, then, allows administra-
tion, loss of consciousness, and muscle relaxation. tion of lower doses of anesthetic agents. Similar
Commonly employed sedatives include diazepam standards, based on blood plasma levels, have
and midazolam. Typical anesthetic agents include been determined for intravenous anesthetic agents.
inhalants such as nitrous oxide and oxygen, isoflu- Because the operational definition of MAC means
rane, or sevoflurane, and intravenous drugs such as that 50% of patients will respond to surgical events,
Anesthesia and Awareness 31
anesthesiologists generally administer a dose equiva- of priming, which occurs when processing of one
lent to approximately 1.3 MAC to ensure adequate stimulus facilitates the processing of a later stimulus
anesthesia. (in negative priming, the first stimulus inhibits pro-
Most modern methods for monitoring the depth cessing of the second). For example, subjects who
of anesthesia involve measures of central nervous have recently read the word assassin are more likely
system function, such as the event-related poten- to successfully complete the fragment a__a__in with
tial (ERP, or simply EP) observed in the electro- an English word than those who have not.
encephalogram (EEG), elicited by somatosensory In fact, some research has found evidence of
or auditory stimulation (ERPs can be elicited by spared priming for information presented during
visual stimulation, too, but surgical patients eyes general anesthesiaat least with some anesthetic
are closed). The ERP consists of three major com- agents, and especially at BIS levels above 60. BIS
ponents: early (appearing in the first 10 msec after levels below 60 appear to abolish both explicit and
the stimulus), reflecting brain stem activity; middle implicit memory for surgical events. But even when
(10100 msec), reflecting subcortical activity; and implicit memory is spared, the effect appears to be
late (1001000 msec), reflecting cortical activity. limited to repetition priming rather than semantic
As a general rule, adequate anesthesia reduces the or conceptual priming. Because the patient is pre-
amplitude of the various peaks and troughs in the sumably unconscious of surgical events at the time
ERP subcomponents, as well as their latency with they occur, spared priming, usually construed as
respect to the stimulus. A frequently employed AEP an expression of implicit memory, is, in this case,
index of consciousness reflects the degree to which better interpreted as an expression of implicit or
three midlatency subcomponents of the auditory unconscious perception. This implicit perception,
ERP are delayed with respect to normal. when it occurs, appears to be analytically limited, in
Analyses of the EEG power spectrum (derived by that it permits the analysis of the sound but not the
a fast Fourier transform of the raw EEG signal) meaning of the stimulus. For that reason, preserved
show that adequately anesthetized patients typically priming during general anesthesia does not justify
have a median EEF frequency of 2 to 3 Hz or less administering therapeutic suggestions intended to
(corresponding to the delta activity observed in facilitate the patients postoperative recovery.
slow-wave sleep), with a spectral edge frequency at Even when there is some sparing of implicit per-
the very high end of the EEG frequency distribution, ception, that does not mean that the anesthetized
within or below 8 to 12 Hz (alpha activity). Another patient is consciously aware of surgical events as
derivative of the raw EEG is provided by bispectral they occur. Still, it would be useful to have an on
analysis (BIS), a popular monitoring technique based line index of conscious awareness that does not
on a complicated and proprietary set of transforma- depend on inferences from physiology. One possibil-
tions based on the amount of high-frequency activ- ity is suggested by the isolated forearm technique,
ity (1430 Hz), synchronization of the EEG at low in which an inflated blood-pressure cuff is used to
frequencies, and the presence of a flat line EEG. restrict the flow of blood to the patients forearm
BIS ranges from close to 100 in patients who are while the muscle relaxant is being administered. As
normally awake to values well under 60 in patients a result, the patient is free to communicate manually
who are adequately anesthetized by clinical criteria. with the anesthetist. One study of awareness during
In one study, a BIS score of 86 was associated with a cesarean section found that although patients might
50% reduction in recall of material presented during respond to instructions delivered during the first
anesthesia and a score of 64 with a 95% reduction. minute or so, response quickly drops to zero there-
after, indicating that the patient is, after all, unaware
Awareness and Memory of what is taking place.
Adequate general anesthesia abolishes conscious John F. Kihlstrom and Randall C. Cork
recollection of surgical events by definition, raising
the question of whether there is any unconscious See also Consciousness and the Unconscious;
perception of these events, outside of conscious Electrophysiological Studies of Mind; Implicit
awareness but nonetheless encoded in memory. This Memory; Neural Correlates of Consciousness;
question has been addressed by looking for evidence Unconscious Perception
32 Anomalous Monism
agent by an interpretation of her verbal and nonver- to interpretation: In some contexts, the event would
bal behavior. (b) Such interpretation is guided by the have been appropriately described as a desire for
overall aim of making the interpretee rational and milk; in others, as a desire for orange juice. Thus, it
coherent. (c) Such interpretation is subject to retro- could have had a different content yet remained the
active revision over time: The agents future behav- same event. Recall that, for Davidson, we must dis-
ior may warrant a change in what mental predicates tinguish the question whether an event exists from
are ascribed to her in the past. how it is described (e.g., as a desire for milk or as a
Davidson argues that achieving coherence among desire for orange juice); the identity of the event does
the interpretees beliefs requires ascribing mostly not turn on how it is described.
beliefs that are true by the interpreters lightsthe This has provoked the objection from, among
so-called principle of charity. Ascription of false others, Jaegwon Kim that although mental events
beliefs takes special motivation, such as infelicitous are causally efficacious on AM, mental properties
epistemic circumstances on the interpretees part (she are not. They may become epiphenomenal, without
couldnt have known that the chair was repainted any effects whatsoever, because the anomalousness
and, hence, falsely believes it is still green), or simpli- of the mental opens the possibility that another,
fication of the overall interpretation. or no, mental description were true of an event
Completely different considerations guide the although its physical description stays constant,
ascription of physical predicates. Thus, there is a thereby ensuring instantiation of physical law and,
principled chasm between the criteria for applying thus, causal efficacy.
mental and physical predicates that blocks analy- Davidson has sought to rebut the objection by
sis of the former in terms of the latter. Whatever appeal to supervenience. Informally, the idea is that
coextensionality obtains between mental and the mental supervenes on the physical in that there
physical predicates is accidental, and not law-like. cannot be two events alike in all physical respects
Furthermore, the mental does not constitute a caus- but differing in some mental respect (Davidson
ally closed system: Regularities involving mental 1980, 214). Davidson argues that supervenience
types of events will have exceptions due to (actual or ensures that mental properties do make a difference
possible) intervening physical factors. For example, to what mental events cause (Davidson 1993, 15).
the putative strict law whoever wants a glass of Having a mental property may be taken here simply
milk and believes that she can get one by opening to have a true mental description. Somewhat more
the fridge will open the fridge may fail to hold in a formally, mental descriptions supervene on physical
particular case because someone who has the desire descriptions in this sense: A predicate p supervenes
and belief mentioned sprains her ankle en route to on a set of predicates S if for every pair of objects
the refrigerator. And even if such a regularity would such that p is true of one and not of the other there
happen to be true, it wouldnt be a law; it would is a predicate in S that is true of one and not of the
only be accidentally true. Thus, there cannot be strict other (Davidson, 1985, p. 242). Here, the predi-
laws involving mental predicates. There are, how- cate p is best thought of as some mental description,
ever, non-strict generalizations comprising our folk whereas S may be thought of as a set of physical
psychology, which underwrite the singular causal descriptions.
claims implicit in action explanation. For instance, The question, however, is whether the pairs of
the weaker generalization if someone wants a glass events (or objects) are taken to belong to the same or
of milk and believes that she can get one by opening different possible worlds (ways the world could be).
the fridge, she will tend to open the fridge may well Are we just comparing distinct events in the same
be true, because it explicitly allows for the excep- situation, in which case supervenience says there
tions blocking strict laws. must be some physical difference between the events
whenever there is some mental differenceor are
we also comparing an event with itself in a different
The Causal Efficacy of the Mental
possible situation where another mental description
Davidsons interpretation-based view of mental- may be true of it? It is controversial whether the
ity, in conjunction with AM, suggests that a given former reading substantiates the claim that mental
mental event could have had different true mental properties make a causal difference. And the latter
descriptions under different circumstances relevant reading appears to be in tension with the principle
34 Anosognosia
of the anomalousness of the mental, for then the use of the term and (b) diverse manifestations and
requirement is that there be a physical difference accounts of anosognosia that indicate it is not a uni-
in the event itself whenever there is a mental differ- tary disorder. Behavioral dissociations are described
ence; hence, there will be a law-like, necessary con- exemplifying the specificity, extension, and partial-
nection between the events physical properties and ity of anosognosia. Phenomena shown by subsets of
its mental properties. This tension may be resolved, patients are cited indicating that unawareness of defi-
however, if the events physical properties are under- cit may depend on patients viewpoints and be simi-
stood in a very broad sense encompassing all cir- lar to delusional states in these particular patients.
cumstances relevant to interpretation of the subject The entry emphasizes the diversity of anosognosia,
in which the event takes place. especially in different neuropathologies.
Sren Hggqvist
Occurrence, Importance, Criteria
See also Emergence; Folk Psychology; Mental Causation;
General Features
Mind-Body Problem; Philosophy of Action;
Physicalism Unawareness or denial of deficit can occur for dis-
orders or losses of perception, sensation, movement,
Further Readings action, memory, language, speech, planning, atten-
tion, conceptual understanding, musical ability, and
Davidson, D. (1980). Mental events. In Essays on actions
emotion. Anosognosia can happen with both focal
and events (pp. 207227). Oxford, UK: Oxford
and diffuse brain damage: stroke, traumatic brain
University Press. (Reprinted from Experience and
injury, progressive dementias, and tumor. Although
theory, by L. Foster & J. W. Swanson, Eds., 1970,
more associated with right brain damage, no clear
London, UK: Duckworth)
Davidson, D. (1985). Replies to essays X-XII. In B.
link of anosognosia with specific damage has been
Vermazen & J. Hintikka (Eds.), Essays on Davidson:
established. Following stroke or traumatic brain
Actions and events (pp. 242252). Oxford, UK: injury, it usually occurs in the immediate acute phase
Clarendon Press. and remits, but it can last for months, even years. If
Davidson, D. (1993). Thinking causes. In J. Heil & A. anosognosia recovers abruptly, sudden awareness of
Mele (Eds.), Mental causation (pp. 318). Oxford, UK: serious deficit can have extreme emotional effects.
Clarendon Press. With progressive brain disease, initial small defi-
Gibbons, J. (1993). Identity without supervenience. cits are usually unnoticed; as they worsen, they are
Philosophical Studies, 70, 5979. noticed, but as deficits further deteriorate, patients
Kim, J. (1993). Can supervenience and non-strict laws become and remain unaware of them. Unawareness
save anomalous monism? In J. Heil & A. Mele (Eds.), of certain deficits (e.g., a small visual field loss) is
Mental causation (pp. 1926). Oxford, UK: Clarendon unsurprising, especially if their severity progresses
Press. slowly. With certain memory or planning losses,
Yalowitz, S. (2005). Anomalous monism. In E. N. Zalta patients might not realize their ability has changed.
(Ed.), Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved However, unawareness of a sudden dramatic deficit
from plato.stanford.edu/entries/anomalous-monism/ (e.g., blindness, deafness, paralysis) is puzzling and
represents a loss of self-awareness.
themselves even if they do not cause the unaware- Contradictory Dissociations (Dissociative
ness. Elaborate or implausible confabulations that or Delusional State)
some patients produce negate or rationalize their
Intriguing dissociations that occur in certain subsets
condition but suggest either something more than
of patients illustrate the complexity and non-uni-
psychodynamic repression alone or an attempt to
tariness of anosognosia. In jargon aphasia, mainly
make sense of an uncomprehended situation, dis-
in the acute stage of Wernickes aphasia and global
regarding plausibility. Many people who suffer
aphasia, patients utter neologisms and unintelligible
equivalent deficits that are not due to brain damage
jargon and are typically unaware of their speech
(e.g., blindness, paralysis) do not deny such deficits.
and comprehension deficits. Some patients rate
It is unclear why brain damage should produce or
recordings of their own speech as normal but rate
legitimize denial or repression.
recordings of someone copying their utterances as
highly deficient. They are satisfied with their own
Dissociations and Complexity
writing but reject it as meaningless when transcribed
Three Aspects of Anosognosia by an examiner.
Showing Dissociations Patients anosognosic for hemiplegia rate their
Different kinds of dissociation define three aspects ability on bimanual and bipedal tasks as normal.
of anosognosia. (Dissociation here refers to one task But a subset of these patients, when asked how well
or behavior being deficient or affected while another the examiner could perform those activities if he or
is not.) she were in the same state as the patient, say that
the examiner would be unable to do them because
Specificity you would need both hands. When asked how they
would do each task (e.g., tie a knot), they do not
Patients with more than one primary deficit are describe normal procedures (as other patients do)
often aware of one while unaware of another; sever- but give bizarre and implausible responses (My
ity or personal importance of deficit does not predict right hand is clever, Id use a machine, Im a
which one the patient is unaware of. Anosognosia good sportsman). Patients among this group, when
in patients with otherwise normal mental abilities asked if their plegic arm is weak, deny it, but if asked
suggests it can be due to a restricted cognitive deficit. Is this arm ever naughty? Does it ever not do what
Extension you want? they readily assent and may say they
will punish that arm for disobeying. These patients
Different kinds of awareness can be compromised. seem normal when discussing topics other than their
Patients with hemiplegia may admit their plegia but plegic limbs. Their responses indicate they are aware
greatly overestimate their motor capacities. Patients in some way of their plegia, and several features of
with aphasia are often aware of having aphasia but their behavior suggest their anosognosia is a delu-
unaware of their errors when speaking. The converse sional state (not simply a false belief held against
occurs where patients are aware of inability at the contrary evidence, but rather an anomalous state
time of failure but moments later deny a deficit. of mind) manifested only regarding the deficit. Such
Patients with Huntingtons disease are frequently phenomena suggest awareness may be linked to
unaware of their motor or memory deficits as mea- attentional stance or viewpoint, for example, judg-
sured by questionnaire but can accurately predict ments made in a detached stance or from anothers
their performance on motor or memory tasks. viewpoint. They are reminiscent of similar findings
with psychotic delusional patients. However, these
Partiality
patients are not typical of all with anosognosia.
Unawareness of deficit can be less than total,
and in different ways. Patients may admit to a more
Final Comment
minor deficiency, attributing it to a trivial cause.
Many deny severe deficits but are willing to stay Many anosognosic phenomena suggest kinds of
in the hospital and be cared for. This may indicate dysfunction in self-awareness or self-monitoring.
either nonconscious knowledge or split awareness. Although the Greek term connotes a single medical
Anti-Individualism About Cognition 37
condition, current research usefully focuses on Keith Donnellan, and Hilary Putnam, subsequently
anosognosias different forms in different pathologies. came to be known as the new theory of reference.
In the decade following the new theory of refer-
Anthony Marcel and Mariia Kaliuzhna
ence, several theorists (including Tyler Burge, Gareth
See also Aphasia; Attention and Consciousness;
Evans, and John McDowell) drew inspiration from
Confabulation; Delusions; Self-Consciousness; Self- this work for the philosophy of mind. The result
Knowledge was anti-individualism about cognition. This entry
will present anti-individualism as it contrasts with
a broadly Cartesian conception of mental states,
Further Readings
will identify the main sorts of argument that have
Jehkonen, M., Laihosalo, M., & Kettunen, J. (2006). been offered on its behalf, and will discuss one of its
Anosognosia after stroke: Assessment, occurrence, salient epistemological implications.
subtypes and impact on functional outcome reviewed.
Acta Neurologica Scandinavica, 114, 293306. Individualistic and Anti-Individualistic
Marcel, A. J., Tegnr, R., & Nimmo-Smith, I. (2004). Approaches to Cognition
Anosognosia for plegia: Specificity, extension, partiality,
and disunity of bodily unawareness. Cortex, 40, 1940. Anti-individualism about cognition is perhaps
Orfei, M. D., Robinson, R. G., Prigatano, G. P., Starkstein, best appreciated by considering its rival, a certain
S., Rsch, N., Calatgirone, C., & Spalleta, G. (2007). Cartesian conception of mental states. Thinking of
Anosognosia for hemiplegia after stroke is a all of the ways in which his beliefs might turn out to
multifaceted phenomenon: A systematic review of the be false, Ren Descartes (in his Meditations) imag-
literature. Brain, 130, 30753090. ines that he is the victim of an Evil Demonone
Prigatano, G. P. (Ed.). (2010). The study of anosognosia. whose deceptive powers extend so far as to create
New York, NY: Oxford University Press. the illusion of a world external to Descartess
Prigatano, G. P., & Schacter, D. L. (Eds.). (1991). mind. Descartes reasoned that, if this Evil Demon
Awareness of deficit after brain injury. New York, NY: Hypothesis were true, then most of his beliefs about
Oxford University Press. the external world would be false. In reasoning in
this way, Descartes assumed that, although the Evil
Demon might affect the truth of what he (Descartes)
ANTI-INDIVIDUALISM ABOUT believed to be the case, the Evil Demon could not
affect the content of what Descartes believed to be
COGNITION the case. This assumption embodies an intuitive and
highly influential conception of the relation between
Anti-individualism about cognition is a view about mind and world. On this conception, facts about
the relationship between thought and the world. In what a person mentally represents to be the case
particular, it holds that how a subject represents the whether sub-personally (e.g., in the early stages of
world in cognition sometimes depends on the objects visual processing) or else in her person-level repre-
and properties in her environment. This dependence sentations (e.g., in her fears, hopes, thoughts, beliefs,
regards the very individuation of her mental repre- worries, etc.)can be determined prior to, and in
sentations: How she represents the world in cogni- a way that does not depend on, any inquiry into
tion depends, in part, on what worldly objects and the nature of the worldly objects and properties she
features she has interacted with. Interaction here aims to be representing. This conception amounts
means not merely in the causal sense that she would to an individualistic approach to cognition: It holds
have been caused to have different thoughts, but in that how a subject is representing the world in cog-
the constitutive sense that she would not have had nition does not depend on anything external to
the thoughts she had if her environment had been the individual herself.
suitably different. As a thesis about the individua- Anti-individualism about cognition is the denial
tion of mental states, anti-individualism derived of this individualistic approach to cognition: It
from work in the philosophy of language in the holds that the mind depends for the very contents
1970s. This work, for example, by Saul Kripke, of its representations on the objects and properties
38 Anti-Individualism About Cognition
it aims to represent in cognition. Broadly anti-indi- NKA is a claim about mental representations of
vidualistic views of cognition have been developed natural kinds, those kinds that make up our natu-
in a variety of different theoretical settings. Taking a ral (as opposed to human-made) world: electrons,
biological-evolutionary approach to the mind, Ruth water, and oxygen, but not Tuesdays, top hats, or
Millikan and David Papineau have argued that the toasters. Inspired by Putnam, NKA holds (roughly)
human representational system is best construed as that thoughts regarding natural kinds are dependent
representing particular kinds of objects and proper- for their individuation on the nature of the kinds
ties in the external environment of our early homi- in question: Differences in the types of entity being
nid ancestors. Somewhat relatedly, Hilary Putnam, represented make for differences in mental repre-
Fred Dretske, and Tyler Burge have developed sentations, even if the representing subject herself
anti-individualistic accounts of thought by appeal is ignorant of the differences between the types of
to the objective nature of the properties represented entity. Putnams famous example of Twin Earth is
in perception. Still other thinkers have argued for supposed to illustrate the point. Imagine two plan-
anti-individualist conclusions by appeal to the rela- ets that are exactly alike except for one difference:
tionship between language and thought. The source Although both planets have a transparent, tasteless,
of most of these arguments is Putnams 1976 devel- thirst-quenching liquid that is found in rivers and
opment of the hypothesis of the division of linguis- streams (and which flows in the taps and shower-
tic labor. According to this hypothesis, words of heads), the liquids in question differ in their chemi-
a public language express the concepts they do in cal nature. So, whereas on one of the planets (Earth)
virtue of the systematic tendency among speakers to this liquid is H2O, on the other planet (Twin Earth)
defer to relevant experts for the proper conceptual it is a liquid with a very different chemical nature
explication of these words. For example, although than H2O. (Putnam uses XYZ as a stand-in for the
any English speaker can use the term molybdenum complicated chemical nature of the liquid on Twin
to refer to molybdenum (a particular silvery metal), Earth.) However, on both Earth and Twin Earth,
few of us would be able to describe this metal in the speakers refer to the liquid in question using
any detail, and still fewer would be able to distin- the word-form water, and in all other respects, the
guish it from all other metals (either by observation, languages spoken on the two planets are the same.
experimentation, or description). The availability Now imagine a subject who has resided for her life
of the word molybdenum, as a device for referring on Earth, and her doppelgnger who has resided
to molybdenum, depends on the deference ordi- for her life on Twin Earth, both currently thinking
nary English speakers would have to the relevant a thought that each would verbalize as Water is
expertsthe ones who have the knowledge and wet. Assuming that both are ignorant of the chemi-
ability to recognize the metal and distinguish it from cal nature of the liquid in question, and that neither
others. On the basis of this phenomenon of seman- could distinguish the watery liquid on Earth from the
tic deference, Tyler Burge argued in 1979 for anti- watery liquid on Twin Earth, even so, according to
individualistic conclusions regarding a broad swath NKA, these subjects are thinking different thoughts.
of human thought. (See, also, Sanford Goldbergs More specifically, they are representing the world
work for a variant on this sort of argument.) differently: One is representing one particular liquid
(H2O) as wet, and the other subject is representing
another particular liquid (XYZ) as wetand this
Versions of Anti-Individualism
is so, even though the subjects are ignorant of the
As Jessica Brown has noted, three main versions of difference between the liquids and of the difference
anti-individualism can be distinguished: natural kind between these content-distinct thoughts.
anti-individualism (NKA), singular thought anti- STA is a claim about mental representations of
individualism (STA), and social anti-individualism particular objects in our environment: this particular
(SA). We might also note that there is a difference woman, that particular apple. Developed by Gareth
between anti-individualism regarding the meaning Evans and John McDowell, STA regards singular
of words and anti-individualism regarding the con- thoughts as distinct when they regard two different
tent of thought (and of our mental representations objectseven if the subjects themselves are unaware
more generally). of the fact that different objects are involved. Thus, if
Anxiety Disorders 39
at one time you observe a bird and think That bird anti-individualism is incompatible with first-person
is a goldfinch, and at some later time you observe authority.
a different bird (albeit indistinguishable to you) and
Sanford Goldberg
think, That bird is a goldfinch, then STA regards
you as thinking two different thoughts. More spe- See also Concepts, Philosophical Issues; Concepts and
cifically, you are representing the world differently in Language; Descriptive Thought; Extended Mind;
the two thoughts: In one thought you are represent- Indexical Thought; Object-Dependent Thought
ing a particular bird, b1, as a goldfinch, and in the
other you are representing a different bird, b2, as a
Further Readings
goldfinch.
SA, which is owed to Tyler Burge, is a claim about Brown, J. (2004). Anti-individualism and knowledge.
those mental representations whose content depends Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
on the division of linguistic labor. Here another Burge, T. (1979). Individualism and the mental. Midwest
Twin-Earth style argument can be made. Imagine Studies in Philosophy, 4(1), 73121.
that on Twin Earth the language uses the word Evans, G. (1980). Varieties of reference. Oxford, UK:
molybdenum to refer to aluminum and aluminum Oxford University Press.
to refer to molybdenum. Now imagine doppelgn- Goldberg, S. (2007). Anti-individualism: Mind and
gers on Earth and Twin Earth who are ignorant of language, knowledge and justification. Cambridge, UK:
the difference between aluminum and molybdenum, Cambridge University Press.
McDowell, J. (1986). Singular thought and the extent of
both of whom express a thought with the sentence-
inner space. In P. Pettit & J. McDowell (Eds.), Subject,
form Molybdenum is a metal. According to SA,
thought and context (pp. 283294). Oxford, UK:
they are thinking different thoughts. More specifi-
Clarendon Press.
cally, they are representing the world differently: The
Putnam, H. (1976). The meaning of meaning. In H.
Earthling is representing molybdenum as a metal, Putnam, Mind, language, and reality: Philosophical
and the Twin Earthling is representing aluminum as papers (Vol. 2, pp. 215271). Cambridge, UK:
a metal. Cambridge University Press.
to be over $42 billion per year, or an annual cost of over previous editions. Currently, the DSM-IV-TR
over $1,500 per individual with an anxiety disor- includes panic disorder without agoraphobia,
der. Direct psychiatric treatment and pharmaceuti- panic disorder with agoraphobia, agoraphobia
cal costs represent 31% and 2% of the total costs, without history of panic disorder, specific phobia,
respectively. Workplace costs, the majority of which social phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, acute
stem from lost productivity, represent 10% of the stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, post-
total cost. Over 50% of the total costs result from traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorder due to a
direct non-psychiatric medical costs, which are general medical condition, substance-induced anxi-
believed to result from medical treatment based on ety disorder, and anxiety disorder not otherwise
non-diagnosis or improper diagnosis. Thus, most of specified. While it is acknowledged that the DSM
the annual economic impact of anxiety disorders can system is not perfect, particularly for anxiety disor-
be avoided or eliminated by proper diagnosis and ders, many would argue that it provides a sufficient
by the proliferation of effective and accessible treat- framework.
ment options. Indeed, many treatments with docu-
mented efficacy for anxiety disorders exist, including Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia
pharmacological and psychotherapeutic options.
Panic disorder is characterized by the unexpected,
Despite the wealth of research on anxiety and
or seemingly out-of-the-blue, occurrence of two
anxiety disorders, uncertainty exists regarding
or more panic attacks that are accompanied by
where to draw the line between separate diagnoses
at least one month of apprehension regarding the
as well as thresholds for determining clinical sever-
recurrence of further panic symptoms. This disorder
ity. Indeed, although evidence strongly suggests that
affects approximately 3% to 5% of the U.S. popu-
the experience of anxiety and fear is universal, cul-
lation during their lifetime. Avoidance of places or
tural variations in the presentation and prevalence
situations that are associated with previous panic
of specific fears highlight the non-universality of cur-
attacks or panic symptoms is a common behavioral
rent diagnostic classification.
repercussion, called agoraphobia, and is referred to
as panic disorder with agoraphobia. Some individu-
Defining and Diagnosing Anxiety als, however, may be diagnosed with panic disorder
without agoraphobia, in which case they do not
Fear and anxiety are considered normal emo-
avoid places or situations for fear that it will set off
tional or cognitive-affective states that are part of
another panic attack. Agoraphobia without history
the defensive motivational system. Fear is seen as
of panic disorder is another diagnostic distinction
the response to a perceived immediate threat and is
where the person may avoid places or situations
typically characterized by an intense physiological
because of fears of other feared bodily functions for
response (fight or flight), focused attention on the
which they do not feel in control (e.g., losing control
perceived threat, and an escape motivation. Anxiety
of the bladder or rectum) but are not associated with
serves as the defensive system that scans for possi-
fear of panic symptoms in particular.
ble or future threats and involves a less pronounced
physiological response, increased cognitive activity
Social Anxiety Disorder/Social Phobia
to detect threat (e.g., hypervigilance, worry), and
increased avoidance motivation. Although these are Social anxiety disorder, also referred to as social
normal responses designed to protect the individual phobia, is characterized by an intense fear of social
from immediate or future threats, in some individu- situations, meeting new people, or entering situa-
als the responses can become sufficiently excessive tions where they may be observed or evaluated by
that they cause significant impairment or distress others. This disorder occurs in approximately 7% or
and are termed anxiety disorders. more of the U.S. population. Individuals with social
In the most recent revision of the American anxiety disorder are overly concerned that they may
Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical do something to embarrass or humiliate themselves
Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text in front of others. They also often avoid any place
Revision (DSM-IV-TR), 12 distinct anxiety disorder or situation where this may occur or, when forced,
diagnoses are codified; this is a dramatic increase endure the situation with great distress.
Anxiety Disorders 41
for the individual is called anxiety disorder not oth- toward anxiety and other disorders related to nega-
erwise specified. tive affectivity. Researchers have concluded that
In addition to the high prevalence rates of anxiety genetics provide a general predisposition for affec-
disorders, high rates of comorbidity (or co-occur- tive disorders, but environmental factors are largely
rence with another disorder) exist within the anxiety responsible for determining the specific disorder
disorders, as well as between anxiety and depressive manifestation. Subsequent studies generally support
disorders. Estimates suggest that patients average the notion of a nonspecific genetic contribution to
2.1 depressive and anxiety disorder diagnoses, and the development of anxiety disorders.
roughly 50% to 60% of individuals with an anxiety A lack of a developed perception of control at
disorder have a comorbid anxiety or mood disorder early developmental stages may also play a large
diagnosis. Given that the development of the anxiety role in the development of anxiety. Overprotective
disorder typically precedes the development of the parenting can lead to children not developing confi-
mood or substance use disorder, anxiety difficulties dence and self-efficaciousness. If parents or primary
may contribute to further distress and impairment. caregivers limit a childs ability to develop percep-
tion of control over the environment, the child may
lack opportunities to learn how to fail and recover,
Structure of Anxiety
how to navigate through life on his own, and how
Although DSM-IV-TR describes the anxiety disor- to make sense of the world around her. In combina-
der diagnoses as independent or unique, considerable tion, genetic and early learning experiences promote
evidence suggests that they share the same or simi- a generalized vulnerability to the development of
lar underlying etiological and functional bases. These anxiety and emotional disorders, with subsequent
transdiagnostic (or unified) conceptualizations of anx- traumatic conditioning, vicarious observational
iety articulate that the anxiety disorders differ only in learning, or information transmission leading to the
what initiates or is the focus of the emotional states, development of specific fears and diagnoses.
as in the possibility of future panic attacks for panic
disorder or public speaking for social anxiety disor- Treatment
der. Much of the theoretical underpinnings of trans- Pharmacological Therapy
diagnostic models are based around the constructs of
neuroticism, trait anxiety, and negative affectivity. Many effective pharmacological treatment
Negative affectivity is a more commonly used options exist for anxiety, including tricyclic and
term that describes the anxiety response and has heterocyclic antidepressants, serotonin reuptake
been described as a general temperamental sensitiv- inhibitors (SSRIs), monoamine oxidase inhibitors,
ity to negative stimuli resulting in feelings of fear, azapirones, beta-adrenergic blockers, and benzo-
anxiety, depression, guilt, and self-dissatisfaction. diazepines. The use of psychotropic medications in
This construct of a generalized vulnerability is treatment can add to improvement for some individ-
similar to Aaron Becks cognitive models of danger uals, usually those with more severity. Anxiolytics
schemata with a perception of a limited capacity disrupt the particular flow of brain circuitry that
to control or predict negative outcomes because of regulates anxiety. However, these effects appear to
perceptions of uncontrollability or unpredictability. be maintained only while the individual is taking the
Seen as a common underlying factor contributing to medication, and relapse rates with anxiolytics are
both anxiety and mood disorders, negative affectiv- high. SSRIs are considered the frontline pharmaco-
ity may explain the high rates of comorbidity and logic intervention for anxiety disorder, with meta-
similarity between mood and anxiety disorders. analyses suggesting strong efficacy with modest
relapse rates and side effects compared with other
Etiology pharmacologic interventions for anxiety.
A considerable body of evidence suggests a hered-
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
itable component in clinical anxiety that is common
across diagnoses. Multivariate genetic analyses have Encouraging efficacy data exist across the range
provided strong support for the idea that genetic of cognitive behavioral treatments (CBT) for anxi-
transmission does not involve specific anxiety dis- ety-related disorders. Recent meta-analyses of CBT
orders but rather a common nonspecific diathesis outcome studies support the effectiveness of such
Aphasia 43
treatments across the anxiety disorders and, gener- Craske, M. G. (1999). Anxiety disorders: Psychological
ally, the superior efficacy of CBT approaches over approaches to theory and treatment. Boulder, CO:
non-CBT psychosocial treatments. Most CBT pro- Westview Press.
tocols include psychoeducation regarding anxiety, Dadds, M. R., & Roth, J. H. (2001). The developmental
followed by instruction in cognitive restructuring psychopathology of anxiety. In M. W. Vasey & M. R.
techniques that address individuals anxious beliefs. Dadds (Eds.), Family processes in the development of
Individuals are gradually exposed to their specific anxiety problems (pp. 278303). New York, NY:
fears, beginning with less distressing situations or Oxford University Press.
Good, B. J., & Kleinman, A. M. (1985). Culture and
elements, and are encouraged to use their cognitive
anxiety: Cross-cultural evidence for the patterning of
restructuring skills to view their anxious beliefs in
anxiety disorders. In A. H. Tuma & J. D. Maser (Eds.),
a more logical and balanced manner. Work done
Anxiety and the anxiety disorders (pp. 297323).
outside of treatment is another critical component
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
of CBT, where these individuals continue to con- Gray, J. A., & McNaughton, N. (2000). The
duct their own exposures throughout the week to neuropsychology of anxiety: An enquiry into the
habituate them to their fears and eventually elimi- function of the septo-hippocampal system (2nd ed.).
nate avoidant behaviors. Homework generally also New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
includes self-monitoring of general anxiety, stress, Norton, P. J. (2006). Toward a clinically oriented model
and depression throughout the treatment phase. of anxiety disorders. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy,
35, 88105.
Conclusion
Anxiety disorders represent one of the most preva-
lent and impactful classes of psychological disorders.
Seen as excessive manifestations of basic emotional
APHASIA
and cognitive-affective responses, anxiety disorders
are currently divided into 12 distinct diagnoses, Aphasia refers broadly to disorders of language,
although recent arguments have been made that the which may be developmental (occurring because of
similarities among the diagnoses outweigh the dif- an abnormal course of development) or acquired
ferences. Although the exact causes of anxiety dis- (occurring because of external disease such as stroke,
orders remain somewhat unclear, research suggests brain tumor, etc.). The term is used somewhat incon-
that genetic and early learning influences interact to sistently. For instance, the disorganized incoherent
create a generalized predisposition toward emotional speech of schizophrenic patients is usually consid-
disorders, which can then be activated by subsequent ered a manifestation of a thought disorder and is not
learning or experience. Highly efficacious treatments considered an aphasic disorder, even though schizo-
exist for anxiety disorders, particularly those based phrenic language often contains nonsense words
on cognitive behavioral therapy and SSRIs. and ungrammatical sentences that could easily be
considered signs of aphasia. These differences in the
Peter J. Norton and Suzanne C. Klenck use of the word aphasia are due to historical factors
(what type of physicians used which terms) that are
See also Behavioral Therapy; Emotion and
unimportant today. What is important is the nature
Psychopathology
and the neurological causes of language disorders.
Knowledge about these topics has changed rapidly
Further Readings in the past three decades because of the contribu-
American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and tions made by cognitive psychology and neuroimag-
statistical manual for mental disorders (4th ed., text ing. This entry first presents a widely utilized clinical
rev.). Washington, DC: Author. perspective on aphasia and then reviews modern
Barlow, D. H. (2002). Anxiety and its disorders: The nature approaches and results.
and treatment of anxiety and panic (2nd ed.). New
York, NY: Guilford Press.
Clinical Aphasic Syndromes
Beck, A. T., & Emery, G. (1985). Anxiety disorders and
phobias: A cognitive perspective. New York, NY: Basic The clinical approach to aphasia identifies some 7 to
Books. 10 aphasic syndromes and classifies aphasic patients
44 Aphasia
into these syndromes. These syndromes are the area, the cortex next to the auditory receptive areas.
following: Pure motor speech disorders arise from lesions inter-
rupting the motor pathways from the cortex to
1. Brocas aphasia, a severe expressive language the brain stem nuclei that control the articulatory
disturbance reducing the fluency of speech in all system. These disorders differ from Brocas aphasia
tasks (repetition and reading as well as because they are not linguistic; they affect articula-
speaking) and affecting elements of language tion itself, not the planning of speech. Pure word
such as grammatical words and morphological deafness follows bilateral lesions cutting Wernickes
endings, without an equally severe disturbance area off from the areas of the brain that affect the
of auditory comprehension transmission of sound input into Wernickes area.
2. Wernickes aphasia, the combination of fluent Transcortical motor aphasia results from the inter-
speech with erroneous choices of the sounds of ruption of input from areas where concepts are
words (phonemic paraphasias) and an auditory formulated to Brocas area. Transcortical sensory
comprehension disturbance aphasia follows lesions between Wernickes area
3. Pure motor speech disordersanarthria, and areas where concepts are formulated. Finally,
dysarthria, and apraxia of speechoutput conduction aphasia follows from a lesion between
speech disorders due to motor disorders, in Wernickes area and Brocas area.
which speech is misarticulated but The basis for clinical aphasic syndromes consists
comprehension is preserved mostly of the relative preservation of patients perfor-
mances in the usual tasks of language use (speaking,
4. Pure word deafness, a disorder in which the
understanding spoken language, reading, and writ-
patient does not recognize spoken words, but
ing). This contrasts with other historical approaches
spontaneous speech is normal
to the description of aphasia, which concentrated on
5. Transcortical motor aphasia, in which the conditions under which language is used (e.g.,
spontaneous speech is reduced but repetition is a patients motivational state). These approaches
intact have not been productive and have largely been
6. Transcortical sensory aphasia, in which a abandoned by clinical aphasiologists. The clinical
comprehension disturbance exists without a approach thus established the basic phenomena
disturbance of repetition that are relevant to describing and understanding
7. Conduction aphasia, a disturbance in aphasia. In addition to emphasizing performance on
spontaneous speech and repetition, consisting of tasks, clinical approaches to aphasia include descrip-
fluent speech that contains many phonemic tions of linguistic and psycholinguistic disorders of
paraphasias, without a disturbance in auditory language. For instance, one feature of Brocas apha-
comprehension sia is agrammatism, a pattern of speech that consists
primarily of substantive words, that is, nouns, action
Other syndromes include anomia (an inability verbs, or significant modifiers, and short phrases
to find words), global aphasia (affecting all aspects with simple syntactic structure. However, the clini-
of language use), and isolation of the speech area cal approach is very limited in characterizing these
(leading to a global aphasia except for sparing of phenomena fully. This fuller characterization has
repetition). There are also disorders affecting writ- become the province of modern studies of aphasia.
ten language (pure alexia, in which a patient can
write but not read), and various disturbances of
Psychological and Linguistic
writing (agraphia).
Approaches to Aphasia
The clinical value of these syndromes largely
comes from their relation to the location of lesions. In the past 30 years, researchers have begun to
Brocas aphasia, which affects expressive language address the limitations of the clinical approach
alone, is due to lesions in Brocas area, the center for to aphasia by developing detailed models of
motor speech planning adjacent to the motor strip. many aphasic abnormalities in relation to mod-
Wernickes aphasia follows lesions that disturb the els of linguistic structure and psycholinguistic
representations of word sounds located in Wernickes processing. A brief introduction to linguistics
Aphasia 45
and psycholinguistics is required for readers to has been preceded by a semantically related word).
understand this work. One group of researchers has reported that distur-
The language code connects particular types bances affecting word meaning co-occur with distur-
of representations to particular aspects of mean- bances of reading irregularly spelled words but not
ing. Words connect phonological units with items, regularly spelled words, and has suggested that this
actions, properties, and logical connections. Word combination of abnormal performances is due to a
formation forms words from existing words. disruption of memories for single entities (regularly
Sentences relate words in hierarchical syntactic spelled words can be sounded out from their parts).
structures to each other to determine semantic Studies such as these have led to investigations and
relationships between them, such as who is accom- models of concepts and word meanings and how
plishing or receiving an action. Discourse relates they are activated normally. As mentioned earlier,
sentences to express temporal order, causation, infer- similar studies have been undertaken for many lin-
ences, and other semantic values. Depending on the guistic structures and psycholinguistic operations.
level of detail at which language is described, there This approach to aphasia does not attempt to
may be hundreds of independent language process- classify patients into a small number of syndromes.
ing impairments. For instance, we may recognize a Instead, it allows patients to have numerous deficits.
disturbance of converting the sound waveform into The advantage of this approach is that it provides
linguistically relevant units of sound (acoustic-to- more detailed information for professionals who
phonemic conversion), or we may recognize distur- treat patients and for neuroscientists who wish to
bances affecting the ability to recognize subsets of approach the organization of brain by correlating
phonemes, such as vowels, consonants, stop conso- deficits with lesions. Its relatively short history and its
nants, fricatives, nasals, and so on. reliance on detailed models of linguistics and psycho-
The psycholinguistic approach describes aphasic linguistics that health care providers are not familiar
symptoms as disorders of these linguistic representa- with have limited its clinical adoption, however.
tions and psycholinguistic operations. There are far
too many descriptions of these disorders to review
Neurological Correlates
them all; the following discussion focuses on one
that affects an important aspect of language and that Aside from providing information about what
also connects with neurological factsdisturbances aspects of language are abnormal and might be tar-
affecting the meanings of words. geted in therapy, studies of aphasia can be used to
Meanings of words are part of a specialized mem- diagnose diseases themselves. For instance, a (rela-
ory store called semantic memory. Most research tively) isolated disturbance of word meanings and
has focused on disorders of the meanings of words concepts relating to objects is seen in a disorder
that refer to objects. Disturbances of word meanings known as semantic dementia. This condition arises
affect the ability of a patient to identify a word or following progressive damage to both anterior tem-
a picture as an example of a specific concept and, poral lobes, and is associated most commonly with a
therefore, cause poor performance on word-picture particular type of pathology (discussed later).
matching and naming tasks for affected words. Not all symptoms are so specific; many arise fol-
Other, more detailed studies of these disorders sug- lowing various types of disease. For instance, pri-
gest that some patients have lost specific items in mary progressive aphasia (PPA), a set of dementing
semantic memory and others cannot retrieve items in diseases whose primary initial symptom was apha-
specific tasks; that disorders may be specific to words sia, has been divided into three main types: nonflu-
or to pictures; that disturbances may be category spe- ent PPA, logopenic progressive PPA, and semantic
cific (they may affect concepts related to living things dementia. Nonfluent PPA is very similar to Brocas
and foods, man-made objects, abstract or concrete aphasia and logopenic PPA is very similar to a com-
concepts, and nominal or verbal concepts); and that bination of anomia and conduction aphasia. The
some patients cannot match words to pictures or diagnosis of PPA, stroke, tumor, or other disorders
name objects but show evidence of understanding is made more on the basis of the time course of
words unconsciously (they show semantic priming symptom development and the radiological findings
effects, responding more quickly to a word when it than on the basis of the language disorder itself.
46 Apraxia
whether language in these individuals has migrated reported patients who made mistakes, such as omis-
to this hemisphereand occurs more rarely follow- sions, object misuse, and mislocations of objects,
ing lesions in the left hemisphere. when they performed complex everyday activities as
Apraxia is often but not always associated with well as when they used individual objects. De Renzi
aphasiaan acquired language disorderas both interpreted IA as a conceptual disorder, caused by
action and language systems are predominantly lat- amnesia for object use that prevents patients
eralized in the left hemisphere. The fact that patients from adequately accessing the functional charac-
may have apraxia without aphasia, and vice versa, teristics of objects. However, the impaired ability to
reinforced the view that these two deficits are not due use objects is not necessarily caused by damage to
to damage to a single mechanism. The anatomical semantic memory, as patients with tool use impair-
contiguity of the cerebral regions in the left hemi- ment and preserved knowledge about objects have
sphere that underlie action and language explains why been documented. Tool use deficits are prevalently
lesions of these regions often impair both functions. associated with lesions of the posterior regions of
the left hemisphere and, in particular, of the parietal
Types of Apraxia cortex, a region that has been identified in imaging
studies with healthy individuals as involved in tool
According to Functions
use. IA is often caused by focal lesions of vascular
The investigation of apraxia began over a century etiology, but it can also be observed in patients with
ago. The first to study this disorder systematically dementia.
was Hugo Liepmann, who developed a model of After having correctly activated the action plan, a
how voluntary gestures are organized in the brain patient may fail to put it into practice. In Liepmanns
and how the ability to evoke and produce them scheme, this deficit corresponds to what is generally
can be affected by brain damage. Liepmann distin- known as ideomotor apraxia (IMA), but he origi-
guished three different types of apraxia, according nally called it motor and, later, ideo-kinetic apraxia.
to the function that he hypothesized to be affected: The best way to detect the presence of this deficit is
ideational, ideomotor, and melokinetic. This clinical to ask the patient to imitate the gestures performed
classification is based on the type of function or pro- by the examiner. Patients gestures may be inac-
cess that is believed to be damaged. Thus, ideational curate in different ways; instead of performing the
apraxia (IA) corresponds to a deficit in formulating desired gesture, patients may end up producing one
an action plan (or movement formula); it manifests that is a repetition of a previously performed ges-
itself when patients are engaged in complex action ture (perseveration) or substituting for the intended
sequences (as in preparing breakfast) but also when gesture one that does not bear any resemblance to
they use one object at a time (such as drinking from it. Movement velocity, acceleration of the move-
a glass). The ideational deficit has been attributed ment trajectory, and hand configuration may or
to different causes. Arnold Pick described patients may not be abnormal in such apraxic patients.
with dementia who suffered from IA, making gross These patients, in addition to the imitation deficit,
mistakes in using objects that they were able to may also have difficulties in generating gestures on
identify. Subsequently, Joseph Morlaas suggested verbal command. IMA is often produced by lesions
that IA was due to a faulty recognition of objects of the left parietal and lateral premotor cortices,
(i.e., agnosia of usage), and Klaus Poeck believed it and of the corpus callosum (in this latter case, the
reflected the disintegration of the sequence organi- deficit involves only the non-dominant hand). The
zation of object-related actions. According to this ideomotor deficit is more frequent after lesions of
latter interpretation, patients should be impaired the parietal cortex than of the premotor cortex and
in all tasks tapping the representation of an action is, usually, more severe in the former case than in the
sequence (e.g., everyday activities and sequencing latter. It has also been associated with lesions of the
photographs of those activities), sparing the use of thalamus and basal ganglia and, more rarely, of the
single objects. supplementary motor area.
Poecks interpretation was challenged by the The clinical distinction between IA and IMA has
work of Ennio De Renzi and collaborators who not always been accepted; some researchers favored
48 Apraxia
damage: how to use different clothes; in which con- Name/Verb Visual Object Visual Gesture
text; the motor knowledge necessary to put them
on; and the matching knowledge between body
parts and clothes. It can also be caused by unilateral
Auditory analysis Visual analysis
neglecta neuropsychological condition in which,
after damage to one hemisphere of the brain (more
frequently the right hemisphere), the patient shows
an inability to attend to the side of space or body Phonological
SDS Input praxicon
contralateral to the lesion. input lexicon
Models of Apraxia
Although Liepmanns original schema has subse- Semantic system
quently been modified, the essential dichotomy
between the two levels of movement production is
still largely used, especially for clinical purposes. In
Phonological
1991, Leslie Rothi, Cynthia Ochipa, and Kenneth output lexicon
Output praxicon
Heilman proposed a cognitive neuropsychologi-
cal model of limb praxis similar in logic to models
of language production. The main features of the
Phonological Short-term
model are depicted in Figure 1. output buffer memory
The model distinguishes between action inputs
and action outputs, but it also comprises intermedi-
ate action processing stages. A visual gesture can be Name/Verb Action
imitated using a semantic or a non-semantic route.
After visual analysis, the semantic route encom-
Figure 1 A modified version of the model of praxis
passes the input praxicon, which, as it contains all
originally proposed by Rothi et al. (1991)
the gestures we know, allows recognition of a ges-
ture as belonging or not to ones own repertoire, Source: Rumiati, R. I., Papeo, L., & Corradi-DellAcqua, C.
and the semantic or conceptual system, which stores (2010). Higher-level motor processes. Annals of the New
the meaning of gestures, while the output praxicon York Academy of Sciences, 1191, 219241. Reprinted by
permission of Wiley-Blackwell.
permits one to actually produce them. Whereas the
semantic route supports imitation of meaningful ges- Note: According to this model, imitation of familiar gestures
tures, the non-semantic route is necessary for imitat- relies on the semantic, indirect route that encompasses the input
ing novel gestures. The model also accounts for how praxicon, the semantic system, the output praxicon, and short-
we use objects and the way we pantomime their use, term memory; imitation of new gestures relies on the non-
either in the visual or verbal-auditory modality. semantic, direct route that, from visual analysis, leads directly
to short-term memory. SDS = structural description system.
Evidence from neuropsychological observations
supports this cognitive architecture. Thus, any dam-
age involving the input praxicon impairs the ability which is affected only when the non-semantic route
to discriminate between known and new gestures is damaged (also called visuo-imitative apraxia).
(pantomime agnosia), leaving intact the ability to The main modifications subsequently made to
perform semantic tasks and to produce gestures on the original model by other scholars are the follow-
imitation and on verbal command. Damage to the ing: the substitution of the innervatory patterns by
semantic system leads to impaired performance in a temporary memory system for gestures and the
semantic tasks (also referred to as ideational or con- acknowledgment of an explicit role of a body repre-
ceptual apraxia) and to impaired pantomiming on sentation, although its exact nature is not clear.
verbal command. Damage to the output praxicon The idea that limb apraxia occurs only when the
causes a deficit in all tasks involving the production gestures are requested by the examiner but disap-
of gestures, except for the imitation of novel gestures, pears when the same gestures are triggered by the
50 Argument Mapping
Contention
The Obama administration
should be moving to ensure
universal access to health care.
Reason Assumption
Millions more Americans This is a health Reason
will have no access to care catastrophe. Were about to spend vast sums
essential health care. trying to rescue the economy.
although good user interfaces for online argument History and Future of Argument Mapping
mapping remain an important challenge.
It appears that argument mapping did not emerge
until the 19th century, with the first reference to the
Benefits of Argument Mapping
practice in a logic textbook by Richard Whately
Argument mapping enthusiasts believe that argu- in 1836. The most notable early exponent was the
ment mapping has numerous potential benefits. legal theorist John Henry Wigmore, who developed
For the suitably skilled person, mapping a complex detailed schemes for displaying legal evidence in the
argument promotes clarity and insight, more rigor- early 20th century. In the mid-20th century, phi-
ous and complete articulation, and more judicious losopher Stephen Toulmin developed a simple but
evaluation. Teachers use argument mapping to help influential argument diagramming scheme. With
students acquire basic concepts, better understand the rise of the informal logic and critical thinking
how arguments are constructed, and enhance their movements, argument mapping began to make
reasoning skills. Argument mapping can be an effec- regular appearances in textbooks. Interest in argu-
tive way to improve general critical thinking skills. ment mapping grew rapidly in the 1990s, due in
In the workplace, argument mapping can promote large part to the increasing availability of comput-
rational resolution in complex, fractious debates; ers and specially designed software. A substantial
improved communication of important arguments; series of maps released by Robert Horn stimulated
and better decision making. widespread interest in the technique. In recent years,
There is a simple, plausible case as to why argu- argument mapping has crossed over from academic
ment mapping should have these benefits. Arguments or educational applications into the workplace (e.g.,
can be complicated, sometimes extremely so. We in intelligence analysis and policy development) and
know that well-designed visualizations help our popular use, particularly with the recent emergence
minds cope with complexity. Hence, argument maps of systems for online collaborative mapping.
should help us deal with arguments. This can be eas- The recent surge in argument mapping signposts
ily demonstrated with simple exercises, but there is an exciting development in humans cognitive his-
scope and need for rigorous empirical investigation. tory. Computer-supported argument mapping offers
52 Atomism About Concepts
a major change in the way we handle informal standing in appropriate causal relations to those
reasoning and argumentation. It is an instance of referents. For example, the concept dog is a mental
Douglas Engelbarts vision of the augmentation of symbol that refers to dogs not because of its relation
human intellect, whereby we develop technologies to other concepts, but because of its causal relation
that can boost our individual and collective intelli- to dogs.
gence by complementing our own cognitive machin-
ery. Contemporary argument mapping approaches Motivations for Atomism
and tools are still relatively rudimentary. We can look
One motivation for concept atomism is the suspi-
forward to more sophisticated frameworks integrat-
cion that, dictionaries notwithstanding, most lexi-
ing more seamlessly with our biologically endowed
cal concepts cannot be rigorously defined. Consider,
cognitive equipment, enhancing our capacity to deal
for example, the concept justice. Ever since Socrates,
with future intellectual challenges.
philosophers have struggled to define this concept,
Tim van Gelder and with little apparent success. Yet if justice were
built from other concepts, we should be able to say
See also Distributed Cognition; Extended Mind; Thinking what those concepts are. We should be able to define
it. Atomists thus conclude that justice is a primitive
Further Readings concept.
Some philosophers have replied that justice is
Horn, R., et al. (1998). Mapping great debates: Can
anomalous and have pointed to concepts that seem
computers think? [Maps]. Bainbridge Island, WA:
to be easier to define. For example, the concept
MacroVU.
bachelor might seem to be definable in terms of the
Kirschner, P. J., Buckingham Shum, S. J., & Carr, C. S.
(Eds.). (2003). Visualizing argumentation: Software
concepts unmarried and man. But atomists are skep-
tools for collaborative and educational sense-making.
tical. Imagine a 60-year-old grandfather who never
London, UK: Springer-Verlag. took his vows but has been in a committed, monog-
Krugman, P. (2009, January 30). Health care now. The amous relationship with the mother of his children
New York Times, p. A29. for 40 years. It seems inappropriate to classify him
Okada, A., Buckingham Shum, S., & Sherborne, T. (Eds.). as a bachelor. Or consider the pope, who is certainly
(2008). Knowledge cartography: Software tools and an unmarried man but, again, does not qualify as
mapping techniques. London, UK: Springer. a bachelor. Atomists argue that examples such as
these show that even concepts such as bachelor are
ultimately indefinable and thus primitive.
ATOMISM ABOUT CONCEPTS A second motivation for atomism derives from
the apparent fact that people can think about things
about which they are ignorant or misinformed. For
Concept atomism is the view that most lexical con-
example, philosopher Hilary Putnam claims to be
cepts (i.e., most concepts associated with single
ignorant of the difference between elm and beech
words in natural languages such as English) are not
trees. But when he thinks, This forest contains
composed from other concepts. They are semanti-
elms, he is nevertheless thinking about elms, not
cally unstructured, or primitive. For example, the
beeches. Atomists take this to show that the con-
concept dog is not built from furry, quadruped, ani-
cept elm cannot be structured from other concepts
mal, or any other concepts. Consequently, a thinker
(e.g., tree with doubly serrate leaves) because, when
can possess the concept dog without possessing any
Putnam thinks about elm trees, his ignorance pre-
other concepts in particular, and can thereby think
vents him from employing those other concepts.
that Lassie is a dog without being able to think that
Lassie is furry, that Lassie is a quadruped, that Lassie
Objections to Atomism
is an animal, and so forth.
Concept atomism was first formulated and Opponents of atomism are not persuaded by these
defended by philosopher Jerry Fodor. On his ver- considerations. They argue that, although concepts
sion of the view, concepts are symbols in a language such as bachelor and dog may be difficult to define,
of thought that acquire their referents by virtue of it doesnt follow that they are indefinable; they argue
Attention, Evolutionary Perspectives 53
also that any person who doesnt know the differ- embraced by Fodor, is to appeal to their differences
ence between an elm and a beech doesnt really have at the symbolic level. For example, what makes the
a concept of either. Additionally, opponents of atom- concepts Deep Throat and Mark Felt distinct is their
ism point to two counterintuitive consequences of association with different symbols in the brainfor
the view. example, different tokens in a language of thought.
First, it is natural to assume that learning a con- But the plausibility of this approach, along with con-
cept is a matter of learning which concepts it is cept atomism more generally, remains controversial.
built from. For example, a child acquires the con-
Jacob Scott Beck
cept bachelor by learning that something is a bach-
elor if and only if it is unmarried and a man. But if See also Causal Theories of Intentionality; Classical
concepts are unstructured, this picture of concept Theory of Concepts; Concepts, Philosophical Issues
learning is in trouble. For if the concept bachelor
isnt composed from the concepts unmarried and
Further Readings
man, then acquiring the concept bachelor cannot be
a matter of learning that bachelors are unmarried Fodor, J. (1998). Concepts: Where cognitive science went
men. Concept atomism thus conflicts with a tempt- wrong. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
ing view of concept learning. Laurence, S., & Margolis, E. (1999). Concepts and
Not all atomists are troubled by this conclusion, cognitive science. In E. Margolis & S. Laurence (Eds.),
however. On the one hand, Fodor embraces the Concepts: Core readings (pp. 381). Cambridge, MA:
view that most lexical concepts are unlearned. This MIT Press.
does not necessarily mean that we are born with Margolis, E. (1998). How to acquire a concept. Mind and
concepts such as bachelor and carburetor, but it Language, 13, 347369.
does lump them together with sunburns, pubic hair, Pinker, S. (2007). Fifty thousand innate concepts (and other
radical theories of language and thought). In S. Pinker,
headaches, and other things that we acquire in life
The stuff of thought: Language as a window into
without learning. On the other hand, atomists such
human nature (pp. 89152). New York, NY: Viking.
as Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence attempt to
defend the idea that concepts are learned by specify-
ing methods of concept learning that do not involve
uncovering a concepts constituent structure.
A second worry about atomism concerns its ATTENTION, EVOLUTIONARY
ability to distinguish coextensive concepts, such as PERSPECTIVES
water and H2O, Hesperus and Phosphorus, or Mark
Felt and Deep Throat. Given that the identification Nervous systems are limited in their capacity to ana-
of each of these pairs was newsworthy, it seems rea- lyze and respond to the environment. Thus, sensory
sonable to count each concept as distinct. But given and motor capacities must be deployed selectively, in
that the members of each pair refer to the very same line with the organisms behavioral goals. The term
thing, it is less clear what makes them distinct. On a selective attention refers to the selective allocation
fairly standard account, these various concepts are of limited cognitive resources, usually to further its
distinct because they have different components. behavioral goals. This entry considers issues con-
For example, the concept water might be composed cerning the evolution of selective attention.
from such concepts as clear, drinkable, and liquid, Before proceeding, it is also important to note
and the concept H2O from hydrogen and oxygen. that cognitive limits of all sorts can have interest-
Notice, however, that this standard account of what ing and unexpected evolutionary consequences, and
distinguishes coextensive lexical concepts will usu- this is certainly true of attention. There are a vari-
ally be unavailable to the concept atomist because ety of signals designed specifically to attract atten-
the atomist holds that most lexical concepts are not tion within the social domain. In fact, theories of
built from other concepts. The atomist who doesnt sexual selection suggest that some secondary sexual
want to deny the seemingly obvious truth that these characteristics have evolved under positive selec-
various concepts are distinct must therefore find tion to engage the attention of prospective mates.
some other way to distinguish them. One possibility, In any case, it is clear that there are specific biases in
54 Attention, Evolutionary Perspectives
attention that reflect the unique adaptive problems of table because they respond more selectively to visual
a species. For example, in humans, attention is biased motion signals when they are engaged in flight.
toward faces over other sorts of images. Recent work Frogs selectively respond to one prey stimulus when
by Alan Bond and colleagues suggests that physical there are multiple prey present. Selective processing
characteristics of a prey species may be shaped by the by blue jays has been documented in a variety of
attentional limits of a predator. Blue jays may hunt tasks, including costs for switching between targets,
using a search template for a locally frequent form of and the use of templates in visual search for prey.
moth, producing selective predation (and subsequent The distance between human brains and those of
disadvantage) for the frequent over the rare form. other species can be expressed both in time (millions
The consequences of attentional limits, therefore, can of years since the last common ancestor), and space
be widespread, and the morphology of a species is (ratio of brain volumes). There are always different
shaped in important ways by the attention systems of concerns about when it is appropriate to adjust for
its conspecifics and its predators. body size when comparing brain sizes. Table 1 pre-
sents brain sizes unadjusted for body size. The rea-
son is to better indicate just how small some of the
The Ubiquity of Selective Attention
brains are that can be engaged in selective attention.
In humans, the neuroscience of selective atten- What is clear, even from this incomplete sketch, is
tion emphasizes the contributions of large cortical that attention systems have been in place a long time,
networks. It is clear that an intact cortex is neces- they are prevalent throughout the animals, and they
sary for efficient selective attention in humans, and can operate, at least to some degree, in the absence
diverse forms of cortical damage produce many of large and evolutionarily expensive machinery like
kinds of selective attention disorders, such as hemi- the human cortex.
spatial neglect, in which patients may not respond Even simulated organisms, evolved through unsu-
to objects in the left side of space (e.g., they may pervised learning, are capable of attending selectively
refuse to eat food from the left side of the plate or to their environment. For example, Robert Ward
fail to read words on the left side of the page). Many and Ronnie Ward used genetic algorithms to create
brain imaging studies show that even apparently an artificial agent, with a brain of only eight sim-
simple tasks, like shifting attention from one object ple units, which could perform some sophisticated
to another, activate a large network of cortical areas. selective attention tasks. A number of agents with
However, the cerebral cortex is a very special randomly wired brains were assessed on a series
structure in evolutionary terms. Within the mam- of selective attention problems involving two target
mals, the cortex is significantly larger in primates objects that had to be caught. The agent had a
than non-primates, and larger still in humans than simple sensorimotor system of proximity sensors
other primates. Selective attention in humans, there- and locomotion. The agents that performed best
fore, requires machinery that is, in evolutionary on the catching tasks were recombined to produce
terms, unique and expensive. On this basis, we might a new generation, which itself was assessed for the
expect selective attention to be crude or even absent best performers, and so on. The result of this process
in other species lacking a well-developed cortex. over many generations was a simple artificial agent
However, this intuition would be mistaken: Selective that could inhibit its responses toward distractor
attention is far from uniquely human and appears to objects, and then subsequently release that inhibi-
operate to some degree in even the smallest brains. tion so that a former distractor could guide behav-
Selective attention abilities and costs of various ior. In so doing, the agent also created a memory
kinds have been documented in many diverse for unselected items, and demonstrated the counter-
nervous systems, as indicated by the examples in intuitive effects of reactive inhibition, in which it
Table 1. Inclusion in the table is based on whether takes longer to orient to previous distractors when
the brain and overt response to a stimulus have been they are highly salient.
shown to depend on the animals current state and The ubiquity of selective attention systems,
behavioral goals. This is a broad definition, and the coupled with the apparent neural complexity of this
table entries represented are not perfectly compa- system in humans, raises some puzzling questions.
rable. For example, fruit flies are included in the Why are such large networks in the human system
Attention, Evolutionary Perspectives 55
Table 1 A selection of nervous systems, tested and demonstrated to be capable of various acts of selective attention,
compared to the human brain in terms of approximate time of divergence from the human evolutionary line and relative
size of brain
Approximate Time of Divergence Relative Brain Size
Species From Humans (Unadjusted for Body Size)
Humans 0 100%
Chimpanzee (ape) 6 million years ago 33%
Macaque (monkey) 25 million years ago 7%
Rat (non-primate mammal) 75 million years ago 0.5%
Blue jay (bird) 310 million years ago 0.5%
Frog (amphibian) 340 million years ago 0.01%
Fruit fly (invertebrate) 500 million years ago 0.0001%
Artificial agents N/A 0.00000001%
Source: Data on divergence estimate largely from Dawkins, R. (2004). The ancestors tale: A pilgrimage to the dawn of
evolution. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Brain sizes are largely from Striedter, G. F. (2005). Principles of Brain Evolution.
Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.
Note: Brain sizes here are not adjusted for body size, to illustrate how brains that are very small relative to a human can
still perform acts of selective attention. The correlation between divergence and brain size in the tested species is merely
accidental. For example, a whale is a non-primate mammal with a larger unadjusted brain size than a human.
necessary? In what ways do people differ from other the large activations found in parietal and frontal
animals in their selective attention requirements? The cortex when people shift their attention from one
human literature offers little guidance here, because object to another. It is tempting to think of the acti-
an interesting but largely ignored question is whether vated network as something like the gears and cogs
attention phenomena found in humans address the needed to move the focus of the tower searchlight
properties of selective attention systems in general, from one corner of the prison yard to the next. But
or of human attention specifically. However, many why would millions of neurons be necessary for
of the standard attention operations which have this fundamental operation when it can be readily
been most scrutinized in humanssearching for and achieved in species with much more limited nervous
prioritizing targets, suppressing the influence of dis- systems? It seems more sensible to work from the
tractors, shifting attention from one object or loca- hypothesis that such large activations reflect the
tion to anotherseem just as important for a frog, consequences of the attention shift, a conclusion
fish, or fly, as for a human. For example, consider an reached through other means in John Duncans
animal placed between two potential prey. Selective theory of biased competition. There is no specific
processing allows the animal to direct its behavior attention module in a biased competition model;
toward one of the targets and ignore a tendency to instead, the activity of multiple brain regions, spe-
respond to the other. A failure of selection could cialized for different tasks, are coordinated by their
mean a response directed toward some intermediate interconnections to focus on a single object and its
but useless point between the two. Such a nonse- implications for behavior.
lective animal would be cruelly exposed for sensory
exploitation from its competitors.
Has Attention Evolved Repeatedly?
One way to reconcile the neural complexity of
human attention with the ubiquity of selective Given the range of species with at least some ability
attention in even very small brains is to suggest that for selective attention, a natural question is whether
attention reflects a state of the nervous system rather attention circuits in different species reflect a highly
than a specific process. To illustrate, consider again conserved, or shared, neural system. Alternatively,
56 Attention, Neuroimaging Studies of
perhaps the circuitry for attention, while performing a common computational approach, this is unlikely
analogous functions in different species, has evolved to be a coincidence. Instead, the common mecha-
independently, in much the same way that analo- nism may be a fundamental computational mecha-
gous solutions have evolved for other good ideas, nism for selective processing, in much the same way
like flying. A definitive answer awaits a comparative that lateral inhibition is a mechanism for contrast
approach, which considers similarities and differ- enhancement in many neural systems. In any case,
ences in the neural organizations and behaviors of it is clear that comparative approaches can produce
species, as well as their genetic makeups. However, it one of two results, and both are valuable. Either
is clear that if selective attention has evolved repeat- the human and nonhuman systems work in similar
edly, we should expect a variety of neural mecha- ways, in which case the nonhuman system validates
nisms adapted for an animals specific circumstances. and extends the human literature, or the nonhuman
Such a diversity of circuitry has already been dem- system operates according to new principles not yet
onstrated in a domain at least related to attention. seen in the human literature. In this case, we have a
Animals benefit by knowing to what extent the working model for new experimentation and theory.
changing stimulation across their sensors is due to
Robert Ward
their self-motion, and to what extent this pattern
reflects motion within the environment. By integrat-
See also Attention, Neuroimaging Studies of; Natural
ing sensory signals with information about current
Action Selection, Modeling
motor commands, referred to as corollary discharge,
it is possible to separate the effects of self and envi-
ronmental motion. This solution allows an animal Further Readings
to ignore the sensory influence of self-motion, while Bond, A. B. (2007). The evolution of color polymorphism:
selectively processing the changes in the environment. Crypticity, searching images, and apostatic selection.
A recent review by Trinity Crapse and Marc Sommer Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics,
illustrates a wide range of corollary discharge cir- 38, 489514.
cuitry across species, each designed to work with the Crapse, T. B., & Sommer, M. A. (2008). Corollary
content and consequences of a species-specific behav- discharge across the animal kingdom. Nature Reviews
ioral repertoire. The diverse mechanisms for process- Neuroscience, 9(8), 587600. doi:10.1038/nrn2457
ing corollary discharge illustrate how a problem that Dawkins, R. (with Wong, Y.). (2004). The ancestors tale: A
is universal for any nervous system (separating self pilgrimage to the dawn of life. London, UK: Weidenfeld
from environmental stimulation) is subject to highly & Nicolson.
specific solutions tied to the unique circumstances of Duncan, J., Humphreys, G., & Ward, R. (1997).
individual species. That is, although the problems Competitive brain activity in visual attention. Current
relating to corollary discharge are universal, it seems Opinion in Neurobiology, 7(2), 255261.
plausible that solutions to the multiple different solu- Striedter, G. F. (2006). Prcis of Principles of Brain
tions to the problem have evolved. Evolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 136.
The literature on human attention is rich with Ward, R., & Ward, R. (2008). Selective attention and
phenomena, but for the most part, comparative control of action: Comparative psychology of an
studies on these phenomena, such as the attentional artificial, evolved agent and people. Journal of
blink or psychological refractory period, have yet to Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
be done. An exception is work with artificial agents. Performance, 34(5), 11651182.
In some ways, the comparison between human and
artificial systems is very powerful, as any similarity
in attention cannot be based on shared inheritance ATTENTION, NEUROIMAGING
but solely on the computational realities of selective
processing. On the one hand is an artificial system STUDIES OF
of a few simple processing units, evolved to oper-
ate in an environment consisting of only two other Neuroimaging methods allow the neural basis of
objects. At the other extreme is the human system, attention to be investigated within the healthy, liv-
with many billions of neurons, adapted for an ing human brain. Two broad classes of neuroim-
extremely complex environment. If both systems use aging methods are electromagnetic methods, such
Attention, Neuroimaging Studies of 57
as electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoen- to how early these effects can occur. These studies
cephalography (MEG), and hemodynamic meth- have revealed that attention cannot simply be char-
ods, such as positron emission tomography (PET) acterized as a unitary mechanism that consistently
and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). acts at a single, fixed site of action. Rather, a variety
Electromagnetic methods measure the voltage or of sites, both early and late in the processing stream,
magnetic field changes that are produced by neu- have been found to be affected by attention, and the
ral activity, through electrodes attached to the scalp precise site of attention at any time is a function of
(in EEG) or sensors located close to the scalp (in multiple factors. For example, paying attention to
MEG). These methods provide excellent temporal the spatial location of a stimulus has been shown
resolution, recording neural activity in real time, to affect early stages of cortical processing, within
but have limited spatial resolution because the mea- the extrastriate fusiform and middle occipital gyri.
sured response is recorded at some distance from Attending to nonspatial features (e.g., color, motion,
the neural activity and each sensor may measure faces) modulates neural activity most strongly in the
activity from multiple brain regions simultaneously. later, higher order areas that specialize in processing
Hemodynamic measures (e.g., PET and fMRI) pro- those features. These imaging results highlight that
vide complementary information, with high spatial attention is flexible and that the sites of attention
resolution but limited temporal resolution. This is effects vary depending on whats being attended.
because these methods rely on blood-flow-related PET and fMRI methods alone have not provided
changes in the brain that lag behind the actual neu- a definitive answer to the question of the earli-
ral activity by several seconds. For PET, variations est point in the brain at which attention can affect
in blood flow can be measured after injection of a processing. Although numerous studies have found
radioactive isotope into the blood, whereas fMRI robust effects of spatial attention in extrastriate
relies on intrinsic magnetic properties of blood. areas, a few neuroimaging studies have also found
Although PET and fMRI provide excellent spatial attention effects in striate cortex. Before conclud-
resolution, the temporal resolution is limited and ing that attention can modulate visual processing
the precise timing of the hemodynamic response can as soon as it first enters the cortex, however, it is
vary across regions, further complicating the abil- critical to consider the temporal imprecision of PET
ity to understand the dynamics between active brain and fMRI measures. These methods rely on measur-
regions. As reviewed in this entry, electromagnetic ing the relatively sluggish hemodynamic response
and hemodynamic methods have each provided a that lags behind neural activity by multiple seconds.
wealth of information regarding the neural archi- Furthermore, visual processing is not simply feed-
tecture of attention systems, and combining these forward through successive visual areas but also
methods can provide even more precise informa- includes subsequent feedback to earlier processing
tion on the spatiotemporal dynamics of attention areas from higher order areas. Therefore, the lack
mechanisms in the brain. The present entry primar- of temporal precision limits the conclusions that
ily focuses on the extensive neuroimaging work on can be drawn from PET and fMRI. For example,
visual attention. It is divided into two main sections, an attention effect in striate cortex could reflect the
reviewing work on the effects of attention (i.e., the initial first-pass processing of sensory information
sites at which the effects of attention are manifest) into the cortex, or it may be due to effects occurring
versus the control of attention (i.e., the sources of well after that initial processing. Indeed, decades
attentional control). of research using event-related potentials (ERPs;
stimulus-locked averaged sections of the electro-
The Effects of Attention encephalogram) have provided evidence that the
earliest effect of attention occurs after the initial pro-
Sites of Attentional Modulation
cessing through striate cortex has proceeded without
A fundamental issue in attention research is the modulation. To address these apparently conflicting
stage of processing in the brain at which attention can results regarding the earliest effects of attention, it
begin to affect processing. The results from numer- is helpful to consider results from studies that have
ous neuroimaging studies converge on the general combined fMRI and ERP measures.
conclusion that there is considerable flexibility in the As described earlier, ERPs have complementary
site of attention effects, although there may be a limit strengths and limitations compared to PET and
58 Attention, Neuroimaging Studies of
fMRI. Therefore, combining these methods can pro- eye fields (FEF) and the intraparietal sulcus (IPS).
vide both high spatial and high temporal precision. This frontal-parietal network has consistently been
The ERP component that reflects the initial process- found to be active in studies of voluntary attention
ing in striate cortex is labeled the C1 (C for its across a variety of conditions, including overt atten-
central scalp location), whereas the first major ERP tion as well as covert attention, spatial attention as
index of extrastriate processing is a subsequent com- well as object attention, and visual attention as well
ponent labeled the P1 (P referring to its positive as auditory attention. Although numerous factors
polarity). Critically, ERP studies have consistently determine the precise site of attentional effects, the
found the earliest attention effect to be a modula- control of attention has been shown to consistently
tion of the P1 component, whereas the earlier C1 engage this frontal-parietal network.
component has not typically been found to be mod- A prominent model of attention holds that there is
ulated by attention. However, some fMRI studies right hemisphere dominance for attentional control.
have found attention effects in striate cortex. In a Neuropsychological patient studies have generally
landmark study combining ERPs with neuroimag- found that damage to the right hemisphere is often
ing, Antigone Martnez, Steve Hillyard, and their more debilitating on attention tasks than is damage
colleagues found that the earliest effect of spatial to the left hemisphere. To explain this pattern of
attention occurred at approximately 75 milliseconds results, it has been postulated that, in the healthy
latency (associated with the P1) and was localized to brain, the right hemisphere monitors both visual
the extrastriate fusiform gyrus, whereas fMRI-mea- fields equally well, whereas the left hemisphere
sured attention effects in striate cortex were found monitors the contralateral right visual field more
to be associated with ERP effects occurring signifi- strongly than the left visual field. Most fMRI studies
cantly later in time, well after the C1 and P1 com- of attentional control, however, have found the fron-
ponents. The initial processing in striate cortex that tal-parietal network to be engaged equally strongly
gave rise to the C1 component was unaffected by bilaterally for both visual fields. A recent fMRI study
attention. These data provide evidence that attention by Joseph Hopfinger, Christine Camblin, and Emily
effects in striate cortex, at least in some fMRI stud- Parks, however, revealed a hemispheric specializa-
ies, do not reflect the initial feed-forward activity, tion in healthy participants that is in accord with
but rather reflect later re-entrant processing in that the asymmetry seen in patient studies. In that study,
region. Recent ERP studies have found attentional voluntary attention was isolated by measuring self-
modulation of the C1 under certain circumstances, initiated shifts of attention, in contrast to previous
although those studies did not use fMRI or PET studies that used an abruptly appearing cue stimulus
to definitely locate the neural site of these effects. to instruct subjects where to attend. For self-initiated
Further studies are required to fully understand all shifts of attention, the frontal-parietal network in
the parameters that determine the site of attention in the right hemisphere was equally active for attending
any given situation. However, neuroimaging studies to both the left and right visual fields, whereas the
have shown that the site of attention effects is flex- left hemisphere control network areas were much
ible and reflective of perceptual and task demands. more strongly active when attention was oriented to
The following sections review work on the atten- the contralateral right visual field compared to the
tional control network in the brain that is thought ipsilateral left visual field. Thus, this neuroimaging
to be responsible for producing the attention effects evidence supports theories of hemispheric asymme-
described earlier. try of attentional control based on patient studies
and extends it to the healthy adult brain.
The Control of Attention Although neuroimaging studies have consistently
found a frontal-parietal network involved in atten-
Orienting Attention (Sources of Control)
tional control, the sequence of activity between these
Mechanisms of attentional control are thought to regions is difficult to resolve with fMRI alone. Early
precede and to be responsible for the effects of atten- ERP studies suggested a parietal-to-frontal progres-
tion described earlier. Neuroimaging studies have sion, but single-unit recording studies in nonhu-
revealed that a widespread network underlies atten- man primates have suggested a frontal-to-parietal
tional control, with two key areas being the frontal progression, at least for voluntary attention. In an
Attention, Neuroimaging Studies of 59
important study combining ERPs and fMRI, Tineke the reorienting process. Neuroimaging studies have
Grent-t-Jong and Marty Woldorff provided new not provided much evidence regarding the sequence
evidence from healthy adults that frontal regions of frontal and parietal activity in the disengagement
appear to initiate the process of attentional orient- and reorienting of attention; however, studies with
ing, with parietal regions coming online later to transcranial magnetic stimulation and single-cell
instantiate the shift of attention. recordings suggest that reflexive attention involves
Beyond the localization of the attentional control a parietal-to-frontal sequence in contrast to the
regions, another question is how this frontal-parietal frontal-to-parietal progression associated with vol-
control network produces the attention effects untary attention.
described in the first part of this entry. fMRI stud- In summary, electromagnetic and hemodynamic
ies by Sabine Kastner and colleagues, and by Joseph neuroimaging methods have provided key insights
Hopfinger and colleagues, have shown that there into the neural mechanisms of attention. A distrib-
are significant and robust effects in visual processing uted frontal-parietal network is involved in control-
regions that precede the presentation of the target ling the orienting and focusing of attention, leading
stimuli. These studies have shown that the same visual to selective biasing of sensory processing regions
areas that show robust attentional effects during the before the expected targets appear. The exact site
processing of the target stimuli show similar attention of attentional effects is flexible, depending on per-
effects before the target stimuli appear. Thus, a criti- ceptual and task demands, but appears to be most
cal mechanism of attention appears to be the biasing robust within early extrastriate regions for visual
of sensory processing regions before the appearance spatial attention. Finally, regions of the frontal and
of stimuli, presumably preparing those areas of the parietal cortices ventral to those involved in the
brain so that incoming information will be selectively initial orienting of attention seem to be involved
processed according to the goals of the observer. In when attention needs to be reoriented following an
summary, neuroimaging has provided evidence that involuntary capture of attention toward a distract-
voluntary attention relies on a frontal-parietal net- ing stimulus. Future studies using these methods,
work that biases relatively early sensory processing separately and in combination, should provide
areas in preparation for selectively enhanced process- further insight into the dynamic brain mechanisms
ing of the attended regions and objects. that allow us to voluntarily focus our attention and
reduce potential distraction.
Disengaging and Reorienting Attention Joseph Hopfinger
The frontal-parietal attentional control network
See also Attention and Action; Electrophysiological
described in the previous subsection is most closely
Studies of Mind; Neurodynamics of Visual Search
associated with the voluntary shifting of attention.
This final subsection reviews the situation when
voluntary control failswhen attention is involun- Further Readings
tarily captured to the wrong location and must be
Corbetta, M., Miezin, F. M., Dobmeyer, S., Shulman, G. L.,
reoriented back to the desired location. Following
& Petersen, S. E. (1990). Attentional modulation of
a reflexive capture of attention, one needs to dis- neural processing of shape, color, and velocity in
engage from the distracting stimulus and reorient humans. Science, 248, 15561559.
attention back to its original focus. Recent work by Corbetta, M., & Shulman, G. L. (2002). Control of goal-
Maurizio Corbetta and colleagues, among others, directed and stimulus-driven attention in the brain.
has provided evidence that the systems underlying Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3, 201215.
disengagement and reorienting are distinct from the Grent-t-Jong, T., & Woldorff, M. (2007). Timing and
frontal-parietal network described earlier. Whereas sequence of brain activity in top-down control of visual-
voluntary attentional control involves dorsal regions spatial attention. PLoS Biology, 5, 114126.
of the frontal and parietal cortex, reorienting of Heinze, H. J., Mangun, G. R., Burchert, W., Hinrichs, H.,
attention evokes activity in more ventral regions of Scholz, M., Munte, T. F., . . . Hillyard, S. A. (1994).
the frontal and parietal cortices; the temporal pari- Combined spatial and temporal imaging of spatial
etal junction, in particular, is strongly implicated in selective attention in humans. Nature, 392, 543546.
60 Attention, Resource Models
Hopfinger, J. B., Buonocore, M. H., & Mangun, G. R. sufficient quantity, or sufficiently early, to the object
(2000). The neural mechanisms of top-down attentional pertinent for that performance. The volume of that
control. Nature Neuroscience, 3, 284291. internal input is often called processing resources or
Hopfinger, J. B., Camblin, C. C., & Parks, E. L. (2010). cognitive resources.
Isolating the internal in endogenous attention.
Psychophysiology, 47, 739747. Evolution of Models
Kastner, S., Pinsk, M. A., De Weerd, P., Desimone, R., &
Ungerleider, L. G. (1999). Increased activity in human The notion of resources explicates a premise implicit
visual cortex during directed attention in the absence of in naive thinking and reflected in natural language:
visual stimulation. Neuron, 22, 751761. Attention is said to be paid, namely, directed and/
Martnez, A., Anllo-Vento, L., Sereno, M. I., Frank, L. R., or expended. Whatever is expended must be taken
Buxton, R. B., Dubowitz, D. J., . . . Hillyard, S. A. (1999). to be some sort of structure or commodity that is
Involvement of striate and extrastriate visual cortical areas limited in some way, hence internal input. Early
in spatial attention. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 364369. theorists of attention, such as Alan Welford and
OConnor, D. H., Fukui, M. M., Pinsk, M. A., & Kastner, Donald Broadbent, construed input, respectively, as
S. (2002). Attention modulates responses in the human a uni-partite channel that may only be directed as
lateral geniculate nucleus. Nature Neuroscience, 5, a whole to a task or an object of attention, or as a
12031209. single channel with limited capacity that is typically
capable of handling only a single task.
Daniel Kahneman posited that internal input
may be expended in various amounts and may be
ATTENTION, RESOURCE MODELS divided between objects of attention. He argued that
the existence of such input is suggested by what he
This entry addresses models of processing resources called the intensive aspects of attention, namely, the
developed by researchers who study attention, dependence of performance on vigilance or arousal,
largely to account for limits of performance. A which he ascribed to the degree of accessibility or
prominent performance limit is the common dif- activation of that internal input.
ficulty of attending concurrently to more than one Donald Norman and Daniel Bobrow coined
object or of conducting more than one cognitive the term resources as a label for the hypothetical
process at the same time, typically encountered in internal input assumed to be demanded for a broad
multiple-task situations (namely, in which a person range of functions believed to require attention.
is to perform more than one task at a time). They suggested that performance of a task or pro-
Whereas attention is clearly associated with selec- cess is resource limited, namely, that it depends on
tion, namely, the operation that enables the execu- the amount of resources invested in it, up to a point
tion of one particular controlled process (rather at which performance becomes data limited, namely,
than others) on one particular object (rather than insensitive to resources and determined just by data
on others), there is no agreement on what requires quality. For example, a task of detecting a moder-
selection or on what limits it. ately loud tone may demand a small quantity of
One stance, asserted in what Diego Fernandez- resources; when that quantity is not fully available,
Duque and Mark Johnson call cause theories, detection may sometimes fail; when it is available,
holds that attention is enabled by some internal input failures must be due to poor sensory data. However,
required for processing (e.g., locations in working the shape of this performance-resource function
memory, share of dedicated time in the executive is strongly task specific. The way Norman and
control system, communication channels). The allo- Bobrow proposed to study that function is via ana-
cation of that input determines both what is selected lyzing dual-task performance by means of a curve
and the quality of behavioral output of whatever is they termed performance operating characteristics
selected. The prevalent postulate of such theories (POCs), plotting performance of one task as a func-
is that performance, or the information processing tion of performance of the concurrent task.
that must generate it, is enabled by the availability In the first formal model of resources Norman
of that scarce internal input, and hence performance and Bobrow proposed, attention was roughly
deficits are due to the fact that it is not supplied in conceived of in terms of allocation of a single type
Attention, Resource Models 61
of that hypothetical internal input demanded for Although resource models had gained popularity
processing that is available in a limited quantity. in cognitive psychology and human factors research
Subsequently, David Navon and Daniel Gopher as of the late 1970s, they lost quite a bit of support
formulated a comprehensive theory of processing after the mid-1980s, when critics argued that,
resources couched in terms of analogies from micro- despite their rigorous appearance, they bear predic-
economics, meant to jointly encompass accounts of tions that are barely falsifiable, hardly selective,
various effects on performancethose of incentive, sometimes little beyond the obvious, and very diffi-
task difficulty, task load, task priority, arousal and cult to test. Alan Allport first noted the circularity in
vigilance, skill, and so on. The theory considered two the predictions of early resource theory. In 1984,
hypothetical cases: the case of a single, all-purpose Navon showed that almost all of the phenomena
resource pool and the case of multiple pools, elabo- predicted from resource theory (effects of incentives,
rated to accommodate modality-specific (visual, effects of task difficulty or complexity, dual-task
auditory, etc.) and analysis-specific (encoding, deficits, effects of task priority, effects of concurrent
response selection, etc.) capacities, any combination task difficulty/complexity, and interaction of diffi-
of which may be demanded for the performance of culty/complexity with manipulations meant to tap
a specific task or process. Obviously, the particular resource availability) can be accommodated by an
combinations are determined by the nature of the alternative notion that does not resort to the five
tasks and hence may vary between tasks. Navon properties of resource theory. Instead, the latter
and Gopher pointed also to the intricate dependence notion postulates that (a) a process may be variably
of the interpretation of data presented as POCs on activated, and (b) the output quality of the process
various assumptions about processing in dual-task depends on the states, varying in time, of various
situations. Christopher Wickens concluded from cognitive or bodily variables called alterants (e.g.,
the examination of a number of dual-task studies anxiety, activation of a certain representation in
that there are about a dozen sources of task inter- memory). Navon also worried that resource theory,
ference that can be characterized as conjunctions despite its appeal due to its apparent rigor, would
of values of three variables: (a) stage of processing not prove sufficient to impose conceptual organiza-
(perceptual, central, response), (b) code of process- tion on phenomena in the field. In that case, the
ing (verbal, spatial), and (c) modality (of input concept would contribute very little to understand-
visual, auditory; of responsemanual, vocal). He ing what actually limits performance.
interpreted that as constituting evidence for the
existence of at least the same number of separate Other Theories and Applications
pools of resources. In the following years, some attempts were made
As explicated somewhat later by Navon, resource to counter criticism of resource models, by Gopher
theory must presume that resources are defined by for one, mainly on the ground that their actual exis-
five properties: tence has been supported by findings in neurosci-
ence. Attempts in the other direction were made
1. Aggregate nature. Resources come in units, any to account for phenomena frequently observed by
number of which can be invested in a certain students of attention (such as the prevalence of per-
process. formance decrements due to having to perform two
2. Exclusive usage of units. Resources are private tasks concurrently) by alternate theses.
commodities in the sense that each unit can be One alternate thesis is the notion of outcome
used or consumed by only one process at a time. conflict, proposed by Navon and Jeff Miller, which
claims that task interference is often due to a change
3. Distributability. Resources can be invested in
in some alterant generated by a process that inter-
more than one process at a time, in that
feres with carrying out a concurrent task. Another
different units are allotted to different processes.
notion that garnered wide popularity is a more mod-
4. Effectiveness. The number of resources invested in erate version of the single-channel hypothesis termed
a single process affects the quality of its output. the single-bottleneck model, proposed by Harold
5. Scarcity. The number of resources available at Pashler, that assumes the existence of a central appa-
any point in time is limited. ratus limited to executing only one process at a time
62 Attention and Action
of the organisms current environment, as related to current behavioral goals. Thus, sensory neurons that
its ongoing behavioral goals. Obviously, the content encode a relevant attribute or location show both
of WM needs to be continuously updated. However, enhanced spontaneous firing rates and increased gain
this updating is highly selective. On this view, the in stimulus-evoked responses. Top-down bias signals
content of WM is itself provided by (i.e., is the out- are carried by backward cortico-cortical connec-
come of) attentional processes. At the same time, tions. (Backward connections are those running from
WM is seen also as the primary source of top-down higher to lower levels, e.g., in perceptual systems, run-
attentional control, such that goal-relevant process- ning in the direction of the sensory inputs.) Backward
ing is prioritized (selected). connections are in fact more numerous anatomically
In most laboratory studies of attention, relevant than the classical forward connections. Their role
and irrelevant stimuli (and actions) are specified by in contextual biasing of conflict-prone neural process-
the experimenter. Outside the lab, however, behav- ing is fundamental.
ioral relevance is determined by an organisms entire
3. Finally, local competition is integrated across
goal hierarchy, with continuously varying priority
widely distributed components of the processing
accorded to unexpected threats and opportunities,
system. Thus, as one focus of processing gains
as well as to the more orderly sequences of attention
dominance within a given (e.g., sensory) cell popula-
shifts needed for any skilled action. Ericsson and
tion, this advantage is propagated to other parts of
Kintsch argue that skilled human performance, from
the network, where cells coding for other (e.g.,
playing chess to making tea, requires not only infor-
motor) properties consistent with or associated with
mation held in short-term WM but also rapid access
the same entity (including its location, reward-value,
to a vast set of retrieval structures in long-term
etc.) gain further support, so that the network as a
memory. They call this long-term working memory.
whole tends to cascade into a state in which the neu-
Interest has centered on the role of various frontal
ral representation of one consistent object-goal-and-
(and parietal) brain structures, in particular the pre-
action is dominant throughout. This property has
frontal cortex, in working memory functions. The
been explored in many different connectionist net-
emphasis here has been on the role of these brain
work models. It suggests a basis for the broadly one
structures in the active maintenance of patterns of
thing at a time character of much of perception and
activity representing current behavioral goals, and
perceptual-motor integration.
the means to achieve them. Influential models put
forward by Desimone and Duncan, Miller and
Cohen, and others propose that these activity pat-
terns in the prefrontal cortex (and other structures, Evaluation
including the posterior parietal cortex) are the source Within the cognitive-neuroscience community,
of top-down bias signals, which serve to guide (i.e., the integrated competition hypothesis has rapidly
selectively prioritize) the flow of neural activity become the most popular general framework for
throughout much of the brain. A brief summary of research on attention and working memory. It has
one of these models is provided in the next section. gained support from a variety of sources, including
single cell recording, functional brain imaging, net-
The Integrated Competition Hypothesis work modeling, and behavioral experiments. As yet,
however, the hypothesis has been applied only to a
Desimone and Duncans integrated competition limited subset of attention-related behavioral tasks;
hypothesis rests on three general principles. in particular, some dual-task data are problem-
atic. How complex human goals and goal-relevant
1. Neural activity within a cell population is
actions are represented in frontal or parietal cortex
(locally) mutually competitive. Thus, increased acti-
remains essentially unknown; and figuring out how
vation in cells responding to one stimulus is accom-
top-down biasing signals are directed, specifically,
panied by reduced activation in neighboring cells
to enhance goal-relevant sensory and cognitive pro-
responding to others.
cessing is another major challenge. Progress on both
2. Top-down priming of cell responsiveness biases these fronts presumably requires an appropriate
this competition in favor of activations relevant to theory of unsupervised learning.
64 Attention and Action
to be consciously registered, as indicated by the fact This would, problematically, involve ruling out the
that subjects fail to report them. possibility that ones evidence of consciousness could
Other experimental effects in which subjects be explained away as unconsciously biased guess-
show a surprising lack of awareness of large stimuli ing. In the face of these complications, the argument
are less obviously attention-involving, but they, too, against the idea that attention is necessary for con-
have been interpreted as resulting from (and so as sciousness has been driven more by theoretical con-
evidence for) a necessary link between inattention siderations than by direct empirical demonstration.
and a lack of conscious awareness. One such effect The emphasis has not been on showing that there
is the change blindness effect, in which subjects are consciously experienced unattended stimuli,
struggle to identify the one changing component but on arguing against the reasons for thinking that
in a pair of pictures that are repeatedly presented, there could not be such stimuli.
one after the other, with a brief flash between them. Defenders of the view that unattended items can
Subjects in these change blindness experiments, figure in consciousness acknowledge that their oppo-
unlike subjects in inattentional blindness studies or nents are able to make sense of the various inatten-
attentional blink studies, do not have their attention tional blindness type effects detailed previously. But
taken up with a distracting stimulus. Nonetheless, it they can acknowledge this while maintaining that
is thought that, when these subjects fail to notice the there are alternative interpretations of those effects
differing elements in alternating pair of pictures, it is that show the same explanatory advantages. There
because they have paid no attention to them. are two possible ways in which these alternative
Lack of conscious awareness has also been interpretations might be given. One might deny that
attributed to lack of attention in certain neurologi- the subjects in these experiments lack conscious expe-
cal conditions. Patients suffering with brain dam- rience of the unattended items (claiming instead that
age affecting the right parietal lobe often behave their failure to report these items results from lack of
as if they were oblivious to items on the left side memory or from an incapacity to use their conscious
of space (a condition known as unilateral neglect). experience as a basis for forming beliefs). One might,
This condition is frequently taken to result from an alternatively, admit that the subjects lack conscious
inability to shift attention leftward. Interpreted in experience but claim that something else, in addition
this way, the condition provides a further example in to inattention, is responsible for this lack. Different
which the absence of attention seems to result in the cases may be treated in different ways. Unilateral
absence of consciousness. It therefore provides some neglect may plausibly be handled as a case in which
evidence for the claim that attention to an item is the subjects lack of awareness is genuine but where
necessary for consciousness of it. factors other than inattention enable us to explain
it. The case of inattentional blindness may be one in
Ways to Defend the View That There Is which the effect is due to lack of attention but where
Consciousness in the Absence of Attention the unattended items do figure in conscious experi-
If we accept the claim that attention to a thing is ence, although not in a way that has the structure,
necessary for consciousness of it, then we can or the durability in memory, that would be required
account for the phenomena outlined previously, but for the subjects to use this experience as a basis for
to accept that claim is to accept that unattended forming beliefs: The effect of inattention might be
background items never feature in conscious experi- understood as inattentional agnosia, or inattentional
ence. That view seems unappealing from the point amnesia, rather than inattentional blindness.
of view of common sense. Anyone who attempts to
Does Attention Require Consciousness?
put this commonsense objection on firm empirical
footing would, however, face methodological com- In addition to the controversy about whether con-
plications. To show that unattended items do figure sciousness requires attention, there is a controversy
in conscious experience, one would have to present about whether attention requires consciousness.
subjects with stimuli that one was sure they were Two lines of evidence suggest that it does not require
paying no attention to. It is unclear how this could consciousness, although, as before, there are routes
be done. One would also have to show that the sub- available by which this evidence can be reinter-
jects were experiencing these stimuli consciously. preted. The debate remains open.
68 Attention and Emotion
The first line of evidence comes from observations James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. Cambridge,
of a blindsight patient. This patient lacks conscious MA: Harvard University Press.
experiences of the stimuli presented in one half of Jiang, Y., Costello, P., Fang, F., Huang, M., He, S., &
space. He nonetheless seems able to pay attention to Purves, D. (2006). A gender- and sexual orientation-
those stimuli, as shown by the fact that cues indicat- dependent spatial attentional effect of invisible images.
ing the location of these stimuli, whether presented Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
in his scotoma or in his unaffected visual field, can, United States of America, 103(45), 1704817052.
as attention directing cues would be expected to, Kentridge, R. W., Heywood, C. A., & Weiskrantz, L.
(1999). Attention without awareness in blindsight.
increase the reliability and speed of the responses
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B,
that he makes (as guesses) when asked about the
266, 18051811.
stimuli of which he lack awareness.
Koch, C., & Tsuchiya, N. (2007). Attention and
The second line of evidence comes from normal
consciousness: Two distinct brain processes. Trends in
subjects in conditions in which conscious experience Cognitive Sciences, 11(1), 1622.
of a stimulus is prevented because that stimulus is Mack, A., & Rock, I. (1998). Inattentional blindness.
presented to just one eye, and the conscious expe- Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
rience of it is blocked by the presentation of more Mole, C. (2008). Attention and consciousness. Journal of
vivid stimuli to the other eye. When the stimuli that Consciousness Studies, 15(4), 86104.
are presented in these conditions are erotic photo- Prinz, J. (2005). A neurofunctional theory of
graphs, they attract and repel the subjects atten- consciousness. In A. Brook & K. Akins (Eds.),
tion (in ways that depend on the subjects gender Cognition and the brain (pp. 381396). New York,
and sexual orientation) despite the fact that these NY: Cambridge University Press.
erotic photographs are not consciously experienced.
Subjects seem to be paying attention to these photo-
graphs but are not conscious of them. The example
seems therefore to show that consciousness is not ATTENTION AND EMOTION
necessary for attention.
If facilitated processing is taken as an indica- Our environment constantly confronts us with a
tor of attention, then these studies indicate that a large number of stimuli, some of which may pose
stimulus can exert an influence on attention without threats and challenges that we need to respond to
being a stimulus of which the subject is conscious. rapidly. Due to the capacity limits of the brain, only
This is not quite enough to establish that a subject a subset of all the environmental stimuli that we
may pay attention to a stimulus of which he is not encounter can be selected for more elaborate process-
conscious. One might claim that the stimuli in these ing and subsequent access to other systems such as
experiments influence attention (perhaps by draw- memory, motor control, and conscious awareness.
ing attention to their location) without the stimuli Several factors can have an impact on the com-
themselves being attended. The empirical results are, petition for neural processing resources. Imagine
as before, amenable to alternative interpretations, you are searching for a specific object, for instance,
with the consequence that the empirical argument is, your car keys. In this situation, perceiver-related
at present, inconclusive. factors such as expectations or voluntary behav-
ioral goals can boost the neural representation of
Christopher Mole
a stimulus via a top-down modulation of sensory
See also Attentional Blink Effect; Blindsight; Change
pathways by frontoparietal regions. This voluntary
Blindness; Inattentional Blindness selection control is referred to as endogenous atten-
tion. Conversely, stimulus-related factors, such as
sudden and unexpected brightness or loudness,
Further Readings or stimulus uniqueness, may lead to enhanced
Chun, M. M., & Marois, R. (2002). The dark side of visual responses in the sensory stream and trigger a reflex-
attention. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 12(2), ive orienting, which is referred to as exogenous
184190. attention capture.
Attention and Emotion 69
Remarkably, the allocation of processing feature differences (e.g., color). Detection times are
resources for perception and awareness also seems typically faster when targets are emotional rather
to be influenced by the emotional relevance of a than neutral but nevertheless increase when an
stimulus. The adaptive function of emotions is to emotional stimulus is surrounded by a larger num-
rapidly determine the value of a stimulus for well- ber of distractors (people need more time to find a
being and survival and to coordinate appropri- spider among ten flowers than among five flowers).
ate behavioral responses. Emotionally significant Moreover, changes in task demands may sometimes
stimuli should therefore be processed efficiently, affect the strength of such effects. Thus, attention
even when they are not related to current voluntary appears to be preferentially guided toward emo-
goals, so that they can be noticed more readily and, tional stimuli, reflecting biases in the allocation of
once detected, become the focus of attention, evalu- attention rather than a direct shortcut to conscious
ation, and action. This third selection mechanism, perception.
which may be designated as motivated or emotional In the attentional blink task, words are pre-
attention, involves both exogenous and endogenous sented successively at a fixation (at about 10 Hz),
factors and is driven by specific neural mechanisms and participants have to detect predefined targets.
centered on the amygdala, a brain region critical for Detection is impaired when a target occurs shortly
emotion processing and learning. after another target. However, this attentional defi-
This entry will give an overview of how emotions cit is greatly attenuated for emotional target stimuli
can interact with attention to shape our perception following a neutral target. Conversely, the deficit
and awareness of the environment, considering both may increase for a neutral target following an emo-
behavioral studies and brain imaging evidence. The tional one, suggesting that the emotional meaning of
different kinds of effects that emotion can have on items tend to capture attention in situations where
attention and perception will be illustrated, and the resources cannot be equally deployed to every suc-
neural mechanisms that drive emotional attention cessive stimulus.
will be discussed. Emotional interference with performance is
exemplified by variants of the Stroop task, in which
participants name the color of either emotional or
Behavioral Effects of Emotion
neutral words. Slower responses to emotional words
on Perceptual Processing
are interpreted to reflect attentional interference by
Behavioral findings demonstrate a facilitation of the emotional meaning. Usually, more interference
perception and prioritization of attention alloca- is observed for negative than positive or neutral
tion for emotional information. Emotional stimuli words, particularly in clinical populations with anxi-
may capture attention more rapidly and/or impede ety disorders.
attentional disengagement longer than neutral stim- When attention has been drawn toward the loca-
uli. Depending on the task and situation, this can tion of an emotional stimulus, it may also dwell lon-
improve performance when the target stimuli are ger at this location and facilitate the processing of
emotional or lead to interference when an emotional subsequent stimuli. For example, in the dot probe
stimulus competes with a non-emotional target. task, participants respond to a target that replaces
In visual search tasks, the detection of a target one of two simultaneous cues, one being emotional
among distractors is typically faster when the target (e.g., a fearful face), the other one being neutral (e.g.,
is emotional as opposed to neutral. For example, a neutral face). Responses are usually faster toward
people are faster to detect a spider among flow- targets replacing the emotional than the neutral cue.
ers than a hedgehog among flowers. Conversely, Emotional cueing may also increase contrast sensitiv-
emotional distractors may impair search for a non- ity for the subsequent target. These cueing effects are
emotional target (people are faster to detect a flower essentially exogenous and reflexive, as the emotional
among hedgehogs than a flower among spiders). cues are not predictive of target location and hence
However, more efficient search does not imply that do not help improve overall performance in the task.
emotional stimuli are processed without attention Emotional orienting effects may arise with both
or visually pop out like targets defined by salient negative and positive emotional cues. However,
70 Attention and Emotion
some findings suggest that positive emotions or processing is more amenable to voluntary control or
mood states may broaden the breadth of attention, more sensitive to resource allocation. On the other
whereas negative emotions primarily serve to focus hand, individual differences can also determine the
attention. Emotional cueing can also operate across effectiveness of conscious attentional control.
sensory modalities (i.e., for visual targets following To sum up, behavioral data indicate that per-
auditory cues), suggesting that the prioritization of ceptual processing and stimulus awareness may be
emotional stimuli is organized supramodally. enhanced for emotional information under condi-
Although the behavioral results reviewed here tions of limited resources (when stimuli appear in
strongly suggest that the emotional meaning or rel- cluttered scenes or rapid succession), although such
evance of a stimulus may drive attention, one cannot enhancement may vary depending on both the task
exclude the possibility that some effects are due to and the observer.
more basic characteristics of the task or stimuli (pos-
sibly correlated with their meaning, such as the basic
Neural Mechanisms Underlying
V-shaped form of the eyebrows in an angry face)
Emotional Attention
rather than to genuine emotional appraisal. A role
of emotional processing is however supported by the Consistent with the behavioral effects that dem-
findings that attentional biases toward emotional onstrate increased perception of emotional infor-
stimuli can depend on the current emotional state mation, brain imaging data from studies using
or long-term emotional characteristics of the indi- functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or
vidual. For example, in visual search tasks, snake positron emission tomography (PET) have consis-
phobics are faster to detect pictures of snakes than tently shown stronger neural responses of perceptual
of spiders, but spider phobics are faster to detect and attentional brain systems to a great variety of
spiders than snakes. Depressive individuals rapidly emotional stimuli as compared to neutral stimuli.
shift their focus of attention toward negative infor- Such effects have been observed for emotional scenes
mation (e.g., words like gloomy or failure), whereas in the occipital visual cortex, emotional faces in the
optimistic people show the opposite pattern and fusiform face area, emotional body movements in
shift their attention toward positive information the extrastriate body area, and emotional prosody in
(words such as happy or success). Differences in the auditory cortex. The neural increases observed
current mood states may similarly influence atten- for an emotional stimulus (relative to neutral stimuli
tion toward positive or negative information. In of the same category) are similar to those that would
the Stroop task, larger interference is obtained for be produced when attention is voluntarily directed
emotional words related to individually relevant to a given stimulus presented among distractors (rel-
topics, as demonstrated for spider phobics, social ative to when the same stimulus is unattended), but
phobics, rape victims, and post-traumatic stress the emotional effects tend to occur irrespective of
disorder (PTSD) patients. This malleability strongly voluntary attention.
suggests that prioritized attention allocation is deter- Imaging studies show that increased responses in
mined by an appraisal of the individual emotional visual or auditory cortex are also obtained for previ-
relevance and not just a reflexive response to basic ously neutral stimuli after these stimuli have been
sensory features of a stimulus. However, the efficacy repeatedly paired with electric shocks or loud noises.
or the degree of automaticity of these emotional This provides strong evidence that the increases
effects on attention is likely to vary depending on in neural activation to emotional stimuli are not
the nature and the complexity of the sensory cues (exclusively) due to intrinsic sensory features of the
conveying an emotional value and on the perceptual stimuli but are related to their emotional meaning.
systems implicated. For example, personally famil- Similarly, research using electroencephalography
iar (hence emotionally relevant) information such (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG) has
as ones own name or face may also capture atten- revealed modulation by emotion at several stages
tion in visual search or Stroop-like tasks, but only of cortical processing, including both early, sensory-
when these stimuli are rare and unaccompanied by related processes (100200 milliseconds post-onset)
multiple distractors; this finding suggests that their and later, more cognitive processes.
Attention and Emotion 71
The amygdala is thought to play a critical role in become unresponsive to ipsilateral stimuli as a con-
these effects, not only for processing the emotional sequence of attention capture on the contralateral
significance of stimuli but also for mediating the side. These neural effects corroborate behavioral
influence of emotion on perception. Several imaging findings that emotional stimuli may not only draw
studies have shown that increased cortical responses but also hold attention to their location. Extending
to emotional stimuli are correlated with amygdala these fMRI results, EEG recordings during the dot
responses: The more the amygdala responded to probe paradigm show higher amplitudes of the early
the emotional meaning of a visual stimulus, the (P1) visual evoked potential to targets replacing an
greater was the activation of visual sensory areas emotional versus a neutral face, further demonstrat-
to this stimulus. The amygdala has dense reciprocal ing that emotional cues may bias spatial attention
connections with widespread regions in the cortex, and enhance visual processing for subsequent stim-
including perceptual pathways as well as prefron- uli that appear at the same location. Spatiotemporal
tal regions, allowing not only rich sensory inputs to analysis of EEG recordings also suggests that the
amygdala circuits but also direct feedback influences visual enhancement of the target stimuli is preceded
of the latter on sensory pathways. Such feedback by a modulation of parietal activity, suggesting that
can boost the processing of emotional stimuli and parietal regions might be responsible for generating
possibly enhance their subsequent storage in mem- spatially selective top-down influences on visual cor-
ory. Compelling evidence for amygdala feedback on tex subsequent to the emotional cue.
cortical responses in humans was provided by the The vast majority of imaging studies concern-
finding that patients with amygdala lesions show no ing emotional influences on perception have used
differential activation of their intact visual cortex to negative or threat-related cues, consistent with
emotional versus neutral faces. physiological and evolutionary considerations sug-
In many cases, amygdala activation may arise gesting a key function for the amygdala in fear
prior to awareness or full attention for the emotion- processing. However, a similar enhancement of cor-
eliciting stimuli and hence serve to redirect atten- tical responses has been reported for positive visual
tional resources to currently unattended but relevant scenes, erotica, pictures of babies, or joyful voices,
information. In some cases, however, amygdala although their relation to voluntary attention mech-
responses to subliminal stimuli might be reduced by anisms has been less systematically investigated than
brief presentation, high attentional competition, or for negative stimuli. Because these positive stimuli
certain personality characteristics such as low anxi- also activate the amygdala, it is likely that emotional
ety. Therefore, the exact conditions and pathways effects on attention are not exclusively sensitive to
allowing for subliminal responses and their regula- fear, but are more generally sensitive to emotionally
tion remain to be clarified. relevant or arousing information. It remains to be
In addition to a direct boosting of neural repre- determined whether a direct and reflexive activation
sentations via amygdala feedback loops, emotional of the amygdala and its feedback projections to sen-
stimuli can also produce indirect effects by modu- sory cortices might be more common and effective
lating activity within the frontoparietal network in response to simple threat cues (as fearful faces)
mediating voluntary attention. In the dot probe than to other emotional stimulus types.
task, greater fMRI activation is observed in this To sum up, interactions between attention and
network, particularly in the intraparietal sulcus, emotion can be observed not only behaviorally but
when targets are preceded by a fearful face as com- also at the neural level, involving a direct boosting
pared with a neutral face; this finding is consistent of stimulus representations in sensory cortices as
with enhanced attentional orienting on such trials. well as a modulation of frontoparietal mechanisms
In contrast, reduced activation in the intraparietal responsible for orienting attention in space. These
sulcus is observed when targets are presented in interactions rely on a large network that is centered
the ipsilateral visual field (i.e., the visual field on on the amygdala but has many reciprocal connec-
the same side) after an emotional face on the con- tions with other regulatory systems in the brain
tralateral side (i.e., the visual field on the opposite (such as orbitofrontal and cingulate cortex, dorso-
side). This suggests that the intraparietal sulcus may lateral prefrontal cortex, and intraparietal areas),
72 Attention and Emotions, Computational Perspectives
to name the ink color in which a threatening word experiments, which suggest that, at least for linguis-
was written than they were the ink color of a neutral tic stimuli, lingering effects are created.
word, although strong effects were most evident in The strategic-emotional interference of the
clinical populations, such as the clinically anxious. Wyble, Sharma, and Bowman model has some
Probably the most notable computational model similarities to the indirect aspects of the Taylor and
of this kind was Gerald Matthews and Trevor Fragopanagos model, although, as previously dis-
Harleys connectionist model of the emotional cussed, the time courses are different. Specifically, in
Stroop. Although the model was not directly wired the Wyble, Sharma, and Bowman model, lingering
up to exhibit this pattern, competition between stim- negative emotional representations inhibit cognitive
uli emerged during learning, and a threat-monitoring control processes. These processes focus attention
unit gave threatening stimuli a positive bias in this on task-relevant stimuli. Thus, in response to the
competition. detection of a threatening stimulus, attentional focus
is in fact broadened to encourage vigilance toward a
diffuse profile of potential further threat stimuli. It is
Indirect Interference
suggested also that reciprocal inhibition between the
John Taylor and Nickolaos Fragopanagos pro- rostral-anterior cingulate cortex (which is believed
posed a more complex realization of attention- to be responsive to emotional salience) and the
emotion interactions in their neurophysiologically dorsocaudal anterior cingulate cortex (which has a
constrained neural network model. Although their cognitive function) implements such an interaction
model contains a pathway by which representations between threat and cognitive control. This said, a
of threatening stimuli can be directly enhanced (via number of the cognitive-emotional areas that have
the amygdala), their model also proposes indirect been proposed to be mutually inhibitory could
effects of threatening stimuli. Specifically, a ventral potentially support such a mechanism.
emotion circuit, including the amygdala and orbital
frontal cortex, is connected to more dorsal attention Applications
networks, including areas such as the dorsolateral
Many computing applications, particularly in the
prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex. The
area of human-computer interaction, would benefit
reciprocal connections between these emotion and
from a better understanding of attention-emotion
attention networks are inhibitory; thus, top-down
interactions. In particular, there is considerable inter-
attentional control can be disrupted by the detec-
est in developing computer systems that are sensitive
tion of negative stimuli. As a result, performance
to the emotional and attentional state of the user.
can be worse on an attended negative stimulus than
Such systems would sense the state of the human
on an attended neutral stimulus, because activation
user, through, for example, facial expression rec-
of the ventral emotion network disrupts attentional
ognition, measurement of physiological state, or
focus on the negative stimulus itself. This aspect of
direction of gaze, and then adjust presentation to be
the Taylor and Fragopanagos model is supported by
consistent with this cognitive state. A classic work on
recent behavioral data and contrasts it with the ear-
this topic is Rosalind Picards Affective Computing.
lier direct models.
Research is also focusing on interacting with users
via agents, robots, and avatars that express emotions.
Strategic Interference Clearly, to consider the efficacy of such systems, it
is important to understand how emotional stimuli
Brad Wyble, Dinkar Sharma, and Howard Bowman
interact with attentional processing. All of the previ-
introduced a model of emotional interference that
ously discussed computational models suggest that
emphasizes longer term, more strategic effects of
incidental emotional stimuli (especially if perceived
threatening stimuli. Thus, whereas all the previously
to be threatening) have a cost for task-relevant pro-
discussed models assume that negative stimuli have
cessing. Consequently, emotion-expressing animated
their full effect within the trial in which they are
characters in computer interfaces may distract from
presented, the Wyble, Sharma, and Bowman model
central tasks.
focuses on cross-trial effects. This is consistent
with recent reevaluations of emotional interference Howard Bowman
74 Attentional Blink Effect
See also Attention, Neuroimaging Studies of; Attention relevant perceptual event. It is typically measured
and Emotion; Computational Models of Emotion using the rapid serial visual presentation paradigm
illustrated in Figure 1A, although auditory presenta-
Further Readings tions have also been used. Participants are asked to
report two targets (here the two letters) embedded in
Mathews, A., Mackintosh, B., & Fulcher, E. P. (1997).
a stream of distractors (here the digits), all presented
Cognitive biases in anxiety and attention to threat.
at the same location at a rate of about 10 per sec-
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 1(9), 340345.
ond. The targets are referred to as T1 and T2, and
Matthews, G., & Harley, T. A. (1996). Connectionist
models of emotional distress and attentional bias.
the time between them (referred to as lag) is system-
Cognition & Emotion, 10(6), 561600.
atically varied. Figure 1B shows the typical result:
Picard, R. (1997). Affective computing. Cambridge, MA: T2 identification accuracy suffers when presented
MIT Press. at short lags after T1, and recovers within about
Taylor, J. G., & Fragopanagos, N. F. (2005). The 500 milliseconds. This temporary dip in T2 per-
interaction of attention and emotion. Neural Networks, formance, called the attentional blink, has become
18, 353369. central to theorizing about the limitations of our
Wyble, B., Sharma, D., & Bowman, H. (2008). Strategic cognitive processes. This entry will treat behavioral
regulation of cognitive control by emotional salience: A and neural evidence in relation to such theorizing.
neural network model. Cognition & Emotion, 22(6),
10191051. Mental Processing Limitations
How much information the brain can handle at once
has been a major question within the science of the
ATTENTIONAL BLINK EFFECT mind. In 1980, John Duncan argued that the answer
depends on the nature of the information. In the
The attentional blink is the term used for the marked visual domain, information hitting our retina is first
deficit in awareness of a relevant perceptual event processed in parallel by the brain. The important dis-
when this event is presented shortly after another tinction is between information that is relevant to an
What was
the 2nd
0.9
What was
the 1st time 0.8
letter?
0.7 attentional blink
2
T2 7 0.6
K 0.5
T1 3 0 200 400 600 800
lag T1 - T2 lag (in ms)
F
8
9 100 ms
Figure 1 (A) Typical rapid serial visual presentation task in which the observer has to identify two letter targets
in a stream of digit distractors, all running at 10 items per second. (B) Fictitious but typical pattern of results for T2,
with good performance at lag 1 (at 100 milliseconds, lag-1 sparing), followed by marked dip in performance up to
about 500 milliseconds (attentional blink).
Attentional Blink Effect 75
observer (information that needs to be remembered first to the second stage. The fact that performance
or acted on, referred to as target information) and on T2 is fine when there are no intervening distrac-
information that is irrelevant (referred to as distractor tors indicates a crucial role for those distractors.
information). In Duncans view, targets are thought Selection theories, therefore, assume that distrac-
to be passed on from the initial parallel stage to a sec- tors lead to active suppression (i.e., disruption or
ond, limited-capacity processing stage that enables inhibition) of the perceptual input. The attentional
awareness of the object. This stage works in a serial blink is the direct consequence of this suppression.
fashion, processing objects one by one. Distractors, This means that as long as no distractor informa-
however, are rejected within the first stage and do tion is encountered, multiple targets can be pro-
not make it to the second stage. As a consequence, cessed at the same time. Thus, selection theory
the brain has problems when there are multiple rel- assumes a more important role for distractor rejec-
evant objects, since the second level can only deal tion than originally conceived by Duncan and a
comfortably with one object at a time. Some target larger second stage capacity than proposed by most
information is therefore likely to be lost. It is not attentional blink theories.
surprising that, when about a decade after Duncan
scientists discovered the attentional blink, they soon
Brain Activity
explained the phenomenon in terms of limited-capac-
ity resources. Specifically, these theories have stated Electro- and magneto-encephalography studies of
that the attentional blink occurs because T1 occupies the attentional blink have so far revealed little effect
the second stage for up to 500 milliseconds. Indeed, of T1 on signals that correspond to the initial visual
there is evidence that the attentional blink varies with processing of T2, including semantic processing.
T1 processing difficulty, for instance, as manipulated This is consistent with a first, unlimited-capacity
by masking (the disruption of a stimulus by either parallel stage. From 270 milliseconds onward, how-
an immediately preceding or a following stimulus), ever, some signals are weakened by the temporal
inter-item similarity, or cognitive load. vicinity of T1, most notably the positive deflection
at 300 to 500 milliseconds referred to as the P3. It is
thought that the P3 reflects working memory consol-
Limited Capacity or Selection?
idation, response selection, or awarenessin other
The attentional blink is a profound and robust words, classic second stage processing. The P3 cor-
effect, but it is not universal. Several conditions relates positively with T2 performance, and, in some
have been found under which multiple targets can studies, negatively with T1 performance. The latter
be processed within a short period of time. One has been interpreted as evidence for limited-capac-
important case is lag-1 sparing: When T2 is pre- ity theory (as it suggests a direct resource trade-off
sented at the very first temporal position following between T1 and T2), but selection theories can also
T1, detection is often unimpaired. This is somewhat accommodate this finding. Functional imaging stud-
difficult to explain from standard two-stage theory, ies suggest that the sources of these signals must be
and several additional hypotheses have been devel- sought in a network involving frontal, parietal, and
oped (many assuming a combined episodic mem- temporal brain areas. The exact functions of these
ory representation of the two targets). Performance areas remain difficult to assess because of the rela-
on T2 also improves substantially when the dis- tively low temporal resolution of imaging techniques
tractors between T1 and T2 are replaced with a and because of concomitant effects of masking and
blank. Most remarkable is that the attentional task difficulty. Using specific types of T1 and T2
blink virtually disappears when the intervening dis- (faces and scenes), one study has provided evidence
tractors are replaced by even more targets. The sec- that the temporal cortex is involved in classifying the
ond stage should now be completely overwhelmed, input, even in the absence of conscious report. The
yet performance improves. This has made scientists frontal regions were only active for reported objects,
propose alternatives to two-stage limited-capacity suggesting a role in our limited awareness. The pari-
theory. According to selection theories, the cause etal cortex may then serve to engage attention on the
of the attentional blink lies not within the limited- targets and perhaps suppress the distractors.
capacity stage, but within the filtering or gating
mechanism that performs the transition from the Christian N. L. Olivers
76 Attitude Change
See also Attention, Resource Models; Attention and forces that shape and modify attitudes is of central
Consciousness; Psychological Refractory Period; importance in predicting the cognitive, affective,
Visual Working Memory and behavioral responses of individuals. The con-
ditions under which attitudes can be changed, and
Further Readings the mechanisms through which such changes are
effected, are increasingly well understood in light of
Duncan, J. (1980). The locus of interference in the
advances in attitude theory and research.
perception of simultaneous stimuli. Psychological
Review, 87, 272300.
Traditionally, attitude researchers studied these
Olivers, C. N. L., & Meeter, M. (2008). A boost and
issues in terms of the explicit evaluative judgments
bounce theory of temporal attention. Psychological individuals make about attitude objects. Such judg-
Review, 115(4), 836863. ments have typically been captured via self-report
Raymond, J. E., Shapiro, K. L., & Arnell, K. M. (1992). questionnaires. However, abundant recent research
Temporary suppression of visual processing in an RSVP has employed indirect means of assessing attitudi-
task: An attentional blink? Journal of Experimental nal reactions. For example, researchers have cre-
Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 18, ated various categorization tasks that allow for the
849860. assessment of evaluative carryover effects, in which
Vogel, E. K., Luck, S. J., & Shapiro, K. L. (1998). the presentation of an attitude object is expected to
Electrophysiological evidence for a postperceptual locus influence the processing of a subsequently presented
of suppression during the attentional blink. Journal of stimulus differentially, depending on whether a posi-
Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and tive or negative evaluation of the attitude object has
Performance, 24, 16561674. been automatically activated. These indirect meth-
ods of attitude measurement are often assumed to
tap a more implicit kind of evaluation that is not
ATTITUDE CHANGE necessarily isomorphic with the explicit evaluative
judgments an individual might make. Although
Attitudes consist of our evaluative reactions to the controversies continue to characterize scholarly
world around us. Whenever we contemplate the discussions of the implicit attitude construct, there
people, objects, places, and issues that we encoun- is a general consensus emerging that two types of
ter (i.e., attitude objects), it is virtually inescapable attitudinal responses can be meaningfully distin-
that we evaluate them, viewing them as good or bad guished: explicit, deliberated evaluative judgments
to some degree. When an attitude is positive, we versus immediate, automatic affective reactions
are inclined to approach and engage with the atti- that are neither deliberate nor logical in their fun-
tude object, but when an attitude is negative, we are damental nature. Automatic affective reactions
inclined to avoid or reject it. In this sense, our atti- occur merely by virtue of the activation of stored
tudes serve as basic guides for navigating daily life mental associations involving the attitude object. In
by providing a summary, bottom-line assessment contrast, evaluative judgments involve propositional
of the often multifaceted stimuli with which we reasoning centering on the validation (or rejection)
interact. In addition to organizing our basic under- of assertions about the attitude object. In addressing
standing of the world, attitudes have been shown issues of attitude stability and change, it is important
to serve other important psychological functions. to consider both types of attitudinal response.
Interpersonally shared attitudes provide an impor-
Malleability Versus Stability of Attitudes
tant basis for building and strengthening social ties
(a social-adjustive function). Publicly voiced atti- Questions about the stability of attitudes have been
tudes allow the individual to assert and reinforce of long-standing interest, and certain cases of long-
personal or collective values (a value-expressive term stability have been well established. One rel-
function). Attitudes can sometimes also allow indi- evant phenomenon is brand loyalty, in which
viduals to cope effectively with anxiety and threat- consumers form an enduring positive attitude toward
ening realities (an ego-defensive function). Given a particular brand of products. Another domain
the significant functions attitudes serve, psycholo- where attitudinal stability has often been reported
gists have long asserted that understanding the is political attitudes; for example, attitudes toward
Attitude Change 77
political parties tend to show considerable stability malleable than positive ones, at least when individu-
across the life span. More generally, many mecha- als own choices determine the extent of their inter-
nisms of resistance exist that minimize the likelihood action with the attitude object.
that well-established attitudes will be changed by
persuasive appeals. Nevertheless, changes in atti- Characteristics of the Attitude Holder
tudes have been documented in countless empirical Some dispositional characteristics are associated
studies, so it is important to understand the condi- with variations in attitudinal stability. High self-
tions under which these changes are most likely to monitoring, the tendency to monitor social expec-
be evident and the psychological processes that are tations and regulate ones behavior to meet those
responsible for them. expectations, is associated with more malleable atti-
tudes; low self-monitors, in contrast, tend to regulate
Characteristics of the Attitude
their behavior by reference to personal values and
Attitudes vary in how strongly held they are, and standards, and they are more likely to have clear and
stability (or resistance to change) is often taken as a stable attitudes as a result. Dogmatism is another
key indicator of attitude strength. Attitude strength personality trait that is commonly associated with
is a multidimensional phenomenon, and the resis- stable attitudes; indeed, its very definition implies
tance to change seen in the case of strong attitudes close-mindedness and resistance to change. There
may be explicable, at least in part, by other features are also person-by-situation patterns to attitude
that typically characterize strong attitudes. Strong malleability, as in the case of repressers versus
attitudes often arise from extensive experience with sensitizers. Repressers are individuals who cope
and knowledge of the attitude object, in which case with anxiety by avoidance and defensiveness, and
there is less leeway for new experiences to modify such people are likely to avoid exposing themselves
the well-established mental representations support- to information that threatens their attitudes in sensi-
ing the attitude. Attitudes that are resistant to change tive, anxiety-related domains. In contrast, sensitizers
also tend to emerge when individuals are embedded cope by actively seeking more information, and thus
in social networks characterized by homogeneity they should be more subject to attitude change in
with respect to a given attitude. In addition, there these domains.
is also evidence that many kinds of attitudes are
genetically influenced, presumably by the effects of Mechanisms of Attitude Change
genes on relevant sensory and hormonal processes,
intelligence, and temperament. Estimates of the When attitude change does occur, several distinct
degree of genetic heritability of a given attitude are mechanisms can operate. Four distinct processes are
positively associated with resistance to change. To considered here.
the extent that genes exert a similar influence on
Contextualization
relevant physiological processes over time, relative
attitudinal stability would be expected. Conversely, The evaluative significance of a given attitude
attitudes that are not strongly influenced by genes, object can change dramatically across different con-
regularly reinforced by the social environment, or texts. For example, a bright orange life vest might
well supported by personal knowledge and experi- be considered a fashion disaster on the runway, but
ence are much more likely to be modified by new it might be the most precious thing imaginable on
experiences. a sinking boat. Research indicates that both auto-
Other attitude features are related to malleability. matic affective reactions and more deliberately
An attitudes valence is one very basic factor that considered evaluative judgments can readily change
constrains its malleability. Positive attitudes imply across contexts. These changes emerge to the extent
approaching and engaging with an attitude object, that an attitude object is mentally represented in
and these new experiences always hold the potential terms of multiple features that can be differentially
to modify ones evaluation of the object. In contrast, salient in different contexts. When attitude objects
negative attitudes imply avoiding and disengaging, are associated with a diverse knowledge base, not
so new experiences are much less likely to occur. As all of this knowledge will be activated on encoun-
a consequence, negative attitudes are typically less tering the object. If different subsets get activated
78 Attitude Change
in different contexts, the net evaluative implications available to document it. Although an abundance
may change. of research has confirmed that various momentary
reactions can be influenced by subliminally pre-
Learning sented stimuli, only a handful of studies has shown
Much research on attitude change has focused that attitudes can be meaningfully swayed by such
on learning processes. Two forms of learning have stimuli. These studies have generally indicated that
been of focal concern, one focusing on affect and the people are only likely to be influenced by sublimi-
other on cognition. nal stimuli when they are in a particularly recep-
tive motivational state. For example, people who
Associative Learning are thirsty may be receptive to subliminal messages
about a beverage. In the domain of attitude forma-
Research on evaluative conditioning proposes
tion, extensive evidence exists for the contention that
that attitudes toward a given object will tend to take
repeated subliminal exposure to a novel stimulus
on the same affective connotations as other stimuli
can enhance the positivity of its evaluation by virtue
with which the object is repeatedly paired. Evaluative
of enhanced processing fluency when the object is
conditioning effects have been documented in many
supraliminally encountered.
attitudinal domains. Advertising represents one
domain where evaluative conditioning is a strategy
of choice; in many advertisements, consumers learn Self-Generated Attitude Change
little about the product other than the fact that it Attitudes can also change by processes of self-
is associated with beautiful people, exciting scenery, justification and self-perception. When individuals
popular music, and so on. The evaluative condition- engage in behavior that is inconsistent with their
ing strategy, by creating new mental associations, attitudes, for whatever reason, the attitude may
can have an influence on immediate, automatic change to come in line with the behavior. Cognitive
affective reactions as well as evaluative judgments dissonance theory argues that this change occurs
that are based on these reactions. Although there because of a drive for consistency; when no suffi-
have been innumerable demonstrations of evaluative cient external justification for a discrepant behavior
conditioning effects, the underlying nature of the can be identified, an internal justification must be
phenomenon remains controversial. found, and often this involves revising ones atti-
tude (I really wanted to do that). Self-perception
Propositional Appeals
theory, in contrast, argues that no motivational drive
Early research on attitude change focused on is required to explain this type of attitude change;
learning new information about the attitude object, rather, individuals simply make inferences about
thereby changing the beliefs underlying ones evalu- their attitudes based on the implications of their
ation. Classic persuasion research addresses this behavior, much as an observer would do. Notably,
process. It is now understood that learning new both of these forms of attitude change rely on prop-
information from a persuasive appeal, per se, is not ositional reasoning. As a consequence, the changes
as important for attitude change as the self-generated are likely to be evident in deliberate evaluative judg-
propositional thoughts about the attitude object that ments, but they are not necessarily seen in measures
are triggered by the appeal. Contemporary persua- of the immediate, automatic affect generated by the
sion models focus on the amount and type of cog- attitude object.
nitive elaboration that is devoted to a persuasive Ultimately, whether attitudes are static or
appeal as key determinants of attitude change and dynamic depends on a range of variables, but there
on the subsequent stability of the newly acquired are a variety of distinct psychological processes that
attitudinal position. can give rise to changes in both relatively automatic
and more thoughtful attitudinal responses.
Subliminal Influence
Galen V. Bodenhausen
The possibility of subliminal stimuli influenc-
ing ones attitudes has been a topic of interest for See also Attitudes and Behavior; Cognitive Dissonance;
decades, but, until recently, almost no evidence was Motivated Thinking; Persuasion; Political Psychology
Attitudes and Behavior 79
a wide range of behaviors but are relatively poor or as a result of non-thoughtful cues as important
at predicting any single specific behavior. Likewise, moderators of attitude-behavior associations.
a very specific attitude is good at predicting a very
specific corresponding behavior but not general pat- Dispositional Characteristics
terns of responding across many behaviors. They and Contextual Factors
noted that many past studies of attitude-behavior
Other research has attempted to explain varia-
consistency involved situations in which research-
tions in the strength of attitude-behavior associations
ers measured attitudes at a very general level but
not in terms of variations in qualities of the attitude
attempted to predict a very specific behavior.
but, instead, in terms of differences in dispositional
characteristics of people or differences in contextual
Moderators of Attitude-Behavior Consistency factors present at the time the attitude is measured
One of the most varied and rich literatures to or the behavior is performed. For example, some
emerge in response to the attitude-behavior problem researchers have noted that some people, low self-
was the research literature exploring moderators of monitors, tend to be internally focused when deter-
the strength of attitude-behavior associations. This mining how they should behave (i.e., they look to
approach is based on the premise that it may be internal guides to behavior such as attitudes and val-
misleading to characterize attitude-behavior asso- ues). In contrast, other people are high self-monitors
ciations as generally strong or weak, because condi- in that they look for external guides to their behav-
tions exist where such associations can be extremely ior, such as the actions of others. Thus, as one might
strong or nearly nonexistent. guess, attitude-behavior associations are stronger for
low-self monitors than high self-monitors. Likewise,
Attitude Strength Properties situational factors can also alter when people are
internally or externally focused when looking for
Of the many categories of factors that have been
guides to behavior. For instance, situational factors
identified to moderate the relationship between atti-
as simple as seeing oneself in a mirror can serve to
tudes and behaviors, the most extensively explored
make people more internally focused. Even when
has been various properties of attitudes. Collectively,
people focus on their attitudes, they also need to rec-
these properties have frequently been referred to as
ognize that the attitude has relevance for the behav-
dimensions or determinants of attitude strength
ior in question. Situational factors can determine
and have been postulated to regulate when attitudes
the likelihood that people recognize the relevance of
will have a strong impact on behavior versus when
their attitude for a given behavior.
attitudes will have little directive influence on behav-
ior. These properties include characteristics of the
Current Theories
underlying cognitive structure of the attitude such
as its accessibility (the ease with which an attitude A final general theme to emerge in attitude-behav-
is activated from memory), ambivalence (the extent ior research has been to account for the intricacies
to which the attitude is based on conflicting positive of the attitude-behavior link by developing formal
and negative reactions), and attitude-relevant knowl- theories that specify the processes by which attitudes
edge (the amount of knowledge associated with the lead to behavior and that identify other constructs
attitude). Other determinants of attitude strength that play an important role in this process. Several
found to moderate the strength of attitude-behavior influential theories of this sort have been advanced.
associations are subjective beliefs one has about the The earliest such theory was the theory of reasoned
attitude, such as the extent to which people are cer- action proposed by Fishbein and Ajzen. This the-
tain of their attitudes and the degree to which the ory begins with the premise that the single most
attitude is personally important to them. Still other proximal determinant of behavior is an intention
research has identified differences in the process by (i.e., a conscious decision to perform a behavior).
which the attitude is formed, such as whether the Intentions can thus be seen as the conscious moti-
attitude is derived from direct or indirect experience vation to engage in a behavior. Intentions, in turn,
and whether the attitude is arrived at as a result of are assumed to be a result of two determinants: atti-
careful thinking about attitude-relevant information tudes and subjective norms. Attitudes are peoples
Attitudes and Behavior 81
general evaluations of the desirability of performing relevant global attitude). Thus, the MODE postu-
the behavior in question. Thus, the focal attitude in lates that for highly deliberative behaviors, attitude-
this theory is always specific to the behavior in ques- behavior consistency processes operate in a manner
tion. For example, if a friend asks you to wash her similar to what has been described in theories such
car (the behavior), the attitude according to this the- as the theory of reasoned action.
ory is the attitude you have toward washing the car. However, when opportunity and/or motivation
This differs from a more global attitude that may be to carefully deliberate about a behavior is low, the
related to your feelings about the friend who asked MODE specifies a different attitude-behavior pro-
the favor. Subjective norms refer to peoples percep- cess. The MODE postulates that in these situations,
tions regarding how they think important others the focal attitude will most likely be global in scope.
would regard the desirability of their performing the For example, if you do not have much time to think
behavior. In the present example, this would include about the request to wash your friends car, you may
your beliefs regarding how you think your friends base your decision to wash the car on your global
and family would want you to react to the request to feelings about the friend who made the request.
wash your friends car. This is because forming attitudes takes considerable
Because the reasoned action model can be diffi- resources, and therefore, humans cannot possibly
cult to apply to behaviors over which an individual have attitudes about every specific behavior or task
does not have personal control, Ajzen proposed his in which we have to engage. Thus, without the moti-
theory of planned behavior. The central idea of this vation or opportunity to make a planned decision,
theory is that the intentions one has to perform a behavior is a result of spontaneous processes based
behavior depend not only on attitudes and subjec- on a global attitude rather than specific informa-
tive norms but also on the control one has over tion. The MODE postulates that the global attitude
the behavior. As such, behavior can be viewed as a exerts its influence on the behavior by biasing in an
continuum of difficulty, with simple everyday tasks attitude-congruent manner perceptions of the target
at one end and difficult, specialized, and skilled of the behavior and behavioral situation and that
behaviors at the other end. If an individual feels she these biased perceptions in turn lead to the behavior.
has control and ability to accomplish some behav-
Leandre R. Fabrigar and Maia S. Kredentser
ior, she will show greater intent to engage in that
behavior. See also Belief and Judgment; Persuasion
In an attempt to integrate findings that some
behavior can be both deliberate and planned
with intentions mediating attitudes and behavior, Further Readings
whereas other behaviors can be more spontaneous
and thus influenced more automatically by attitudes, Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision
the motivation and opportunity as determinants
Processes, 50, 179211.
(MODE) model was posited by Russell Fazio. With
Allport, G. W. (1935). Attitudes. In C. Murchinson (Ed.),
the MODE model, Fazio argues that both spontane-
A handbook of social psychology (pp. 798844).
ous and reasoned reactions can be explained by tak-
Worcester, MA: Clark University Press.
ing into account both motivation and opportunity. Fabrigar, L. R., Wegener, D. T., & MacDonald, T. K.
An individual is more likely to engage in planned or (2009). Distinguishing between prediction and influence:
reasoned behaviors if he is motivated (say, by per- Multiple processes underlying attitude-behavior
sonal relevance) and has the opportunity (e.g., lots consistency. In C. R. Agnew, D. E. Carlston, W. G.
of time) to think about how he will respond (behave) Graziano, & J. R. Kelly (Eds.), Then a miracle occurs:
to an event. In such situations, an individual is likely Focusing on behavior in social psychological theory and
to behave in ways that align with a specific attitude. research. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
For instance, in the aforementioned example, if you Fazio, R. H. (1990). Multiple processes by which attitudes
had time to think about the car washing request, you guide behavior: The MODE model as an integrative
would wash the car based on your feelings toward framework. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in
completing that action rather than your feelings experimental social psychology (Vol. 23, pp. 75109).
toward the person asking the favor (or some other San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
82 Attraction
Fazio, R. H., & Roskos-Ewoldsen, D. R. (2005). Acting smile, a large chin, and high-status clothing as highly
as we feel: When and how attitudes guide behavior. attractive; men judged women having large eyes,
In T. C. Brock & M. C. Green (Eds.), Persuasion: prominent cheekbones, and a big smile as highly
Psychological insights and perspectives (pp. 4162). attractive. Similarly, men rated women who possess
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. baby-like characteristics of big eyes, small nose, and
Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention, small chin as highly attractive. Seemingly innocu-
and behavior: An introduction to theory and research. ous cues such as seeing the color red can also make
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
women appear more attractive to men.
Zanna, M. P., Higgins, E. T., & Herman, C. P. (Eds.).
Physical attractiveness also relies on body shape.
(1982). Consistency in social behavior: The Ontario
Men rate women with an hourglass figure as most
symposium (Vol. 2). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
attractive, particularly when women are not over
or under weight. Women prefer a man with broad
shoulders and narrow hips, but only in conjunction
ATTRACTION with high financial status. Generally, attraction is
also more likely when partners have similar levels of
Attraction is an important factor for the develop- physical attractiveness such that an attractive person
ment of romantic relationships. Social psychology is attracted to a more attractive partner. Here the
traditionally defines interpersonal attraction as a mechanism is that everyone wants the most desir-
positive evaluation of a specific person that involves able partner they can get, so that in an open market
the behavioral tendency to approach the person, of interactions, everyone ends up with others of
having positive feelings for the person, and hold- about their own value.
ing positive beliefs about the person. Attraction has A great deal of research on romantic attraction
also been described as a desire to form a friendly uses models from evolutionary psychology. The idea
or romantic relationship with a specific person. is that modern individuals have inherited tendencies
In both approaches, attraction is distinct from the to pursue strategies that lead to the successful produc-
related idea of attractiveness, the positive and desir- tion of offspring. Men have evolved to prefer signs
able qualities that a person may possess. This entry of fertility such as youth and beauty; women, signs
will examine some of the many factors that influ- of protection and support of rearing of offspring
ence attraction, such as physical qualities and inter- such as status and financial resources; and everyone,
personal dynamics. personalities (kindness, honesty) that facilitate the
Most research on attraction has been done in maintenance of pair bonds through child rearing.
North America and has focused on unacquainted This approach has generated some strikingly original
peers. This research started in the 1960s with experi- research, such as studies related to womens men-
ments on perceived similarity. In the mid-1980s, strual cycles. One found that females who were fertile
research began to be influenced by evolutionary per- and most likely to conceive preferred less feminine
spectives and gender differences in mate preferences. male faces, especially for short-term relationships; in
These trends have continued, employing increas- contrast, women who were less likely to conceive pre-
ingly sophisticated methods (e.g., physiological and ferred more feminine male faces. Another found that
genetic measures) and making use of new develop- in the context of a short-term relationship, women
ments (e.g., online matching and speed dating). prefer men with a more masculine, lower voice, espe-
Perceiving a potential partner as physically attrac- cially when they are fertile. In yet another example,
tive is a key component of attraction, particularly based on rating videotapes of men, women who were
for romantic attractions. For example, a study of fertile especially preferred men who confronted oth-
more than 2,000 participants in a speed-dating ser- ers and were physically attractive.
vice found that the selection of potential partners for Personality also matters. First, it affects percep-
a future interaction was based primarily on physi- tions of attractiveness: Discovering a person has
cal appearance for both men and women. Other positive personality characteristics makes the person
research has identified the physical characteristics appear more attractive; learning about a persons
that make a person attractive. Women judged men negative characteristics makes the person appear
having large eyes, prominent cheekbones, a big less attractive. Second, attractive personalities are a
Attribution Theory 83
major direct basis for attraction. Thus, for roman- (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (4th ed.,
tic attraction, across cultures and genders, everyone pp. 193281). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
prefers a potential mate who is a good companion, Buss, D. M. (2008). Evolutionary psychology: The new
dependable, intelligent, affectionate, considerate, science of the mind (3rd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
and honest. Foster, C. A., Witcher, B. S., Campbell, W. K., & Green, J. D.
Regarding similarity, the most influential theory (1998). Arousal and attraction: Evidence for automatic
posits that attraction occurs when a potential part- and controlled processes. Journal of Personality and
ner provides valuable rewards. Thus, we like those Social Psychology, 74, 86101.
Lewandowski, G. W., Jr., Aron, A., & Gee, J. (2007).
with similar attitudes because it is rewarding to be
Personality goes a long way: The malleability of
agreed with and because we assume that those who
opposite-sex physical attractiveness. Personal
agree with us have other positive and potentially
Relationships, 14, 571585.
rewarding qualities. Note, however, that actual simi-
Montoya, R. M., Horton, R. S., & Kirchner, J. (2008).
larity is less important than perceived similarity and Is actual similarity necessary for attraction? A meta-
that effects are mainly due to a dislike of those we analysis of actual and perceived similarity. Journal of
perceive as dissimilar. Social and Personal Relationships, 25, 889922.
Several studies have examined whether opposites
attract, or at least whether there is an attraction
between those with complementary needs (e.g., liking
to take care of people and liking to be taken care of). ATTRIBUTION THEORY
Partners who are different may provide self-expan-
sion by providing new resources, perspectives, and Fritz Heider, in his book The Psychology of
identities, such as exposing us to new experiences Interpersonal Relations, theorized that people func-
and opportunities for learning. Dissimilarity may tion like naive scientists to determine causes of
also promote attraction if a potential partners dis- behaviors; peoples thoughts about the causes of
similarity could help attain ones own ideals. their own and others behaviors are termed attribu-
A powerful influence on attraction is real (or tions. This entry briefly traces the history of attri-
imagined) discovery that another person likes one- bution research following Heiders original work,
self, a consistent effect across all types of attractions. including early cognitive theories that emphasized
At the extreme romantic end, a very common factor rational principles for making attributions; later
in accounts of falling in love is feeling liked or cognitive theories that purported to describe how
admired by a person of suitable attractiveness. people actually make attributions, particularly with
Situational factors also play an important role. respect to ability and morality; and recent theorizing
People are more likely to form friendships and about the role of affect.
romantic relationships with those with whom they
are more familiar. People are more likely to feel close
Early Attribution Theories
to someone they have met when something funny
has happened. And romantic attraction is more Following Heiders lead, subsequent attribution
likely in physiologically arousing situations. In these researchers considered cognitive variables and pro-
situations, ones arousal that originated from being cesses. For example, suppose an observer wished to
frightened or excited by something, or even from explain why Jill was impolite to Joe. Relevant con-
simple physical exertion, becomes misattributed to siderations include whether Jill is impolite to oth-
the unacquainted other. ers as well, whether others are impolite to Joe, and
whether impoliteness arises when Jill and Joe get
Gary W. Lewandowski Jr. and Arthur Aron
together. If Jill is impolite to others, this suggests that
See also Love; Relationships, Development of
the behavior was due to Jills being an impolite per-
son. If others are impolite to Joe, this suggests that
there is something about Joe that provokes impo-
Further Readings lite behavior. If Jill is not generally impolite, and Joe
Berscheid, E., & Reis, H. T. (1998). Attraction and close is not typically the recipient of impolite behavior,
relationships. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey but impoliteness arises when they are together, this
84 Attribution Theory
suggests that the problem resides in the interaction is ambiguous with respect to ability (because anyone
between Jill and Joe. can fail). In contrast, in the domain of morality, it is
Other theorists have focused on social desirability. the negative behaviors that are diagnostic of traits
Because there is social pressure to perform socially because immoral behaviors only can be performed
desirable behaviors and avoid socially undesirable by immoral people, whereas moral behaviors can be
behaviors, socially desirable behaviors can be attrib- performed by moral or immoral people.
uted to social pressure, whereas socially undesirable These arguments were refined later by research-
behaviors provide better clues to what the person is ers who pointed out that not all ability or morality
really like. dimensions work in this way. Let us first consider
Attribution theorists also have considered non- ability and imagine that Jill successfully negotiates a
common effects, which can be illustrated as fol- difficult piano sonata, whereas Sarah makes a free-
lows. Suppose that Leslie chooses between two jobs; throw. It is unlikely that a bad piano player would
both jobs are near the ocean, near good restaurants, have been able to succeed at the piano sonata,
and pay equally well, but the first job is more inter- whereas it is reasonably likely that even a bad free-
esting than the second job. Leslies choice of the first throw shooter would sometimes make a free-throw.
job over the second one could confidently be attrib- Therefore, the successful piano performance is more
uted to the work being interesting rather than to the indicative of good piano playing ability than the
ocean, restaurants, or pay. successful free-throw is of good free-throw shooting
In addition to the foregoing rational attribu- ability. The general principle here is that successes
tion processes, early experiments also suggested are considered to be more indicative of underlying
a less rational process where observers overesti- ability if the likelihood that a person without the
mate the degree to which behaviors tell us about ability could succeed is low.
the traits of the people who perform them. Much Morality works differently and is more a matter
early research seemed to indicate that observers of definition than of the probability of performing
give insufficient weight to the situations in which behaviors. For example, suppose that Pete per-
behaviors are performed, thereby leading to stronger forms a dishonest behavior and Tom performs an
trait inferences than are justified; this effect has been unfriendly behavior. Well, then, honest people are
termed correspondence bias or fundamental attri- defined as those who never (well, hardly ever) per-
bution error. Later research, however, demonstrated form dishonest behaviors, whereas friendly people
that these effects are due, at least in part, to method- are defined less stringently (even friendly people are
ological artifacts. The use of different instructions or expected to perform unfriendly behaviors at times).
different experimental paradigms has been shown to Consequently, Petes dishonest behavior is likely
eliminate or even reverse the tendency to underuse to result in a strong trait attribution that Pete is a
information about situations. At present, the perva- dishonest person, but Toms unfriendly behavior is
siveness of the phenomenon in the absence of likely to result in a much weaker trait attribution
methodological artifacts is unclear. about Toms unfriendliness.
much negative affect, leading the observer to infer linguists. In recent years, these two directions have
that the person who performed it must be dishon- blended together to provide a better understanding
est, whereas an unfriendly behavior does not induce of acoustic processing in general. This entry will
much negative affect and does not lead to a strong describe the basic building blocks from the cochlea,
trait attribution of unfriendliness. Several experi- up through the brain stem and midbrain, and con-
ments demonstrated not only that different types of tinue on to the cerebral cortex. The bulk of the stud-
immoral behaviors induce different amounts of neg- ies are based on animal models, and therefore the
ative affect but that, when experimental manipula- topic of language processing will not be covered.
tions are performed to influence the level of negative
affect induced by immoral behaviors, attributional Peripheral Processing
weight is influenced similarly. Hearing in terrestrial vertebrates begins as sound
In summary, the attribution area has been exclu- waves strike the head and body. Sound waves can
sively cognitive for much of its history but with a be thought to be composed of two parameters: fre-
recent increase of attention on affective processes. quency (pitch) and intensity (loudness). The outer
However, a comprehensive theory that completely ear, or pinna, plays a key role in shaping the acous-
specifies the interactions between cognitive and tic stimulus as it enters the ear canal and travels to
affective processes and their effects on attributions the tympanic membrane (eardrum). The unique
has yet to be formulated. shape of the pinna causes different frequencies of the
David Trafimow sound to be reflected and resonated, causing some
frequencies to be amplified and others to be damp-
See also Belief and Judgment; Causal Theories of ened. This can result in a quite different sound that
Intentionality; Emotion and Moral Judgment; reaches the tympanic membrane compared to what
Rationality of Emotion; Social Cognition was in the air. These cues are important for local-
izing sounds, particularly in elevation, and are the
Further Readings reason that sounds seem to originate from inside the
head when using earphones, where the amplification
Jones, E. E. (1990). Interpersonal perception. New York,
and dampening does not occur.
NY: Freeman.
The vibrations of the tympanic membrane are
Reeder, G. D., & Brewer, M. B. (1979). A schematic model
amplified by the three ossicles (small bones) of the
of dispositional attribution in interpersonal perception.
Psychological Review, 86, 6179.
inner ear, which then converts these vibrations into
Trafimow, D., Bromgard, I. K., Finlay, K. A., & Ketelaar, T.
a traveling wave within the cochlea, much like a
(2005). The role of affect in determining the pebble dropped into a pond creates waves toward
attributional weight of immoral behaviors. Personality the shore. The cochlea is a spiral structure within
and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 935948. the temporal bone that contains the mechanical and
neural elements that allow transduction of the sound
energy into neural signals. This is done by the travel-
ing wave moving the basilar membrane, on which
AUDITION, NEURAL BASIS sit the sensory receptors, the hair cells. The basilar
membrane is cleverly designed such that the motion
Audition, or the sense of hearing, is one of the most is greatest for low frequency sounds at one end, and
complex and least understood primary sensory sys- the location of the peak motion moves from one
tems in humans. Research on the neural mechanisms end to the other as the frequency increases. Thus,
of how we perceive acoustic signals has converged there are specific hair cells that will be activated the
from two extreme directions. The first is from the most for each particular frequency that the person
periphery toward the central structures, initiated or animal is sensitive to. There are two classes of
largely by scientists from Bell Laboratories in their hair cells: the outer hair cells and the inner hair cells.
attempts to make a better telephone. The second The inner hair cells provide the sensory information
direction is from the most complex perception, to the brain, whereas outer hair cells influence how
human speech, initiated largely by psychologists and the basilar membrane moves and do not provide any
86 Audition, Neural Basis
sensory information. The inner hair cells release the Left Cochlea Right Cochlea
neurotransmitter glutamate onto an afferent neu-
ron called a spiral ganglion cell (SGC), so named
because the cell body of this neuron is located in the SGCs SGCs
spiral ganglion. The SGCs are the first to generate
action potentials, and there are approximately 20 DCN DCN
cochlear
SGCs for each sensory hair cell. The axons of these nucleus
AVCN AVCN
afferents combine to form the auditory-vestibular, or
eighth, nerve, which then enters the skull and makes PVCN PVCN
contact with the cochlear nucleus of the brain stem.
Spiral ganglion cells have exquisite frequency
selectivity in their response, due primarily to the SOC
NLL NLL
functional characteristics of the basilar membrane
and the hair cells providing input to the SGC. Thus,
at very low stimulus intensities, the SGC will respond Inf Inf
only to a very narrow range of frequencies. This Coll Coll
range increases as the stimulus gets louder, making a
V-shaped tuning function. As adjacent hair cells are
located at slightly different locations on the basilar
membrane, the frequency range of the correspond- MGN MGN
lateral lemniscus is little studied, and it is currently in contralesional space (i.e., in space on the opposite
unclear what functional role it plays in audition. side from the lesion) or to identify complex acous-
The inferior colliculus, however, is an obligatory sta- tic signals. Deficits in sound localization have been
tion along the ascending auditory pathway and as noted in human patients; this can occur with a lesion
such is a bottleneck of processing. This structure, on only one side. Such individuals are still able to
located in the midbrain, is also composed of several identify what the sound is by using the intact hemi-
different subunits depending on the species, but all sphere, so there is no impact on speech perception or
contain a core region. Neurons in this region, as their perception of things in the auditory world.
with the preceding stations, are organized by their In much rarer cases, lesions occur in the auditory
best frequency response. As this structure is three- cortex on both sides; these people become function-
dimensional, shaped somewhat like an egg, neurons ally deaf, a condition known as cortical deafness.
along a single slice through this egg all have the same Thus, knowledge that the auditory cortex is neces-
frequency selectivity, much like a stack of plates, sary to generate acoustic percepts has led to con-
with each plate responding to a specific narrow fre- siderable effort in understanding how the cerebral
quency range that is just above those in the plate cortex processes information.
above it and just below those of the plate underneath
it. Neurons in the inferior colliculus retain the binau- Spatial Perception
ral processing selectivity that was seen in the SOC
and further refine the acoustic signal before transmit- The most studied, and consequently best understood,
ting this information to the auditory thalamus. function of the auditory cortex is in its role in sound
localization. It is clear that there is not a topographic
map of acoustic space in the cerebral cortex, as there
Thalamic Processing
is a map of the contralateral body surface in the
The auditory thalamus is the medial geniculate somatosensory cortex or of the contralateral visual
nucleus and can be divided into two broad regions: field in the visual cortex. Many neurons in the audi-
one that maintains the high frequency selectivity, tory cortex are selective for the spatial location of
known as the lemniscal thalamus, and one where the the stimulus, and in most but not all cases, the loca-
frequency selectivity is much broader, known as the tion that gives the greatest response is in contralat-
non-lemniscal thalamus. These two regions have dif- eral space. Neurons in A1 have moderately spatially
ferent cortical targets, with the lemniscal thalamus tuned neurons, but this spatial tuning is sharpened in
projecting primarily to the primary auditory cortex the caudal (toward the back) belt fields and is broad-
and other core regions and the non-leminscal thal- ened in the more rostral (toward the front) belt fields.
amus projecting primarily to the non-core regions. This implies that acoustic space may be selectively
Auditory cortex itself, in primates, is composed of a processed in the more caudal regions of auditory cor-
core region (including the primary auditory cortex, tex but not in a topographic manner. Populations of
or A1), which projects in turn to a belt region. The neurons, then, are most likely to encode the spatial
belt region is a series of cortical fields that are adja- location of a stimulus, with each neuron providing
cent to the core and are heavily interconnected with some information about where the stimulus likely
their immediate neighbors. The lateral belt areas also is and, equally important, where the stimulus likely
project to the parabelt region in a similar manner, is not. Such population codes have been shown to
which is located just lateral to the belt areas. Thus, have enough information in the caudal belt areas to
the core region is not directly connected with the account for sound localization performance across
parabelt but must transmit information to the belt different intensity levels and may be a general form
cortical areas, which, in turn, project to the parabelt. of cortical processing of many different stimulus
attributes across different cortical areas.
Cortical Processing
Nonspatial Perception
The cerebral cortex is implicated in all forms of audi-
tory perception. In the absence of auditory cortex, it The processing of nonspatial information has
is not possible to perceive the location of the sound resulted in a cloudier answer. The first and foremost
88 Auditory Masking
equal intervals in dB. Expressed in dB, the signal-to- masker level required is low, because the masker and
masker ratio at threshold is roughly constant, hav- signal are not separated on the basilar membrane.
ing a value in ideal listening conditions of about 10 As the masker is moved away from the signal in fre-
dB for maskers and signals with identical frequency quency, the masker level needs to be increased. A
composition. This means that we can just detect a sharp V shape indicates good frequency selectiv-
signal with a level 10 dB less (10 times less intense) ity (i.e., good separation of frequencies) at the place
than the masker level when the two sounds occupy tuned to the signal.
the same frequency region (although see section on For complex sounds containing a range of fre-
frequency selectivity). quency components, masking depends on the degree
of overlap between the sounds in their cochlear rep-
Temporal Factors resentations. For example, a sound with a wide range
Masking is maximal when the masker and the of frequency components could mask a sound with a
signal are presented at the same time (simultaneous narrow range of components, but not vice versa. At
masking). However, masking may also be caused high levels, low-frequency sounds can mask sounds
by a masker presented either just before (forward of all frequencies. The rapid increase in the effective-
masking) or just after (backward masking) the sig- ness of low-frequency maskers with increasing level
nal. Backward masking is a weak effect in trained is called the upward spread of masking.
listeners and only causes an increase in the thresh- Psychophysical data on frequency selectivity have
old within 20 milliseconds or so of the onset of the been used as the basis for data compression in the
masker. Forward masking, however, can persist for MP3 sound format used in portable music players
over 100 milliseconds after the offset of the masker. such as iPods. A sound that is masked does not need
to be encoded accurately, and so the file size can be
Frequency Selectivity reduced.
The basilar membrane in the cochlea separates Binaural Factors
out the different frequency components of sounds.
Each place on the membrane is tuned to a particu- The brain can separate the inputs to the two
lar characteristic frequency and, for a pure tone, ears to some extent, so that little masking occurs
sensitivity decreases as the frequency of the tone is
moved away from the characteristic frequency. The 90
Masker Level at Threshold (dB SPL)
for maskers and signals presented to opposite ears, primarily in girls, and associated with a specific gene.
and masking is greatest when masker and signal are Aspergers disorder shares the social and repetitive
presented to the same ear. For the same masker and behaviors of autistic disorder but does not show early
signal presented to both ears, threshold is reduced language delay or mental retardation. Childhood
when the timing of the masker or signal is changed disintegrative disorder is a rare condition, in which
between the ears, for example, if the signal is inverted severe autistic regression and poor outcome follows
in one ear compared to the other while the masker is at least 2 years of normal development.
the same in both ears. This effect may be related to
the neural mechanisms used to localize and separate Diagnoses That Commonly
sounds based on their time of arrival at the two ears. Occur With Autism
Christopher J. Plack Disorders that commonly occur with ASDs include
mental retardation, anxiety, depression, tic dis-
See also Audition, Neural Basis; Hearing orders, and seizure disorders. Although the DSM-
IV-TR does not allow for co-occurring diagnoses of
Further Readings autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD), several recent studies demonstrate that
Moore, B. C. J. (2003). An introduction to the psychology ADHD symptoms are common in ASDs.
of hearing (5th ed.). New York, NY: Academic Press.
Plack, C. J. (2005). The sense of hearing. Mahwah, NJ: Characteristics
Erlbaum.
Yost, W. A. (2006). Fundamentals of hearing: An ASDs are characterized by an impaired ability to
introduction (5th ed.). New York, NY: Academic Press. form normal relationships, deficits in the use of
nonverbal forms of communication such as eye
contact and gesture, lack of social reciprocity, poor
awareness of others reactions, and failure to share
AUTISM experiences with others. The back-and-forth of
conversations appears to be an area of especially
Pervasive developmental disorders (PDDs) are a profound pragmatic language deficit. Social cogni-
group of neurodevelopmental disorders with simi- tion (processing of social information), especially
lar behavioral profiles and are referred to as autism in the area of processing face identity and facially
spectrum disorders (ASDs). In this entry, when an expressed emotion, is also consistently impaired.
autistic disorder is not specified, autism will mean Children with an ASD generally present with
ASDs. The entry will outline the current diagnos- significant impairment in language functioning.
tic criteria for autism, discuss the characteristics and Although some autistic children are mute, verbal
course of the disorder, address the known patho- autistic children are typically, though not always,
physiology, and provide a brief overview of assess- able to acquire normal morphology, syntax, and
ment and treatment. phonology. However, development of language is
usually delayed, and pragmatic, abstract, and infer-
Current Diagnostic Criteria
ential language is weak.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental An overly narrow focus of attention characterizes
Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM- ASDs; this narrow focus may contribute to the phe-
IV-TR), defines criteria for autistic disorder and nomenon of savant skills (exceptional ability in one
PDD-not otherwise specified, as well as Retts disor- area) and lead to extreme degrees of perseveration,
der, childhood disintegrative disorder, and Aspergers routine-boundedness, resistance to changes in the
disorder. The diagnosis of autistic disorder in the environment, difficulty with divided attention tasks,
DSM-IV-TR requires six symptoms, at least two of and difficulty in shifting attention. Sustained atten-
which are social, one communication, and one repet- tion, however, appears to be spared, at least under
itive behavior/resistance to change. Retts disorder certain conditions. A theory of weak central coher-
is a severe disorder of early development, involving ence, in which top-down processing is impaired
deterioration of motor and cognitive skills, occurring relative to bottom-up and perceptually dominated
Autism 91
processing, has been proposed as an explanatory outcome, as well as residual difficulties such as anxi-
principle for the autism syndrome. ety, depression, tics, and obsessiveness.
Executive functioning deficits (e.g., difficulties A substantial proportion of adults with an ASD
with organization, planning, flexibility, impulse con- need to live in residential facilities or with family mem-
trol, working memory) are common in older chil- bers. The options for residential, semi-independent,
dren with an ASD. Younger children display such and independent living situations are continuing to
impairments less consistently. This suggests that change and improve.
such deficits do not explain core symptoms of ASDs,
and are not universal in, or specific to, autism. Epidemiology
Historically, autistic disorder has been thought to
Developmental Course and Outcome occur in 4 per 10,000 children; however, recent
There appear to be two, fairly distinct onset patterns studies have reported higher prevalence rates. For
of ASDs: In the majority, development is delayed preschoolers, recent estimates from the United
during the first and second years of life, especially in Kingdom suggest rates of 16 per 10,000 for classic
language and social development. In perhaps a third autism and 62 per 10,000 for ASDs. Debate persists
of the children, however, development appears to be about whether this reflects increased awareness and
essentially normal during the first 12 to 24 months, diagnostic changes, or a true increase.
followed by regression of skills, especially language, Autistic disorder is more common in males than
and an abrupt development of autism symptoms. females by about 4 to 1. Females with autistic disor-
Lack of evidence for a specific environmental trigger der tend to score lower on both verbal and nonver-
for the regression has led to speculation of abnormal bal measures of intelligence.
activation of innate immune processes as potential
Pathophysiology
agents.
Autism diagnoses can be reliable as early as 18 to The first major postmortem study of autistic brains
24 months, and several groups are working toward by Tom Kemper and Margaret Bauman found small
identifying possible signs of an ASD in the first year and densely packed cells in cerebellum, inferior olives,
of life. Studies of younger siblings of affected chil- and limbic regions. Other studies, however, have
dren, as well as home videos from the first year of found a heterogeneous group of brain abnormali-
life, suggests that failure to respond to name, emo- ties, with marked interindividual differences. Because
tional flatness, poor disengagement of attention, social disability is prominent, studies of the amygdala
poor social orienting, and low rates of joint atten- have seemed promising but have yielded inconsistent
tion may be observable in children with an ASD by evidence, and research suggests that it may be linked
the end of the first year. to anxiety rather than social dysfunction. Other func-
Behaviors may worsen in adolescence, and sei- tional magnetic resonance imaging studies point to
zures sometimes begin. At the same time, adoles- abnormal processing of social information, especially
cence represents a time of increasing interest in close faces, although abnormal brain activation during
relationships; although children with an ASD have face processing may reflect impaired social attention,
difficulty developing these relationships, they may not impaired face processing per se.
show increased social motivation at puberty. Anatomical imaging studies have been inconsis-
Behavioral peculiarities and deficits in daily living tent; Martha Herbert and colleagues found regions
skills may diminish as children mature and receive of white matter (connecting fibers) enlargement and
interventions. The most consistent predictors of good abnormal asymmetries in autism, similar to those
outcome in ASDs are IQ and the presence of early in children with developmental language disorders.
communicative language. In general, higher func- Normal or slightly small head circumference at birth,
tioning children improve over time; a smaller per- followed by acceleration of head circumference to a
centage of individuals may even lose their diagnostic relatively large size by about 15 to 24 months, fol-
label. Recent research provides evidence for recov- lowed by slowed growth resulting in gradual return
ery in individuals with an ASD, and researchers are to average size, is one of the few replicated biological
beginning to identify predictive factors of optimal findings in autism. In a widely quoted study, Manuel
92 Autism
Casanova and colleagues reported that columns of Neurochemical research has focused on neurotrans-
cells in the neocortex (top layer of the brain) show mitters, especially monoamines, glutamate, GABA
abnormal structure. Theorists have suggested that (gamma-aminobutyric acid), and neuropeptides. The
white matter abnormalities result in overconnectiv- most replicated finding is that of peripheral hyperse-
ity between adjacent cortical areas and long-distance rotonemia (elevated levels of serotonin in blood).
cortical underconnectivity, resulting in superiority
in rote and concrete information processing but Assessment
impaired abstract, integrative thinking; this is a
dominant theoretical model of autism at present. Medical Assessment
Genetic contributions to autism have been a focus In the absence of specific medical concerns,
of research since Susan Folstein and Michael Rutter exhaustive medical workups for individuals with
identified a genetic contribution to its inheritance autism generally have limited clinical benefit; how-
in 1978. Concordance rates are high, with pairs of ever, hearing should always be assessed. Blood
siblings tending to have the same impairments or screening for fragile X may be warranted. Epilepsy
diagnoses. These rates are less than 100% in mono- occurs in 11% to 39% of cases, and referral to neu-
zygotic twins, and recurrence rates in siblings are rology is recommended for any concern about pos-
usually estimated at 2% to 10%. Environmental sible seizures. Psychiatrists can assess comorbidity,
or epigenetic (changes in gene expression not due including ADHD, depression, anxiety, and obses-
to changes in the DNA itself) factors could explain sive-compulsive disorder. If medication for medical
these rates. Only a minority of cases are linked to conditions or severe behaviors (e.g., seizures, aggres-
well-defined single gene or chromosomal disorders sion, sleeplessness, depression, poor attention) needs
such as fragile X, whereas many, individually rare to be considered, a psychiatrist or neurologist should
genes or chromosome regions have been identi- manage the case.
fied. Several genes implicated in autism are related
to components of the synapse. Some suggest that Neuropsychological Assessment
autism is a disorder of synaptic transmission.
Children with ASDs should have periodic neu-
Jonathan Sebat and colleagues reported that 10%
ropsychological assessments to describe the childs
of affected singletons had de novo (not seen in their
current profile of cognitive abilities and behavioral
parents) copy number variants in single stranded
challenges. Periodic reevaluations will help gauge
DNA loci (an unusual number of copies of a chro-
the success of treatment programs and detect any
mosome region without changes in the DNA making
deterioration of ability. An evaluation should assess
up that region). The implications of these findings
language, visuospatial skills, abstract thinking and
are that copy number variation may be associated
problem solving, memory, attention, and social cog-
with autism, that singleton (one family member with
nition; in very young children, the assessment may
an ASD) and multiplex (two or more first-degree
be limited to the development of language, motor,
relatives with an ASD) cases may differ genetically,
and nonverbal reasoning skills.
and that singleton cases may reflect variation in a
discouragingly broad array of possible loci. Clearly,
Behavioral Assessment
the genetics of autism are extremely complex, but
unraveling these complexities, particularly the trans- A behavioral assessment is designed to guide
mission of singleton versus multiplex cases, will lead treatment planning. A standardized instrument for
to more effective genetic counseling in the future. the evaluation of adaptive skills in individuals with
Chemical studies of neurotransmitters and other autism, such as the Vineland Adaptive Behavior
biomarkers such as cytokines (signaling molecules ScalesII, will assess communication, daily living,
whose increase may indicate trauma or infection) socialization, and motor skills. Problem behaviors
have also presented a very inconsistent and hetero- (e.g., social incapacity, resistance to change, self-
geneous set of findings, with lack of replication the injury, hyperactivity, aggressiveness) may require
rule rather than the exception, probably pointing evaluation. In most cases, a functional behavior
once again to the multiplicity of biological pro- assessment by a behaviorally trained psychologist
cesses potentially responsible for the autistic picture. will be essential to optimal treatment planning.
Automatic Behavior 93
Automatisms are behaviors that happen outside back toward normality, the more likely seizure is to
conscious controls. Claims that an offender was not occur.
fully conscious at the time of the crime imply lack Apart from automatisms observed in schizophre-
of cognitive scrutiny and will. Automatisms, along nia or during intoxications, three other conditions
with acts committed by accident, under duress, are associated with automatism in psychiatry:
compulsion, or threat, or from instinctively taking
avoiding action, are not voluntary acts and are not 1. Dissociations are coordinated physical acts
punishable. The concept of free will as determinative undertaken while groups of mental processes or
of voluntary action is central to an understanding of ideas are separated from the rest of the personality
automatism in law. so that they assume an independent existence; thus,
Automatisms result from medical conditions, they are dissociated from the normal stream of con-
external physical force, or serious emotional dis- sciousness. Dissociated acts escape the integrative
turbances that may cause gaps of consciousness or activity of the mind and are common in hysterical
interruptions in the thread of psychic life. During neurosis, multiple personalities, autoscopy (the per-
automatisms, a person may perform simple or com- ception of self in the exterior environment) and in
plex actions, more or less uncoordinated, without other out-of-body experiences, mystical phenomena,
being fully aware. Afterward, there may be confused states of possession, voodoo, and experiences of
memories or total amnesia for the episode. Acts that mediums during sances in spiritualism.
take place during an interruption in the psychic life 2. Psychological blows are unexpected and sud-
of the individual qualify as automatisms. The use of den emotional shocks, on witnessing catastrophes or
automatism as a defense against a criminal indict- on receiving news, that seriously devastate emo-
ment, although available in other latitudes, has been tional equanimity. A psychological blow defense
a concept mostly developed in the English-speaking presumes that any person, even one with intact per-
world. sonality structure and no history of mental prob-
Habitual and mechanized acts that are repetitive lems, could be overcome and dissociate. Based on
and learned (gesturing, walking, riding a bike, driv- R. v. Rabey, courts apply an objective test for a psy-
ing, etc.) or unconscious acts in the psychoanalytic chological blow that measures the gravity and sever-
sense, such as Freudian slips, take place while the ity of the psychological trauma in a person with no
person is conscious; hence, memory for the event is history of mental or personality difficulties; absent
preserved. These acts do not qualify as automatisms. this, courts will find for insane automatism, as in
However, deeply repressed materials may occasion- R. v. K.
ally burst through in catathymic explosions, those
uncontrollable emotional outbursts that are usually 3. Somnambulism is a state of dissociation in
accompanied by dissociation. These acts qualify as which, when the person sleeps, some fragment of the
automatisms. personality directs him into performing complicated
acts, as asserted in R. v. Tolson. As determined in
R. v. Parks, somnambulism is a normal form of
Neurology and Psychiatry automatism.
A presumed association between epileptic seizures
and violence was seminal to the development of Law
case law on automatism. Offenders who com- Three factors lie at the intersection between medi-
mit a crime during an epileptic attack are usually cine and law with regard to automatism as a defense:
found not criminally responsible. Automatisms are
also observed in complex partial epileptic seizures 1. Memory. Any one of the three memory func-
characterized by motionless stare, interruptions tions, registration, retention, or recall, may be
of ongoing behaviors, stereotyped non-purposeful affected in automatism. Memory storage is not pho-
movements, and subsequent amnesia. tographic; on recall, events are reconstructed accord-
Dazed, semi-conscious victims of concussions ing to life experiences, emotional needs, or
may display automatisms. Other brain conditions unconscious needs. Recall may not be possible
also may lead to automatisms because the faster (amnesia) when events are not registered (as during
metabolic changes happen, either from normality or intoxications), are lost (due to brain damage), or are
Automaticity 95
repressed (due to painful memories). Forgetting is a absence of will is a factor for a defense of automa-
function of memory as is remembering. Amnesia, tism. Automatisms negate the required mental
however, is not just forgetting but is a pathological state of voluntariness for commission of a crime;
process. Amnesia is crucial to an understanding of without voluntary control, there should be no
automatism; there is no automatism without amne- guilty mind.
sia, but not every case of amnesia is automatism. While the burden of proof for automatism rests
Determining the causes of amnesiaorganic or on the accused, mere claims of its existence are not
functional, conscious attempts at distorting facts enough in courts of law. To have credibility, the
(lying)and determining its timing, whether before claim requires an air of reality meaning that it
or after an event, are important clues to understand must possess a certain degree of plausibility whose
a claim of automatism. Clinically and at litigation, weight is to be determined at trial. If this test is met,
it is essential to determine how far before and after then, the prosecution bears the burden of disprov-
the trauma the amnesia extends. Pre-traumatic ing the defense; reasonable doubts that the accused
amnesia (retrograde amnesia) affects an interval pre- did not have the requisite volition lead to acquit-
ceding the injury, for which the individual has no tal following an algorithm of unconscious act, no
memory. Retrograde amnesia is short, usually less voluntary control, anterograde amnesia, external
than 30 minutes; periods of weeks may signal hys- factor, unlikely repetition, and air of reality. Only
terical manifestations. Anterograde amnesia devel- unconscious, involuntary acts qualify for a defense
ops after the trauma; it is longer and may last for of automatism.
months. Retrograde amnesia is not important at an Automatism is a total defense. Proof that a crime
automatism defense because the offense would have was committed during a state of insane automatism
happened before the trauma, which itself could have triggers application of dispositions for insane defen-
caused the amnesia. Only anterograde amnesia dants and transfer to specialized forensic facilities.
counts for automatism. A finding of sane automatism leads to full acquittal.
However, acquitting, on the basis of automatism,
2. Locus of cause. Causes of automatism are
someone who has committed a serious offense raises
internal or external. A malfunctioning of the mind
multiple legal and sociopolitical concerns.
resulting from personal weaknesses or mental condi-
tions is analogous to disease of the mind; these Julio Arboleda-Flrez
causes are deemed internal.Transient disturbances of
consciousness such as concussions are not consid- See also Amnesia; Automaticity; Autoscopic Phenomena;
ered diseases of the mind, and, thus, they constitute Consciousness and the Unconscious; Freedom of
external causes, as was determined in R. v. Quick. Action; Unconscious Emotions, Psychological
Perspectives
The internal/external test establishes the basis to
decide whether an automatic act is insane automa-
tism, meaning the act was caused by internal preex- Further Readings
isting mental pathology, or sane automatism, R. v. K., 2 O.R. 401 (1971).
meaning the act was due to external factors in the R. v. Parks, 75 C.C.C.3d 287 (S.C.C., 1992).
absence of preexisting mental problems. R. v. Quick, QB 910 (1973).
3. Likelihood of repetition. The putative associa- R. v. Rabey, 54 C.C.C.2d 1 (S.C.C., 1981).
tion between mental illness and unpredictable vio- R. v. Stone, 113 C.C.C.3d 158 (1997).
lent behavior underlies the need to determine R. v. Tolson, 23 Q.B.D. 168 (1889).
whether an automatic act was sane or insane autom-
atism. Internal factors due to mental conditions
might repeat, but external factors such as a physical
blow to the head or a psychological blow are
AUTOMATICITY
unlikely to repeat.
Automaticity represents one of the oldest and most
A guilty mind, mens rea, is not a factor for a popular concepts in psychology. Although histori-
defense of automatism, but because an act, actus cally most popular in the context of cognitive psy-
reus, is a crime only if it was willingly committed, chology, the concept has made inroads into various
96 Automaticity
other areas (e.g., social psychology). In general, the prohibits attention from contributing to it. For exam-
term is intended as a qualitative description of the ple, research on spatial attention and automaticity
processes supporting highly practiced tasks (e.g., has typically used manipulations that direct spatial
reading). These automatic processes can be con- attention toward or away from a stimulus. If the
trasted with controlled processes that support the processing of that stimulus does not require spatial
performance of less practiced or novel tasks. The attention, then directing spatial attention away from
concept of automaticity has inspired a fair amount of it should not affect its processing. To illustrate, to
debate among (mostly cognitive) psychologists. This test the claim that reading does not require spatial
debate has typically concerned either the definition attention, spatial attention can be drawn away from
of automaticity (e.g., should automaticity be viewed a prime word (i.e., a word presented before a target
as all-or-none, or along a continuum?) or the classi- word that is intended to prime target processing),
fication of a given skill as automatic (e.g., is reading and the impact of that prime word on the subsequent
automatic?). This entry attempts to provide a con- processing of a target word can be assessed. If word
sensus view of automaticity while highlighting where processing does not require spatial attention (i.e., is
disagreements or conceptual difficulties have arisen. automatic), then the prime word should still influence
In addition, where appropriate, examples are pro- processing of, and responses to, the target word when
vided from research on the automaticity of reading in spatial attention is drawn away from it. Conversely, if
order to provide concrete illustrations of the concept word processing requires spatial attention (i.e., is not
of automaticity in action. Reading is an ideal medium automatic), then drawing attention away from the
for this exercise, because researchers have long con- prime word should eliminate its influence on target
sidered automaticity in the context of the processes word processing. Research on other forms of atten-
involved in reading, and this work has revealed many tion (e.g., central attention) has used a similar logic
interesting controversies that are bound to apply to but with different manipulations of attention.
other purportedly automatic skills.
Automaticity has typically been conceptualized An Automatic Process Cannot Be Controlled
in terms of a set of criteria. Although there is some The control criterion can be broken down into two
disagreement about the specific criteria, there is a distinct sub-criteria. First, automatic processes do
modicum of consensus around the following three. not require intention. Intention can be defined in
An automatic process (a) does not require attention, terms of an individuals goals. An automatic process
(b) cannot be controlled, and (c) can occur outside does not need an explicit goal or act of will to be ini-
of awareness. Each of these criteria is reviewed in tiated; it will occur simply in response to the proper
turn, focusing on how each is assessed. stimulus.
The intentionality criterion may also be referred
An Automatic Process
to as the volition criterion. An automatic process
Does Not Require Attention
occurs involuntarily. Thus, an automatic process
Of all the criteria associated with automaticity, the is said to be stimulus-driven as opposed to goal-
idea that an automatic process does not require driven. For example, if a word is present, then the
attention has probably attracted the most inter- processes involved in reading it are engaged without
est. This particular criterion has evolved to contain the requirement that the individual intend to read
within it what might be considered sub-criteria asso- that word. The most widely accepted evidence that
ciated with different forms of attention. For exam- reading is automatic with regard to the intentional-
ple, an automatic process should not require spatial ity criterion is the Stroop effect. In a typical Stroop
attention, central attention, or any other form of experiment, the participants goal is to name the
attention (e.g., temporal attention). ink color of a words print (e.g., the word GREEN
The assessment of the attention criterion typi- might be presented in red, and the correct response
cally involves a manipulation designed to withhold would be red). Despite this explicit goal or intent,
a specific form of attention from contributing to the the participant can often be shown to have read the
process of interest. If a given process is automatic, word, even when reading the word is detrimental to
then it should be unaffected by a manipulation that performance (i.e., the printed word conflicts with
Automaticity 97
the ink color) and, therefore, is not likely inten- of the prime word is dependent on awareness. If
tional. A significant debate surrounds the conclusion semantic processing is automatic in the sense that
that processing of the putatively unattended and it does not require awareness of the word, then the
irrelevant word in traditional Stroop tasks always semantic priming effect should remain even if par-
takes place. ticipants are unaware of the words presentation.
The second sub-criterion related to control is that In contrast, if semantic processing is dependent
automatic processes are ballistic. A process is ballis- on awareness of the word, then semantic priming
tic if once started, it cannot be stopped. Thus, initia- should be eliminated when the mask renders the
tion of the process is a sufficient condition for the participants unaware of the prime. The conclusion
completion of that process. For example, suppose from this literature appears to be that processing is
we assume that the activation of a words semantic not dependent on awareness. That said, there is still
representation is the completion of word recogni- considerable debate as to what awareness is and
tion. Then, if word recognition is ballistic, a seman- how to measure it.
tic representation will always be activated following
initiation of the word recognition process. The stop- Conceptual Issues
signal paradigm, in which participants are signaled The concept of automaticity has inspired more
to stop at different points in the execution of a task, than its fair share of debate. One persistent area of
has been used to test the ballisticity criterion. This debate surrounds which criteria should be used to
criterion, which focuses on the control of a given identify a process as automatic. Three criteria have
process once it has been initiated, can be contrasted been described here. This list is not exhaustive, and
with the intentionality criterion, which focuses on different researchers assume different criteria. Other
the initiation of a process. It is possible to dissoci- criteria that have been proposed include that (a) auto-
ate these sub-criteria, for example, by demonstrating matic processes capture attention, (b) automatic pro-
either that process X does not require intention to cesses are fast, (c) automatic processes interfere with
begin, but that process X can be stopped midstream, nonautomatic processes but are not interfered with
or that process X requires an act of will to begin, but by nonautomatic processes, (d) automatic processes
once started cannot be stopped. do not require effort, and (e) automatic processes
are independent of expectancy. The uncertainty
An Automatic Process Does
surrounding the definition of an automatic process
Not Require Awareness
makes it critical that researchers be explicit about the
An automatic process does not require conscious criteria included in their definitions of automaticity.
monitoring. Demonstrations that a process does not Unfortunately, many researchers fail to do this, and
require awareness have typically relied on masked this failure leads to considerable confusion.
priming paradigms. In these paradigms, a stimulus Another important issue in the conceptualiza-
is presented and masked so that the participant is tion of automaticity concerns the extent to which
unaware of what was presented. If stimulus process- a given process must meet all (stated) criteria in
ing does not require awareness, then eliminating order to be considered automatic. Traditionally,
awareness via masking should not inhibit process- an all-or-none definition has been used. Recently,
ing of the masked stimulus. This paradigm has been however, a more piecemeal approach has been
used to determine whether semantic processing of adopted, wherein a given process is considered
a word requires awareness. When a target word automatic in terms of one criterion but not another.
(e.g., DOCTOR) is preceded by a related prime For example, reading may be automatic in the
(e.g., NURSE), processing of the former is facili- sense that it can occur outside awareness but not
tated relative to when the target word is preceded in the sense that it does not require attention. This
by an unrelated prime (e.g., TABLE). By compar- lowering of the bar, so to speak, likely reflects the
ing conditions wherein participants are aware of the realization that no single process meets all the crite-
prime word and conditions in which participants ria for automaticity.
are made unaware of the prime word via masking, The last major conceptual issue surrounds the
researchers can determine if semantic processing extent to which automaticity should be considered
98 Automaticity
Besner, D., Stolz, J. A., & Boutilier, C. (1997). The Stroop terms of underlying cerebral mechanisms. The
effect and the myth of automaticity. Psychonomic focus is then directed on the core type of autoscopic
Bulletin and Review, 4, 221225. experiences, heautoscopy, which is the encounter of
Hasher, L., & Zacks, R. T. (1979). Automatic and effortful a person with a phantom double (i.e., doppel-
processes in memory. Journal of Experimental gnger) of herself. This multisensory, psychologically
Psychology: General, 108, 356388. meaningful, and emotionally stirring experience has
Lachter, J., Forster, K. I., & Ruthruff, E. (2004). Forty-five received much attention in anthropological and
years after Broadbent (1958): Still no identification ethnological studies and in creative fiction as the
without attention. Psychological Review, 111, 880913.
motif of the double. The often profound symbol-
Logan, G. D. (1988). Toward an instance theory of
ism contained in folkloristic and belletristic accounts
automatization. Psychological Review, 76, 165178.
of heautoscopy is also found in clinical case reports
MacLeod, C. M., & Dunbar, K. (1988). Training and
and provides a challenge to a view of autoscopic
Stroop-like interference: Evidence for a continuum of
automaticity. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
phenomena that is solely based on neuropsycho-
Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 14, 126135.
logical mechanisms. Integrating formal aspects of an
Moors, A., & De Houwer, J. (2006). Automaticity: A autoscopic episode and its symbolic content requires
theoretical and conceptual analysis. Psychological one to transcend current-day cognitive neurology.
Bulletin, 132, 297326. The study of autoscopic phenomena may thus
Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and contribute in important ways to bridging the gaps
automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual between neuroscientific views of body and self and
learning, automatic attention and a general theory. the philosophy of the mind.
Psychological Review, 84, 127190.
Phenomenology and Cognitive
Neurology of Autoscopic Phenomena
AUTOSCOPIC PHENOMENA As early as the end of the 19th century, French and
German neuropsychiatrists recognized the need to
distinguish several types of autoscopic phenomena.
Have you ever seen your own face in a flash-like
The classification they proposed is based on phe-
vision, as if glancing into a suddenly exposed mirror
nomenological criteria and has remained valid. In
with the sole difference that there was no reflecting
fact, the traditional classification scheme was only
surface in the vicinity? Have you ever bumped into
rediscovered in Anglo-American medical literature
a figure, whom you first thought to be a stranger
around the turn of the following century, with its
but who gradually made himself recognized, by
typical urge to explain phenomenal experience in
an eery feeling of psychological affinity, as nobody
terms of underlying cerebral processes. Four major
else than yourself, your second self, or doppel-
types of autoscopic phenomena are discussed here,
gnger? Have you ever felt separated from your own
along with the neuropsychological mechanisms cur-
body, perhaps hovering a few meters above, look-
rently assumed to be at the heart of the phenomena.
ing down onto the body as if it were an empty shell
Some rare types and related conditions are also men-
you had just hatched from? As different as these
tioned.
scenarios may appear, they depict experiences sub-
sumed under the heading of autoscopic phenomena.
Autoscopic Hallucinations:
Autoscopic phenomena form a heterogenous class
Seeing an Image of Oneself
of reduplicative experiences of ones own body and
self. Literally, autoscopy means seeing oneself, but In an autoscopic hallucination, a person sees
an autoscopic experience commonly involves far herself (often only the face or upper parts of the
more than the visual senses. body) as reflected in a mirror. This specular form
This entry describes the classification of auto- or mirror hallucination (in French, hallucina-
scopic phenomena as currently accepted in medical tion spculaire) is almost always a consequence of
and psychological literature. Based on phenomenol- brain damage, centered mainly around occipital or
ogy, this classification allows a rough interpretation occipito-temporal areas. Whether the extrastriate
of the different types of autoscopic experiences in body area is specifically involved is a matter of
100 Autoscopic Phenomena
sense of spatial unity between body and self (disem- reflecting surfaces or when looked at directly. Usually,
bodiment). The environment seems to be perceived this negative visual hallucination is accompanied by
from a location not coinciding with ones physical a similar failure in the somesthetic domain, that is,
eyes; visual impressions during an out-of-body expe- the non-awareness of having a body (asomatogno-
rience are thus glimpses of the world from the minds sia). Inner heautoscopy (in French, hautoscopie
eye. These glimpses may or may not contain an image interne) involves the visualization of inner organs in
of ones body. If they do, this image is explicitly identi- extracorporeal space. Many authors are reluctant to
fied as ones own body and not as a second self or consider this experience an autoscopic phenomenon;
doppelgnger. Out-of-body experiences are reported it was frequently described in the early 20th century
by persons in life-threatening situations and are fre- and almost exclusively in patients with hysterical dis-
quently experienced by individuals with neurological orders. All types of autoscopic phenomena discussed
disorders such as epilepsy and migraine. The neuro- in this entry have been reported as poliopic variants,
physiological mechanism is thought to be a transient that is, a multiplication rather than a duplication of
disintegration of vision, touch, and proprioception in ones face, body, and/or self. Poliopic heautoscopy
multisensory cortical areas at the junction between can be conceived of as a whole-body variant of the
occipital, temporal, and parietal lobes. Especially illusory multiplication of body parts or supernumer-
in cases of epilepsy, this disintegration can wax and ary phantom limbs. Whether childrens imaginary
wane, such that a person may experience a kind of companions, vivid autobiographical memories
double consciousness or an intermediate state with visualization of oneself as an agent, or certain
between heautoscopy and an out-of-body experience. hypnagogic hallucinations should be brought into
the conceptual vicinity to autoscopic phenomena is
The Feeling of a Presence: The Invisible Double debatable. The syndromes of delusional misidenti-
This is the distinct awareness of another being in fication do not have an autoscopic nature; the term
the near extracorporeal space. It is comparable to double in those contexts refers to an impostor of
the phantom limb phenomenon in that the location another person or object, whose existence is inferred
and extension of the felt presence can be precisely rather than perceived.
pinpointed in space, and despite the absence of any
visual confirmation, the feeling is overwhelmingly Beyond Neurology: The Reflective
real. The other being is an invisible doppelgnger, Mirror of Heautoscopy
even if the presence is rarely consciously identified Phantasmal reflections of ones own body and self
as a second self. Self-identification is often inferred, have long stimulated folk-psychological and aca-
however, from the observation that the nearby pres- demic imagination about the unity of mind, the mul-
ence is following ones own steps, mimicking ones tiplicity of personality, and the origin of the soul.
actions, or knowing ones thoughts. Frequently Out-of-body experiences, cross-culturally largely
observed in schizophrenia, the feeling of a pres- invariant, are at the heart of dualistic notions about
ence is also reported by neurological patients with body and soul, and continue to nourish beliefs in an
lesions of a predominantly parietal localization and afterlife. On the other hand, in many cultures dop-
tends to co-occur with out-of-body experiences and pelgngers have the status of a harbinger of deatha
heautoscopy. Correspondingly, these three types of justified view, perhaps, given the statistically short
autoscopic phenomena can be induced by electrical survival times after stroke, brain tumors, and other
stimulation of similar sites within the parietal cortex. serious neurological diseases. The popularity of the
The feeling of a presence is also known by moun- motif of the double in creative fiction, peaking in
taineers and explorers, particularly from episodes of Romantic literature, is undoubtedly due to the phe-
exhaustion, lack of oxygen, and social deprivation. nomenological varieties of heautoscopy. The essence
of this particular type of autoscopic experience is best
Rare Types of Autoscopic Phenomena
captured in the words of French artist Jean Cocteau
and Related Conditions
(18891963), who once demanded that mirrors
Negative heautoscopy (also asomatoscopy) should reflect a little more before throwing back
refers to the not-seeing of ones own body, either on images. In fact, heautoscopic mirrors defy the laws
102 Availability Heuristic
of optics. They are cognitively reflective, in Cocteaus Lukianowicz, N. (1958). Autoscopic phenomena. Archives
sense, in that they confront a person with a highly of Neurology and Psychiatry, 80, 199220.
integrated, embodied image of the self. Handedness Menninger-Lerchenthal, E. (1946). Der eigene
is maintained, which gives the image a fair portion Doppelgnger [The own double]. Bern, Switzerland:
of autonomy and the potential to develop a will of Hans Huber.
its own. In creative writing, this will is often con- Mikorey, M. (1952). Phantome und Doppelgnger
trary to a protagonists intentions, and the emerg- [Phantoms and doubles]. Munich, Germany: Lehmanns.
ing antagonism classically culminates in killing the Rank, O. (1971). The double: A psychoanalytic study.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
doppelgnger, that is, symbolically killing oneself
(Original work published 1914)
lively examples can be found in the work of Oscar
Sollier, P. (1903). Les phnomnes dautoscopie [The
Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray), Edgar Allan
phenomena of autoscopy]. Paris, France: Alcan.
Poe (William Wilson), and Guy de Maupassant (Le
Horla). A similarly dramatic hostility can be found in
clinical case reports, albeit there are also benevolent
doppelgngers, especially in cases of anosognosia AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC
(the nonrecognition or active denial of ones own ill-
ness) where a patient may pity his second self for the This entry provides a brief explanation and back-
bad shape he fails to recognize in himself. ground for the availability heuristic, a cognitive
Autoscopic phenomena thus form a set of human process hypothesized to underlie peoples intuitive
experiences formidably suited to illuminate the judgments of probability.
borderlands of neurology, psychiatry, and philos-
ophy. Their study spans from visual self-recognition Heuristics and Biases
to the localization of the self in space and finally to The availability heuristic is a theoretical construct
issues of perspective taking in a double sense, visuo- that forms part of the influential heuristics and biases
spatially and psychologically. framework for explaining intuitive judgment in
Peter Brugger humans, pioneered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos
Tversky in the 1970s. From this perspective, because
See also Anosognosia; Capgras Delusion; Consciousness of their limited time, knowledge, and computational
and Embodiment; Self-Consciousness ability, in general, people cannot make judgments
according to the often complex normative rules of
Further Readings logic, probability theory, and statistics. Instead, they
have to resort to simpler judgment heuristics that
Blanke, O., & Mohr, C. (2005). Out-of-body experience, exploit natural assessments. Natural assessments
heautoscopy, and autoscopic hallucination of benefit from naturally existing propensities of mem-
neurological origin. Implications for neurocognitive
ory and perception that are conveniently available
mechanisms of corporeal awareness and self
and easily assessed. These judgmental heuristics are
consciousness. Brain Research Reviews, 50, 184199.
often useful, but sometimes they lead to systematic
Brugger, P. (2002). Reflective mirrors: Perspective-taking in
and serious cognitive biases.
autoscopic phenomena. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 7,
With regard to confidence (probability) judg-
179194.
Brugger, P., Regard, M., & Landis, T. (1997). Illusory
ment, the key notion has been variable substitu-
reduplication of ones own body: Phenomenology and tion, according to which the complex judgment of
classification of autoscopic phenomena. Cognitive probability is substituted with a simpler natural
Neuropsychiatry, 2, 1938. assessment. Assessment of probability in the sense
Cocteau, J. (1932). Essai de critique indirecte [An essay of implied by probability theory and statistics involves
indirect criticism]. Paris, France: Grasset. consideration of all possible outcomes and their fre-
Dening, T. R., & Berrios, G. E. (1994). Autoscopic quencies of occurrence. In the face of this complex-
phenomena. British Journal of Psychiatry, 165, ity, it is proposed that people substitute probability
808817. with a subjective variable that is conveniently avail-
Keppler, C. F. (1972). The literature of the second self. able and easier to assess. The availability heuristic,
Tucson: University of Arizona Press. specifically, suggests that the ease with which an
Availability Heuristic 103
event can be brought to mind or imagined is used from the processes at the encoding of information
as a proxy for probability, as when you assess the into memory or from processes at the retrieval of
probability of an event by considering how easy it is the information. Events that are strongly emo-
to retrieve similar events from memory. One could tionally charged or inherently interesting in other
estimate, for example, the risk of dying from pneu- respects tend to receive more attention and there-
monia by assessing the ease with which one can fore to become better encoded in memory. If you,
come up with examples of people that have died for example, read a list of names of people, half
from pneumonia. If it is difficult to come up with of which are famous women (e.g., Madonna), the
such examples, the risk of dying from pneumonia is other half unknown males, afterward you are likely
presumably fairly low. to overestimate the percentage of female names on
Although availability may be a useful guide to the list, simply because they receive more attention
probability in many real-life circumstances, because and become better encoded in memory. Other judg-
the ease of retrieval or imagination is often affected ment biases arise from the way memory is searched
also by factors other than probability or frequency, at retrieval. For example, in experiments in which
use of the heuristic may produce a number of biases, people are asked if there are more English words
or cognitive illusions, in probability judgment. These starting with the letter r or more words that have
biases may arise in two slightly different ways, either the letter r in third place, people erroneously tend to
as a consequence of biases in the external flow of guess that that there are more words that start with
information itself or because of the properties of r. The reason seems to be that we find it easier to
encoding and retrieval relevant to human memory. search memory for words starting with a letter than
for words with letters in third place; therefore, the
External Origins of Availability Bias first category is more available and appears to be
The reliance on availability may in part produce more frequent.
biased probability or frequency judgments because It is clear that peoples judgments are often
of biases in the external information flow a person affected by the general sort of biases implied by
encounters in his or her environment, which make the availability heuristic. Recent research has con-
the ease of retrieval a misleading cue to the popula- centrated on determining the relative importance
tion frequencies. For example, peoples perception of putative external versus cognitive origins of the
of the frequency of different death causes correlates availability biases, if the judgments are driven
more strongly with the frequencies reported in media primarily by the content of the retrieved material or
than with the true fatality frequencies. People thus specifically by the ease or fluency of the retrieval
tend to overestimate the rate of violent and dramatic experience, and efforts have been made to relate the
deaths that receive the most attention by the media availability heuristic to more detailed computational
(e.g., murder, car accidents) whereas they underes- models of memory.
timate the risk of more mundane causes of death Peter Juslin
(e.g., pneumonia, cardiovascular disease). One may
overestimate the prevalence of ones own opinions See also Belief and Judgment; Debiasing; Representativeness
and values in the population, simply because one Heuristic; Similarity
tends to socialize specifically with people who have
similar opinions and values. In a variety of domains, Further Readings
people are exposed to selective information and to
the extent that people are unaware of this fact, reli- Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., & Kahneman, D. (2002).
Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive
ance on availability yields biased judgments.
judgment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Schwarz, N., & Wnke, M. (2002). Experiential and
Internal Origins of Availability Bias
contextual heuristics in frequency judgment: Ease of
A second, perhaps psychologically more interesting, recall and response scales. In P. Sedlmeier & T. Betsch
origin of bias derives from the operating principles (Eds.), Etc. Frequency processing and cognition
of the human mind. These biases may derive either (pp. 89108). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
B
behavior is followed by an unpleasant consequence
BEHAVIORAL THERAPY or by no reinforcement, its frequency will decrease
until that specific behavior has been extinguished,
As the development of behavioral therapy has which means that the behavior has disappeared.
always been closely related to new evolutions in psy-
chological research, it is hard to give a concise and
Wave 1: Behavioral Therapy
definite definition. Nevertheless, throughout the past
century, this therapeutic approach has become the Based on John B. Watsons behaviorist principle that
most practiced, most researched, and best evidenced psychology should only research overt behavior,
strategy to treat psychopathology in both adults and behavioral therapy originated in three different and
children. This entry will describe how current behav- independent locations, guided by Joseph Wolpe in
ioral therapy developed in three waves. For each South Africa, Hans Eysenck in the United Kingdom,
wave, the entry will describe the theoretical foun- and Skinner in the United States. Mainly following
dation, some examples of related therapeutic tech- the principles of classical conditioning and operant
niques, and some important points of discussion. learning, these pioneers approached maladaptive
Next to other important research findings, behavior as a reaction to a specific context (so-called
the discovery of two learning principles has been stimulus-response [S-R] chains) in which this reac-
extremely important for the development of behav- tion should be replaced by more adaptive behavior.
ioral therapy. On the one hand, Ivan Pavlov dem- They deliberately objected to taking into account the
onstrated that dogs learn that certain stimuli in a non-observable inner world of the client and thus
context (footsteps or a sound signal) function as opposed difficult-to-investigate classic psychoana-
predictors for food serving, which lead them, after lytic claims that maladaptive behavior stems from
some trials, to produce saliva in anticipation of food. unconscious processes.
This research has led to an increase in understanding Behavior therapists abstract a thorough so-called
of so-called classical conditioning principles. These functional analysis from the clients description of
learning experiences lead an organism to ascribe their maladaptive behavior and the contexts in which
meaning to a context-stimulus. On the other hand, they demonstrate this behavior. This functional anal-
B. F. Skinner demonstrated that pigeons learn to ysis contains the relevant context-related stimuli, the
press a lever if this behavior is followed by receiving behaviors, and the consequences of these behaviors
a food pellet. This led to an increased understanding and leads therapists to understand the forces that
of so-called operant learning principles. These learn- influence the provoking/eliciting or continuation of
ing experiences lead an organism to increasingly maladaptive behavior. Several techniques have been
show a certain behavior if that behavior is followed proposed that can be adopted to change the mal-
by a pleasant consequence (or reinforcement). If adaptive behavior. Therapists can teach clients to
105
106 Behavioral Therapy
avoid exposing themselves to the stimuli that elicit a theory in which he stated that the development,
maladaptive behavior (e.g., teach smokers to avoid maintenance, and relapse of depression can be
places where many people smoke). Therapists can explained by the influence of what he called cog-
suggest that clients adopt more adaptive behaviors in nitive schemas. Cognitive schemas were described
certain contexts (e.g., teach smokers to chew gum in as a structure for screening, coding and evaluat-
a smoking provoking context). Therapists can ing impinging stimuli (Beck, 1964, p. 564). It was
influence clients to institute consequences (e.g., if assumed that information processing within the
smokers smoke, they might punish themselves, or if organism is more or less a symbolic behavioral chain
they avoid smoking, they might reward themselves). that is affected by external or internal stimuli (input)
In spite of the apparent effectiveness of these and that the outcome is observable in the behavior
approaches in the treatment of, for example, fear- that one is demonstrating, guided by these cognitive
related behavior problems, obesity, and addiction- processes (output). On the basis of cognitive sche-
related problems, this classic behaviorist approach mas, an individual interprets new experiences in a
has been criticized, as it appears difficult to sustain meaningful way. Schemas direct attention to previ-
the view that thoughts and cognitions have no influ- ously stored information to generate expectancies
ence on maladaptive behavior. Furthermore, behav- and interpretations for new experiences. Research
ioral therapy has been criticized for not finding a has shown that depressive individuals have cognitive
good strategy for treating, for example, depression- schemas with less adaptive content, leading to three
related pathology. different biases in the processing of information:
whether the assumptions are correct), or using cited treatment programs. As noted by Steven Hayes
psycho-education to provide accurate information and colleagues, these programs have in common
about the content of maladaptive schemas. that rather than focusing on changing psychologi-
In addition, Becks theory has been further refined cal events directly, these interventions seek to change
and has led to the development of a more encom- the function of those events and the individuals rela-
passing theory with regard to maladaptive schemas tionship to them through strategies such as mind-
that are constructed early in life in interaction with fulness, acceptance, or cognitive defusion [a form
parents or other important caregivers and that later of cognitive distancing] (Hayes, Luoma, Bond,
influence the development of psychopathology. In Masuda, & Lillis, 2006, p. 4).
line with the acknowledgment of maladaptive cogni- The most important treatment strategy according
tive schemas, Jeffrey Young has developed the cogni- to these new approaches is to help clients experi-
tive schema theory, distinguishing different so-called ence their internal struggle with unfavorable cogni-
early maladaptive schemas and providing thera- tions or emotions instead of experientially avoiding
peutic strategies to tackle the different maladaptive internal cognitive or emotional information. If the
schemas underlying a wide variety of symptoms of urge to avoid negative experiences guides behavior,
psychopathology, including those that character- individuals will no longer try to accomplish personal
ize axis II disorders (more specifically, personality goals and pursue personal values. Instead, they will
disorders). be overly focused on (mostly maladaptive) behavior
Although the cognitive revolution within that aims to avoid negative emotions and interferes
behavioral therapy has led to the development of with personal goals and values. By receiving train-
often well-established evidence-based cognitive- ing in so-called mindfulness skills, clients learn to
behavioral treatment protocols, many controver- stop avoiding negative cognitions and emotions and
sial issues remain. This is partly due to the fact begin to accept them and to stay with their mind
that research on cognitive psychology and cogni- in the present. During these training sessions, cli-
tive therapy has been developing rather indepen- ents learn to meditate. Clients learn to focus their
dently, leading to a gap between research findings attention on the actual present and to stop being
and therapeutic theory. It also remains uncertain distracted by (maladaptive) thoughts or emotions.
whether focusing on maladaptive cognitions has an Once they have acquired this ability, clients will be
additional effect above mere activating alternative more skilled in accepting their internal struggles
behaviors. In addition, incorporating cognitive treat- instead of following their urge to solve or avoid
ment techniques within behavioral therapy has led their emotional distress; in the meantime, they can
to a mix of treatment ingredients that makes it hard continue working toward what they consider to be
to identify which are the real mechanisms of change. important goals in their lives.
Furthermore, there seems to be some slowing down Increasing clients mindfulness skills results in a
in the development of cognitive therapy with only a significantly improved quality of life in patients with
few true innovations to improve efficacy. It is inter- chronic pain and in clients with recurrent depression.
esting that therapists tend to be rather reluctant to Current research is investigating the effectiveness
use cognitive techniques; this may be because these of ACT and MBCT in treating a very wide variety
techniques focus so strongly on rationality and cog- of symptoms. Although this implies that the value of
nitive skills, seemingly at the expense of emotions. these new approaches requires more evaluation, the
therapeutic community is becoming increasingly
enthusiastic about using these new strategies.
Wave 3: Acceptance and Commitment
In summary, this brief overview shows how
Therapy and Mindfulness Based
behavioral therapy is a therapeutic approach that
Cognitive Therapy
continues to be under construction. Following
Following this dissatisfaction, cognitive behavioral new findings and developments in experimental,
therapists started developing entirely new thera- neurological, clinical, and other fields of psychology,
peutic approaches of which acceptance and com- the therapeutic strategies continue to be adapted
mitment therapy (ACT) and mindfulness based and reevaluated. This evidence-based therapeutic
cognitive therapy (MBCT) currently are the most approach is probably one of the most important
108 Behaviorism
values of behavioral therapy, as it improves the qual- the movement in 1913 and it was extended and
ity of mental health care offered. The downside is further popularized by Edwin Guthrie in the mid-
the often wide gap between research and its transla- 20th century. During the same period, Clark Hull
tion into helpful techniques that can be successfully attempted to transform all of psychology into
applied. a rigorous science that still exists as theoretical
behaviorism. Finally, B. F. Skinner created radical
Guy Bosmans and Caroline Braet
behaviorism as a philosophy of the science of psy-
See also Anxiety Disorders; Behaviorism; Borderline
chology, but he is better known for the application
Personality Disorder of behavioral methods in education, the treatment of
psychological dysfunction, and elsewhere.
Further Readings John B. Watson
Beck, A. T. (1964). Thinking and depression: 2. Theory and Although Edward Thorndike introduced behav-
therapy. Archives of General Psychiatry, 10, 561571.
iorism in 1898, when he showed how the use of
Hayes, S. C., Luoma, J., Bond, F., Masuda, A., & Lillis, J.
rewards and punishers (the law of effect) is far more
(2006). Acceptance and commitment therapy: Model,
useful than had been suspected, Watson popularized
processes, and outcomes. Behaviour Research and
it, beginning with a combative paper published in
Therapy, 44(1), 125.
1913 and titled Psychology From the Standpoint
Kendall, P. C., & Braswell, L. (1985). Cognitive-behavioral
therapy for impulsive children. New York, NY: Guilford
of the Behaviorist. In that paper, Watson expanded
Press. the domain of psychology, which, aside from
Meichenbaum, D. H. (1977). Cognitive-behavior Thorndikes work, had been largely restricted to the
modification. An integrative approach. New York, NY: analysis of verbal reports of conscious experience by
Plenum Press. adult human subjects. If psychology is the study of
Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned reflexes: An investigation behavior, then it need not involve verbal report, and
of the physiological activity of the cerebral cortex. a variety of populationsincluding children, people
London, UK: Oxford University Press. with certain mental disorders, and even animals
Skinner, B. F. (1935). Two types of conditioned reflex and a could be studied.
pseudo type. Journal of General Psychology, 12, 6677.
Young, J. E., Klosko, J. S., & Weishaar, M. (2003). Schema Mental Activity and the Goal of Psychology
therapy: A practitioners guide. New York, NY: Guilford Watson did not throw out the mind, as is com-
Press.
monly assumed. He merely followed Thorndike
in treating mental activity as a form of behavior.
Thinking, feeling, remembering, imagining, and see-
BEHAVIORISM ing are not causes for what we say and dothey are
part of our behavior. He defined the goal of psychol-
Just as there are many cognitive psychologies, ogy to be the study of stimulus-response relations,
there are many varieties of behaviorism. All behav- emphasizing that stimulus could be a discrete event,
iorisms hold that behavior (activity) is the subject like a light flash or a phobic stimulus, or a molar
matter of psychology, in contrast with psychology event, extending over long periods, like a method
defined solely as the study of conscious experience. of teaching reading or the redistribution of wealth.
Some forms of behaviorism hold that behavior is Response was treated the same way: Depending on
significant in its own right. Other forms are actually your purpose, it could be an eyeblink or a decrease
cognitive (mediational) and treat behaviors as mere in crime.
indicators of underlying processes. Most current
Pattern Reactions
applications of psychology are based on some form
of behavioral approach. Although Watson had a masters degree in biology,
This entry constitutes a brief overview of behav- he believed that behavior was important in its own
iorism through a summary of the views of four right and that biological underpinnings were only
well-known behaviorists. John B. Watson founded distractions. Yet, he argued that behavior involves
Behaviorism 109
the whole body and we always see pattern reactions, Guthrie felt that rewards and punishments
involving the three groups of behavior. Thus, at were overemphasized in psychology and that they
any moment we are moving, feeling emotion, and work only when they result in new behaviors that
communicating, in different degrees (in Watsons substitute for previous behaviors. His writings are
words, manual, visceral, and laryngeal habits). For filled with examples illustrating this process and the
example, while making an important decision, I may reader cannot help but notice Guthries constant
pace the floor, feel my heart rate increase, and talk concern with practical matters.
to myself. Watson believed that thinking involves Space limits prohibit further discussion of
all of these behaviors, as does anger and imagination Guthries theory, but the interested reader will find
and everything else that we do. countless practical applications to daily life and to
education in his 1952 The Psychology of Learning.
Treating Phobias
Mary Cover Jones assisted Watson in the test- Clark Hull: We Are All Machines
ing of at least five methods of eliminating phobic Drive Theory
reactions in young children. After treating dozens
of young patients, they settled on the method of The 1940s and 1950s were dominated by
counterconditioning, later popularized by the psy- the behaviorism of Hull and his followers, which
chiatrist Joseph Wolpe and now widely used. Briefly, epitomized stimulus-response (S-R) learning theory.
the method consists of pairing the phobic stimulus Educated as an engineer, Hull viewed all organ-
with a competing stimulus, such as a favored food isms as machines constantly acting to maintain
or muscle relaxation, in such a way as to substitute homeostasis. This means that we constantly work to
relaxation for fear. maintain ideal levels of nutrients in the body, blood
Watsons academic career ended after a 1920 pressure, body temperature, and so on, as popular-
scandal and he went into advertising, where he ized by Walter Cannon at Harvard (following the
quickly became successful. He was one of the main French physiologist, Claude Bernard). Thus, we are
figures who transformed advertising from a pro- always in a state of need for something, whether it
vider of information about products to a vehicle of be food, water, warmth, comfort, or something else.
persuasion, as it has remained. When a need motivates action, it acts as a drive.
All through our lives, we act to reduce drives: This
was a popular view during the 20th century, held by
Edwin Guthrie and Stereotypy
many others, including Sigmund Freud, who pub-
Guthrie was a behaviorist who presented the sim- lished his views on that subject in 1915. For Hull,
plest possible theory that stressed the prevalence of rewards (reinforcers) always reduce drives or are
stereotypy. That is, in any situation, we do (think, associated with other things that reduce drives.
move, feel) as we did the last time we were in that Hulls major work, Principles of Behavior, pub-
situation. Because the present situation can never lished in 1943, ensured his leadership in experimen-
be the same as a previous situation, our behavior tal psychology. His theory was laid out as a series
varies. To change our behavior, we should use any of postulates, all of which were true or were widely
means necessary to produce the behavior we want believed to be true. For example, the first postulate
in the situations we want. For example, Guthrie stated that stimulation, say on the skin, leaves an
suggested that if we want to train a dog to come aftereffect that persists for a longer or shorter time
on command, we would not repeat the command, depending on the strength of stimulation and other
Come, if the dog does not come, because that factors. The fourth postulate holds that stimuli
attaches the command to the wrong response. So, present when a response is followed by reinforce-
we offer food or use a rope to pull the dog to us. ment (drive reduction) become attached to that
If we want to eliminate a behavior, we substitute response and form S-R habits, constituting all cases
an incompatible activityGuthrie suggested eating of learning.
apples as an alternative to smoking. However, in his Hull insisted on clear language rather than wea-
own case he found that it was possible to smoke sel words, and he insisted on quantifying every-
while eating. thing. He developed equations to predict behavior in
110 Behaviorism
all kinds of situations, and, with his many followers, mechanisms, we have a theory and usually neglect
he was successful enough to influence workers in the behavior that we are ostensibly explaining.
industrial psychology, social psychology, and those
attempting to assess need for achievement and other Time and Contingencies
needs during the 1950s and 1960s. Even in the 21st Often, theories are concocted because we do not
century, Hulls influence is clear: S-R psychologys appreciate the fact that behavior occurs over time
simplicity appeals to many people. and cannot be understood if we examine only dis-
crete snapshots. As Aristotle taught, one swallow
B. F. Skinner: Not S-R Psychology doesnt make a summer and one honest act doesnt
In 1938, Skinner published The Behavior of constitute honesty. Love, intelligence, and memory
Organisms, a book that remains a mystery to many cannot be understood except as patterns of behav-
readers. That is because Skinners operant psy- ior occurring over time. To take a simple example,
chology is very different from other behaviorisms I imagine the house I grew up in, and I can do this
and from all cognitive psychologies. In later publi- because of a long history living there as a child and
cations, he introduced radical behaviorism, a phi- because of frequent recollections. But we might teach
losophy of science and mind that further baffles children that we have the image of the house in
many readers. The following sketch cannot fully our mind, because a child cannot understand the
clarify all of this, but his 1974 popular book, About concept of behavioral history. Both William Baum
Behaviorism, is a good source for interested readers. and Howard Rachlin elaborated and extended this
point of view.
Radical Behaviorism The emphasis on behavior over time led to the
Skinner introduced radical behaviorism in 1963, development of schedules of reinforcement in the
in a piece titled Behaviorism at Fifty, a reference 1950s; for the first time, behaviors could be precisely
to Watsons 1913 diatribe. He contrasted this with controlled over days, weeks, months, or years. This
methodological behaviorism, which is the view of approach could explain such diverse phenomena as
the old S-R psychologies and of cognitive psychol- why gambling casinos are so successful and how
ogy. Methodological behaviorists stress scientific to arrange payoffs and penalties to improve educa-
method and observable behavior: They believe that tion, increase workers production, and treat psy-
we can study the body and other physical things chological maladjustment. Contingencies refer to
but not the mind, as ones mental activity cannot be arrangements of consequences for specific behaviors
observed by others. in specific situations, exemplified in reinforcement
Skinners radical behaviorism is different and schedules and in myriad applications to human
questions the mind/body distinction. The real dis- problems. In important respects, Skinners work
tinction is between private/public, and psychol- represents a return to Watsons way of thinking,
ogy must include both. In subsequent writings, he although Skinner never thought so.
proposed ways in which we may know the private
Inspiration
(mental) world of another. Thus it is incorrect to say
that Skinner opposed the study of the mind. Skinners greatest influence may lie in the inspi-
ration he lent to countless others. The Association
Theories Are Unnecessary for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI) included
How could Skinner argue against the use of theo- more than 16,500 members in 2008/2009. He also
ries while he appeared to be introducing one of his inspired some of the leading figures in modern
own? The answer lies in what he meant by theory, psychology, from Baum and Rachlin to the social
of course. He felt that, as long as we refer to behav- psychologist Daryl Bem, whose theory of self-
ior (including thinking, seeing, and the rest) and the perception exemplifies Skinners thinking.
environment (stimuli, consequences of responding),
Cognitive Revolution?
no theory is involved, but when we refer to under-
lying causes of behavior, such as cognitions, S-R In the 1960s, a so-called cognitive revolution
habits, brain mechanisms, or information processing occurred in reaction to popular interpretations of
Belief and Judgment 111
conclude that the answer is 4r2. This judgment famous counterexamples apparently showing that
may lead me to acquire the belief that the formula a subject can have a justified true belief that p and
is 4r2. However, judgments do not always lead to yet fail to know that p. Subsequent work (beyond
belief acquisition. In an oral exam, my judgment the scope of this entry) attempts to provide a better
may simply manifest my long-standing belief that analysis of knowledge in terms of belief, or to show
4r2 is the formula. Moreover, already believing that that there can be none.
the formula is 4r2 because my professor has told We can believe falsehoods, but deliberation as
me, I can set out to prove it to myself. If successful, to whether to believe that p appears to be guided
that process will end in the judgment that 4r2 is the solely by deliberation as to ps truth. We do not, for
formula, but no new belief is acquired. example, consider whether wed like it to be the case
Is judgment always the acquisition or manifesta- that p. Controversy surrounds the formulation and
tion of belief? An example adapted from Christopher explanation of this transparency thesis. One issue is
Peacocke suggests not. A department head sincerely whether truth is the norm of belief, in that one ought
judges that gender is no indication of applicant to believe p only if p is true. Another is whether
quality. However, for years, his hiring behavior has we have any epistemic freedom to choose what to
consistently favored male candidates over equally believe. Active deliberation is a matter of reach-
qualified female candidates. Although he judges that ing or suspending judgment. Moreover, judgments
gender is no indication of applicant quality, he seems (because they are actions as opposed to states) are
to believe otherwise. of the right category to be free or constrained. These
We are not actively involved in every belief loss issues must be considered in relation to judgment
or acquisition of ours. Memories fade overnight. In and not just belief.
contrast, judging is something we do. Agents enjoy The relationship between transparency and self-
a distinctive perspective on their own acts; arguably, knowledge provides a case in point. Sometimes we
they are in a position to know what they are doing discover what we believe in the same way that third
as they act. Consequently, it is plausible that what parties do. Thus, the department head in the earlier
marks out an event of belief loss or acquisition as example may acknowledge his sexist beliefs when
a judgment is the subjects awareness of the event confronted with the systematic bias in his hiring
as something that he or she is doing. As Matthew decisions. However, normally, we take ourselves
Soteriou develops this approach, an event is a judg- to enjoy special first-personal access to our beliefs.
ing that p just if one concurrently believes that one is Some suggest that transparency helps explain this.
judging that p. Asked if you believe that p, (by transparency) you
Peter Geach suggests that because the whole con- simply consider whether p. If you conclude that p
tent of a judgment must be grasped at once, judg- is true, you are justified in believing that you believe
ments must be instantaneous. This makes it hard that p. It is initially opaque how endorsement of a
to see how judgments could be conscious mental proposition concerning the world could justify a
actions as opposed to mere changes of mental state. proposition concerning ones mind. However, once
Soteriou replies that judgments cannot be character- we recognize that judgments are actions, we can
ized exhaustively in terms of their contents. A judg- exploit our distinctive agential perspective in giv-
ment that p always has some unfolding conscious ing an account of self-knowledge. Recall Soterious
mental event (e.g., the entertaining of speech sounds view that one judges that p just if one concurrently
in ones auditory imagination) as its vehicle. believes that one is judging that p. If this is right,
then this distinctively first-personal knowledge of
what one is doing in judging that p can ground the
Epistemology
further judgment that one believes that p.
Knowledge is a factive mental state: If you know One either knows a proposition or does not; there
that p, p is true. Neither belief nor judgment is fac- is no middle ground. It is controversial whether the
tive. Traditionally it was assumed that belief con- same is true of belief. We can be more or less confi-
stituted knowledge when true and sufficiently dent in our attitude toward a proposition we have
justified. In 1963, Edmund Gettier offered two considered, without outright believing or disbelieving
Belief and Judgment 113
it. Impressed by this, some philosophers introduce inputs (e.g., seeing flames) and outputs (e.g., running
the idea of a subjects degree of belief, or credence, away) as well as relations to other mental states.
in a proposition. A natural way to try to establish Judgments will typically form a crucial class of these
a subjects credence in a proposition is by establish- inputs and outputs. Functionalism is an extremely
ing the shortest odds at which they will accept an broad church. Its members divide as to whether psy-
affordable bet regarding its truth. The shorter the chological roles are determined by conceptual analy-
odds they accept, the greater their credence will be. sis or scientific investigation. They also divide as to
Thus, Stephanie has a credence of 0.25 in Brazil win- how inputs and outputs should be specified. Those
ning the World Cup just if she will rationally accept hoping to reduce the mental to the physical attempt
a bet at odds longer than 3:1 against Brazil winning. to spell out inputs and outputs in purely physical
Some philosophers reject degree-talk entirely, argu- terms. Others argue that functional specifications
ing that degrees of belief are better thought of as cannot be provided except in mentalistic terms.
outright beliefs in objective chances. Accordingly, One key disagreement concerns the importance
Stephanie does not have a credence of 0.25; rather, of a subjects internal (physical) makeup in belief
she believes outright that there is a 0.25 chance of attribution. According to the interpretationist
Brazil winning. Note that because we cannot know, approach associated with Donald Davidson and
based on the odds, that we will not win a very large Daniel Dennett, a subject is held to believe that p just
lottery, it is implausible to equate knowledge with if (roughly speaking) the entirety of their behavior is
sufficiently high credence. best explained by a set of beliefs, desires, and other
attitudes that includes the belief that p. Internal struc-
ture is strictly irrelevant. Interpretationists embrace
Analyzing Belief
the apparent consequence that whether a subject
Many philosophers have sought to analyze belief as believes that p may be indeterminate, because two
a kind of disposition. We can manifest our beliefs in different but equally explanatory theories of behav-
actions (and reactions) other than judgments. Thus, ior may be available. Representationalists, in con-
belief cannot simply be the disposition to judge that trast, take beliefs to be causally efficacious internal
p. More plausibly, to believe that p is to be disposed representations, realized in the neural architecture of
to act as if p were true. Thus, the (repressed) sex- the brain. One has an attitude toward a proposition
ist belief of the department head is manifested in p by being related to a stored representation with p
his overall pattern of sexist actions. A given belief as its content. What makes this attitude a belief as
explains an action only in concert with other beliefs opposed to a desire is the functional role the repre-
and desires. I manifest my belief that the left-hand sentation plays in a subjects mental economy.
track is the quickest way to Tipperary by taking it, Representationalists diverge when it comes to
only if I want to go to Tipperary quickly. Even if I specifying the nature of the stored representations
do have that desire, I may believe that my nemesis and explaining how they acquire content. Fodor,
is lurking to ambush me on that path and so take in his influential language of thought hypothesis
another. Or again, I may take that path precisely (designed to explain the human capacity to enter-
because I want a final showdown. There is no pros- tain a potentially unlimited number of different
pect of spelling out what it is to act as if p is true thoughts), claims that our internal representations
independently of other beliefs and desires. Given the have a structure like that of natural language:
right complement of beliefs and desires, any action Complex representations are built out of subsenten-
can be thought of as manifesting a given belief. tial symbols, the content of a complex representa-
Consequently, philosophers argue that we must treat tion being a function of the content of the atomic
propositional attitudes holistically, not one by one. symbols it contains in combination with the lan-
Dispositional analyses emphasize what belief guages syntax. On this picture, thought, in general,
leads to. We might also consider what leads us to involves the recombination of symbols in a way that
belief. According to functionalist approaches, a sub- is causally sensitive to syntactic rules. There remains
ject has a belief that p just if they are in a state that a great deal of disagreement concerning the status
occupies a certain causal role specified in terms of and commitments of this view. One central issue is
114 Bilingual Language Processing
how it fares with respect to connectionist models of is the nature of bilingual memory representation and
cognitive architecture. how it is influenced by learner and word characteris-
tics. Models of bilingual memory representation are
Ian B. Phillips
considered in the context of these issues.
See also Attitudes and Behavior; Conscious Thinking;
Dutch Book Arguments; Representational Theory
Tasks
of Mind A number of tasks are used to examine bilingual lan-
guage processing. In some of these tasks, the speed
Further Readings and accuracy with which people respond are used to
infer how words are represented in bilingual mem-
Davidson, D. (1984). Inquiries into truth and
ory and/or how these representations are accessed.
interpretation. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
In the translation production task, a word is pre-
Dennett, D. (1987). The intentional stance. Cambridge,
sented in one language to be translated aloud into
MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1975). The language of thought. Cambridge,
another language. Translation recognition is a
MA: Harvard University Press.
similar task, wherein a pair of words is presented to
Geach, P. (1957). Mental acts. London, UK: Routledge & be judged as correct or incorrect translations. In the
Kegan Paul. picture naming task, a line drawing is presented
Gettier, E. L. (1963). Is justified true belief knowledge? to be named in a given language. In the lexical deci-
Analysis, 23, 121123. sion task, a letter string is presented to be judged a
Jeffrey, R. C. (1983). The logic of decision (2nd ed.). real word or a nonword in a given language. Finally,
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. in the priming task, a prime is shown (typically
Kripke, S. A. (1979). A puzzle about belief. In A. Margalit very briefly), followed by a target, to which an indi-
(Ed.), Meaning and use (pp. 239283). Dordrecht, vidual must make a response (usually, a lexical deci-
Netherlands: Reidel. sion). Using words of various types in these tasks
Lewis, D. (1972). Psychophysical and theoretical allows researchers to infer how these kinds of words
identifications. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 50, are represented and accessed.
249258. In some cases, these tasks are performed follow-
Shah, N., & Velleman, D. J. (2005). Doxastic deliberation. ing a sentence context, often to determine the way
The Philosophical Review, 114, 497534. context affects how words are processed. Other
Soteriou, M. (2009). Mental agency, conscious thinking, tasks specifically examine sentence-level process-
and phenomenal character. In L. OBrien & M. Soteriou ing. The self-paced reading task involves presen-
(Eds.), Mental actions (pp. 231253). Oxford, UK: tation of a sentence one word at a time, paced by
Oxford University Press. the bilingual. The grammaticality judgment task
involves presenting a sentence for a judgment about
grammatical acceptability. Both of these tasks allow
BILINGUAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING researchers to examine bilinguals sensitivity to
grammar in their two languages, often by including
The increasing global prevalence of bilingualism has violations of grammar.
led to a growing interest in how bilinguals process
language. Research on bilingual language processing Selective/Nonselective Access
focuses on bilingual comprehension and production A prominent theme in bilingual language process-
skills. The study of these topics has helped research- ing research is whether bilinguals are able to turn
ers answer a variety of questions, including the fol- off one of their languages when they are using the
lowing: Can bilinguals ever turn off one of their other exclusively (i.e., can they selectively access one
languages? How are words and translations inter- language?). This issue has been explored using sev-
connected in bilingual memory? What word and eral tasks that provide converging evidence; some of
learner characteristics influence the way words are these tasks exploit the relationship between words
represented and processed? To address these ques- in the two languages to determine whether both lan-
tions, researchers employ a number of tasks, some guages are accessed. Although initially the question
of which are discussed in this entry. Also discussed of interest was whether bilinguals typically access
Bilingualism, Cognitive Benefits of 115
only one language at a time, current research aims English). This type of cross-language relationship
to understand when such selective access is likely to often slows processing or makes it less accurate
occur and what circumstances increase its likelihood. (e.g., in translation production). The distributed
Some research on this issue suggests that bilinguals feature model hypothesizes that cognate translations
can more easily turn off a weaker language than share more of their meaning features than do non-
a very dominant language (e.g., their first language). cognate translations across languages.
A learner characteristic that has been explored in Word concreteness has been studied extensively
relation to language processing is the proficiency with respect to its influence on both monolingual
of the bilingual. The revised hierarchical model by and bilingual processing. Concrete words refer to
Judith Kroll and Erika Stewart provides a basis for perceptible entities whereas abstract words refer to
understanding how increased proficiency in a sec- imperceptible entities. In many tasks (e.g., trans-
ond language would lead to changes in how second lation production), concrete words are processed
language words are connected to their meanings more quickly and accurately than abstract words.
and, in turn, to changes in the way that these words As with cognate translations, the distributed feature
are processed. This model proposes that initially, model proposes that concrete words share more
second language words only gain access to their meaning features across languages than do abstract
meanings through the first language, but that when words, leading to the concrete-word advantage in
the bilingual becomes more proficient in the second bilingual translation. Recent research has revealed
language, the connections between second language some conditions under which the concrete-word
words and their meanings become stronger. By con- advantage is not observed, both within and across
trast, the distributed feature model by Annette De languages.
Groot proposes that learners have direct access to Natasha Tokowicz
the meanings of second language words from the
beginning stages of learning, and that word charac- See also Bilingualism, Cognitive Benefits of; Concepts
teristics (described in the next section) play a more and Language; Heritage Language and Second
important role in lexical processing. Language Learning; Language Development;
Production of Language
Word Characteristics
Further Readings
In some cases, researchers focus on the way that
certain types of words influence bilingual lan- Bhatia, T. K., & Ritchie, W. C. (2004). The handbook of
guage processing. Two specific characteristics have bilingualism. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
been studied in detail: form overlap and word De Groot, A. M. B., & Kroll, J. F. (Eds.). (1997). Tutorials
in bilingualism: Psycholinguistic perspectives. Mahwah,
concreteness.
NJ: Erlbaum.
Form Overlap Doughty, C. J., & Long, M. H. (2003). The handbook of
second language acquisition. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
One characteristic of cross-language word pairs Kroll, J. F., & De Groot, A. M. B. (Eds.). (2005).
that influences bilingual language processing is the Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches.
relative similarity of the words in spelling, sound, or New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
both. Translation equivalents (i.e., words that mean
the same thing across languages) that are similar in
form are called cognates (e.g., telfono in Spanish BILINGUALISM, COGNITIVE
and telephone in English). In many tasks (e.g., trans-
lation production, picture naming), cognates elicit BENEFITS OF
faster and more accurate processing. By contrast,
cross-language word pairs that share form but not The ability to proficiently use more than one lan-
meaning are referred to as interlingual homographs guage, or bilingualism, is of interest to psycholo-
or false cognates (e.g., pan in Spanish and bread in gists investigating language processing and the
116 Bilingualism, Cognitive Benefits of
relationship between language and other cognitive advantages seen in children and in aging studies. In
abilities. Interest in the topic has extended beyond the a series of studies by Albert Costa and colleagues,
academic literature into the popular press because of young adult Spanish-Catalan bilinguals were faster
reports that bilingualism improves some aspects of than monolinguals to indicate the direction of a
cognitive functioning. This entry summarizes some center arrow in a task with congruent (|||||)
of the more recent literature on how bilingualism and incongruent (|| |{ |) flankers. In another
affects language and cognitive processing. Evidence study by Anat Prior and colleagues, college-aged
suggests some significant differences between bilin- immigrant bilinguals were faster than monolinguals
guals and monolinguals that, although small, have to switch from classifying objects by color versus
interesting implications for theories of language pro- by shape. With aging, bilingual advantages seem to
cessing and cognitive control. The effects reviewed become more robust. One study by Bialystok and
pale in comparison with more obvious differences colleagues that generated considerable press found
associated with bilingualism (e.g., bilinguals can that bilingualism in immigrants to Canada was asso-
communicate with a broader audience). However, ciated with later age-of-onset of Alzheimers disease
subtle differences between bilinguals and mono- (AD) relative to that typical for monolinguals. Here
linguals have contributed to important theoretical it is hypothesized that bilingualism may be analo-
debates in the literature, and increasingly bilingual- gous to cognitive reserve, which also delays the
ism is viewed as a tool that reveals the fundamental onset of AD; for example, high levels of education
mechanisms supporting language and other cognitive may delay the onset of AD.
processing. A current challenge in this line of work is
to link the benefits of bilingualism more precisely to
Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying
their cause.
Bilingual Advantages
An important goal in research on bilingualism
Bilingual Processing Advantages
and cognitive control is to identify the connection
Evidence is accumulating that bilinguals outperform between theories of bilingual language processing
monolinguals on a variety of tasks. These benefits of and the observed advantages. To date, the precise
bilingualism emerge in infancy and persist through- link between theory and the advantages found
out the life span into old age. Beginning with the remains elusive and is the focus of some debate. On
pioneering work of Ellen Bialystok, initial findings one view, bilinguals practice with resolving compe-
were that bilingual children are better at meta- tition between languages leads them to develop more
linguistic skills. For example, bilingual children efficient cognitive mechanisms for resolving com-
separated meaning and grammar at an earlier age petition. This hypothesis relates to David Greens
than did monolinguals when asked to judge if sen- inhibitory control model, which proposes that
tences like Why is the cat barking so loudly? are bilinguals face constant competition between lan-
grammatical or not. Producing the correct response guages. However, attempts to link bilingual advan-
(yes in this case) requires identifying that words tages specifically to inhibitory control (the ability to
and their referents are separate entities and focusing inhibit responses or information that comes to mind
on grammar while suppressing the tendency to focus automatically) have had mixed results. Bialystok
on meaning (i.e., in this case that cats dont bark). In and colleagues suggest that bilingual advantages are
several additional studies, Bialystok and colleagues restricted to complex tasks that require control over
reported that bilingual children are advantaged in attention to competing cues (interference suppres-
tasks that seem to have nothing to do with language. sion), but are not present in tasks that trigger com-
For example, another study found that Cantonese- peting responses (response inhibition). In a similar
English bilingual children were better than mono- vein, work by Albert Costa, Mireia Hernndez, and
lingual children at switching card-sorting rules (e.g., their colleagues in Barcelona, where bilingualism is
sort by color vs. sort by shape). Similar advantages extremely common, suggests that bilingual advan-
are found in young adulthood, although these tend tages may reflect heightened monitoring ability
to be smaller and more difficult to observe than (e.g., in Barcelona, it is common for children to
Bilingualism, Cognitive Benefits of 117
speak one language with one parent and a different observed because language proficiency was mea-
language with the other parentan arrangement sured using an extensive battery of tests (and cor-
that requires constant language switching and relations for individual subtests were not reported).
monitoring). A challenge with studying better bilinguals is that
such people may have started out with a stronger
set of cognitive skills that allowed them to become
Apparent Failures to Replicate
highly proficient bilingual or multilingual (the clas-
Important clues as to the mechanism underly- sic chicken or egg problem: Does multilingualism
ing bilingual advantages may emerge from cases lead to advantages, or are people who are advan-
in which attempts to find bilingual advantages are taged more likely to become multilingual?). Some
not successful. Costa and colleagues have described degree of connection between bilingualism and
bilingual advantages as being difficult to replicate or general mechanisms of cognitive control comes from
now you see them, now you dont. An important imaging studies showing overlapping brain regions
consideration is to differentiate studies that may sim- active during task switching and language switch-
ply have lacked power for observing bilingual effects ing; however, current technology may be insensi-
from those that can provide an elegant demonstra- tive to subtle differences between task-general and
tion of how bilingual effects can be made to appear language-specific control.
or disappear with only subtle changes in the task. In
other cases, no bilingual advantage may be found
Cognitive Costs Associated
even though a positive influence of bilingualism is
With Bilingualism
present if other factors correlated with bilingualism
negatively affect executive control (e.g., bilingualism On the flip side of bilingual advantages, there is
is associated with low socioeconomic status in some some clear burden associated with learning and
parts of the world). maintaining more than one language in a single
The difficulty of observing bilingual effects across cognitive system. Work by James Flege and col-
bilinguals of different types also suggests multiple leagues indicates that bilinguals (even highly profi-
mechanisms underlying the observed advantages; cient early learners of two languages) perceive and
for example, some types of bilingualism may lead produce vowels slightly differently from monolin-
to a switching advantage (i.e., faster responses when guals, probably reflecting cross-language interfer-
switching from one task to another), whereas oth- ence. Studies by Kimbrough Oller and colleagues
ers may lead to better ability to monitor which have shown that bilingual children tend to know
response is appropriate when. An important clue as labels for some concepts in one language but not in
to the origin of bilingual advantages is that more the other language and vice versa, leading bilinguals
bilingual sometimes seems to translate into more to obtain lower vocabulary scores than monolin-
advantage. Here more bilingual can mean sev- guals on standardized tests. It used to be thought
eral different things, including knowledge of three that bilingual kids catch up to their monolin-
languages (tri-lingualism), knowledge of more than gual peers as their experience with both languages
three languages (multilingualism), greater degrees of increases. However, Tamar Gollan and her col-
proficiency (native-like ability in both languages), or leagues have shown that with sufficiently difficult
degree of language use (equal use of both languages tests, the vocabulary and naming disadvantages
in daily life). In one such study, Andrea Mechelli associated with bilingualism can be detected into
and colleagues found that bilinguals had denser gray adulthood and older age. Young adult and older
matter in left inferior parietal cortex when compared bilinguals are slower than monolinguals to name
with monolinguals, with increasingly greater density pictures, have reduced verbal fluency, and are more
for bilinguals with earlier age-of-acquisition of both likely to fail to retrieve words they are sure they
languages and for bilinguals with greater degrees know (i.e., have more TOTs or tip-of-the-tongue
of proficiency in a second language. Although sug- states). These disadvantages appear even when
gestive, this study could not reveal precisely what bilinguals are tested in the language they report is
it is about bilingualism that leads to the advantages their stronger language.
118 Black English Vernacular (Ebonics)
It might seem elegant to assume that both bilin- Language and Second Language Learning; Planning in
gual advantages and disadvantages are the result of Language Production; Production of Language
competition between language systems, but Gollan
and colleagues suggest that it is a mistake to attri- Further Readings
bute all of the consequences of bilingualism for lan-
Abutalebi, J., & Green, D. W. (2008). Control mechanisms
guage and cognitive processing to one mechanism.
in bilingual language production: Neural evidence from
Unlike bilingual advantages, which seem to become
language switching studies. Language and Cognitive
more robust in older age, bilingual disadvantages
Processes, 23, 557582.
may diminish: There is some evidence that older Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., Green, D. W., & Gollan, T. H.
bilinguals do a better job than younger bilinguals in (2009). Bilingual minds. Psychological Science in the
acquiring and maintaining fluency in two languages. Public Interest, 10(3), 89129.
Because cognitive control is known to decline with Valenzuela, M. J., & Sachdev, P. (2006). Brain reserve and
older age, these data also imply that the link between dementia: A systematic review. Psychological Medicine,
cognitive control and bilingual language proficiency 36, 441454.
is relatively weak. Instead, bilinguals may effectively
be less proficient because they use words in each lan-
guage less frequently than monolinguals, who are,
in a sense, over-practiced in the one language that BLACK ENGLISH VERNACULAR
they know. From this perspective, older bilinguals (EBONICS)
may have an easier time than younger bilinguals in
being bilingual, because their increased age allows This entry briefly describes the history of Black
them more time to master two languages. English Vernacular (BEV) with primary emphasis
on the United States; BEV is frequently referred to
Future Directions in Research as Ebonics, a term that is internationally relevant
on Bilingualism to the linguistic consequences of the African slave
Future work on the effects of bilingualism will be trade. Some changing linguistic terminology related
focused on determining which specific aspects of to the speech of enslaved Africans is then intro-
bilingualism are associated with which advantages duced, followed by specific linguistic examples of
(and disadvantages) and on how these effects relate BEV. Concluding remarks confirm the long-standing
to theories of bilingual language processing and to vibrancy of BEV, or Ebonics, and its contemporary
larger conclusions about relationships between lan- influence on youth culture and youth language usage
guage and cognitive control. Although the effects of throughout the world.
bilingualism are often subtle, significant effects hold
promise for revealing properties fundamental to lan- Historical Considerations
guage processing and to attention/control systems. Africans who were enslaved hundreds of years ago
Indeed, from some theoretical perspectives, it is sur- were not able to preserve their native languages.
prising to find anything more than a very general They were forced, on capture and during the ensu-
relationship between language processing skills and ing Atlantic crossing, to listen attentively to their
performance on nonlinguistic tasks. In this respect, captors who, whenever possible, separated slaves
the field seems to have moved far beyond a simple who spoke the same language in the hope of pre-
Is bilingualism good for you or bad for you? venting insurrections. The initial linguistic contact
approach to a more principled attempt toward exam- between slaves and their European captors produced
ining the cognitive advantages and disadvantages of several contact vernaculars, commonly identified as
bilingualism and their implications for understand- pidgins. Pidgins are distinctive because they have
ing the minds of bilinguals and monolinguals alike. no native speakers. The children of African slaves
Tamar H. Gollan who spoke pidgin were the first to convert these new
contact vernaculars into various Creole languages;
See also Aging, Memory, and Information Processing this occurred wherever African slaves were sold. In
Speed; Bilingual Language Processing; Heritage Brazil, the dominant European contact language was
Black English Vernacular (Ebonics) 119
Portuguese. In Haiti, the dominant European con- Copula absence: missing is or are
tact language was French, and in Jamaica and the He coming home tomorrow (i.e., He is coming
United States, the dominant European contact lan- home tomorrow).
guage was English. Ebonics, first coined by Robert
Williams in 1975, was originally formulated as a We tired (i.e., We are tired).
term to be applied broadly to the entire linguistic
Completed actions with be done
consequences of African slavery since its inception.
She be done finished work early (i.e., She has
already finished work early).
Changing Linguistic Terminology
They be done told her to go (i.e., They already told
Prior to Williamss formulation of Ebonics, linguists her to go).
used various terms to refer to Black speech. In
1933, Leonard Bloomfield described the difference Use of been with heavy stress
between substandard English, which for many was on the word itself
considered improper, and nonstandard English,
I been know your name (i.e., I have known your
which linguists had identified as being different from
name for quite a while).
prescribed standard English but not inferior to it. In
an effort to promote greater accuracy, nonstandard She been sold that car (i.e., She sold that car
Negro English was eventually adopted by linguists long ago).
during the 1960s to refer to the speech of American
slave descendants; in 1972, the terms Black English Phonological (Pronunciation) Examples
and Black English vernacular prevailed. Early in Final /f/ for /th/
the 1980s, some linguists began to adopt the term
African American vernacular English in an effort Ruth /Ruf/, both /bof/, tooth /toof/
not merely to provide a racial reference but one Postvocalic /r/ absence
that was more specifically tied to the history and
culture of enslaved Africans in America as well Door /Doe/, Four /foe/, Car /Ca/
as their descendants. Ebonics, although coined in
Loss of final stop consonant in
1975, did not frequently appear in technical linguis-
consonant clusters
tic studies until after it had gained global attention
in 1996 at the behest of the Oakland, California, Last /las/, Desk /des/, Told /tol/
school board after their passage of a controversial
Phonological metathesis
resolution declaring Ebonics, not English, to be the
official language of the 28,000 African American ask aks
students who were enrolled in the school district at
that time. Contemporary Relevance
of BEV and Ebonics
Illustrative Examples of Black Although the speech of African Americans today is
English Vernacular quite diversespanning the entire spectrum from
BEV differs from standard American English in BEV to impeccable renditions of the most eloquent
several ways, most notably including grammatical forms of standard American Englishyouth culture,
differences and phonological variability. and hip-hop culture in particular, it has been greatly
influenced by BEV. Urban poets, rap artists, and hip-
Grammatical Examples hop devotees routinely judge the fluency and artistry
Habitual use of be of contemporary BEV during highly stylized verbal
jousts that are commonly called Battles. Despite the
They be telling stories (i.e., They are always telling fact that BEV and Ebonics are the historical prod-
stories). uct of racially sanctioned linguistic isolation, result-
He be laughing (i.e., He is always laughing). ing from overt racial segregation and inequality, the
120 Blindsight
popularity of the Blues, gospel music, and other consciousness, vision, and the brain, and has been
African American verbal art forms now have cul- fodder for a rich scientific and philosophical debate.
tural appeal that far exceeds people of African This entry will cover the essential concepts from
descent. neurology that are relevant to blindsight, provide
BEV and Ebonics have come to influence the lan- a brief history of blindsight research, describe the
guage and culture of many adolescents and young defining characteristics of blindsight and how these
adults throughout the world, particularly if they might be explained by the architecture of the brain,
identify positively with hip-hop culture and genres and discuss the possibility of blindsight in normally
of speaking that owe their very existence and inspi- sighted individuals as an emerging direction in blind-
ration to the linguistic legacy of the African slave sight research.
trade and the long-standing survival of BEV in the
United States.
Hemianopia (Cortical Blindness)
John Baugh
To clearly understand what blindsight is, it is nec-
See also Heritage Language and Second Language
essary to understand cortical blindness. Lesions in
Learning; Language Development; Word Learning the primary visual cortex (called V1) of the occipital
lobe, due to stroke or head trauma, normally lead to
blindness in the corresponding region of the patients
Further Readings
field of view (FOV). For example, damage to the
Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. New York, NY: Holt. lower part of V1 in the left hemisphere will produce
Dillard, J. L. (1972). Black English: Its history and usage in a blind region (or scotoma) in the upper-right
the United States. New York, NY: Random House. quadrant of the FOV. Damage to the entirety of V1
Green, L. (2002). African American English: A linguistic in the left hemisphere will lead to blindness in the
introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University entire right-hand side of the FOV (called hemiano-
Press. pia, meaning half-field blindness). Note that in
Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city: Studies in the V1 the signals from the two eyes are combined into
Black English vernacular. Philadelphia: University of a single binocular view (you do not normally see
Pennsylvania Press. two of everything, even though you have two eyes),
Rickford, J. R. (1999). African American vernacular so the blind area in this case is not specific to one eye
English: Features, evolution, educational implications. or the other. The two eyes may continue to function
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
normally, but the signals from the left side of each
Williams, R. L. (1975). Ebonics: The true language of black
retina (in the latter example) are cut off at their main
folks. St. Louis, MO: Institute of Black Studies.
junction with the cerebral cortex (V1).
Just what do such patients experience when they
look at the visual scene? One might suppose that
BLINDSIGHT these patients experience something like a large
black stain in their visual field that occludes objects
Blindsight, as the name implies, is a paradoxa sort from view. In fact, what the patients experience in
of seeing without seeing. Ever since the term was their scotoma is probably more like what you see
first coined in the early 1970s it has raised profound behind your head. Most likely you do not feel that
and intriguing questions about what it means to anything is missing from your field of view behind
see, and what it means to guess. For example, your headit is simply not part of your field of
if you make 100 random guesses in a row and 90 of view. Likewise these patients are usually unaware
your guesses are correct, does it qualify as guess- that anything is missing, even when they bump into
ing? If you respond accurately (by guessing) to something.
visual stimuli but deny having consciously seen any- Normally the extent of such patients scotomas
thing, does this count as seeing? Barring a para- is determined by asking the patients to fix their gaze
normal explanation, how could this be possible? By and then recording their responses to brief flashes
raising these and other questions, the phenomenon of light, presented one at a time at a broad array
of blindsight has enriched our understanding of of points covering the normal extent of the visual
Blindsight 121
field (a process called perimetry). The points that effect of scattered light making its way into the nor-
the patients consistently fail to detect are taken to mally sighted region(s) of the visual field or might be
delimit the scotoma(e), and thus concludes the test mediated by islands of spared tissue in the primary
or so it would seem. visual cortex. Perhaps of greater significance was the
suggestion that the nonconscious aspect of blindsight
The Discovery of Blindsight was trivial, being no different from normal near-
threshold vision (i.e., normal vision when stimuli are
Toward the end of World War I, the British neurol-
so faint as to be practically invisible). At the visual
ogist George Riddoch examined soldiers who had
threshold, it is not unusual for normal subjects to
suffered gunshot wounds to the back of the head
show some sensitivity, when forced-choice proce-
(with damage to the primary visual area, V1). He
dures are used, even though they may not be certain
noted that these patients often consciously detected
of having seen much of anything. Each of these chal-
motion within the blind region(s) of their field of
lenges has since been countered, by argument, appro-
view, although it was, and remains, unclear that they
priate control experiments, and/or neuroimaging,
actually saw anything in the strict sense. Because
and the consensus at present is that no combination
Riddoch did not offer an explanation, his observa-
of these factors can adequately explain blindsight.
tions were not followed up.
Another area of controversy concerns the unusual
Then, in the early 1970s, some intrepid research-
conscious sensations that blindsight patients often
ers had the novel and counterintuitive idea of ask-
report (very similar to Riddochs patients). Does
ing a patient to make guesses about visual stimuli,
this count as seeing? When a particularly salient
presented within the scotoma, even when the patient
stimulus is presentedfor example, a high-contrast
denied sensing anything at all. The patient found this
pattern of lines (a grating) that moves abruptly or
to be an unusual request, but complied nonetheless
flickerspatients sometimes report a sensation but
and made random guesses regarding, for example,
find it difficult to describe and seem reluctant to call
the position of a circular patch of light or the orien-
it visual. A particularly well studied hemianope, GY,
tation of a small line (horizontal vs. vertical). The
who has been the subject of many studies, sometimes
patients guesses were impressively accuratemuch
reports a feeling that something happened when
more so than would be expected by chance (e.g.,
a high-contrast stimulus abruptly appears in his
29/30 correct on one task). In a case study published
blind hemifield, but he insists that he does not see
in 1974, blindsight researcher Larry Weiskrantz and
anything. He has also expressed it as something like
his colleagues reported that, when told how well he
black on black. Blindsight researcher Petra Stoerig
had done, the patient expressed great surprise, and
once cleverly asked GY to vary an image presented
reiterated that he was only guessing (p. 712). Thus,
to his sighted hemifield until it gave an impression
the term blindsight was coined to describe the abil-
of how he experienced an image simultaneously
ity to make accurate guesses regarding stimuli that
flickering in his blind hemifield. GY complied with
were not consciously seen. At least several dozen
these instructions and produced a cloudy-looking
such patients have been identified and tested (quite
dark bar with blurred edges, on a cloudy-looking
extensively in several instances) since the time of
dark background. This was cited as evidence that
these early studies. Although blindsight was origi-
GYs blind-field sensations may indeed be visual
nally discovered in the context of cortical blindness,
in some sense but is still inconclusive. Most people
the possibility of seeing without seeing might also
are capable of describing a nonvisual sensation in
apply to normally sighted persons (see the final sec-
visual terms if asked to do solike making a visual
tion to learn more).
rendering of a texture or shape that is examined
only by touch.
Controversies in Blindsight Research
The concept of blindsight is simple, even if counterin-
tuitive and difficult to grasp at first, but the reality is
True Blindsight: The Philosophical Zombie
not so simple, and blindsight research (ongoing since
and the Importance of When
the 1970s) has not been without controversy. Early Still, if visual stimuli are stationary with moderate
critics suggested that blindsight might simply be an to low contrast, the patient may deny experiencing
122 Blindsight
127
128 Case-Based Reasoning, Computational Perspectives
damaged. As such, when presented with a familiar congruence between belief and experience provides
face, despite consciously recognizing it, the patient strong evidence for the validity of the former and the
exhibits no increase in autonomic arousal. authenticity of the latter.
The absence of autonomic arousal when in the The neurological dysfunction posited by Ellis and
presence of the significant other is said to pervade Youngs mirror-image model provides an organic
consciousness as some form of anomalous, often basis for the selectivity characteristic of the Capgras
deeply disturbing, experience. Consequently, when delusion. More contemporary explanations tend to
in the presence of the significant other, something be grounded on this model and differ only in terms
feels wrongthere is physical recognition in the of the type of second-stage cognitive deficit they
absence of emotional connectedness. The stron- propose in accounting for the formation and main-
ger the emotional connection between patient and tenance of the delusional belief.
other, the more salient its absence is going to feel.
Garry Young
Brendan Maher conjectured that the delusional
belief is indicative of the patients reasoned attempt See also Delusions; Face Perception; Fregoli Delusion;
to make sense of this strange state of affairs. Unconscious Perception
In contrast, proponents of a two-deficit account
argue that the delusional belief (second deficit) stems
Further Readings
from the patients misinterpretation of the anoma-
lous experience (first deficit). This misinterpretation Chung, M. C., Fulford, K. W. M., & Graham, G. (2007).
is the result of some form of cognitive dysfunction Reconceiving schizophrenia. Oxford, UK: Oxford
what Max Coltheart refers to as a disruption in the University Press.
patients belief evaluation system. This disruption is Coltheart, M., & Davies, M. (2000). Pathologies of belief.
thought to be responsible, then, not only for belief Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
formation but, importantly, for its maintenance in Enoch, M. D., & Trethowan, W. H. (1979). Uncommon
the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence. psychiatric syndromes. Bristol, UK: John Wright.
The two-deficit account has traditionally empha- Oltmanns, T. F., & Maher, B. A. (1988). Delusional beliefs.
sized the second-stage cognitive dysfunction when New York, NY: Wiley.
accounting for the delusional nature of the belief.
While the exact nature of this disruption may vary
from theorist to theorist, it is nevertheless common- CASE-BASED REASONING,
place for the patients underlying experience to be COMPUTATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
described simply as anomalous, odd, or bizarre. Yet
it is precisely this bizarre experience that the patient
tries to explain by mistakenly adopting a delusional People who encounter new problems are often
impostor belief. reminded of similar prior problem-solving episodes,
For precisely this reason, Garry Young has and those remindings can provide starting points
recently challenged what he claims is the unidirec- for generating new solutions or warnings of potential
tional nature of two-deficit explanations. Instead problems. Remindings can also support interpreta-
of presenting an account that moves unidirection- tive tasks by providing comparison points to com-
ally from neurological deficit to anomalous experi- pare and contrast to new situations. Computational
ence to delusional belief, he proposes an amended models of case-based reasoning (CBR) model both
interactionist model. According to this model, the of these processes. This entry introduces the CBR
formation of the delusional belief actually alters the process, its tenets, and its ramifications.
nature of the patients experiencemoving from
Historical Background
an initial sense of estrangement to a full-blown
impostor experience. This interaction helps explain The roots of computational models of CBR date to
why the delusional belief is maintained: The (delu- research currents around the early 1980s, includ-
sional) belief offers the best explanation for what ing Roger Schanks studies of reminding and mem-
is experienced because it, in part, helps shape what ory, Edwina Risslands studies of legal reasoning,
is experienced. From the patients perspective, the and Bruce Porters studies of medical diagnosis. In
Case-Based Reasoning, Computational Perspectives 129
treating specific stored experiences as the primary CBR cycle. Each step in the cycle involves research
knowledge source and the process of adapting prior issues, such as how cases are organized in the mem-
cases to new needs as the primary reasoning process ory of cases (called the case base), what retrieval
(rather than the chaining together of general rules), algorithms are used, how solutions are adapted to fit
CBR contrasted with rule-based artificial intelligence new problems, and how the cases are stored.
(AI) approaches. The study of CBR was appealing, The long-term success of systems applying the
both from a cognitive science perspective, for model- CBR cycle depends on two types of regularity, one
ing human reasoning, and as a way to further the concerning the relationship between problems and
development of robust and efficient AI systems for solutions in a domain and the other concerning the
reasoning and learning. Reasoning from prior cases problems a system will encounter. Problem-solution
may be possible even in poorly understood domains regularity, the property that similar problems gen-
for which it is impossible to account for why the erally have similar solutions, is required to ensure
prior cases solution was successful, and CBR may that similar prior cases retrieved by the reasoner will
speed up problem solving by reusing prior effort provide useful starting points for new reasoning.
when generating a solution from scratch would be Problem-distribution regularity, the property that
expensive while maintaining the flexibility to adjust a reasoner will tend to encounter similar problems
for new circumstances. over time, is required to ensure that the cases learned
by the reasoner will be useful in the future.
Types of Case-Based Reasoning
Case-based problem solving characterizes how spe- Relationship to Other Approaches
cific prior solutions are applied to solve new prob-
CBR contrasts with eager learning approaches
lems. For example, a doctor deciding how to treat a
such as decision trees and neural networks, which
patient with unusual symptoms might be reminded
form generalizations from training data and then
of the successful treatment of a prior patient, a travel
reason from those generalizations rather than from
planner might develop a new itinerary by adapting
the data itself. Instead, CBR is a lazy learning
an old one, or a labor mediator might start from
method, which retains raw examples and does fur-
a prior labor agreement when seeking a new one.
ther processing only when needed. Case adaptation
Because CBR may use varied criteria to determine
may be seen as a type of just-in-time generaliza-
which cases to retrieve and to adapt prior solutions,
tion, done in the context of a new problem and only
CBR is not limited to straightforward reuse and may
to the extent needed to handle the new situation.
lead to creative solutions. For example, an architect
CBR may be taken as a stance toward cognitive
may combine aspects of prior designsor may use
science. In the CBR stance, both commonsense and
information about those designs to select contrast-
expert reasoning are seen as largely based on experi-
ing featuresto creatively design a novel building.
ence, and expertise arises from acquiring cases and
Case-based models are also applied to interpretation
the knowledge required to apply those cases effec-
tasks, to classify or analyze new instances by com-
tively. A number of psychological studies provide
paring and contrasting them to prior examples. For
support for the human use of CBR, and the CBR
example, a travel agent assessing whether a client
stance suggests viewing the retrieval, adaptation, and
would like a hotel might do so by comparing it to
storage of prior experiences as the core of cognition.
the most similar hotels the client liked or disliked in
Computational models of CBR developed in support
the past.
of this stance provide precise specifications of testable
hypotheses of how human CBR functions and the
The Case-Based Reasoning Cycle
knowledge it requires, addressing questions about
Agnar Aamodt and Enric Plaza characterize the case- memory organization, retrieval, analogical mapping
based problem solving process as one of retrieval, between old and new cases, adaptation of previous
reuse of an old solution, revision of that solution, solutions, storage, and forgetting. Computational
and retention of the result. This process forms a models of CBR have proven useful in artificial intel-
closed loopfrom retrieving an old case to storing ligence as a basis for studying intelligent systems
a new case for future retrievaland is known as the more generally.
130 Categorization, Neural Basis
Case-Based Reasoning Applications this work is that all of the major memory systems
probably contribute to category learning and that
Human problem solvers routinely solve problems
the neural circuits that mediate initial category learn-
in domains that are hard to codify precisely. They
ing are different from the circuits that enable us to
make reasonable conjectures and learn useful things
respond automatically to highly learned categories.
from both successes and failures, from few exam-
ples, and despite limited and uncertain knowledge.
Multiple Category Learning Systems
The desire to capture these abilities in artificial
intelligence systems motivates the development of One recent discovery, which is due in part to this
many CBR applications for tasks such as diagno- new emphasis on neuroscience, is that humans have
sis and planning. Especially prevalent are conversa- multiple category-learning systems. An obvious
tional CBR systems, in which cases are retrieved in hypothesis, which quickly followed this discovery,
an interactive dialogue with the user for tasks such is that all major memory systems are capable of
as diagnosis. Case-based models of human cogni- some form of category learning. Memory research-
tion and CBR applications combine in CBR applica- ers have identified a number of unique human
tions for the learning sciences, which apply CBR to memory systems, which are commonly divided
the development of effective teaching strategies and into two classes. Declarative memories are those
build educational computer systems using CBR. that are accessible to conscious awareness, such as
short-term or working memory and the memory of
David Leake past episodes (episodic memory). Nondeclarative
memories are those for which we have little con-
See also Analogical Mapping and Reasoning
scious awareness. Included in this set are procedural
memory (e.g., muscle memories, such as the exact
Further Readings actions performed when knotting a tie) and percep-
Kolodner, J. (1993). Case-based reasoning. San Mateo, CA: tual memories that result from repeated exposure
Morgan Kaufmann. to the same stimulus (i.e., the perceptual represen-
Leake, D. (1998). Cognition as case-based reasoning. In tation memory system). Different memory systems
W. Bechtel & G. Graham (Eds.), The Blackwell have different properties; therefore, each should be
companion to cognitive science (pp. 465476). Oxford, ideally suited to learning about unique types of cat-
UK: Basil Blackwell. egory structures. As a result, changing the nature
Lopez de Mantaras, R., McSherry, D., Bridge, D., Leake, of the categories might change which brain areas
D., Smyth, B., Craw, S., . . . Watson, I. (2006). Retrieval, mediate the learning.
reuse, revision, and retention in CBR. Knowledge Many brain areas have been implicated in cat-
Engineering Review, 20, 215240. egory learning, but perhaps the two most important
are the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the striatum.
The PFC, shown in Figure 1, is the anterior portion
CATEGORIZATION, NEURAL BASIS of cortex that lies behind the forehead, and the stria-
tum (which includes the caudate nucleus and the
Within the cognitive sciences, categorization is putamen), shown in Figure 2, is a major input struc-
defined as the act of responding differently to objects ture within a large collection of subcortical nuclei
or events in separate classes or categories. It is a called the basal ganglia.
vitally important skill that allows us to approach
friends and escape foes, to find food and avoid tox-
The Role of the Prefrontal Cortex
ins. Not surprisingly, the scientific study of categori- A huge literature implicates the PFC in working
zation has a long history. For most of this time, the memory and other executive processes, so the mem-
focus was on the cognitive processes that mediate ory systems hypothesis predicts that the PFC should
categorization. Within the past decade, however, the be especially important in tasks where the catego-
new tools of cognitive neuroscience have been used ries can be learned using executive reasoning. One
to investigate the neurobiology of categorization pro- example is the rule-based category-learning task, in
cesses. As discussed in this entry, the consensus from which the categories can be learned via an explicit
Categorization, Neural Basis 131
Prefrontal Cortex
Figure 1 A human brain with the prefrontal cortex in a darker shade (the front of the brain is on the right)
Caudate
Nucleus
Striatum
Putamen
Dopamine Pathways
hypothesis-testing or trial-and-error procedure and how to play tennis or golf, but recent work suggests
the correct categorization rule is easy to describe ver- that procedural memory is heavily used in certain
bally. For example, learning the category square is kinds of category learning that require integrating
a rule-based task since it is easy to describe the rule information from multiple perceptual attributes
that determines membership in this category. in a way that is not easy to describe verbally. One
There is now overwhelming evidence that the PFC example of such an information-integration task
is critical in rule-based tasks. For example, impaired might be learning to discriminate between wolves
performance on a well-known rule-based task (the and German Shepherds. Adults are very good at
Wisconsin Card Sorting Test) is among the most this task, but they are poor at describing the rule or
classic of all signs of PFC damage. In addition, many strategy that allows them to achieve this success.
animal lesion studies have confirmed the important People learn information-integration and rule-
role played by the PFC in rule learning and use, and based categories in different ways. For example,
virtually all neuroimaging studies of rule-based cat- information-integration category learning requires
egory learning have reported task-related activation immediate feedback after each response, whereas rule-
in the PFC. based learning does not. In contrast, feedback pro-
cessing requires attention and effort with rule-based
categories, but not with information-integration cat-
The Role of the Striatum
egories. There is also good evidence that the striatum
The striatum seems especially important to catego- plays an important role in information-integration
rization since it has been identified in virtually every learning. For example, several studies have reported
cognitive or behavioral neuroscience study of cate- that Huntingtons and Parkinsons disease patients
gory learning. For example, the striatum is damaged are both impaired in difficult information-integration
in several neuropsychological disorders, including tasks. In addition, all known neuroimaging studies
Parkinsons disease and Huntingtons disease, and of information-integration category learning have
many studies have shown that both of these patient reported significant task-related activation in the
groups are impaired in category learning. In addi- striatum.
tion, the striatum is frequently identified in neuro- In summary, one reason the striatum may be so
imaging studies of category learning, and single-cell frequently implicated in category learning is that it
recording studies in monkeys have identified neu- plays a key role in both working memory and pro-
rons in the striatum that learn to respond to the cate- cedural memory. A second related reason, however,
gory membership of a stimulus. Finally, a long series is that the striatum may be the only brain region
of lesion studies in rats and monkeys supports the capable of reinforcement learningthat is, learn-
hypothesis that the striatum is both necessary and ing in which synapses active on trials when correct
sufficient for visual discrimination learningthat feedback is given are strengthened and synapses
is, for learning to emit one response to one stimu- active on trials when error feedback is given are
lus and a different response to some other stimulus. weakened. The training signal that makes reinforce-
Technically, this is a special case of categorization in ment learning possible in the striatum is thought
which each category contains only one exemplar. to be provided by the neurotransmitter dopamine,
The striatum seems to participate in a wider which has two key properties that are critical for
variety of categorization tasks than even the PFC. successful reinforcement learning. First, much evi-
One possibility is that whereas the memory-related dence suggests that dopamine levels in the striatum
functions of the PFC seem to be limited to declara- are elevated above baseline following feedback that
tive memory systems, such as working memory, the a response was correct and depressed below baseline
striatum contributes both to declarative and non- following feedback about an error. Second, active
declarative memory. For example, a wide variety synapses are strengthened when dopamine levels are
of evidence implicates the striatum in working high and weakened when dopamine levels are low.
memorypresumably because parts of the stria- Reinforcement learning is not used to remember a
tum are reciprocally connected to the PFC. But conversation from earlier in the day, because we can
the striatum is also critical for procedural memory. remember that conversation regardless of whether
Historically, procedural memory has been associated it was rewarding. However, reinforcement learn-
with motor skills, such as ones muscle memory for ing is probably required for a radiologist to acquire
Categorization, Neural Basis 133
expertise in deciding whether a mammogram shows category learning in such patients, even though the
evidence of a tumor. patients frequently have no memory of any specific
category exemplars. Thus, at this point, the exact role
The Perceptual Representation of the hippocampus in category learning is unclear.
Memory System The sensory association regions of cortex are also
important for categorization. For example, infero-
One memory system thought not to depend on the
temporal cortex (i.e., lying behind the temples),
striatum is the perceptual representation memory
which is critical for high-level processing of visual
system (PRS), which is a nondeclarative system that
objects, has drawn interest because of reports that
facilitates perceptual processing of a stimulus as a
damage in this brain region can cause a category-
consequence of having seen that stimulus before.
specific deficit (i.e., an agnosia) in the ability to
Behavioral effects of the PRS can be observed after
recognize exemplars from some specific category
only a single stimulus repetition, and PRS effects can
(e.g., tools or fruits). The most widely known of
be induced when two stimuli are different but percep-
such deficits occurs with human faces (i.e., prosop-
tually similar. The PRS does not provide a detailed
agnosia). Despite such results, the evidence is good
memory trace of an event. Rather, it is thought only
that category learning does not occur in inferotem-
to provide a nonspecific feeling of familiarity. Thus,
poral cortex. For example, categorization training
the PRS could assist in categorization only in tasks
does not make inferotemporal cortex neurons more
where exemplars from the contrasting categories are
likely to respond to other stimuli in the same cate-
associated with different levels of familiarity.
gory or less likely to respond to stimuli belonging to
In (A, not A) category-learning tasks, participants
a contrasting category (e.g., unlike some cells in the
decide whether a stimulus is or is not in the target
striatum). Similarly, the firing properties of cells in
category A. In this task, the Category A members
inferotemporal cortex do not change when the cat-
have a coherent structure since they are created from
egory membership of specific exemplars is changed.
a single prototype, but typically, all not A category
The best evidence suggests that although inferotem-
members are visually distinct. One might expect
poral cortex does not mediate the learning of new
more PRS activation on A trials than on not A trials,
categories, it is crucial to the categorization process
and in fact, there have been several proposals that
because it encodes a high-level representation of the
the PRS mediates much of the learning that occurs
visual stimulus.
in the (A, not A) task. Neuropsychological support
for this hypothesis comes from studies showing that
a variety of patient groups with known deficits in Automatic Categorization
rule-based and information-integration category
So far, this review has focused on new category
learning are apparently normal in (A, not A) tasks
learning. There are many reasons to believe, how-
(e.g., Parkinsons disease patients). The neural basis
ever, that the neural circuits that mediate category
of the PRS is still unclear, although the evidence is
learning are different from the circuits that mediate
good that PRS effects can be seen in visual cortex.
automatic responding to highly learned categories.
As might therefore be expected, neuroimaging stud-
For example, many neuropsychological groups that
ies of (A, not A) tasks have all reported learning-
are impaired in category learning (e.g., Parkinsons
related changes in visual areas of occipital cortex.
disease patients) do not lose old, familiar categories
(e.g., furniture).
Other Brain Areas
A number of recent studies suggest that whereas
Another brain area that plays a critical role in mem- the PFC and the striatum are critical for initial learn-
ory function is the hippocampus. Damage to the ing, the role of both of these areas greatly diminishes
hippocampus causes anterograde amnesia, which after extended periods of practice. For example,
is an impaired ability to remember recent episodes. there is evidence that after much training, the rele-
For this reason, one might expect the hippocampus vant areas of premotor and motor cortex that medi-
to be critical for category learning. Although a few ate the categorization response begin to respond
studies have reported slight category-learning deficits before the PFC or the striatum. Such results are
in patients with anterograde amnesia, many more consistent with recent proposals that the develop-
have somewhat surprisingly reported near normal ment of categorization automaticity is characterized
134 Categorization, Psychological Perspectives
by a transfer of control from the neural circuits that thought about) item to knowledge that is relevant
mediate the learning to cortical-cortical projections for dealing with that item. It is a remarkable, often
between sensory areas that mediate the perception of effortless, ability that helps our survival. This entry
the stimulus and premotor/motor areas that mediate provides an overview of categorization with an
the motor response. According to this view, a pri- emphasis on its various functions and its importance
mary role of the striatum in information-integration across a wide variety of cognitive activities.
tasks is to train these cortical-cortical projections.
Functions of Categories
F. Gregory Ashby
Categories allow one both to determine the type
See also Categorization, Psychological Perspectives; of thing one is dealing with and to access knowl-
Category Learning, Computational Perspectives; edge that might be relevant to how to deal with
Classical Theory of Concepts; Memory, Neural Basis it. Classification, the process of assigning category
membership, is clearly a very important function of
Further Readings categories. We need to know if the item is a hammer
or a rattlesnake. However, classification is rarely the
Ashby, F. G., Ennis, J. M., & Spiering, B. J. (2007).
A neurobiological theory of automaticity in perceptual
goal. Rather, we use the classification to appropri-
categorization. Psychological Review, 114, 632656.
ately deal with the item. If it is a hammer, we can
Ashby, F. G., & OBrien, J. B. (2005). Category learning use it for some purpose, such as putting in a nail or
and multiple memory systems. TRENDS in Cognitive as a paperweight, whereas if it is a rattlesnake, our
Science, 2, 8389. knowledge suggests moving away.
Knowlton, B. J., Mangels, J. A., & Squire, L. R. (1996). These other functions beyond classification
A neostriatal habit learning system in humans. Science, include just about all cognitive processes, but it is
273, 13991402. useful to highlight four in particular: prediction/infer-
Muhammad, R., Wallis, J. D., & Miller, E. K. (2006). ence, understanding/explanation, reasoning, and
A comparison of abstract rules in the prefrontal cortex, communication. First, when we know what category
premotor cortex, inferior temporal cortex, and striatum. an item is in, we can make some inference about a
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 116. property or prediction about the future that in turn
Seger, C. A. (2008). How do the basal ganglia contribute to may affect our plans and actions. Is this dog likely to
categorization? Their roles in generalization, response harm us? Will it make noise? We can use our knowl-
selection, and learning via feedback. Neuroscience and edge about dogs to make more accurate inferences
Biobehavioral Reviews, 32, 265278. and predictions. Second, we can use knowledge
about categories to understand or explain events.
Our knowledge about dogs helps us understand why
CATEGORIZATION, PSYCHOLOGICAL it might be barking and explain why it jumped all
PERSPECTIVES over the child who just ate dinner. Third, we can
reason about categories based on their knowledge
and relation to other categories. If we know a dog is
Categories are classes of items that are treated as
a mammal, we can reason that it is warm-blooded
equivalent with respect to some purpose. We have
even if we never thought about that before. Fourth,
categories for such diverse items as cars, cheeses,
to the extent that people have similar categories, we
dogs, football games, mothers, and religions.
can communicate with others and learn indirectly
Categories do not simply group items, they provide a
about categories. Our knowledge of rattlesnakes, for
crucial way by which we can organize and make use
many of us, is all learned through communication,
of our experience. We do not need experience with
and we can pass this information to others without
a specific car to drive it or a specific dog to decide
the need for them to experience a live rattlesnake.
whether we can pet it or not. Categorization refers
to the set of processes that are involved in putting
Categorical Knowledge for Classification
items into classes and accessing knowledge about
the class. It is a central cognitive activity in that it A central question is how knowledge about catego-
provides a means for going from an observed (or ries is organized to support these various functions.
Categorization, Psychological Perspectives 135
Much of the work has focused on structure support- view avoids the strict definitional requirements of
ing classification, and we examine the major clas- the classical view and may fit better how items from
sification views, similarity-based and theory-based, natural categories are classified.
before broadening the discussion to consider other The exemplar view also uses similarity in a
aspects of categorization. probabilistic way, but rather than having a sum-
mary representation (prototype), this view assumes
that people classify new instances in terms of their
Similarity-Based Views of Classification
similarities to specific category members. That is,
A simple intuitive idea is that we determine the a new item reminds us of various earlier items and
category of a new item by choosing the category it is we assume that it is in the same category as those
most similar to. This new animal is a dog because it items. Thus, a new large friendly animal may remind
is similar to the category of dogs. That is, each item one of the neighbors large dog and leads to its clas-
consists of a set of features (e.g., furry, four-legged), sification as a dog. A less friendly smaller animal
and we categorize by finding the category with the might remind one of a different dog but still lead
most similar set of features. We may distinguish dif- to the same final classification. Although one might
ferent ways in which similarity is used. retrieve some items from other categories, for most
The classical view of categories, dating back at new items, the majority of retrieved items are likely
least to Aristotle, is much like a definition or rule: to be from the same category. Although it may seem
All members of a category are similar in that they strange not to have a single category representation,
each have a particular set of features. In addition, this view allows much greater flexibility for classifi-
any item that has these features is a member of the cation of atypical items.
category. A square is any closed two-dimensional All of these views have some intuitive appeal
figure with four equal sides and equal angles, and and seem to capture some aspects of classification
any such figure is a square. This view allows varia- well. Some current mixed-model views combine the
tions in other features, such as size of the square, classical view with one of the probabilistic views to
but ensures a commonality among all category allow rules when useful and more flexible classifica-
members. tions otherwise.
The prototype view provides a very different idea Theory view. Simple sets of features may not be
of how to use similarity to structure categories, an adequate for how people categorize items in the
idea which also points out a problem with the clas- world. We know that birds have wings, fly, and live
sical view. This proposal is that while each category in nests in trees, but these are not three separate
can be viewed as consisting of similar members, the features: The wings enable the birds to fly, which
features do not all have to be true of every member. enables them to live in trees. A category representa-
Rather, category members are organized around tion not only includes prototypical features but also
a prototype, or best member, that contains all the relations among features and explanations about
category features. Other members vary in how the relations (e.g., having wings enables flying) that
many of these features they contain. To classify a draw on previous knowledge. Rather than com-
new item, one compares it with the prototypes of paring feature lists to derive similarity, we need to
all the different categories, giving more weight to understand how the features fit together and relate
the important features, and chooses the most similar to other world knowledge.
prototype. Members with more features are viewed The theory view proposes that categories are
as more typical than other members; for example, organized by our theoriesexplanations regarding
a robin is a typical bird. Even atypical members, relations between categories and/or features of a cat-
such as a penguin, are likely to match its category egory. These theories are knowledge based, meaning
prototype more than other categories prototypes. they are dependent on what we already know. For
You can think of this as related to a family resem- instance, when learning about a new type of motor
blance in an extended familythere may be some vehicle it may be helpful to relate them to other cat-
family characteristics that one sees when viewing a egories such as cars and motorcycles.
picture of the whole family, but family members dif- A central question in categorization is, What
fer in how many of these they each might have. This makes categories coherent (i.e., make sense)? The
136 Categorization, Psychological Perspectives
theory-based view addresses this question. Categories how typical members they are, in terms of how well
are coherent if they are consistent with ones knowl- they approach the ideal. For example, for the take-
edge and theories about the world. A category can in-a-fire category, typical items include baby and
be considered more coherent if many of its features money, whereas less typical are favorite clothes and
are causally related to each other (e.g., wings enable an antique lamp. With repeated use, we may include
flight). Features that are causally related are most such categories in our knowledge (e.g., foods to eat
likely correlated with each other and will appear on a diet).
together more often than not. Hence, featural simi-
larity is a common, though not necessary, by-product Basic Levels and Cross-Classification
of category coherence. For example, many members
Although we often think about items as being in
of the dog category do look somewhat similar. The
a single category (Fido is a dog; that object is a car),
important point, though, is that category members
all items belong to many categories. There are two
also seem similar because they are grouped by some
major types of multiple classifications: different lev-
underlying explanatory principle, such as a biologi-
els and cross-classifications at the same level.
cal theory (e.g., DNA) for dogs. This idea explains
All items are part of some hierarchy and can be
why people are easily able to accommodate category
classified at different levels, such as an item being
members that do not look very similar to other
a Jonathan apple, an apple, a fruit, and a physical
members, as long as they fit in with the underly-
object. Even so, there is often a particular preferred
ing explanation for that category. For example, we
level at which items tend to be classifiedas an
understand that beanbag chairs are chairs (though
apple, not a fruit or Jonathan apple. This psycho-
they do not look like other chairs) and that whales
logically privileged level is called the basic level. Not
are mammals even though they look more like fish.
only do people usually name items at this level; they
Even though the theory-based view goes beyond
are also faster to verify an item at this level (shown a
similarity to address why categories seem coherent,
picture, the time to agree it is an apple is faster than
the view is complex and not fully developed. It is
to say it is a fruit or Jonathan apple), to learn these
possible that an underlying explanation does not
terms earlier, and to have a variety of other advan-
always drive categorization. In these cases, similar-
tages. This basic level seems to represent a good
ity could be playing a more central role in category
compromise for two different goals of the system:
organization, and something like the prototype view
to have the categories be informative and to have
may be sufficient.
them be distinctive. At higher levels, much informa-
tion is given up (e.g., saying something is a fruit does
Goal-Based View of Categories not say much about how it tastes), whereas the dis-
As stated at the beginning, we categorize items with tinctiveness becomes minor at lower levels (e.g., dif-
respect to some purpose. We discuss three cases of ferences between Jonathan and Macintosh apples).
the importance of this purpose for understanding Thus, the basic level may be a useful level for many
categorization and then address what this might say of the goals for which categories are needed.
about categories in cognition. Even within a level, however, items belong to
many categories. An apple is a fruit and a break-
Ad hoc Categories fast food. A person might be a professor, a father, a
golfer, and a coin collector. Predicting, explaining,
Try to think of the following category: items
and so on may depend critically on what category
to take out of your house during a fire. You will
one thinks is relevant for the task. Thus, these differ-
notice that it is fairly easy to decide on most items
ent categories each provide a rich set of knowledge
and that the items differ tremendously (e.g., photo-
that may be accessed as a function of how the item
graphs, pets). Ad hoc categories are ones spontane-
is classified.
ously constructed in the service of a goal. The basis
for this category is not definitional, similarity to a
Category Use
prototype, or similarity to other category members,
but rather similarity to some ideal (a highly valuable We think of categorization as including classifica-
and portable object). Thus, items can also vary in tion and the use of the category because in many
Categorization, Psychological Perspectives 137
situations classification is part of a larger goal- for interacting with people, solving problems, and
related task. Often, we want to do something with understanding events. Not only are many of these
the classification that an item is a car, that a person not objects; many are quite abstract. For example, to
has a disease, or that the math problem is an exam- speak a sentence, we need to use word classes (e.g.,
ple of permutations. We might want to drive a car noun, verb), and we understand abstract words such
to our errands, decide on a medication to treat the as jealousy or democracy. Some examples provide
disease, or access the permutations formula to solve an idea of categorizations breadth, while also relat-
the problem. One could view these goal-related ing them to goals, similarity-based and theory-based
activities as separate from classification, except that views of category representation, and basic levels.
they influence later classifications. The way we use a Social categories are critical for interacting with
category for a particular goal-related task influences others. Individuals belong to many social categories,
the category representation and, thus, later categori- such as student, father, and banker, and these cat-
zations. If in solving a permutations problem, we see egories convey useful information, such as whether
that order is important, that additional knowledge one is likely to be young, tired, or wealthy. We use
may influence how we classify later problems. If a social categories frequently, and some appear to be
treatment of a disease has a large effect on a particu- activated automatically (gender, age, race). Because
lar symptom, perhaps that symptom becomes more people belong to many social categories, which cat-
weighted in our later diagnoses. egory is most relevant will be influenced by various
factors such as context and goals. Social categories
Categories and Cognition help not only to categorize but also to explain social
Categories are classes of items that are treated behaviors, to infer unobservable properties, and
as equivalent with respect to some purpose. We more generally to shape our perceptions of the social
can walk through the world classifying objects we environment.
happen to see without those items being part of any People often use problem categories to help solve
particular purpose, but much of categorization is a problem, in both formal education (such as cat-
goal driven. Even mundane actions, such as unlock- egorizing math problems), as well as in complex
ing a door, require classifications of the key, lock, real-world situations (such as fixing a car or treating
and door and an understanding of how the action a disease). Categorizing the problem allows one to
leads to the ability to get through the door. Those take appropriate actionto buy a new carburetor
goal-related activities influence how we think about or prescribe a strong medicine. Such categorizations
the items and even what we notice about them. For are clearly influenced by the goals, and also by the
example, people know little about the details of coins knowledge people bring to bear. Such categories
(such as pennies), despite having seen thousands of show examples of both similarity-based and theory-
them because most of the details are irrelevant for based views of category representation across levels
our goal-related activities with the coins. Many of of expertise. For example, expert physicists catego-
our uses of items are consistent with their default rize problems using principles and theories involved,
classifications (apple, dog, hammer), but we can also such as Newtons second law, whereas novices rely
classify them differently when the purpose of our on superficial properties of the problems, such as
interaction changes (snack food, comfort, doorstop). pulleys or inclined planes.
Finally, although some categories, such as scenes
and events, contain multiple complex objects and
Types of Categories
relations between them, people quickly identify
People have categories not only for objects but also classroom and beach scenes as well as party events
for a wide variety of different classes, such as people, and basketball games. One may categorize these
ideas, and events. The importance of categoriza- situations at various levels (outdoor scene, beach,
tion lies in its usefulness for learning from earlier white-sand beach; sporting event, basketball game,
experiences. By separating different types of things high school basketball game), but both scenes and
and organizing knowledge around the types, we events generally have a basic level, just like objects.
can apply to a new situation what we learned from This level efficiently provides much information rel-
earlier situations of that type. We use categories evant to our goals. Being invited to the beach, as
138 Category Learning, Computational Perspectives
opposed to just the outdoors, suggests what supplies twice, they must develop categorization schemes
to bring, but knowing that it is a white-sand beach that capture the useful regularities in their environ-
does not add much useful detail. ment. One challenge for psychological research is
to determine how humans acquire and represent
Brian H. Ross, Eric G. Taylor,
categories. Formally, category learning can be cast
and Erin L. Jones as the search for the function that maps from per-
ceptual experiences to category membership. In this
See also Categorization, Neural Basis; Category
Learning, Computational Perspectives; Classical
light, various models of human category learning are
Theory of Concepts; Concepts, Philosophical Issues; accounts of how people approximate this function
Conceptual Combination; Human Classification from a limited number of observations. In this entry,
Learning; Similarity human category learning will be considered from
this formal perspective.
A function can be seen as a machine that takes
Further Readings
inputs and generates outputs. For example, a soda
Barsalou, L. W. (1983). Ad hoc categories. Memory & machine (after it receives payment) takes a button
Cognition, 11, 211227. press selection as input and outputs the appropri-
Hemenway, K., & Tversky, B. (1983). Categories of ate brand of soda. In algebra class, most students
environmental scenes. Cognitive Psychology, 15, are taught notation for functions, such as y = f(x)
121149. where y is the output, x is the input, and f is the
Kim, N. S., & Ahn, W. (2002). Clinical psychologists function. For example, y = f(x) = 0.5556x 17.7778
theory-based representations of mental disorders predict is a linear function that takes as input temperatures
their diagnostic reasoning and memory. Journal of in Fahrenheit and outputs (i.e., converts to) temper-
Experimental Psychology: General, 4, 451476.
atures in Celsius. Functions can also be nonlinear,
Macrae, C. N., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2000). Social
such as those that compute compounding interest.
cognition: Thinking categorically about others.
Whereas the temperature conversation function has
Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 93120.
continuous outputs, category functions have a finite
Markman, A. B., & Ross, B. H. (2003). Category use and
category learning. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 592613.
set of discrete outputs. For example, a vertebrate
Medin, D. L. (1989). Concepts and conceptual structure.
animal can be categorized as a bird, mammal, fish,
American Psychologist, 44, 14691481. reptile, or amphibian. Thus, category functions are
Murphy, G. L. (2002). The big book of concepts. more like the soda machine than temperature con-
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. version example, though the inputs to the category
Murphy, G. L., & Medin, D. L. (1985). The role of theories function can be quite complex, including all that a
in conceptual coherence. Psychological Review, 92, person can sense.
289316.
Rosch, E., Mervis, C. B., Gray, W. D., Johnson, D. M., &
A Balancing Act Between
Boyes-Braem, P. (1976). Basic objects in natural
Flexibility and Bias
categories. Cognitive Psychology, 8, 382439.
Ross, B. H., & Murphy, G. L. (1999). Food for thought: Any learning system faces a trade-off that is known
Cross-classification and category organization in a in statistics as the bias-variance dilemma. This
complex real-world domain. Cognitive Psychology, 38, trade-off involves finding the right balance of induc-
495553. tive bias and flexibility when learning the category
function from a limited set of examples (as people
do). Inductive bias guides a models interpretation
CATEGORY LEARNING, of data. To make an analogy, people have an induc-
tive bias to view events co-occurring in time (e.g.,
COMPUTATIONAL PERSPECTIVES smoke and fire) as causally related. A strong bias
constrains the form of the category function that
Judging a person as a friend or foe, a mushroom a model considers. For example, prototype models
as edible or poisonous, or a sound as an l or r are are strongly biased to only learn linear mappings
examples of categorization problems. Because (i.e., functions) from stimuli to categories, because
people never encounter the same exact stimulus prototype models represent categories by a single
Category Learning, Computational Perspectives 139
average (i.e., abstraction) of category members. For seeding the model with hypothetical training exam-
example, a prototype model would represent the ples (prior to observing any actual examples). For
category of birds as a single point (i.e., the proto- example, one may have a prior that heads and tails
type) that is the average of the features (e.g., size, are both equally likely when flipping a coin. Thus,
color) of all birds (e.g., eagles, robins, penguins, after flipping the coin once and observing tails, one
sparrows). In practice, prototype models are best would not conclude that the coin would always
for learning categories that have a common fam- come up tails. The prior serves as a bias in favor
ily resemblance structure. For example, for the of certain hypotheses about the category function.
category birds, most birds have characteristics in As many examples are observed, the importance of
commonthey tend to be small, have wings, can the initial prior wanes. This prior knowledge can
fly, and so on. However, other items violate this be quite complex. For example, prior knowledge
structure (e.g., penguins, bats). Thus, the prototype reflecting biological theories can be incorporated
model will have trouble with these items as they into a Bayesian model designed to learn about ani-
go against its bias of categories consisting of one mal categories.
single clump of items. Other models, such as exem-
plar models, are weakly biased. Rather than averag- When Biases Prevent Learning
ing items together in memory, the exemplar model The preceding discussion focuses on how biases can
stores each item separately, which allows it to learn be helpful or harmful in promoting (i.e., speeding)
any possible function. For example, an exemplar the learning of the category function. Of course,
model would represent the category of birds as the very strong biases, such as in the prototype model,
collection of all birds (i.e., one point for each cat- can actually make some category functions unlearn-
egory member). Exemplar models can learn any able. While researchers typically focus on the rate at
category function, whether it be linear or nonlin- which people learn various categories, one impor-
ear. However, even the exemplar model has biases tant question is whether a model can even learn a
because it will learn some functions more rapidly category structure. For example, early work in neu-
(i.e., require fewer training examples) than others. ral networks was criticized and partially abandoned
The latter point hints at why biases can be use- because certain category functions (ones that peo-
ful. When a models bias corresponds to the actual ple could readily learn) were in principle unlearn-
category structure, it will learn the correct category able by the models. For example, these early models
function more rapidly than a less biased model or a could not learn nonlinear functions, such as exclu-
model that has an incorrect bias. When a model is sive-or (e.g., a spoon is small and steel or large
too flexible, it will be overly affected by the variance and wooden). The learning rules in these mod-
(i.e., noise) of the training examples it observes. In els attempt to adjust connection weights to reduce
such cases, the model will fail to learn the underlying prediction error (i.e., attempt to better approximate
pattern and be overly affected by the idiosyncratic the category function). Unfortunately, the models
properties of the examples it has observed. Thus, the were overly biased toward certain solutions and
category learning function learned will initially be incapable of learning many category functions, no
incorrect and will not accurately classify new exam- matter how long the model was trained.
ples. In general, more flexible (i.e., the less biased) Learnability concerns extend to all modeling
models require more training examples to infer the approaches. For example, Bayesian models need to
underlying form of the category function. be sufficiently flexible (by having a wide range of
Bayesian methods offer a natural way to deal possible hypotheses about what the category func-
with the bias-variance dilemma by simultaneously tion could be) to be able to eventually learn the
considering models of varying complexity (i.e., underlying category function.
flexibility). Bayesian methods provide a means to
combine prior beliefs with the current observation
The Curse of Dimensionality
to determine the probability that an item is a mem-
ber of a category. Biases for an individual Bayesian One research challenge is determining what kinds of
model can be explicitly built into the models prior category functions people readily learn. The size of
(i.e., beliefs held prior to observing any category the input space is a major factor. Problems tend to
members), which can be loosely thought of as be easy to learn that involve only a few dimensions.
140 Causal Theories of Intentionality
In the temperature conversion example, the x in f(x) described here takes the content of a mental rep-
was a single number (i.e., one dimension), as opposed resentationwhat that concept represents or is
to a lengthy vector of many inputs. As the dimension- aboutto be a function of causal relations between
ality of the input space increases, the number of train- mental representations and their typically external
ing examples needed to support learning can increase objects. This emphasis on causal relations should be
rapidly. Many learning problems humans face appear understood broadly, however, so as to cover theories
to be high dimensional. For example, one could view couched in terms of lawlike natural relations or the
every receptor in the retina as a dimension for visual law-governed way in which one natural event car-
learning problems. In practice, these dimensions are ries information about another.
not all independent and the brain can take advan-
tage of the structure in the world. Still, one must The Problem of Intentionality
exploit such biases to learn in large problem spaces.
Category learning functions that are smooth and For good reason, the aboutnessof human thought
regular are often the most tractable for learning mod- seems mysterious, especially to those who embrace
els. Likewise, the effective dimensionality of a cat- the contemporary scientific view of the universe.
egory learning problem can be reduced in situations When a human thinks about his or her next meal,
in which attention can be oriented away from certain something in the humans mind represents food or
dimensions. For example, when a mechanic tries to takes food as its object. In contrast, consider the
classify what is wrong with a vehicle, the color of the physical relation of being next to. The filing cabinet
vehicle is usually irrelevant to the decision. might be next to the desk, but it is not about the
desk; it is not directed at the desk, it does not mean
Bradley C. Love the desk, and it does not take the desk as an object.
What in the physical world grounds the aboutness
See also Categorization, Neural Basis; Categorization,
of concepts and mental states?
Psychological Perspectives; Similarity
Causal relations may be the answer. Causes and
effects permeate the universe, though, and intention-
Further Readings ality does not. Thus, a causal theory of intentionality
Anderson, J. R. (1991). The adaptive nature of human must identify the particular form or pattern of causal
categorization. Psychological Review, 98, 409429. relations that determines the intentional relation.
Briscoe, E., & Feldman, K. (2011). Conceptual complexity
and the bias/variance tradeoff. Cognition, 118, 216. Laws and Information
Love, B. C., & Tomlinson, M. (2010). Mechanistic models
of associative and rule-based category learning. In Asymmetric Dependence
D. Mareschal, P. Quinn, & S. Lea (Eds.), The making In the human case, mental representations most
of human concepts (pp. 5374). Oxford, UK: Oxford
likely take physical form in the neural system, and
University Press.
of course, these neural structures participate in the
Nosofsky, R. M. (1992). Exemplars, prototypes, and
natural order of causes and effects. This suggests a
similarity rules. In A. F. Healy & S. M. Kosslyn (Eds.),
straightforward causal account of intentional content:
Essays in honor of William K. Estes: Vol. 1. From
A mental representation is about whatever causes
learning theory to connectionist theory (pp. 149167).
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
its activation (where activation might amount to
increased rates of neural firings). For instance, when
one sees a cow, this activates the collection of neurons
heightened firing of which constitutes the activation of
CAUSAL THEORIES OF
a mental representationthe representation of cows.
INTENTIONALITY We should, however, want to identify a persisting
representation of cows, one that can be activated in
This entry surveys a range of proposed solutions to a variety of contexts, on each occasion serving as a
the problem of intentionalitythat is, the problem vehicle for the subjects thoughts about cows. This
of explaining how human thoughts can be about, or desideratum introduces a complication. We should
be directed toward, objects. The family of solutions want standing representations partly because humans
Causal Theories of Intentionality 141
often think about cows in the absence of cowsthat about some source; that is, the mental representation
is, even when a cow has not, on the occasion of the may simply be about whatever state of the source
subjects thought, directly caused the activation of the mental representation carries information about.
any of his or her mental representations. This is espe- Begin with the notion of the amount of informa-
cially clear in cases of misrepresentation, in which tion carried. On a specific occasion when a signal
something other than a cowsay, a horse in the is transmitted, the transmitting source is in one of
fogcauses a subject to think about cows, because, its possible states; so, too, is the device receiving
as we would normally put it, the person has mistaken that signal, and this latter statethe state of the
the horse for a cow. Thus, we require a more discern- receivermay reveal more or less about the state
ing causal theory, one that does not simply identify of the source. If the state of the receiver is consistent
the intentional content of a mental representation with a wide variety of states of the source, then the
with whatever causes its activation. For the simple state of the receiver carries less information about the
theory does not seem to allow for misrepresentation; source than if the state of the receiver had been con-
rather, it entails that any cause of the activation of a sistent with only one or two states of the source. As
given mental representation is correctly characterized an illustration, consider a case in which an English
by the intentional content of that representation. speaker passes a one-word note to another English
In response to such concerns, Jerry Fodor develops speaker. The end of the word is illegible; all that can
his asymmetric dependence account of intentional be made out is pe, with a smudge following it. The
content. The fundamental idea is that relative to the resulting state of the receiverthe visual apparatus
activation of some particular mental representation, of the person reading the noteis consistent with a
certain lawlike processes are derivative on others. substantial range of English words: pet, pen, perco-
There are standard ways in which the activation of late, pedestrian, and many more. Thus, the state of
a mental representation can be caused, and there are the receiver does not pinpoint the state of mind of
nonstandard ways. Moreover, the former have their the person who wrote the note. In contrast, if the
status precisely because the other processes depend note had shown the letters perenniall followed by a
asymmetrically on them: Were the standard chan- smudge, the state of the receiver would have carried
nels not in place, the nonstandard channels would as much information as possible in this situation;
not be either, but not vice versa. The nonderivative for it rules out all possibilities except that the person
law-based relations that cause the activation of a writing the note had perennially in mind (assuming
mental representation thus determine its intentional in this case that the domain of states of the source is
content. A concept represents whatever it is nomi- limited to thoughts about English words).
cally linked to (i.e., linked to by laws of nature) and The informational approach need not focus only
is such that its nomic link to the concept is the one on quantity of information, though. A simple infor-
on which all other such links depend. mational theory might hold that the receiver state
Consider a case in which visual input caused by is specifically about whatever state of the source it
a horse eventuates in the activation of what we nor- homes in onthat is, whatever state (or possible
mally consider the subjects mental representation range of states) the source must be in, given the state
of a cow. According to the asymmetric dependence of the receiver.
theory, the mental representation in question would Our earlier problem about misrepresentation
not be activated if it were not the sort of thing acti- recurs, however. Whatever the state of the exter-
vations of which can be caused in a lawlike way by nal source, it is thereby among those with which
cows. The converse, however, is not true: If the con- the state of the receiver is consistent! Fred Dretske
cept in question were to lose entirely its sensitivity to once proposed to handle this problem by positing
horses, its activation would still be caused by cows. a period during which the intentional content of a
Thus, it represents cows, not horses. mental representation is established (and which is
then retained by future activations of the mental
representation in question). If, during the learning
Informational Semantics
period, a mental representation carries information
Alternatively, a mental representations inten- about only one property or kind, the mental rep-
tional content might be the information it carries resentation is thereafter about that one property or
142 Causal Theories of Intentionality
kind. In contrast, if, during the learning period, the neurological structure indicates warmth and, via
mental representation carries less definite informa- reinforcement, comes to control, say, certain bodily
tion (its activation is consistent with the presence movements. Developmentally early cases might
of more than one possible state of the world), then involve, for instance, the warmth of a parents body.
the mental representation is thereafter about the rel- Moving toward that warmth rewards the infant or
evant range of possibilities. Once the learning period young child by satisfying a desire for, say, human
ends, the mental representation can be misapplied, contact; moreover, it does so precisely because that
thus allowingas a theory of intentional content contact comes from the source of warmth. If, at a
shouldfor misrepresentation. later time, this mental representation is activated, the
child thinks about warmth, regardless of whether, on
these further occasions, the representation indicates
Causal History
the presence of something warm or whether moving
Information and Learning History toward something warm results in a reward.
Many causal theories take the subjects history
The Best Test Theory
to determine the intentional content of at least
some of his or her mental representations. Seeing Robert Ruperts historically oriented proposal
the shortcomings of the idea of a learning period, emphasizes comparative probabilistic relations, at
Fred Dretske later focused on changes that take least for those representations emerging early in
place during the learning process itself. Think of development. The fundamental idea is that a mental
an information-bearing structure as a mere detec- representation is about whatever kind or property
tor: When it lights up, it has detected the presence of is the most efficient cause of that mental represen-
whatevers presence is guaranteed by that structures tation. The efficiency of a cause is measured in the
lighting up. Such indication can, in some circum- following way. Take a mental representation. For
stances, provide a reward for the subject. In these each property or kind of thing that has caused the
cases, behavioral success reinforces the connection activation of that mental representation, ask the fol-
between the information-bearing structure in ques- lowing: Of all of the mental structures members of
tion and the reward-engendering action it caused. As that kind (or instances of that property) have acti-
a result, a structure can acquire a function within the vated in a given subject, what proportion were cases
subjects cognitive systemthe function of produc- of the representation in question? In this fashion, we
ing the kind of behavior in question. The intentional can ask, relative to a single mental representation
content of said structure, then, is whatever (a) the (in a single subject), which property or kind is most
structure indicated on the occasion of its acquiring efficient in its causing of that mental representation
a new function in the cognitive system and (b) is relative to its causing of other mental representa-
such that the structures indicating it explains this tions. This approach is thus doubly comparative.
modification. Even just one instance of form of First, relative to a given mental representation, each
behavior can be rewarded, with reinforcement as a kind (or property) has an efficiency rate, which is
result: The mental representation the activation of comparative in the way that relative frequencies
which caused the subject to exhibit said behavior are. That is to say, a single kinds efficiency rate is
can now be tightly associated with that form of determined by dividing the number of times it has
behavior. Moreover, when this occurs, it can occur caused any mental representation at all into the
because what the activated mental representation number of times it has caused the activation of the
carried information about (what it indicated) helps mental representation in question. So its efficiency
to explain the success of the subjects behavior on rate involves facts concerning only the way in which
that occasion. it has caused activation of the mental representation
On this view, misrepresentation occurs when in question relative to its causing of the activation
a mental representation is applied to something of other mental representations. Second, having in
other than that the indication of which explains hand an efficiency rate for each kind or property
why the mental representation acquired its role in relative to the single mental representation of inter-
the cognitive system. Assume, for example, that a est, relations among these efficiency rates determine
Causal Theories of Intentionality 143
the intentional content of the mental representation indeterminacies or to inform the choice of an
in question: The mental representation is about the intentionality-determining causal relation. Biological
kind or property with the highest efficient rate rela- theories of intentional contents, so-called teleose-
tive to that mental representation. mantics, place teleology at center stage. Independent
Consider a typical subject. Sometimes (on dark of questions about isomorphism, the general idea is
nights, for example), cows cause the activation of this: The current content of a mental representation
the representation we would take to be the sub- is whatever was correlated historically with activa-
jects horse concept, but the efficiency rate of cows tions of that kind of mental representation but only
relative to that concept is, presumably, very low; of in cases in which such correlation explains (e.g., evo-
all the times cows have caused the activation of a lutionarily) why mental representations of that type
concept in the subject, the proportion of those that continued to be reproduced (see the work of Ruth
were horse concepts is very low. In contrast, most Millikan and David Papineau).
of the time horses have caused the activation of any
mental representation at all, it has been the horse
Intentional Systems
concept, at least for the typical subject. So relative to
the horse concept, horses are the winners. The theories discussed above assign specific inten-
tional contents to particular mental representations.
Isomorphism and Teleology Perhaps, however, a mental representation has inten-
tional properties only if it appears within a suitable
Isomorphism-based views focus on the relation
kind of system. For example, it may be that only a
between the internal structure of a mental repre-
system of structures capable of producing intelligent
sentation and the internal structure of what it rep-
behavior contains elements with intentional content.
resents: For a mental representation to be about
If there are such further conditions on intentionality,
some structure in the world, relations between the
the approaches reviewed in the preceding sections
elements of the mental representation must mirror
are incomplete; for no physical structure represents
the relations between the elements in the thing repre-
simply on account of its satisfying, say, the asymmet-
sented. Moreover, on the explicitly causal version of
ric dependence condition. Instead, a structure with
this view, proposed by Dennis Stampe, a representa-
intentional content must also appear as part of sys-
tions having its particular internal structure must
tem with the requisite characteristics.
have been caused by the analogous structure in the
thing represented. Compare: The elements of a pho- Robert Douglas Rupert
tograph relate to each other in the same way that the
elements of the photographed scene relate to each See also Atomism About Concepts; Classical Theory of
other at the time the photograph was taken. Concepts; Intentionality of Bodily Sensation; Intentionality
There is, however, a surfeit of structure in the uni- of Emotion; Representational Theory of Mind
verse, which leads to a kind of indeterminacy. It may
be that at many steps in the causal chain leading Further Readings
to the activation of a mental representation, there
Cummins, R. (1996). Representations, targets, and
appears an appropriate structureone to which the
attitudes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
structure of the representation is isomorphic. Which
Dretske, F. (1981). Knowledge and the flow of information.
of the things (external object, structured light, pat- Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
terns of upstream neural firings) is the object of Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining behavior: Reasons in a
the mental representation? To solve this problem, world of causes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
isomorphism-based theories typically defer to facts Fodor, J. A. (1990). A theory of content and other essays.
about the purpose or function of various compo- Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
nents of the cognitive systemfor instance, the Millikan, R. G. (1984). Language, thought, and other
visual systems function of tracking objects in the biological categories: New foundations for realism.
environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Many causal theories of intentionality appeal to Papineau, D. (1984). Representation and explanation.
such teleological considerations in order to resolve Philosophy of Science, 51, 550572
144 Causal Theories of Memory
Rupert, R. D. (1999). The best test theory of extension: case of remembering, according to the causal theo-
First principle(s). Mind & Language, 14, 321355. rists diagnosis, is that the subjects current ability to
Stampe, D. W. (1979). Toward a causal theory of linguistic represent the event does not stand in the right sort of
representation. In P. French, T. Uehling, Jr., & causal connection to her having experienced it.
H. Wettstein (Eds.), Contemporary perspectives in the Obviously, there remains a need for the causal
philosophy of language (pp. 81102). Minneapolis: theorist to elucidate what is meant by the right sort
University of Minnesota Press. of causal connection in this context, and what, for
instance, disqualifies the kind of causal connection
that obtains in our example, where the diary forms
CAUSAL THEORIES OF MEMORY the causal link between past and present. This is an
instance of the problem of deviant causal chains,
Causal theories of memory aim to give a philosophi- which also affects other causal theories in the phi-
cal account of what it is to remember something. losophy of mind (e.g., of perception and action).
According to such theories, to remember something We can distinguish between two ways of construing
is to be in a mental state or undergo a mental epi- causal theories of memory in terms of the type of
sode that stands in an appropriate kind of causal responses to this problem that they embody.
connection to one or more of ones previous mental
states or episodes. More specifically, causal theories Memory Traces as Internal
of memory typically have it that the causal connec-
One type of response to the problem of devi-
tion involves the persistence of a trace: The original
ant causal chains, in the case of causal theories of
experience of an event has left a trace on the subject,
memory, involves adding further constraints to the
which is now operative in the subjects remembering
basic idea behind such theories. One such constraint
the event. In psychology, the idea that remembering
might be that memory necessarily involves traces
involves the activation of memory traces is typically
internal to the body of the subject, which would rule
taken as uncontroversial, the main focus of research
out the diary entry as a suitable trace.
being on what is known as the problem of localiza-
This response turns on an understanding of
tionthat is, of trying to identify brain structures
causal theories of memory, according to which
that realize such traces. In fact, however, attempting
they imply some substantive assumptions about the
to explain what it is to remember in terms of the
nature of memory traces, for instance that they must
idea of a memory trace turns out far from straight-
be realized in the subjects internal physiology (the
forward. This entry summarizes arguments for and
technology of the day is often invoked to illustrate
against causal theories of memory and distinguishes
the idea of a trace in this sense; e.g., wax tablets,
two ways of understanding the appeal such theories
phonographic records, or connectionist networks).
make to the notion of a trace.
Yet the more causal theories introduce such substan-
tive assumptions, the less they seem able to offer a
The Basic Intuition and the Problem plausible analysis of our commonsense concept of
of Deviant Causal Chains remembering, which is typically taken to be their
aim. It does not seem true that having the concept of
Causal theories of memory typically take as their
remembering requires having beliefs about physiol-
remit the concept of remembering quite gener-
ogy, any more than having the concept of talking
ally, but most of the more detailed analyses focus
to someone on a telephone requires having beliefs
on remembering particular, personally experienced
about the processes that make this possible. Thus,
events, or what psychologists call episodic memory.
this way of construing causal theories of memory
As applied to episodic memory, one basic intuition
lays them vulnerable to the charge of scientism
that informs causal theories of memory is that there
that is, of confusing empirical hypotheses about
can be cases in which a subject has in fact experi-
mechanisms underpinning memory with an insight
enced a certain past event and can now represent it
into what it is to remember.
correctly, without it being true that she remembers
the event. For instance, a subject might no longer
remember her first kiss yet nevertheless represent it
The Very Notion of a Trace
correctly because she is reading a diary she kept at A second type of response to the problem of devi-
the time. The reason why this does not constitute a ant causal chains, in the case of causal theories of
Change Blindness 145
that attention plays in the process. A number of CB person who changes is the focus of attention, yet
findings support the conclusion that change detec- CB results. These observations suggest that one must
tion in these circumstances requires focal attention. not only attend to the object in order to detect the
For instance, changes to items that are of central change, but must attend to the specific aspects of the
interest in the scene are more easily detected than object that would allow one to detect the change.
changes to items of marginal interest. Given that The findings concerning the role of attention in
attention should be preferentially allocated to cen- change detection support the view that only attended
tral interest items, this finding is consistent with the aspects of a scene are represented with sufficient
view that attention is necessary for change detection. detail and longevity to allow an observer to readily
Second, changes become easy to detect if one is cued detect changes. Presumably, these attended aspects
to attend to the location of the change prior to the are represented within visual working memory and
change occurring. These findings suggest that atten- this representation is durable enough to allow a
tion is necessary for change detection. comparison of the prechange item to the postchange
Other results, however, suggest that attention item. The conclusion that attention is required for
to an object may be necessary but not sufficient to conscious recognition of an object is consistent with
detect a change. For instance, research finds that conclusions from other methods such as inatten-
people often fail to notice when the main actor in tional blindness and the attentional blink.
a video is replaced with a different actor during a In addition, the findings that people are often
camera cut. Even in real-life interactions, people poor at detecting changes seem to indicate that peo-
often fail to notice when the person they are giving ples mental representations of visual scenes are far
directions to changes to a new individual, provided less complete and complex than previously assumed.
the direction givers view of the swap is blocked by At the extreme, the findings were used to suggest
an occluding event. Clearly, in these situations the that peoples subjective experience of a rich and
Character and Personality, Philosophical Perspectives 147
detailed visual representation of the world was an Simons, D. J., & Rensink, R. A. (2005). Change blindness:
illusion. Instead, it was argued that mental represen- Past, present, and future. Trends in Cognitive Sciences,
tations of visual scenes were extremely sparse and 9(1), 1620.
volatile, changing as the focus of attention switched
to different items within the scene.
Although CB research was used to promote this CHARACTER AND PERSONALITY,
view, other researchers suggested that the CB find-
ings may underestimate the amount of visual infor-
PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES
mation that is represented. This position is supported
by evidence demonstrating that people are implicitly Some kinds of psychological states are dispositions,
aware of changes, suggesting that changes are repre- as contrasted, roughly, with occurrent states, such as
sented at some level, even if that level is not able to a feeling of pain or a perception of a car. Character
support conscious report. In addition, people began traits and personality traits are both kinds of psy-
to argue that CB could result from a storage failure chological disposition. (Quite what dispositions are
or a comparison failure rather than a failure to ini- is a vexed topic on its own, and what psychologi-
tially represent information from a scene. cal dispositions are is equally vexed, as we will see
Research following up on these potential short- shortly.)
comings has demonstrated that people extract more The distinction between character traits and per-
visual information from scenes than CB suggests, sonality traits is not a precise one. Roughly speaking,
storing these visual details in a visual long-term character traits (such as kindness, benevolence, and
memory of the scene. Thus, CB does not seem to open-mindedness) are more evaluative and tend to
probe the entire contents of visual representations be more fundamental to an individuals psychology
but instead seems to probe the immediately available than personality traits (such as being unsociable and
contents of visual working memory. being bumptious). In particular, character traits tend
As a result, change detection paradigms are cur- to be more evaluative of a persons moral worth. The
rently used to probe the contents of visual working central focus in what follows will be on character
memory and to track the deployment of attention traits, not on personality traits or on other kinds of
in a scene. In the working memory research, it is psychological dispositions such as sentiments (being
assumed that an item is represented within working a dog lover) and temperaments (being a melancholic
memory if changes to it are detected. In the atten- person).
tional tracking research, the time required to find a A significant and important challenge to our
particular change is used as an indication of when notion of character traits, and to virtue theory, has
attention was deployed to that aspect of the scene. come from recent work in social psychology, which
can be considered under the general idea of situ-
Mark W. Becker ationism. Virtue theory is, roughly, the theory that
what matters in morality is more than simply act-
See also Attention and Consciousness; Attentional Blink ing well or bringing about good states of affairs
Effect; Inattentional Blindness; Visual Working Memory
but also being a good person, a person with a good
character. Situationism will be the main focus of this
Further Readings entry. Before considering situationism in detail, it is
Becker, M. W., & Pashler, H. (2002). Volatile visual important to appreciate that there are in fact two
representations: Failing to detect changes in recently distinct challenges here: (a) a challenge to our ordi-
processed information. Psychonomics Bulletin & nary notion of character as embedded in our every-
Review, 9, 744750. day commonsense psychology and (b) a challenge
Hollingworth, A. (2003). Failures of retrieval and to virtue theory as found in Plato and Aristotle, and
comparison constrain change detection in natural as expressed in much modern philosophical writing
scenes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human in the virtue theoretic tradition. There is a substan-
Perception & Performance, 29, 388403. tial question of what the relation is between virtue
Rensink, R. A., ORegan, J. K., & Clark, J. J. (1997). To see theorys notion of character and the notion of char-
or not to see: The need for attention to perceive changes acter as it is found in everyday psychology: It is far
in scenes. Psychological Science, 8(5), 368373. from clear whether virtue theory is a refinement of
148 Character and Personality, Philosophical Perspectives
everyday psychology or a correction of it or whether familiar plot device, from Mozarts Cos Fan Tutte
the relation is altogether more subtle and complex. to the myth of Cephalus and Procris. And the 1983
In any event, if the challenge from social psychol- film Trading Places, directed by John Landis, reveals
ogy to our notion of character in either form goes very nicely how our behavior is, to a considerable
through, there will be significant implications for extent, sustained by our social role. Nevertheless, it
moral philosophy. is very important to see these ideas operationalized
in a way that is tractable for moral psychology and
Situationism moral philosophy.
A number of findings in social psychology have been
The Implications of Situationism
brought to bear by psychologists, and adopted by
philosophers, to show that our notion of character It is generally agreed that our everyday notion of
is not nearly as robust as we take it to be: Subjects character is open to criticism in a number of respects,
actual behavior in experimental conditions seems and situationism highlights these to considerable
to depend much more on the particularities of the effect. First, we do tend to attribute character traits
situation than on subjects dispositions of character. (and personality traits) to people on much too little
This leads some situationists to deny outright that experience of their behavior across a wide number
there is a viable notion of character. Others more and range of different situations (e.g., we see some-
moderately insist that our dispositions to behave are one behave ungenerously just once and then decide
much less stable in their manifestation than we sup- that she is an ungenerous person). Second, we often
pose and that they apply across a much narrower stereotype people, attributing character traits on the
range of situation types. So either way, substantial grounds of irrelevant other factors (he is from New
revision in our thinking is required. York, so he is likely to be rude). Third, we tend to
Two brief examples will give a flavor of the find- take insufficient account of the role in which the per-
ings. In one experiment, subjects are located in a son is placed in arriving at our trait attributions (we
phone booth in a shopping mall when they see an think that the quiz show host, who knows all the
experimenter drop her papers; as they see the papers answers, is cleverer than the quiz show contestant,
being dropped, some of the subjects happen to who knows none of the answers).
find a dime in the coin return slot, and others do However, when we turn to the complexities of
not. Of those who found the coin, 14 of 16 helped virtue theory, virtue theorists insist that the right
the experimenter pick up her papers; of those who notion of character is much more subtle and flexible
did not (and these subjects have no significant differ- than is often presupposed in the social psychology
ences in character), only 1 of 24 helped. In another experiments. They insist that character traits are not
famous experiment, some seminarians stopped to simply dispositions to behave; to think this would
help a seemingly injured colleague and some did not. be to conflate character traits with personality traits,
Whether any particular subject manifested helping many of which are, indeed, understandable in this
behavior depended almost entirely on whether or way (garrulousness is a disposition to talk more
not he was in a hurry; dispositional facts about him than most when in company). What is central to
were not a significant variable. Thus, the conclusion our notion of character according to virtue theory
is, helping behavior is more dependent on the con- is that a character trait is concerned with the agents
tingencies of the situation than on character. reasons, and a virtue is a disposition to appreciate
While these experiments are no doubt of consider- all the relevant reasons and to deliberate about those
able importance, the fragility of our character traits reasons in the right way. For example, generosity
has been acknowledged, in philosophy and in lit- is a disposition not just to give to the needy but
erature, for a very long time. Aristotle, for example, also to give to the needy for the right reasons. So a
acknowledged the reality of failures to act as we and generous person would not give to the needy drug
others know we should, and the idea in literature addict if it would only worsen his addiction. Only
of testing a lovers proclaimed fidelity and finding via the agents reasons leading to intention and then
it wanting (as in social psychology, this is achieved to action is a character trait to be understood as a
typically through some kind of deception) is a very disposition to behave. It is in this central respect that
Character and Personality, Philosophical Perspectives 149
modern proponents of virtue theory argue that situ- irrelevant factors, also fail to see the situation as they
ationism has an overly simple view of what charac- should: For example, they might not see the others
ter is, and thus, they argue, it misses its target. distress because they are in a hurry and this again
will be something that they may well later regret.
Why Situationism Is Impoverished Situationism, it is claimed, blurs all these vital dis-
According to Virtue Theory tinctions that virtue theory insists on.
The central idea in virtue theory of a virtuous char-
Why Virtue Theory Is in Need of
acter being a disposition to be properly responsive
Modification According to Situationism
to reasons can be brought out in a number of ways.
First, there is the idea that traits are not to be The situationist might well accept these points, but
identified in isolation from each other, for what is he or she can still insist that virtue theory has a lot to
essential to a virtuous persons reasoning is being learn from situationism.
properly appreciative of all the relevant consider- First, the situationist will say that the notion of
ations, some of which may be competing so that, character in virtue theory represents an ideal of
for example, the demands of honesty might prima character that the experiments in social psychology
facie conflict with the demands of loyalty (or there have shown to be something that cannot be realized
might even be competing demands of loyaltyfor in human beings. And any ethical theory ought to
example, whether to be loyal to ones friends or to be concerned with what human beings are in fact
ones political principles). Thus, practical wisdom capable of. (This last point is contentious: The virtue
the capacity to appreciate all the relevant consid- theorist might reply that we need to aim for ideals
erationsis essential to virtue (as it is not to what even if we cannot possibly achieve them.)
Aristotle called natural virtue). And the fact that Second, the situationist will say that virtue
someone fails to behave as loyalty might require on theory operates with far too broad a notion of a
a particular occasion is by no means sufficient to trait, assuming that, for example, honesty will be
show that he or she is disloyal or lacking in virtue; manifested across a whole range of different types
for that person might have been right to have seen of situation, from the workplace to the home, from
that in this situation and deliberative context what is marking exams to filling in tax returns. Yet this
most importantwhat is, all things considered, the cross-situational consistency is belied by a multiplic-
right thing to dois to be honest. ity of experiments. Moreover, he or she will add, we
Second, virtue theorists say that their emphasis not only cannot expect consistency within a particu-
on the agents reasons enables them to make the lar virtue; we also cannot expect consistency to be
crucial distinction, which situationism fails to make, manifested across virtue; the so-called doctrine of
between the person who, for example, acts in a self- the unity of the virtues, with practical wisdom at its
ish way because people are selfish (and to hell with core, is quite unrealistic.
everyone else) and the person who acts selfishly Third, the situationist will argue that virtue the-
because of some kind of temptation or distraction ory, in its idealization of human character traits, is
that leads them to act against their firm resolution to deeply problematic in its practical application. First,
be generous or to act against their own better judg- with an ideal of virtue in mind, it places insufficient
ment on this occasion that it is right to be generous. emphasis on the need to avoid situations that might
The second kind of person, the one who is tempted, tempt those of us who are less than fully virtuous
is likely to regret their selfish action, and they might (i.e., all of us). Second, we not only need to avoid
well try to make amends later. tempting situations, but we also need to recruit the
Third, and related to this second point, virtue help of others to see us through our resolutions. And
theorists claim that an essential aspect of our char- third, the ideal of character found in virtue theory
acter is the ability to see situations in a certain light can easily lead to a culture of blameof holding
so that, for example, the selfish person, unlike the ourselves and others irretrievably responsible for our
unselfish or generous person, will simply not see failures of character, when in many cases these fail-
someone elses plight as a situation that calls for ures are ones that any of us would have manifested
help. But the unselfish people might, if distracted by in the same circumstances.
150 Classical Theory of Concepts
Further Implications of the Debate conditions for something falling under the concept
that is, the definition of the concept. This entry first
This debate has significant implications not only
introduces the theory, and then discusses two pow-
for philosophical accounts of moral theory but also
erful objections to it.
for moral practicefor moral education, for moral
There are now many alternative theories of
responsibility, and for punishment. All of these
concepts on offer, but they all are, in some way or
implications need to be explored in the light of the
another, reactions to the classical theory of con-
empirical findings in social psychology, but, the
cepts, or the definitional view of concepts. The
virtue theorist would add, properly informed by a
classical theory has two different aspects, though
notion of character that is not simply understood as
they are often distinguished insufficiently. First, it
a disposition to behave in a certain way.
is assumed that all concepts (except, perhaps, some
Peter Goldie specific basic or primitive concepts; see below) have
a classical analysis, or a definition, in terms of sim-
See also Attitudes and Behavior; Attribution Theory; pler conceptsa definition that gives necessary and
Emotion and Moral Judgment; Moral Development; sufficient conditions for falling under the concept,
Personality: Individual Versus Situation Debate or, in other words, for belonging to its extension.
Second, it is presupposed that if a subject has or
Further Readings possesses a conceptgrasps itthen he or she must
know the relevant definition or correct analysis.
Adams, R. M. (2006), A theory of virtue: Excellence in being
for the good. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Consider thus the worn out example, bachelor
Darley, J. M., & Batson, C. D. (1973). From Jerusalem to
(italicized expressions are here used to designate
Jericho: A study of situational and dispositional concepts that are expressed by the corresponding
variables in helping behaviour. Journal of Personality words and phrases; the latter are mentioned by put-
and Social Psychology, 27, 100108. ting them in quotes; e.g., bachelor). Now, accord-
Doris, J. (2002). Lack of character. Cambridge, UK: ing to the traditional view, bachelor is constituted
Cambridge University Press. by the more primitive concepts unmarried and
Flanagan, O. (1991). Varieties of moral personality. man; thus, bachelor can be defined with the latter,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. or, those concepts provide its analysis. Hence, it is
Goldie, P. (2004). On personality. London, UK: Routledge. necessary and sufficient for something to fall under
Harman, G. (1999). Moral philosophy meets moral the concept bachelor to be unmarried and a man.
psychology. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 99, Moreover, anyone who possesses the concept bach-
315331. elor must know this. Or to change the example, pre-
Harman, G. (2000). The nonexistence of character traits. sumably the concept vixen can be defined in terms
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 100, 223226. of the concepts female and fox and anyone who has
Isen, A. M., & Levin, P. F. (1972). Effects of feeling good the concept vixen must know that this is the case.
on helping: Cookies and kindness. Journal of In accordance with such suggestive paradigms, it
Personality and Social Psychology, 21, 384388. has been thought that virtually all concepts have a
Kamtekar, R. (2004). Situationism and virtue ethics on the definition in an analogous way. For example, tiger
content of our character. Ethics, 114, 458491. might get analyzed along the lines of a large, car-
Ross L., & Nisbett, R. E. (1991). The person and the nivorous, quadrupedal feline, tawny yellow in color
situation: Perspectives of social psychology. New York,
with blackish transverse stripes and white belly; con-
NY: McGraw-Hill.
sequently, something would fall under the concept
Sreenivasan, G. (2002). Errors about errors: Virtue theory
tiger if, and only if, it has the latter properties. Or
and trait attribution. Mind, 111, 4768.
perhaps lemon can be defined as, say, pale yellow,
tart, oval citrus fruit and so forth; it is necessary and
sufficient for belonging to the extension of lemon to
CLASSICAL THEORY OF CONCEPTS have these features. And once again, the idea is that
a subject would possess the concept tiger or lemon
The classical theory of concepts is the view that, only if he or she knows these definitions.
at least for ordinary concepts, a subject who pos- It is commonplace to use specific Latin terminol-
sesses a concept knows the necessary and sufficient ogy in such cases: If it is definitions that are under
Classical Theory of Concepts 151
discussion, the concept being defined, such as the classical theory but argues that almost all con-
bachelor, is called the definiendum, and what is cepts have no definition but are primitive. In any
offered as the definition, such as unmarried man, case, the idea of plentiful inborn concepts remains
the definiens. Analogously, in the case of analysis, far from uncontroversial.
what is analyzed is the analysandum, and what
provides the analysis the analysans. Objections to the Classical Theory
The classical theory of concepts is deeply rooted
in the tradition of western philosophy: In Platos Though once the prevailing view of concepts, the
dialogues, Socrates is described as asking for clas- classical theory has been under much attack more
sical analyses of various concepts; definitions also recently. To begin with, it is an undeniable fact that
have an important place in Aristotles thought. In we have really achieved satisfactory definitions of
early modern philosophy, the classical theory was none too many concepts. In psychology and cog-
also dominant; one can find expressions of it in nitive science, the classical theory has also been
the works of Ren Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Baruch criticized from the direction of competing theories
Spinoza, and especially John Locke, for example. It such as the prototype theory. Moreover, it has been
is also clearly present in the early 20th century in argued that a number of vague concepts such as
the thinking of Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and bald and short cause troubles for it. Let us, however,
the logical positivists and has indeed been a corner- in the rest of this entry, focus on a couple of more
stone of the traditional analytic philosophy, which general problems of principle.
emphasized conceptual analysis so strongly. In more
Quinean Doubts: Definitions as Episodic
recent philosophy, Frank Jackson and Christopher
Peacocke, for example, have advocated variants of There is an argument due to W. V. Quine, and
the classical theory. developed further by Hilary Putnam, which sug-
Apparently, some classical thinkers expected gests that there are many concepts that do not have
every concept to have a classical definition but a definition, in the sense of the classical theory of
on closer scrutiny, such a view is very difficult to concepts. The gist of Quines argument is that even if
defend. As a result, beginning at least with Pascal a concept is originally introduced into science via an
(in the 17th century), it has been widely granted explicit definition, definitions in science are episodic;
that some concepts must be primitive and cannot that is, the status of the resulting equivalence of the
be further defined. The question then arises, though, new concept and its definiens need not be eternally
how are these basic or primitive concepts possessed privileged, a necessary truth, or true by convention.
or grasped? In the rationalistic tradition following Putnam has developed this view further by introduc-
Descartes, it has been typical to think that these ing his notion of law-cluster concepts. These are
are grasped with some sort of immediate intuition. concepts that are implicated in a number of scientific
Moreover, it has been characteristic for this school laws. And if any one of these laws is treated as a
to think that these concepts are not acquired at all necessary condition for the concept, one is, Putnam
but innate. Empiricists such as Locke, David Hume, submits, in trouble.
and their followers, in contrast, have always been For example, in the classical Newtonian physics
skeptical about such ideas, and have held that all the concept momentum was defined as mass times
concepts must be ultimately grounded in sense velocity. Soon after, it became clear that momentum
perception. Accordingly, it has been suggested that is a conserved quantity. The law of conservation of
primitive concepts are somehow made to correspond momentum, in contrast to the definition of momen-
to simple sensations or impressions, or sense data. tum per se, was originally treated as an empirical law,
Such classical empiricist views of concepts have had but later, it and the above definition functioned on a
considerable troubles in the last half a century or par. When Einstein later developed his special theory of
so. The idea of innate concepts, on the other hand, relativity, it turned out that this theory was in conflict
has experienced a new revival, largely because of the with the assumption that momentum is mass times
works of the distinguished linguist Noam Chomsky velocity. It was the latter thought that was revised,
and especially of Jerry Fodor, a leading philosopher however much it was treated as a definition earlier.
of cognitive science influenced by Chomsky. Fodor Such considerations strongly suggest that, at least
himself does not, however, combine this idea with for certain kind of scientific concepts, the classical
152 Classical Theory of Concepts
theory of concepts fails. Note that this line of argu- as tigers or lemons, respectively, because they have
mentation does not claim that there are no analytic the right genetic structure and lineage. Hence, the
truths or that vixen, for example, could not be cor- conventional definitions that people would associate
rectly analyzed as female fox. The point is, rather, with concepts may fail to provide either necessary or
that concepts such as vixen or bachelor are very sufficient conditions.
special (in Putnams terminology, one-criterion The most famous externalist argument is the Twin
concepts) and not representative and do not offer a Earth thought experiment due to Putnam: Imagine
good model for a general theory of concepts. Many that somewhere, there is a planet very much like
other concepts do not have any such standing defini- Earth, Twin Earth. Even languages similar to ours
tions, if the argument is sound. are spoken there. There is, however, a difference:
The liquid called water there is not H2O, but a
Concept Externalism totally different substance; call it XYZ. It is assumed
that it is indistinguishable from water in normal
A different line of critique derives from seman- circumstances; it tastes like water and quenches
tic externalism, developed by Saul Kripke, Hilary thirst like water, lakes and seas of Twin Earth con-
Putnam, and others. Though the arguments origi- tain XYZ, and so on. Let us further assume that
nally focused on linguistic expressions and their modern chemistry has not yet developed in either
meaning, it didnt take long before they were also planet. Consequently, nobody would have been able
applied to concepts. In this latter development, the to differentiate between XYZ and H2O, and people
work of Tyler Burge has been especially influential. in Earth and Twin Earth would associate exactly
At the core of this approach are various arguments the same definition with the substance they call
from ignorance and error. They aim to demon- water, along the lines of liquid, bright, tasteless,
strate that the classical view and its kin require, from quenches thirst, fills lakes and seas. Nevertheless,
the average persons, knowledge they plainly do not their respective concepts, so the argument continues,
have and emphasize how fallible and ignorant we must be different, for they have different substances
all tend to be. Often, they are based on the plausible in their extension. The best definition people could
general assumption that the underlying reality may give would not be sufficient.
go beyond perceptual appearance. The essential idea of externalism thus is that
Consider thus, for example, the concept dolphin what entities really fall under a conceptsay, tiger
or dinosaur. Ignorant persons might suggest that fish or watermay partly depend on external features
is a constituent of the concept dolphin or that pre- of the environment unknown by the subject. The
historic lizard is a part of dinosaur. But in fact, dol- soundness of externalism itself is certainly a vividly
phins are not fishes, and dinosaurs are not lizards. debated topic, but it is fair to say that even its critics
The definitions these people would provide would typically give up some essential features of the classi-
go wrong. Or, let us reflect the above examples, tiger cal theory of concepts.
and lemon, and their proposed definitions. Now
whether something really is a tiger or a lemon is in Panu Raatikainen
part a matter of inner nature (such kinds are stan-
dardly called natural kinds). Therefore, it is not See also Anti-Individualism About Cognition; Atomism
About Concepts; Categorization, Psychological
impossible that a creature had tawny yellow color,
Perspectives; Concepts, Philosophical Issues
stripes, and so onindeed, was indistinguishable
from tigersand still failed to be a tiger; it might
have a radically different inner nature. Similarly, a Further Readings
fruit might well be pale yellow, tart, and oval and Burge, T. (2007). Foundations of mind: Vol. 2. Philosophical
nevertheless not count as a lemon, because it has a essays. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
wrong kind of inner nature. On the other hand, such Jackson, F. (1998). From metaphysics to ethics: A defense
kinds may have untypical members: A tiger might of conceptual analysis. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
have only three legs, lack stripes, be very tame, and Press.
be a vegetarian. Or some lemons may not be yel- Kripke, S. A. (1980). Naming and necessity. Cambridge,
low, tart, or oval. Nevertheless, these would count MA: Harvard University Press.
Cognitive Dissonance 153
Margolis, E., & Laurence, S. (Eds.). (1999). Concepts: Core addition, dissonance processes can lead to changes
readings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. in attitudes toward a variety of objects and issues,
Peacocke, C. (1992). A study of concepts. Cambridge, MA: such as boring tasks, boring reading passages, deli-
MIT Press. cious chocolate, eating grasshoppers, bitter bever-
Putnam, H. (1975). Mind, language and reality: Vol. 2. ages made with vinegar, increasing tuition at ones
Philosophical papers (Essays 2 and 1113). Cambridge, university, and mandatory comprehensive final
UK: Cambridge University Press. exams.
Putnam, H. (1988). Representation and reality
(Chaps. 1 and 2). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The Original Theory of
Quine, W. V. (1966). The ways of paradox, and other essays Cognitive Dissonance
(Essays 6 and 10). New York, NY: Random House.
In the mid-1950s, Leon Festinger proposed the the-
ory of cognitive dissonance, which as mentioned
above, states that an unpleasant state of psychologi-
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE cal discomfort, dissonance, is created when an indi-
vidual holds two or more elements of knowledge of
Cognitive dissonance theory originally predicted that some importance that are relevant to but inconsis-
when an individual has in mind two or more ele- tent with one another.
ments of knowledge that are relevant to each other According to the original theory, the degree of
(and important) but inconsistent with one another, dissonance in relation to a particular cognition =
he or she will experience a state of psychological dis- D / D + C. In this formula, D is the sum of cogni-
comfort, which is referred to as dissonance. Lying to tions dissonant with a particular cognition and C
a friend is just one of many examples of a situation is the sum of cognitions consonant with that same
that might create dissonance. Thus, the theory is cognition. Also, in this formula, each cognition is
concerned with how perception and cognition influ- weighted for importance.
ence and are influenced by motivation and emotion. Festinger theorized that the unpleasant state of dis-
Over the past 50 years, hundreds of experiments sonance motivates individuals to engage in cognitive
have tested dissonance processes, and research on work to reduce the inconsistency. This can be accom-
the theory continues to this day. For the most part, plished by adding consonant cognitions, subtracting
these experiments have explored the ways that the dissonant cognitions, increasing the importance of
experience of cognitive dissonance causes attitude consonant cognitions, or decreasing the importance
and behavior changes, although the theorys reach is of dissonant cognitions. Attitude change is one of
much broader. This entry reviews the original theory the most often assessed ways of reducing dissonance.
of cognitive dissonance and the experimental meth- This attitude change is expected to be in the direc-
ods used to test it; discusses revisions to the original tion of the cognition that is most resistant to change.
theory; and surveys recent research on neural circuits In experimental tests, researchers often assume that
involved in dissonance processes, cultural differences the knowledge about recent behavior is usually most
in dissonance processes, neural network models, and resistant to change, because it is often very difficult
nonhuman animal responses to dissonance. to undo that behavior. This concept of resistance
The theorys long and continuing impact prob- to change of cognition is vital to the theory and
ably resulted for several reasons: The theory is distinguishes dissonance theory from other theories
stated abstractly, can be applied to a wide array of concerned with similar processes. The concept, resis-
issues, and deals with the interaction of cognition, tance to change, specifies which cognitions will likely
motivation, and affect. Moreover, the theory has be altered by the individual experiencing dissonance.
generated research that suggested ways of inducing
lasting attitude, belief, and behavior change. For Experimental Paradigms Used to
example, dissonance research has demonstrated that Test Dissonance Theory
dissonance processes can reduce prejudice, increase The theory of cognitive dissonance has been
water conservation, increase the purchasing of con- tested using a number of experimental paradigms.
doms, reduce hunger and thirst, and reduce pain. In One paradigm is referred to as the free-choice or
154 Cognitive Dissonance
difficult-decision paradigm. In this paradigm, the fervor among members of an apocalyptic religious
individual is asked to make a decision that is diffi- group following a predicted cataclysm that failed
cult. After a decision, all of the cognitions that favor to transpire. Subsequent studies have supported the
the chosen alternative are consonant with the deci- theory-derived prediction that when individuals
sion, while all the cognitions that favor the rejected firmly held beliefs are unequivocally disconfirmed,
alternative are dissonant. The greater the number and they often intensify the original beliefs.
importance of dissonant cognitions and the lesser the Acting hypocritically can also arouse dissonance.
number and importance of consonant cognitions, When a person says one thing but then behaves
the greater the degree of dissonance experienced by opposite to what he or she said or preached, that
the individual. In a decision situation, dissonance person may experience dissonance. Experiments
is typically greater the closer the alternatives are in using this hypocrisy paradigm have revealed that
attractiveness (as long as each alternative has several when individuals are reminded of their hypocrisy
distinguishing characteristics). Dissonance caused by immediately after advocating a particular position,
a decision can be reduced by viewing the chosen alter- they will reduce dissonance by acting more in accord
native as more attractive and/or viewing the rejected with their advocacy. For example, reminding indi-
alternative as less attractive. This effect has been viduals of times they failed to practice safe sex just
referred to as spreading of alternatives. For example, after they have made persuasive speeches on the
a person might have to decide where to attend univer- benefits of safe sex causes them to purchase more
sity or simply have to decide what to eat for dinner. condoms, presumably because they intend to prac-
If the decision is difficult, the person will value the tice more safe sex in the future.
chosen university more after the decision than prior
to the decision; he or she will also devalue the rejected
Theoretical Revisions of Dissonance Theory
university more after the decision than prior to the
decision. Some theorists hypothesized that the effects obtained
Another paradigm is the induced compliance in dissonance experiments were due to nonmoti-
paradigm. According to the logic underlying it, dis- vational, cognitive processes or impression man-
sonance should be aroused when a person acts in a agement concerns. However, subsequent research
way that is contrary to his or her attitudes, as long confirmed that dissonance is a motivated process. In
as he or she is provided little external justification particular, research revealed that the dissonant cog-
for doing so. One common way of accomplishing nitions cause negative emotional states, and these
this in experiments is to provide individuals with an negative emotional states motivate the cognitive
illusion of choice in engaging in the counterattitudi- and behavioral changes. Following this dissonance
nal behavior. Individuals may reduce this dissonance reduction, the negative emotional states subside.
by changing their attitudes to be more consistent Beginning in the late 1960s, researchers began to
with their actions or by perceiving the counterat- propose motivational explanations for dissonance
titudinal behavior as less important, depending on effects that differed from Festingers theory. Four
the resistance to change of relevant cognitions. For revisions have been proposed.
example, people might be asked to endorse or write Elliot Aronson proposed that dissonance is not
a statement supporting a social policy (e.g., gay mar- due merely to an inconsistency between cognitions.
riage) with which they might not agree. If they make Instead, he posited that dissonance occurs when a
the statements with little external justification, they person acts in a way that violates his or her self-con-
will change their attitudes to become more favorable ceptthat is, when a person performs a behavior
to the stated position. inconsistent with his or her sense of self. Since most
Dissonance can also be aroused by exposure to persons have a positive self-concept, dissonance
information that is inconsistent with beliefs or atti- is most often experienced when a person behaves
tudes. Typically referred to as the belief disconfir- negatively, behaving in an incompetent, irrational,
mation paradigm, this situation involves presenting or immoral manner. One of the primary predictions
information inconsistent with an individuals firmly derived from this revision is that low and high self-
held beliefs or attitudes. It is based on Festinger and esteem individuals should respond with less and
colleagues field observations of increased religious more dissonance reduction (e.g., attitude change),
Cognitive Dissonance 155
respectively, because in dissonance experiments the function of facilitating the execution of effective
high self-esteem individuals are induced to act in and unconflicted action. Experiments have revealed
ways that are more discrepant from their positive that experimentally increasing the degree of action
self-views. Experiments testing this prediction have orientation experienced following difficult decisions
produced mixed results. increases the degree of dissonance reduction.
Claude Steeles self-affirmation theory proposed
that persons possess a motive to maintain an over- Neural Circuits Involved in
all self-image of moral and adaptive adequacy. Dissonance Processes
Accordingly, dissonance-induced attitude change
occurs because dissonance threatens this positive Physiologically oriented research has revealed that
self-image. While Festingers dissonance theory the state of dissonance is associated with activation
posited that individuals are motivated to recon- of a brain region known as the anterior cingulate
cile inconsistent cognitions, Steele proposed that, cortex and with activation of the sympathetic ner-
instead, individuals are merely motivated to affirm vous system. Consistent with conceptual models of
the integrity of the self. In support of this idea, Steele cognitive control, evidence also suggests that the
presented experiments, where, following a disso- reduction of dissonance involves activation of the
nance induction, participants either were, or were dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, particularly the left
not, presented with an opportunity to affirm an dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
important value. When participants were allowed
to affirm an important value, dissonance-related Cultural Influences on Dissonance Processes
attitude change did not occur. Other experiments Some researchers have suggested that dissonance
have suggested that making important but non-self- processes only occur in Western cultures but not
affirming values salient reduces dissonance by reduc- in Eastern cultures (i.e., East Asia). Other research-
ing the individuals perception of the importance of ers, however, suggested dissonance-related attitude
the dissonant act, consistent with Festingers theory. change can occur in individuals from East Asia when
Joel Cooper and Russell Fazio proposed the idea those individuals are concerned about the interper-
that the discomfort experienced in dissonance exper- sonal consequences of their actions. That is, individ-
iments was not due to an inconsistency between uals from East Asia, who are typically motivated to
the individuals cognitions but rather due to feeling be interdependent with others and avoidant of inter-
personally responsible for producing an aversive personal conflict, experience dissonance when they
consequence. In support of this idea, experiments act inconsistently with those cultural ideals. Along
revealed that dissonance-related attitude change only similar lines, research has revealed that individuals
occurred in conditions in which an aversive conse- experience dissonance even when other individuals
quence was produced. More recently, experiments with whom they identify behave in ways that would
have found dissonance-related arousal and attitude arouse dissonance for the perceiver (e.g., your favor-
change in induced compliance conditions where ite political candidate behaves immorally). These
individuals do not produce aversive consequences. results serve as a reminder that the importance of
Several experiments since 1995 have supported the cognitions is one of the factors affecting the mag-
the original conception of dissonance theory, but nitude of dissonance in Festingers original theory.
why does dissonance evoke this emotive state? Eddie Cultural values would be expected to relate to the
Harmon-Jones proposed an action-based model of importance of cognitions and, thus, to the amount
cognitive dissonance in an attempt to answer this of dissonance these behaviors would evoke.
question. The action-based model proposes that the
perceptions and cognitions likely to arouse disso-
Neural Network Models and
nance are those that are associated with action ten-
Nonhuman Animal Data
dencies. The action-based model further proposes
that dissonance between cognitions evokes an aver- Several neural network models have been developed
sive state because it has the potential to interfere with to predict how cognitive dissonance will influence
effective and unconflicted action. Dissonance reduc- an individuals attitude and behavior. Experiments
tion, by bringing cognitions into consonance, serves have also demonstrated that nonhuman animals
156 Cohort Model of Auditory Word Recognition
(e.g., white rats, capuchin monkeys) show evidence processing incoming speech continuously as it is
of cognitive dissonance reduction. heard. At all times, the system computes the best
interpretation of currently available input combining
Eddie Harmon-Jones
information in the speech signal with prior semantic
See also Attitude Change; Motivated Thinking
and syntactic context. Originally proposed in 1980
by William Marslen-Wilson and Lorraine Tyler, the
cohort account has been subject to ongoing refine-
Further Readings ment in response to new empirical data and neural
Aronson, E. (1992). The return of the repressed: network simulations. Predictions of the model for
Dissonance theory makes a comeback. Psychological neural responses to speech are currently being tested.
Inquiry, 3, 303311.
Beauvois, J. L., & Joule, R. V. (1996). A radical dissonance
theory. London, UK: Taylor & Francis.
Origins of the Cohort Model
Cooper, J., & Fazio, R. H. (1984). A new look at
(1973 to 1985)
dissonance theory. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in During the 1970s, response time data collected by
experimental social psychology (Vol. 17, pp. 229264). Marslen-Wilson and others demonstrated the speed
San Diego, CA: Academic Press. and accuracy of speech perception and comprehen-
Egan, L. C., Bloom, P., & Santos, L. R. (2010). Choice- sion. Native speakers can shadow (i.e., repeat aloud)
induced preferences in the absence of choice: Evidence heard sentences with minimal delays between per-
from a blind two choice paradigm with young children ception and production while correcting for mispro-
and capuchin monkeys. Journal of Experimental Social nunciations of key words. Detection tasks similarly
Psychology, 46, 204207.
show rapid word identification in sentences with
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance.
participants responding within 300ms of the start
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
of a target wordsubstantially before all of the rel-
Harmon-Jones, E., Amodio, D. M., & Harmon-Jones, C.
evant speech has been heard. Early identification
(2009). Action-based model of dissonance: A review,
is achieved by comparing incoming speech with
integration, and expansion of conceptions of cognitive
conflict. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology,
known lexical items (for example, the word trespass
41, 119166. is distinct from all other words once the segment
Harmon-Jones, E., & Mills, J. (1999). Cognitive /p/ has been heard) in combination with contextual
dissonance: Progress on a pivotal theory in social cues provided by the sentential context.
psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological The cohort model proposed by Marslen-Wilson
Association. and Tyler in 1980 thus suggests that word identifica-
Steele, C. M. (1988). The psychology of self-affirmation: tion begins with initial activation of a set of can-
Sustaining the integrity of the self. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), didates that match the start of a spoken word (the
Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 21, word-initial cohort that for trespass would include
pp. 261302). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. words such as tread, treasure, treble, etc.). Activated
Van Veen, V., Krug, M. K., Schooler, J. W., & Carter, C. S. candidates are rejected as incompatible speech seg-
(2009). Neural activity predicts attitude change in ments are heard; word recognition occurs when
cognitive dissonance. Nature Neuroscience, 12, information in the speech signal uniquely matches
14691474. one single word (the uniqueness point). The impor-
Wicklund, R. A., & Brehm, J. W. (1976). Perspectives on tance of the sequential structure of spoken words in
cognitive dissonance. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. predicting word recognition has been confirmed in
a range of response time tasks. For example, people
can decide that speech does not match a real word
COHORT MODEL OF AUDITORY (i.e., make lexical decisions about spoken pseudo-
words) as soon as they hear a segment that deviates
WORD RECOGNITION from all spoken words. Hence, decision responses
occur with a constant delay when measured from
The core idea at the heart of the cohort model is the /s/ of the tromsone or the /p/ of trombope; it is at
that human speech comprehension is achieved by these positions that participants can determine that
Cohort Model of Auditory Word Recognition 157
these pseudowords are not the familiar word trom- hearing the word beaker) are more consistent with
bone. These findings uniquely support accounts the predictions of TRACE.
of speech perception in which word recognition Much of this behavioral data is well simulated by
can occur when sufficient information has been a different neural network simulation of word recog-
perceived in the speech signal and provide strong nition: the Distributed Cohort Model (DCM) devel-
support for the first instantiation of the cohort oped by Gareth Gaskell and William Marslen-Wilson
model. in the 1990s. The DCM differs from TRACE both
by using distributed representations (i.e., encoding
speech information over multiple rather than single
Computational Instantiations
artificial neurons) and by simulating phoneme percep-
(1986 to 1999)
tion and word identification as two parallel processes
The predictions of the cohort model for the tim- rather than two sequential stages. This allows the
ing of word recognition depend on assessing pho- model to simulate the differential impact of ambigu-
netic information that is shared by or distinguishes ous speech sounds (e.g., a sound that is acoustically
between different spoken words. These can be esti- intermediate between an /s/ and an /f/) on phoneme
mated from computerized pronunciation diction- and word perception. It also provides the most accu-
aries revealing the proportion of items (like doll rate simulation to date of cross-modal priming results
embedded in dolphin) that challenge early identifica- similar to those reported by Zwitserlood. Lexical
tion. A further methodological development was the identification in DCM is achieved by activating out-
use of cross-modal priming to test the time course of put representations in proportion to their conditional
word recognition. Consistent with cohort assump- probability given the current speech input, a proposal
tions, Pienie Zwitserlood showed that speech that that to some extent anticipates recent Bayesian theo-
matches multiple words (e.g., the start of captain or ries of language comprehension.
captive) activates multiple meanings to a degree that
is modulated by prior sentence context. Word fre-
Expansion and New Horizons
quency also affects activation of word candidates, so
(2000 to Date)
captain would be more active than capstan because
of its higher frequency of occurrence. These findings Following the success of the Distributed Cohort
motivated a revision to the cohort theory in which Model in explaining adult recognition, behavioral
word activation and identification are graded pro- studies have focused on extensions of this account
cesses that combine the speech input, lexical infor- to new empirical data, populations, and explanatory
mation, and contextual cues. domains. One focus of recent research is the recog-
This revised version of the cohort model shares nition of words such as darkness and darkly that
a number of important characteristics with the comprise a stem (dark) and affix (-ness, -ly). These
TRACE computational model of spoken word polymorphemic words are decomposed into their
recognition developed by Jay McClelland and Jeff constituents during identification and behave differ-
Elman in 1986. This is a simulation of a network ently from morphologically unrelated pairs such as
of simple neuron-like processing units (neural net- dolphin and doll. A further extension of the cohort
work), that simulates the processes by which people model has been to account for behavioral evidence
recognize spoken words. This model motivated concerning word learning in adults and infancy.
further tests to distinguish between the Cohort and In adults, new learned spoken words do not show
TRACE theories. Two findings that are contra- cohort-like recognition behavior straightaway, but
TRACE are that (a) ambiguous phonemes do not only if a period of sleep follows initial learning.
slow down the identification of pseudowords in the Infants show adultlike recognition behavior early
same way that they slow down word identification, on in development (under 2 years old) since they
and (b) mispronunciations that create pseudowords also recognize words as soon as the speech signal
impair recognition (e.g., hearing bandin for bandage allows similar sounding words to be ruled out.
has similar effects to cabin for cabbage). However, Perhaps the most ambitious extension of the
eye movement effects observed for rhyme competi- cohort account, however, is to incorporate con-
tors (e.g., looking at a picture of a speaker when straints provided by functional brain imaging.
158 Collective Action
The continuous processing of speech in the cohort there are many agents acting in the same location
account have been validated by electro- and mag- some of them are going for lunch, others are shop-
netoencephalography (E/MEG) data showing that ping, and so forth. By collective action we typically
neural responses to spoken words are timed to the mean action by several agents who are suitably
perception of critical segments in speech. Support socially connected (e.g., are acting on the shared
for separate semantic and phonological pathways as goal to go for lunch to a certain restaurant or are
in the DCM has come from brain imaging studies acting on the belief that there will be a traffic jam
consistent with dual-pathway accounts of the neuro- because of a sports event). Here, the same type of
anatomy of spoken language. A challenge for future action is being performed with the knowledge that
imaging work is to establish the unique functional the others are also performing it or a related type of
contribution and timing of neural responses within action. This entry discusses collective action from
these distinct pathways. a conceptual point of view and also considers the
structural motivational aspects inherent in situations
Matthew H. Davis
of collective action. Collective actions are studied
See also Electrophysiological Studies of Mind; Frequency
especially by social psychologists, sociologists, and
Effects in Word Recognition; Speech Perception; Word economists as well as philosophers and researchers
Recognition, Auditory; Word Recognition, Visual in computer science. Below the central conceptual
features of collective actions are focused on and
some relevant classifications are made.
Further Readings The social connectedness of participants in a col-
Gaskell, M. G., & Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1997). lective social action can, in its most central sense,
Integrating form and meaning: A distributed model of be taken to refer to the social attitude, especially
speech perception. Language and Cognitive Processes, we-attitude, shared by the participants. The atti-
12, 613656. tude can be a want, goal, intention, belief, wish,
Hickok, G., & Poeppel, D. (2007). The cortical hope, feeling, and so on. A persons we-goal can be
organization of speech processing. Nature Reviews schematically explicated as follows: A participant
Neuroscience, 8(5), 393402. is said to have a we-goal G if and only if (a) he or
Marslen-Wilson, W. (1984). Function and processing in she has the goal G (partly) because (b) he or she
spoken word recognition: A tutorial review. In H. believes that the other participants have the goal G,
Bouma & D. G. Bouwhuis (Eds.), Attention and and (c) he or she also believes that it is a mutual
performance X: Control of language processing. belief among the participants that the participants
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. have G. The genuineness condition (a) is obvious.
Marslen-Wilson, W., & Tyler, L. K. (1980). The temporal The conformity condition (b) serves to connect the
structure of spoken language understanding. Cognition, participants subjectively, and the social awareness
8(1), 171. condition (c) connects them intersubjectively (if the
Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (2007).
belief is true). In the case of intentional action, the
Morphology, language and the brain: The
because will typically express a reason, in other cases
decompositional substrate for language comprehension.
a mere cause. For instance, people may contribute to
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London
a collective good (here, a goal) where the (expected)
B: Biological Sciences, 362(1481), 823836.
McClelland, J. L., & Elman, J. L. (1986). The TRACE model
goal satisfaction will be a shared reason for action.
of speech perception. Cognitive Psychology, 18(1), 186.
Note that the social awareness of kind (c) is needed
Zwitserlood, P. (1989). The locus of the effects of to exclude nonsocial cases such as Max Webers of
sentential-semantic context in spoken-word processing. people in the street simultaneously opening their
Cognition 32(1), 2564. umbrellas when it starts to rain. Also, fads and fash-
ions clearly require mutual awareness. Note still that
there is also weak collective action with a shared
we-attitude where the because is replaced by and.
COLLECTIVE ACTION Let us consider some subcases of collective action
performed because of a shared we-attitude. We con-
Consider people walking in the street. As such, this centrate on intentional cases (and ignore, e.g., invis-
is not normally regarded as collective action even if ible hand cases) and those in which the agents are
Collective Action 159
in a symmetric position. Our classification consists to be regarded as central theoretical and practical
of four main classes of collective action constituted, problems in the social sciences.
respectively, by (1) independent participant action, While a collective action dilemma in its full sense
(2) interdependent participant action, and (3) joint is a many-person problem, this entry will concen-
action. Also (4) group action, especially action per- trate on a simple two-person two-choice Prisoners
formed by an organized group (e.g., business com- Dilemma. It is given by the following matrix, where
pany) and attributed to a whole grouprather than the rows represent the first persons (or row players)
to some persons collectivelyis also a kind of col- action strategies or choicescooperate (C) and
lective action. (1) and (2) consist of actions based on defect (D)and the columns the second persons
the participants shared personal interests (I-mode (or column players) similar choices:
interests) whereas at least in the full-blown cases of
(3) group interests (we-mode interests) will serve
C D
as the participants reasons for action, such as Toms
and Janes joint action of cleaning the house. With C 3,3 1,4
some exceptions, analytical philosophers have con-
D 4,1 2,2
centrated on (3) and cases with a small number of
participants closely intentionally connected (in con-
trast to what we have in the case of large groups). The first number in each cell represents the pay-
Category (1) typically contains cases such as off (money or utility) to the row player, while the
people going for lunch to the same fashionable place second number represents the payoff to the column
for a social reason, typically a shared we-attitude. player. There are four possible joint outcomes: CC,
Category (2) contains cases involving strategic CD, DC, and DD. For example, the outcome CD is
action in the sense of game theory. Here the belief obtained when the row player chooses C and the
about mutual dependency is central because ratio- column player chooses D. CD gives the payoff of
nal action requires optimal response to the others one unit to the row player and four units to the
actions. For example, people walking in a narrow column player. Note that the choice of C by the first
corridor make an effort to avoid bumping into each player can lead either to CC or CD, depending on
other. Category (3) involves I-mode cases of joint whether the second player chooses C or D. The first
action based on the participants shared personal players preference ranking of the joint outcomes, as
intentions and beliefs. For instance, some people represented by the payoff numbers, is DC > CC >
may jointly tidy up a road after a storm or celebrate DD > CD (with > meaning is preferred to), and
a sports victory in the streets of a town. Category symmetrically for the second player. DC involves
(3) also includes we-mode cases, in which the par- the row players free riding (failure to choose C),
ticipants act as a group (e.g., lift a table or sing a and it gives the highest payoff to him or her but the
song as a group). They are thus performing their lowest (or sucker) payoff to the column player.
individual actions for a group reason and jointly In this single-shot game situation, CC is preferred
intend to perform their action together and, because by both players to mutual defection DD, but DD is
of the joint intention, are collectively committed to the only equilibriumthat is, an outcome in which
its performance in a sense resulting in their being in neither player can rationally change his or her choice
the same boat. This kind of full-blown joint action as long as the other one sticks to his or her choice.
must involve a joint intention to act together and CC represents what collective rationality entails:
appropriate shared beliefs making the participants The group formed by the players gains most (i.e., six
interdependent. As to proper group action (category units) by ending up in this joint outcome. In contrast,
[4]), a group (e.g., a business company or a univer- DD is taken to be the individually rational result
sity) performs an action via its members (or a suit- that maximizes an individuals expected payoff or
able subset by them, the operatives) performing a his or her most secure choice. It is typically assumed
relevant joint action in virtue of which an action can here that the players do not communicate with each
be attributed to the group. other in a way creating binding commitments.
There are collective action dilemmas that involve Yet, even this simple case involves some central
a conflict between individual and collective ratio- elements of a collective action dilemma of which
nality. Such dilemmas have in recent decades come the following account can be given: Letting S be a
160 Collective Action
game structure of the above kind, we can define that why people often cooperate in dilemma cases where,
S involves a collective action dilemma if and only for instance, rational choice theory recommends
if S involves a conflict between collectively rational defection. Consider first what standard rational
and individually (privately) rational action, that choice theory entails for our earlier single-shot
is, if and only if there are (distinct and incompatible) Prisoners Dilemma example. If the agentthe first
actions or strategies C and D such that C is a col- or row player, here Ithinks strategically and
lectively rational, cooperative action and D is an intends to maximize his or her value or utility, he
individually rational action. This characterization or she can reason thus: I prefer the joint outcome
fits (e.g., the Prisoners Dilemma and the game of DC to all the other joint outcomes; however, I real-
Chicken) a game with the preference ranking DC > ize that if you are reasoning similarly and planning
CC > CD > DD in the case of the row player. There to go for CD, we will end up in DD. Still, wanting
is a free rider incentivea participant individually to avoid the worst outcome CD, I cannot rationally
gains by refraining to cooperate, as long as suf- aim at the collectively optimal CC. So I choose D
ficiently many others participate, as required for the and rationally expect DD to result in the single-shot
production of the good in question. The characteriza- case. In this case, my reason for choosing D is to
tion also includes take some dilemmas such as the secure at least the third-best alternative, given my
tragedy of the commons (e.g., pollution, fish deple- beliefs and the other players rationality.
tion, and in general terms, refraining from excessive In contrast to the above case with individualistic
utilization of a resource) and give some dilemmas or I-mode preferences, acting for a we-mode reason
(e.g., national defense, voting, and in general doing can lead to the group members (collectively) ratio-
ones active share in the provision of a good, be it one nally cooperating in collective action dilemmas. Here
in an institutionalized context or not). Consider air the members adopt the groups point of view and are
pollution. By reducing our individual environmental disposed to act as interdependent and collectively
pollution by a small amount (this is the C choice) a committed group members. They (our group,
remarkable improvement in air quality is achieved. we) accept to act on the higher payoff as a group
There is a collective gain, which improves each indi- and thus come to intend to choose C (over D). Thus,
viduals situation relative to what universal defection they cooperate as a group and choose C here as their
(everyones choice of D) would yield. part of the groups achieving the group goal (typi-
These kinds of situations normally have the struc- cally a collective or at least a nonexcludable good in
ture of either the Prisoners Dilemma or Chicken. the group). The original dilemma dissolves.
However, there are also other kinds of collective The we-mode approach has also received experi-
action problems (e.g., coordination situations) with mental support. It applies especially to dilemmas
uncertainty of others contribution even if contribut- where there is a collectively preferred joint outcome
ing is collectively rational (e.g., the Assurance game, and the participants are or take themselves to be
defined by the preference ranking CC > DC > DD in the same boat with collective commitment. In
> CD, fits in here). These kinds of cases need not institutionalized cases where the state in a quasi we-
involve a free rider incentive. mode fashion provides public goods for the citizens
Mancur Olson is famous for defending a number (typically on the basis of taxes), strong sanctioning is
of claims about public goods and their provision, often possible and even I-moders can be brought
especially that large groups can at best provide sub- to act according to the norms issued by the statein
optimal levels of public goods. The general conclu- many cases partly against their will.
sion about his theses is that they at least need special
Raimo Tuomela
qualifications to hold true.
There is much both theoretical and experimen- See also Decision Theory, Philosophical Perspectives;
tal research concerning how people behave or tend Joint or Collective Intention; Philosophy of Action
to behave in collective action dilemmas, but here
this research cannot be discussed except for a brief
Further Readings
comment on a group-based (or we-mode) approach
that contrasts with the prevalent individualistic (or Bacharach, M. (2006). Beyond individual choice. Princeton,
I-mode) accounts. The we-mode approach explains NJ: Princeton University Press.
Common Coding 161
Bratman, M. (1999). Faces of intention. Cambridge, MA: In contrast, the common coding approach sug-
Cambridge University Press. gests that in addition to such separate codes, there
Fehr, E., & Gintis, H. (2007). Human motivation and are further levels of representation in which afferent
social cooperation: Experimental and analytical and efferent information have the same format and
foundations. Review of Sociology, 33, 4364. dimensionality. Common coding is meant to apply
Hardin, R. (1982). Collective action. Baltimore, MD: to the relationship between representations on the
Johns Hopkins Press. afferent and the efferent side (referring to ongoing
Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action. events and intended actions, respectively). These
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
representations are commensurate, since they both
Sandler, T. (1992). Collective action: Theory and
refer to external events. They permit creating link-
applications. Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, UK:
ages between perception and action that do not rely
Harvester Wheatsheaf.
on arbitrary mappings. In common coding, action
Schmitt, F. (Ed.). (2003). Socializing metaphysics: The
nature of social reality. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
planning is conceived of in terms of operations that
Littlefield.
move from current events to intended future events.
Tuomela, R. (2007). The philosophy of sociality: The These operations involve the matching of event
shared point of view. New York, NY: Oxford University codes and action codes; perception and action may
Press. modulate each other by means of similarity.
Ideomotor Principle
is modulated by similarity, or compatibility, Ideomotor theory claims that events that follow
between stimulus and response sets. For example, from given actions (action outcomes) will hereafter
as has been shown by Marcel Brass and colleagues, gain the power to trigger those actions. The theory
common coding can account for movement imita- requires two steps: (a) acquisition of associations
tion in stimulus-response compatibility paradigms. between actions and effects and (b) inverting these
Other studies have extended the scope of the notion associations for goal-directed action (learning and
of compatibility to action effects. Hommel showed control, respectively). Studies by Birgit Elsner and
that stimulus-effect compatibility may under certain Hommel showed that action-effect learning has in
conditions override stimulus-response compatibil- fact the power to turn action outcomes into action
ity. Likewise, Wilfried Kunde showed that response- triggers, lending support to the claim that ideomotor
effect compatibility may be functional as well. These learning paves the way for ideomotor control.
effect-related compatibility effects provide direct
support for the claim that action selection engages Interactive Coordination
anticipatory representations of action effects. In studies by Bekkering, Knoblich, Prinz, Natalie
In a series of studies on visual action recognition, Sebanz and Wohlschlger the notion of common
Gnther Knoblich and colleagues have shown that coding has also been applied to coordination of
observers can tell self-produced from other-produced perception and action across individuals. Studies
action, indicating that visual action perception may on imitation and ideomotor action provide ample
engage resources for action production. These stud- evidence showing that individuals who watch others
ies, too, make a strong case for shared representa- acting may become induced to act like themeither
tional resources for perception and action. in terms of movements or goals. Further studies have
Content-based interference between perception addressed functional properties of action simulation,
and action has also been demonstrated in a number which is often seen to mediate the transition from
of dual-task settings. Jochen Msseler and Hommel action perception to action production.
reported an inverted compatibility effect between Interactive coordination may also apply to
response processing in one task and stimulus pro- task sets for coordinating perception and action.
cessing in a concurrent task (i.e., better performance Coordination of task sets across individuals has been
on incompatible than on compatible trials). Gijsbert demonstrated in paradigms in which two individuals
Stoet and Hommel reported similar interference share a common task in a division-of-labor-mode.
effects between stimulus and response processing These studies suggest that individual performance
across two tasks that were nested in each other. does not only depend on ones own share of the task
A number of further studies from Hommels and but on the others share as well, suggesting corepre-
Prinzs labs demonstrated both regular and inverted sentation of the others task set.
compatibility effects between motion perception and
movement production, making a strong case for
shared representational resources for perception and Related Approaches
action. While most traditional approaches tend to stress the
relative independence of perception and action, some
Movement and Goals
theories have argued for closer links. For instance,
Ideomotor theory claims that action production Alvin Liberman and Paolo Viviani have proposed
implicates representations of action goals. Evidence so-called motor theories that make a strong case for
in support of this claim comes from studies by Prinz, motor contributions to speech and action percep-
Harold Bekkering, Franz Mechsner, and Andreas tion. The same applies to the theory of dimensional
Wohlschlger. They refer to such diverse research overlap advanced by Sylvan Kornblum. Further, fol-
domains such as imitation, bimanual coordination, lowing the lead of James J. Gibson, close represen-
ideomotor action, and tool use action. Further stud- tational connections between perception and action
ies by Gisa Aschersleben and Moritz Daum have (albeit of a nonrepresentational kinds) have been
underscored the role of action goals for action pro- claimed by various kinds of ecological approaches
duction in early infancy. to perception, action, and cognition.
Compound Words, Processing of 163
compound, the semantic transparency of the com- out of compounds, favoring computation. These
pounds head (e.g., the similarity of the meanings of include salient markers of the boundary between
ball and snowball) contributes more to the ease of compound constituents: hyphens, capitalized let-
processing than the transparency of the compounds ters or spaces, and low-frequency combinations of
modifier (snow in snowball), though the strength of characters or phonemes straddling the boundary
this effect varies cross-linguistically with the position (e.g., wb in snowball). Additional work has shown
of the head in the compound (e.g., final in English that short compounds are biased toward the storage
and Dutch, initial or final in Basque and French). On route, while long compounds favor computation.
a finer-grained semantic level, the relation between Taken together, the findings corroborate the current
the compounds head and modifier (snowball, models of morphological processing that advocate
relation: MADE OF) affects how compounds are the parallel use of storage and computation dur-
produced and the ease of recognition and learning of ing processing. These models also embrace Gary
novel compounds for both adults and children. Libbens notion of the hungry lexicon, which sug-
Nevertheless, the notion that semantics is pre- gests that rapid and accurate lexical recognition and
dominant in compound processing is currently being production of compounds hinges on the simultane-
challenged by a series of experiments that demon- ous and interactive processing of multiple sources of
strate that the meanings of constituents are activated information. In other words, the relevant informa-
via computation in both transparent and opaque tion is processed as soon as it becomes available at
compounds. Also, there is evidence that even low- respective levels of sound, form, or meaning.
frequency and clearly transparent compounds leave Robust cross-linguistic findings demonstrate that
traces in the mental lexicon and activate the storage relations between semantically or formally similar
route. Studies using behavioral measures with fine groups of compounds (morphological paradigms
temporal resolution confirm that semantic effects or families) are also important determiners of the
only emerge at late stages of lexical processing and lexical representation and processing of compounds.
that the storage versus computation biases are pri- Cross-linguistic experiments on existing and novel
marily sensitive to properties of compounds form compounds with both adult and child participants
rather than meaning. establish that compounds with constituents that
occur in a large number of other compounds (e.g.,
fireman, policeman, postman) tend to be processed
Form and Analogy
faster and more accurately than compounds with
Recent cross-linguistic research has shown that constituents that have less paradigmatic support. The
compound processing implicates activation both morphological paradigm of the compounds constit-
of compounds as wholes and of their constituents. uents has also influenced the choice, placement, and
Linguistic properties of compounds and constituents acoustic realization of the linking element in Dutch
(e.g., the frequency of occurrence or orthographic and German compounds (-s- in sportsman). These
length) demonstrably affect acoustic characteristics observations provide support for the view of mor-
of the production of compounds in speech, as well phology as probabilistic, rather than deterministic,
as the time it takes listeners or readers to recognize regularities in mappings between word forms and
a compound during auditory or visual comprehen- meanings and shed light on the architecture of the
sion. Moreover, morphemes deeply embedded in mental lexicon underlying compound processing.
larger constituents of compounds (-er in dishwasher)
influence lexical processing, suggesting that morpho-
Future Directions
logical parsing reaches lower hierarchical levels of
word structure. The order of accessing constituents Over the past 40 years, the processing of compound
in opaque as well as transparent compounds appears words has proved an insightful area of psycholinguis-
to be left-to-right in production and comprehension, tic exploration, and research on this topic continues
as if the constituents were presented distinctly as reg- to expand over languages with different morpho-
ular words in a sentence. logical structure, testing how different populations
An important body of work has identified a range of speakers make use of their mental lexicon in real-
of cues that facilitates segmentation of constituents time language production and comprehension tasks.
Computational Models of Emotion 165
Prospective research topics include the refinement expressions, vocal qualities, physiological measures
of theoretical models of morphological processing, (skin conductance, heart rate, blood pressure, etc.),
the acquisition of compounding by children and and brain imaging.
L2 learners, and the neurophysiological founda- A model that expresses emotion, usually through
tions of unification of constituents into a compound facial expressions or voice modulation, can improve
meaning. interactions with humans by providing an indirect
way of indicating the state of a computer system
Victor Kuperman
whether it is being successful in its task or not and
See also Conceptual Combination; Word Learning; Word
whether the human using the system is making prog-
Recognition, Auditory; Word Recognition, Visual ress on a task. Emotion expression also can enhance
computational entertainment systems by making the
behavior of virtual characters more realistic.
Further Readings
The remainder of this entry focuses on models
Hay, J. B., & Baayen, R. H. (2005). Shifting paradigms: described as simulating emotional processing.
Gradient structure in morphology. Trends in Cognitive Rosalind Picard lists five criteria that must be met
Sciences, 9, 342348. for a model to fully simulate emotion. In her words,
Libben, G. (2005). Everything is psycholinguistics: Material such a system has emotion. In this article, we will
and methodological considerations in the study of finesse the debate over the differences between
compound processing. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, simulating and having emotion and concentrate on
50, 267283. whether existing models achieve these criteria or
not. Picards five criteria for a model are as follows:
attempt to model, cognitive architectures tend to be and the agent. Models of specific emotional processes
implemented at the symbolic, as opposed to neural, (e.g., fear conditioning) and mental disorders (e.g.,
level (although hybrids exist). depression) also exist.
Most existing computational models of systems The strength of neural network models lies in
that simulate emotion are based on an appraisal their ability to model directly measurable phe-
theory. Appraisal theories postulate that a situation nomena, and hence they can be directly validated.
is evaluated along a set of fixed dimensions, many The weakness of these models is that the low-level
of which relate the situation to the agents goals, interactions of the various parts of the brain are not
such as goal relevance, goal conduciveness, agency, sufficiently understood to develop large-scale mod-
novelty, and so on. They usually (but not always) els. Furthermore, the computational requirements
describe emotions as categories, postulating a dozen of simulating neural networks restrict them in size,
or so different emotions (joy, fear, anger, guilt, etc.). making building complete models impractical.
These theories are used to explain how emotion Future work will likely see these approaches
arises from cognitive processing and how an agent merge, as high-level models attempt to explain lower
can cope with its emotions by either internal actions, level phenomena and low-level approaches attempt
such as changing goals or its interpretation of the to broaden. An area in need of exploration from
situations, or external actions, which attempt to both sides is embodied emotions, in which a realistic
change the situation. Since these theories are cogni- model of the body is integrated with models of the
tively oriented, appraisal theories fit naturally within brain. Many phenomena, from hormone levels to
the context of cognitive architectures. action tendencies, will likely remain poorly under-
The strength of these models is their breadth stood until this leap is made.
and integration of the different aspects of emotion
Robert P. Marinier III and John E. Laird
with the rest of cognition, providing complete theo-
ries of how emotion is produced and how it influ- See also Attention and Emotions, Computational
ences behavior and learning. These models make Perspectives; Decision Making and Reward,
predictions that can be compared to overt human Computational Perspectives; Emotion,
behavior, such as self-reports of emotions in real or Psychophysiology of; Emotion, Structural Approaches;
imagined situations. In addition to psychological Facial Expressions, Computational Perspectives
modeling, emotion has proved valuable in increasing
the functionality of cognitive architectures through Further Readings
improving decision making, planning, and learning.
The weakness of these models is that they abstract Levine, D. S. (2007). Neural network modeling of emotion.
away from many details of human behavior, making Physics of Life Reviews , 4(1), 3763.
it difficult to validate them using physiological data, Ortony, A., Clore, G., & Collins, A. (1988). The cognitive
such as that available from brain imaging. structure of emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Neural network models are at the other end of University Press.
Picard, R. (1997). Affective computing. Cambridge, MA:
the spectrum, focusing on brain structures known to
MIT Press.
be involved in emotions (e.g., the amygdala and lim-
bic system) and how they interact with higher level
cognition and attention (dorsolateral prefrontal cor-
tex) and other areas. Some models include computa- CONCEPTS, COMPARATIVE
tional theories of the interactions between emotion
systems and learning (e.g., via nucleus accumbens). PERSPECTIVES
Neural network models tend to adopt a circum-
plex approach to emotion, in which emotions are The question of what it means to have a concept
described along two or three dimensions, such as becomes even more difficult to address in the com-
arousal and valence. Superficially, this is similar to parative literaturethat is, in research studying con-
appraisal theories; however, here there are fewer cept formation across a variety of species. Typically,
dimensions and they describe properties of the emo- to form and hold concepts means to have an internal
tion, not of the relationship between the situation representation of an object, event, or construct that
Concepts, Comparative Perspectives 167
allows one to categorize exemplars, or members of functional categories such as foods and tools and
the category, in a meaningful way. This ability to rep- toys and animalscategories that can include exem-
resent the world in terms of concepts means that one plars that are perceptually quite diverseor even
can respond to novel exemplars one encounters in more abstract categories that include nonobservable
appropriate and adaptive ways. For instance, a child entities such as things that make one happythis
does not need to learn that every individual vehicle would constitute evidence that animals also form
could be dangerous if stepped out in front of when concepts.
crossing the street. Rather, once the child learns that
any large, fast-moving vehicle could be harmful, and
Methods of Study
can categorize trains, streetcars, buses, trucks and cars
of various types into the vehicle category, the child Thus, comparative researchers interested in the gen-
can respond in a safe and appropriate manner when eral topic of whether animals form concepts have
he or she encounters one in his or her environment. focused on diverse but convergent questions. Some
That is, once the child has a concept of vehicle and have continued in the tradition of the early research,
what vehicles are and what they can do, that child can presenting animals with various pictorial stimuli
respond to all members of that category in an appro- and asking them to categorize the stimuli, using
priate fashion. This entry will address the question of two-choice discrimination paradigms, in which
what sorts of concepts nonhumans can form, if any. they select images that belong to one category, and
not images that belong to another, or simply that
dont belong. Alternatively, they might use a match-
Do Animals Have Concepts?
to-sample paradigm, in which animals select from
It is a longstanding empirical question in the com- comparison images the one that matches the cat-
parative literature whether animals similarly form egory depicted in a sample image. Experimenters
concepts. Richard Herrnstein and colleagues pio- can then rigorously manipulate and examine the
neered some of the earliest studies with pigeons stimuli chosen and rejected by their subjects in order
when they asked whether the birds could learn to to determine what features are being used to drive
discriminate between pictures of humans and pic- their choices. Recently experimenters have devised
tures that did not include humansthus indicating new techniques, such as bubbles, for isolating and
that they had a concept of human. The researchers illuminating salient features of the stimuli to present
then went on to show that pigeons also had con- and measuring the impact on the animals choices.
cepts for water and trees and other natural objects. Alternatively, researchers can now use more flexible
The early concept formation literature was thus software to directly manipulate the features in a stim-
dominated by studies aiming to show that animals ulus to examine the individual effects of, for exam-
formed many natural concepts, at many levels of ple, enlarged eyes, elongated legs, darkened hair, and
abstraction. Following in the important footsteps of so on. While it is difficult to adequately summarize
Eleanor Roschs seminal work with human children, the outcome of the various studies across all of the
it was important to show that animals could form species studied, suffice to say that most animals use
abstract as well as concrete level categories. Very a variety of salient perceptual features to aid them in
concrete categoriesthose in which the exemplars performing these categorical discrimination tasks
all share many physical features in commoncan some of which are categorically relevant, such as the
be discriminated solely on the basis of attending to presence of eyes when discriminating animals from
perceptual features. If animals respond differently nonanimals, and some not categorically relevant,
to pictures of humans versus nonhumans solely by such as preferring close-up to distant images when
looking for and responding to skin-colored patches discriminating humans from nonhumans. Thus,
or eyes or clothing, this would not indicate that they this large body of literature remains agnostic on the
truly held a concept of human, but rather that they question of whether animals truly form concepts in
responded to the world as a conglomeration of per- the same manner that humans do, independent of
ceptual features, not as conceptual wholes. However, specific individual features but is suggestive that ani-
if they could form categories for things that were mals are much more perceptually biased rather than
not bound together by perceptual features, such as forming overarching abstract concepts.
168 Concepts, Development of
Concepts for Unobservables Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee
have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences,
Another prolific body of research has focused on 4, 515526.
the equally fascinating question of whether non- Rosch, E., Mervis, C. B., Gray, W. D., Johnson, D. M., &
humans are capable of forming concepts for unob- Boyes-Braem, P. (1976). Basic objects in natural
servablesthings that cannot be directly perceived categories. Cognitive Psychology, 8, 382439.
through the senses. One particular class of unob- Vonk, J., & Povinelli, D. J. (2006). Similarity and difference
servable constructs includes mental states, such as in the conceptual systems of primates: The
thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. Ever since David unobservability hypothesis. In E. Wasserman &
Premack and Guy Woodruff posed the famous ques- T. Zentall (Eds.), Comparative cognition: Experimental
tion, Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? explorations of animal intelligence (pp. 363387).
researchers have wondered if nonhumans reflect Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
on the thoughts of others. These types of questions
are particularly challenging for scientists as it is dif-
ficult to determine when one is predicting anoth-
ers future actions on the basis of their underlying
CONCEPTS, DEVELOPMENT OF
thoughts or beliefs or simply on their past actions
or contextual cues. Recently, a large corpus of data Concepts are critically important to a range of
has suggested that chimpanzees at least do possess human activities and, accordingly, are widely vary-
a theory of mind; that is, they are capable of form- ing in content, process, structure, and function.
ing concepts for some mental states, such as seeing, There are competing theoretical accounts for how
intentions, and perhaps even knowing. For instance, concepts develop, ranging from the position that
they respond differently to humans, and other chim- there are qualitative changes in concepts with age
panzees, depending on what they have seen, and to the view that foundational concepts are innate.
therefore what they know, about things such as However, despite this debate, there is widespread
where food might be hidden in competitive foraging agreement for early conceptual understanding even
situations. However, these findings are not without in infancy. Childrens concepts have broad impli-
an alternative explanation. Thus, the question of cations for conceptual development more broadly,
what sorts of concepts nonhumans hold is still an including stereotyping, knowledge acquisition, and
open empirical questionone that is as intriguing as cultural influences on thought.
it was when Darwin first pondered, is the difference Concepts are mental representations that orga-
between man and other creatures one of degree or nize experience. They are central to the full range
one of kind? of psychological activities, including recognition
(an infant smiling on viewing a face), language use
Jennifer Vonk (a toddler requesting a snack), problem solving
(using analogy to figure out the structure of benzene
See also Categorization, Neural Basis; Categorization, or the orbits of planets), and theory construction
Psychological Perspectives; Classical Theory of (Darwins introduction of natural selection). They
Concepts; Concepts, Development of; Concepts,
provide an efficient means of storing information
Philosophical Issues; Concepts and Language
(e.g., rather than remembering every single apple
one has encountered in the past, one can instead
Further Readings update a general representation of apples), permit
Herrnstein, R. J., Loveland, D. H., & Cable, C. (1976). making inferences into the future (e.g., inferring that
Natural concepts in pigeons. Journal of Experimental a newly encountered apple is edible), and form the
Psychology: Animal Behaviour Processes, 2, 285302. building blocks of ideas (e.g., the thought Apples
Lazareva, O. F., & Wasserman, E. A. (2008). Categories are juicy requires the constituent concepts apples
and concepts in animals. In J. Byrne (Ed.), Learning and juicy). Within psychology, the most-studied
theory and behavior: Vol. 1. Learning and memory: human concepts are categories of physical objects
A comprehensive reference (pp. 197226). New York, (apple, horse, table), but our concepts also include
NY: Elsevier, North-Holland. properties (happy), events or states (running),
Concepts, Development of 169
individuals (Fido), and abstract ideas (fairness). One as invitations to form a category and search for
of the hallmarks of human cognition is our ability to commonalities. By 9 months of age, children more
impose order on experience and organize it flexibly readily notice similarities among objects that receive
according to our needs. the same name, compared to objects that receive dif-
Scholars have studied childrens concepts as a ferent names or that receive no labels at all. Likewise,
means to investigate classic developmental issues, words encourage children to extend their knowledge
including the question of whether there are innate in new ways. For example, if a preschool-aged child
concepts, continuity, and change in thought; the learns a new fact about one bird, she will infer that
domain generality versus specificity of human cogni- other birds have that same property, even other
tion; and the origins of complex reasoning. Studies birds that look very different from the bird they
of concept development also provide insights on chil- first learned about. Moreover, the form of language
drens knowledge and beliefs about the world. For influences the kind of expectations children reach,
example, much research has investigated childrens with nouns more than adjectives leading children to
concepts of particular core domains of thought such treat categories as stable and inference promoting.
as mental states (theory of mind), biological pro- For example, children think that a person labeled
cesses, physical entities, number, space, and time. with a noun (He is a carrot eater) is more likely to
eat carrots his whole life than is a person described
Different Kinds of Concepts with a verbal predicate (He eats carrots whenever
he can).
Children acquire a wealth of different kinds of con-
cepts, and these different concepts develop in dif-
ferent ways. For example, how students acquire a What Develops? Contrasting
mathematical concept in a classroom may differ in Developmental Theories
important ways from how infants acquire a con-
Historically, childrens concepts were characterized
cept of animacy. Concepts vary from one another in
in terms of what they lacked: Whatever it was that
content (mathematical, biological), process (learned
adults have, children were thought not to have. Thus,
explicitly in school vs. implicitly in ordinary interac-
classic developmental theorists such as Jean Piaget
tions), structure (taxonomic relatedness vs. thematic
and Lev Vygotsky proposed a host of developmen-
relatedness), and function (allowing quick identifica-
tal dichotomies: Children are perceptual, adults are
tion of prey while hunting vs. determining scientific
conceptual; children are thematic, adults are taxo-
classification). Furthermore, certain concepts are
nomic; children are concrete, adults are abstract.
important for influencing other concepts and, thus,
However, these dichotomies have been undermined
can be considered foundational. A concept such as
by compelling results with young children making
cause, for example, implicitly guides childrens learn-
use of subtle experimental techniques. Rather than
ing; a concept such as alive has implications for how
asking children to verbally articulate their concepts,
one thinks about animals, plants, and self-moving
these methods rely on more implicit measures (how
artifacts.
long an infant looks at an image; the sequence in
which an array of objects are touched; inferences that
Concepts and Language
require only simple pointing judgments). When tested
An enduring question is the relation of language in these ways, preschool children and even infants
to concepts. Research with infants, as well as with consider an impressive range of cues, features, and
nonhuman species, demonstrates conclusively that conceptual structures. Early concepts are not wholly
organisms do not require language in order to perceptual, as children reason about intentions, num-
learn and use complex and sophisticated concepts. ber, and causation. Early concepts are not wholly the-
Preverbal infants have rich expectations regarding matic, as children detect commonalities among items
number, causation, animals, containment, physical that rarely appear together in the real world (e.g.,
support, and so forth. At the same time, language kangaroos and polar bears are both animals). Early
appears to emphasize and support certain types of concepts are not wholly concrete, as children have the
reasoning. Infants and young children treat words capacity to talk and reason about abstract kinds of
170 Concepts, Development of
things (e.g., birds as a general category). Indeed, it is focusing instead on the differences between groups.
not even clear that concrete representations are help- This tendency may encourage the acquisition of
ful to children, as at times they stand in the way of social stereotypes. For example, 4-year-olds infer
childrens understanding of more abstract concepts that two girls will engage in similar behaviors, even
(such as letters of the alphabet or arithmetic). if one of them looks more like a boy or has previ-
Given childrens impressive capacities to learn ously chosen to engage in male-stereotypic behav-
and reason, an important question is how children iors. Young childrens gender concepts, more so than
acquire such a rich set of concepts in such a short those of adults, emphasize the differences between
amount of time. There are at least three mechanisms groups. Preschoolers view gender stereotypic prop-
that researchers have identified, all of which have erties (ballet for girls or football for boys) as auto-
some support (though scholars debate the relative matically acquired, whereas adults acknowledge
role of each): innateness, associative learning, and individual variation in the development of these
theory construction. The idea that there are innate properties. Moreover, young children expect gender
concepts is controversial but supported by the finding differences to be deeply reflective of other proper-
that even newborns appear to have consistent expec- ties, including a range of physical, behavioral, and
tations in particular domains. For example, infants internal differences.
expect physical objects to maintain a continuous,
connected path over time, to maintain a connected, Knowledge Acquisition
bounded whole (e.g., not to split apart into two One of the primary functions of concepts is to
separate objects), and to bypass other objects when enable people to make inferences about future
moving through space pass (i.e., not to pass through events. When children learn a new fact about one
other objects), suggesting that certain assumptions category member (for example, that a sparrow
about the properties of physical objects have innate has hollow bones) they readily generalize this new
support. Other concepts are readily acquired on the knowledge to other category members (such as
basis of associative learning. Human infants possess other birds). In this way, childrens concepts facili-
powerful mechanisms for detecting regularities in tate knowledge acquisition. Concepts can also inter-
the environment and learning associations. As do fere with learning, however, by making it difficult
other organisms, child learners who experience two to understand new information that conflicts with
properties in close and frequent co-occurrence will an individuals current understanding. For example,
learn to associate those properties together. Infants when children focus on within-category similarities
readily acquire associations between properties such (e.g., the properties shared by all birds), they often
as shape, movement, and texture and make use of have difficulty understanding the process of evolu-
such associations to learn some of the differences tion by natural selection, which rests on an apprecia-
between animals and artifacts. Still other concepts tion of the meaningful variability that exists within
appear to require causal reasoning and integration categories. Similarly, intuitive concepts of physical
of facts within a growing commonsense theory. objects, which include expectations about object
For example, childrens understanding of what solidity, may interfere with learning more advanced
living things have in common undergoes marked theories of physics. Confronting errors in childrens
change as children gain a deeper understanding of existing concepts is therefore important for develop-
the causal principles involved in biology. ing successful educational methods.
Implications for Conceptual Development Universality and Cultural Variability
The ease with which young children acquire concepts Childrens concepts reflect both universal tenden-
has broad implications for other aspects of childhood cies and culture-specific variation. Research con-
thought, including stereotyping, knowledge acquisi- ducted in a range of diverse cultures supports the
tion, and universality/variability across cultures. conclusion that there are certain cognitive biases
that universally guide conceptual development. For
Stereotyping
example, young children across diverse cultural con-
In their early developing concepts, children at texts assume that categories of living things (wolves,
times overlook the variability within categories, fish, trees) capture an underlying reality. They believe
Concepts, Philosophical Issues 171
that membership in such categories (e.g., being a Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996).
wolf), as well as associated properties (e.g., having Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274,
sharp teeth), are determined by a deep, intrinsic, and 19261928.
stable property that is acquired through natural pro- Spelke, E. (1994). Initial knowledge: Six suggestions.
cesses (e.g., inheritance from wolf parents) (termed Cognition, 50, 431445.
psychological essentialism). There is also evidence, Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge,
however, that cultural input influences conceptual MA: MIT Press. (Original work published 1934)
development across childhood. For example, cul- Waxman, S. R., & Markow, D. B. (1995). Words as
invitations to form categories: Evidence from 12- to
tural contexts influence how children make sense of
13-month-old infants. Cognitive Psychology, 29,
human behavior. Children in relatively more collec-
257302.
tivist communities (as in China) are more likely to
view behavior as determined by an individuals con-
text, whereas children in relatively more individual-
istic communities (as in the United States) are more CONCEPTS, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES
likely to view behavior as resulting from individual
factors such as personality traits. In this entry, the main theories of and the current
controversies about concepts in the philosophy of
Conclusions psychology are reviewed. The relation between phi-
Childrens concepts are remarkably sophisticated, losophers and psychologists theories of concepts
from infancy onward, and reveal a diversity of ways is first discussed. Then, the two principal kinds of
of viewing the world. Childrens concepts also pro- philosophical theories of concepts are briefly intro-
vide important tools for further learning. At the duced. Third, the four main types of psychological
same time, concepts can lead children to biases and theories of concepts are presented. Then, the recent
stereotypes, and their concepts undergo tremendous debate about concept pluralism and concept elimi-
change throughout childhood. In these ways, chil- nativism is examined. Finally, the controversy about
drens concepts provide a microcosm of the wealth empiricism is surveyed.
of theories that humans construct over development.
Susan A. Gelman and Philosophers and Psychologists
Marjorie Rhodes Theories of Concepts
The term concept is used in philosophy and in psy-
See also Categorization, Psychological Perspectives; chology, and philosophers, such as Georges Rey, Eric
Concepts, Comparative Perspectives; Concepts and Margolis, and Jerry Fodor, commonly assume that
Language; Knowledge Acquisition in Development;
psychologists theories of concepts aim at solving the
Representations, Development of
issues they themselves are interested in. In addition,
they commonly hold that as solutions to the issues
Further Readings
of interest in philosophy, psychological theories of
Carey, S. (2009). The origin of concepts. New York, NY: concepts are defective. For instance, in 2003, Fodor
Oxford University Press. concludes his review of Gregory Murphys book,
Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of The Big Book of Concepts, as follows:
essentialism in everyday thought. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press. It is part of our not knowing how the mind works
Gelman, S. A., & Kalish, C. W. (2006). Conceptual that we dont know what concepts are or what it is
development. In D. Kuhn & R. Siegler (Eds.), Handbook to have one. Just about everything that current
of child psychology: Vol. 2. Cognition, perception and cognitive science says about either topic is wrong.
language (pp. 687733). New York, NY: Wiley. But at least it is clear that concepts arent typicality
Inhelder, B., & Piaget, J. (1964). The early growth of logic structures and that having them is not being able to
in the child. New York, NY: Norton. sort things. Except for leaving that out, Gregory
Rhodes, M., & Gelman, S. A. (2008). Categories influence Murphys book tells you most of what there is to the
predictions about individual consistency. Child psychology of concepts. Read it, therefore, by all
Development, 79, 12701287. means; but dont even consider believing it. (p. 4)
172 Concepts, Philosophical Issues
Philosophical theories of concepts are also some- conditions but not to explain the properties of our
times criticized for being unable to explain what higher cognitive competences.
psychological theories of concepts are meant to Taking this conclusion for granted, one could
explainnamely, how we categorize, make induc- endorse two different views about the relation
tions, and so on. between the philosophical and the psychological
The lack of progress in the resolution of the con- theories of concepts. One could propose, as Susan
troversy between philosophers and psychologists sug- Carey or Eric Margolis and Steve Laurence do, that
gests an alternative picture of the relation between these theories focus on different aspects of the same
philosophers and psychologists theories of concepts: entities. Instead, one could propose, as Edouard
These theories are not meant to solve the same Machery has done, that concept refers to differ-
issues and are thus not competing. In support of this ent entities when used by psychologists and philoso-
alternative picture, one can note that philosophers phers. In brief, Machery favors the second position
and psychologists disagree about what phenomena because, if the first position were correct, then, when
a theory of concepts should explain. A meticulous prototype theorists say that concepts are prototypes
examination of the psychological and the philo- or when exemplar theorists say that concepts are
sophical theories of concepts also shows that their sets of exemplars, what they say would be literally
explananda differ. mistaken. The principle of charity suggests that
It is thus important to distinguish clearly the those psychologists are better understood as theoriz-
issues philosophers and psychologists are trying to ing about different things than philosophers.
solve:
several concepts, inferentialists hold that possess- theories, when one categorizes, draws an induction,
ing a given concept always involves possessing other makes an analogy, and so forth, one spontaneously
concepts. brings to mind the properties that are typical, diag-
Atomists hold that having a concept of x consists nostic, and so forth, of the relevant category, sub-
in standing in some relation with the property of stance, and so on. Prototypes are typically assumed
being an x. Particularly, Fodor holds that having a to be used in cognitive processes that compute the
concept of x is to stand in a nomological relation similarity between a prototype and other representa-
(i.e., in a relation that has the status of a law of tions, such as the representations of the objects to be
nature) with the property of being an x such that a categorized, in a linear manner.
mental symbol occurs (one entertains thoughts about Exemplars, as theorized, for example, by Douglas
x) when one perceives the instantiated property of Medin in 1978 and Robert Nosofsky in 1986, are
being an x. For instance, roughly, to have the con- bodies of knowledge about individual members of
cept cat is to be disposed to entertain thoughts about a category (e.g., kitty, tiger), particular samples of
cats whenever a cat is present in ones environment. a substance, particular instances of a kind of event
On this view, one can have a single concept, whence (e.g., my last visit to the physician). For instance,
the name atomism. according to exemplar theories, a concept of cats
would consist of a set of bodies of knowledge about
specific cats (kitty, tiger). When one categorizes,
The Four Main Psychological draws an induction, makes an analogy, and so on,
Theories of Concepts one spontaneously brings to mind the properties of
There are four main kinds of theories of concepts specific members of the relevant categories, of spe-
in psychology as discussed by Murphy in his 2002 cific samples of the relevant substances, and so forth.
book and Machery in his 2009 book: the classical Exemplars are typically assumed to be used in cogni-
theory of concepts, prototype theories of concepts, tive processes that compute the similarity between a
exemplar theories of concepts, and theory theories of set of exemplars and other representations, such as
concepts. Although there are several distinct proto- the representations of the objects to be categorized,
type theories of concepts, these theories agree about in a nonlinear manner.
the distinctive features of prototypes. The same is Theories, as theorized by Murphy and Medin
true of exemplar and theory theories. and by Carey, for example, are bodies of causal,
According to the most common versions of the functional, generic, and nomological knowledge
classical theory of concepts, a concept of x repre- about categories, substances, types of events, and
sents some properties as being separately neces- so forth. A theory of cats would consist of some
sary and jointly sufficient to be an x. The concept such knowledge about cats. When one categorizes,
of grandmother is perhaps the best illustration of draws an induction, makes an analogy, and so forth,
this approach to concepts: If people have a classi- one spontaneously brings to mind this causal, func-
cal concept of grandmother, they hold that to be a tional, generic, and nomological knowledge. Recent
grandmother it is necessary and sufficient to be the work on causal knowledge by Alison Gopnik and
mother of a parent. Most psychologists and philoso- colleagues suggests that theories might be used in
phers of psychology have abandoned the classical cognitive processes that are similar to the algorithms
theory of concepts for the reasons given by Murphy involved in causal reasoning.
and by Machery in the Chapter 4 of his book. Anna
Wierzbicka and Jacob Feldman are exceptions to
Concept Pluralism and Concept
this trend.
Eliminativism
In substance, prototypes, as theorized, for exam-
ple, by Eleanor Rosch and James Hampton, are What is the relation between the psychological
bodies of statistical knowledge about a category, a theories of concepts introduced in the previous sec-
substance, a type of event, and so on. For instance, a tion? The received view is that these theories are
prototype of dogs could store some statistical knowl- competing: It is often assumed that concepts are
edge about the properties that are typical or diag- either definitions or prototypes or sets of exem-
nostic of the class of cats. According to prototype plars or theories. Recently, however, psychologists
174 Concepts, Philosophical Issues
results touted by Barsalou, Prinz, and others do not perceptual representations, they are committed to
undermine the amodal theories of concepts in gen- the claim that the retrieval and use of conceptual
eral. Rather, they provide evidence against specific knowledge activates the cortical areas used in
amodal theories of concepts, while being naturally perception and action. However, a typical finding
accommodated by other amodal theories of con- in cognitive neuroscience is that the brain areas acti-
cepts (a problem called Andersons problem). vated are near, and thus not identical to, the brain
Second, several experiments showing that people areas involved in perceptual or motor processing.
use perceptual representations fail to provide evi- Furthermore, these brain areas are almost always
dence against amodal theories of concepts because anterior to the brain areas activated in perceptual
amodal theorists expect people to rely on imagery processing. A plausible interpretation is that the
in these experiments (the problem from imagery). brain areas activated in the tasks tapping into higher
Finally, it could be that perceptual symbols consti- cognition are amodal representations, which are dis-
tute only a kind of concepts (the generality prob- tinct from the perceptual representations activated
lem). In fact, research suggests that at least some in the tasks tapping into perceptual processes.
conceptual representationsnamely, the represen-
Edouard Machery
tations of the magnitudes of classes of objects or
sequences of soundsare amodal. Although these See also Atomism About Concepts; Categorization,
representations do not form a language, they are not Psychological Perspectives; Classical Theory of
perceptual either. Dove has developed the generality Concepts; Concepts, Comparative Perspectives
problem in great detail, showing that the research in
support of neo-empiricism has typically focused on a
Further Readings
single kind of conceptsnamely, concrete or highly
imageable conceptsand that neo-empiricist find- Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems.
ings are unlikely to be found in experiments involv- Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 577660.
ing concepts with low imageability such as abstract Block, N. (1986). Advertisement for a semantics for
concepts. psychology. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 10,
Others have identified further difficulties. 615678.
Reviewing a range of cognitive-neuroscientific work Carey, S. (2009). The origin of concepts. New York, NY:
on concepts and various important behavioral stud- Oxford University Press.
ies, Mahon and Caramazza grant that the perceptual Feldman, J. (2000). Minimization of Boolean complexity in
and motor systems are often activated during con- human concept learning. Science, 407, 630633.
ceptual processing, but they insist that this activation Fodor, J. A. (1998). Concepts: Where cognitive science
falls short of supporting neo-empiricism. The reason went wrong. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Fodor, J. A. (2003, January 17). Is it a bird? Problems with
is that this activation may be a simple by-product:
old and new approaches to the theory of concepts.
The activation of these brain regions results from
Times Literary Supplement, 34, p. 4.
the activation of other brain areas, ones not involved
Gopnik, A., Glymour, C., Sobel, D., Schulz, L., Kushnir, T.,
in perceptual processing, and from this activation
& Danks, D. (2004). A theory of causal learning in
spreading from the latter areas to the former. children: Causal maps and Bayes nets. Psychological
Finally, as reviewed by Martin in 2007, for Review, 111, 131.
example, many fMRI studies show that tasks meant Hampton, J. A. (1979). Polymorphous concepts in semantic
to tap into the processes underlying higher cogni- memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal
tion (particularly, tasks involving the understanding Behavior, 18, 441461.
of particular words) activate either the very brain Machery, E. (2005). Concepts are not a natural kind.
areas involved in perceptual and motor processing Philosophy of Science, 72, 444467.
or brain areas near those. While neo-empiricists Machery, E. (2006). Two dogmas of neo-empiricism.
have often touted these findings as supporting neo- Philosophy Compass, 1, 398412.
empiricism, others, such as Machery, hold that they Machery, E. (2007). Concept empiricism: A methodological
actually challenge this approach. The reason is that critique. Cognition, 104, 1946.
since neo-empiricists insist that retrieving a concept Machery, E. (2009). Doing without concepts. New York,
from long-term memory consists in producing some NY: Oxford University Press.
176 Concepts and Language
Machery, E. (2010). Prcis of doing without concepts. Q1: We use language to express thoughts, and
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 195244. thus, concepts. How are the properties of language
Mahon, B. Z., & Caramazza, A. (2008). A critical look at that underwrite expression connected with the
the embodied cognition hypothesis and a new proposal thoughts, and thus concepts, expressed?
for grounding conceptual content. Journal of
Q2: Humans are unusual, perhaps unique, in both
PhysiologyParis, 102, 5970.
Martin, A. (2007). The representation of object concepts in linguistic and conceptual abilities. To what extent
the brain. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 2545. are these abilities interdependent? Could a creature
Medin, D. L., & Schaffer, M. M. (1978). Context theory think at allpossess any conceptual abilities
of classification learning. Psychological Review, 85, without language? Could creatures without
207238. language use the same concepts as the linguistically
Murphy, G. L. (2002). The big book of concepts. competent? Could a creature have language
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. without concepts?
Murphy, G. L., & Medin, D. L. (1985). The role of theories Q3: Human languages, and human linguistic
in conceptual coherence. Psychological Review, 92, abilities, appear to vary, for instance in the forms
289316.
of classification imposed by their vocabularies.
Nosofsky, R. M. (1986). Attention, similarity, and the
Does such variance induce, or reflect, variance in
identification-categorization relationship. Journal of
conceptual abilities?
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition, 10, 104114.
Linguistic Expression of Concepts (Q1)
Peacocke, C. (1992). A study of concepts. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press. Many philosophers hold the following: (a)
Piccinini, G., & Scott, S. (2006). Splitting concepts. Thoughts (e.g., beliefs), in concert with the way
Philosophy of Science, 73, 390409. the world is, determine truth values, so are either
Prinz, J. J. (2002). Furnishing the mind: Concepts and their true or false. (b) Determination of truth value for
perceptual basis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. thoughts is derivative from determination of truth
Rey, G. (1983). Concepts and stereotypes. Cognition, 15, value for thought contents (so that, for example,
237262. your belief that this is an encyclopedia entry is true
Rosch, E., & Mervis, C. B. (1975). Family resemblance: because it is true that this is an encyclopedia entry).
Studies in the internal structure of categories. Cognitive (c) Determination of truth value for thought con-
Psychology, 7, 573605. tents is derivative from contributions made by con-
Weiskopf, D. A. (2009). The plurality of concepts.
stituent concepts and the way those concepts are
Synthese, 169, 145173.
combined in constituting the thought content. From
(a) through (c), if we hold fixed the way the world
is, then two beliefs with contents constituted in the
CONCEPTS AND LANGUAGE same way from the same concepts must have the
same truth value.
Concepts are constituents of thought contents, or The most straightforward view (SV) about
constituents of abilities to entertain, or reason with, the way language expresses concepts is this: Each
contents. Your belief that this is an encyclopedia substantive expression type (perhaps as typed by
entry has the content: that this is an encyclopedia meaning) expresses a concept, and each type of sen-
entry and that content embeds constituent concepts: tential mode of combination (broadly, each syntactic
encyclopedia and entry. Your ability to entertain or structure type, including nonsubstantive expression
reason with the content that this is an encyclope- types) expresses a way of putting concepts together
dia entry involves abilities to think about encyclope- to constitute a thought content. (Very roughly,
dias and entries and, thus, possession of concepts of substantive expression typessuch as heavy and
encyclopedias and entries. This entry restricts atten- encyclopediamake a distinctive contribution to
tion to a brief discussion of three large questions the subject matter of a sentence, while nonsubstan-
about connections between concepts and language; tives and structural features of sentencesperhaps
it focuses on philosophical rather than psychological including is, the, and the way expressions are com-
issues. bined in The encyclopedia is heavydetermine
Concepts and Language 177
how the substantives work together to determine the described. Having acquired English from locals,
subject matter of sentences.) Pierre dissents from Sentence 4:
Given a through c, we can test SV by seeing
whether, if we hold fixed the way the rest of the 4. London is pretty.
world is, all thoughts expressed by a sentence type
are guaranteed to have the same truth value. If they It is plausible that the thought content Pierre
are not, then we must reject SV. (If we do not hold expresses through assent to Sentence 3 is different
fixed the way the rest of the world is, changes in from the thought content he expresses through dis-
truth-value are to be expected: The true thought that sent from Sentence 4. For otherwise, Pierre would
the encyclopedia is heavy would be false if the world appear to believe and disbelieve the same thought
was such that it was a far lighter book.) content, and it is more natural to view Pierre as
An immediate problem for SV is the existence of ignorant rather than irrational. The difference in
context sensitive expression types, such as indexicals thought contents plausibly traces to a difference in
(e.g., I, here, now) and demonstratives (e.g., this, the concepts that Pierre expresses using Londres
that, those, she, he). and London. Nonetheless, it is plausible that
London and Londres have the same linguistic
1. I live near London. meaning. Hence, we have reason to reject SV.
ordinarily understood. Those who seek to argue expressions, a requirement on anyones ability with
that conceptual ability is dependent on linguistic a particular concept (e.g., of belief), encyclopedias,
ability should therefore carefully specify the opera- Tuesdays, elm trees, and so on? (2) Could linguistic
tive features of linguistic ability. ability be a requirement on someones ability with
Davidsons central argument has three main a particular concept? One case where an affirma-
premises. First, having beliefsor more generally, tive answer to (1) is plausible is concepts of days
states with contentrequires conceptual grasp of the week. Plausibly, one could not have a con-
of the distinction between beliefs being true and cept of Tuesdays without having a system of seven
their being false. Second, conceptual grasp of the symbols correlated with day-length periods of time.
distinction between truth and falsehood for beliefs With respect to (2), one case for which an affirma-
requires possession of a concept of belief. Third, tive answer is plausible is a concept of elm trees.
grasp of a concept of belief requires linguistic abil- Plausibly, someone might be very bad at telling elm
ity. Davidsons argument for the third premise is not trees apart from oak trees and yet still have distinct
transparent. His idea appears to be that intelligible concepts of elms and oaks because they stand in the
application of a concept of belief requires a means right sort of linguistically mediated relations with
of grounding the attribution of false beliefs. Unless experts at distinguishing elms from oaks (a develop-
there is need to appeal to false beliefs in character- ment of a case from Hilary Putnam).
izing a subjects mental life, appeal to belief would With respect to the second question, Ren
be redundant. One might instead appeal to the way Descartes argued that the exercise of some forms of
the world is. And, the only means of grounding the linguistic ability furnished decisive evidence that the
attribution of false beliefs is to appeal to a feature possessor of that ability had a mind and, thus, con-
of the subjects behavior that is assessable for truth ceptual abilities. The form of linguistic ability about
or falsehood in partial independence from the way which Descartes made this claim was the ability to
the world is. Since Davidson holds that only lan- use language appropriately without that use being
guage provides the kind of stable, repeatable feature a merely triggered response to environmental con-
of subjects behavior that can be assessed in the tingencies (e.g., a thermostats response to changes
required way, he holds that grasp of a concept of in ambient temperature). Alan Turing held a similar
belief requires linguistic ability. view. According to Turings Test, ability to engage
Davidsons argument can be challenged at almost appropriately in ordinary conversation is a dem-
every step. In particular, it is not obvious that having onstration of mindedness. The plausibility of such
beliefs requires a conceptual grasp of the distinction views depends on the operative conception of lin-
between true and false beliefs. It is plausible, for guistic ability, in particular that it embeds an appro-
example, that infants have numerous beliefs before priateness condition. Similar views based on less
they are in a position to recognize that some of those demanding conceptions of linguistic abilitysuch
beliefs are false. And it is not obvious that appropri- as the ability to ape others utterances (something
ate attribution of false belief requires linguistic ability. a mere recording device might be able to do) or to
It is plausible, for example, that prelinguistic infants respond to presentations of colored tiles with utter-
reactions to apparently unexpected outcomesfor ance of the right color word (an ability akin to that of
instance, a moving ball that fails to emerge in a natu- a complex thermostat)are less plausible. Plausibly,
ral way from behind a screencan provide nonlin- something close to conceptual ability is built into the
guistic evidence for their having false beliefs. operative conception of linguistic ability.
Davidsons argument attempts to derive a global
conclusion about the connection between concep-
Linguistic Determinism (Q3)
tual ability and linguistic ability from a particular
case, the concept of belief. Increasingly, theorists Linguistic determinism is the view that conceptual
have shied away from the global question and abilities are shaped by linguistic abilities, so that
focused instead on whether linguistic ability is differences in language can make for differences
required for possession of particular concepts. Here, in conceptualization. Historically, the view is most
we should distinguish between two questions: (1) Is often associated with Benjamin Whorfs now largely
linguistic ability or ability with a particular range of discredited claim that the Hopi, an indigenous
Conceptual Combination 179
people of America, spoke and so thought about time boomerang flu (flu that goes away only to come
in a radically different way from Europeans. back again) and zebra mussel, which refers to
The view comes in a variety of strengths, with mussels that have stripes somewhat resembling those
the strongest forms involving incommensurability of a zebras though quite smaller. The left-most noun
between the conceptual repertoires of speakers of of a combination is the modifier (e.g., zebra) and the
different languages so that there is no thought con- right-most noun is the head noun (e.g., mussel). The
tent shared among speakers of different languages, creation of novel phrases or noun-noun combina-
so no agreement or disagreement between them. The tions is an important mechanism for expanding a
strongest form of the view has not found favor in cultures language.
recent times, in part because the strongest form of Conceptual combination usually refers to a com-
view cannot be stated or conceived from within the bination of two nouns (e.g., zebra mussel), but the
confines of a single linguistic community and (so) is process often involves combinations of adverbs,
not clearly intelligible. However, research into the adjectives, and acronyms as well as additional nouns
role of linguistic ability in local shaping of particu- (e.g., confident FBI shoe print expert).
lar ways of thinkingfor example, thinking about This entry examines the different kinds of combi-
color, space, time, and motionforms an important nations and how they are interpreted, then describes
strand of current research among philosophers and different views of conceptual combination. The
psychologists. entry also compares conceptual combinations in
English to those in another language (Chinese).
Guy Longworth
a property interpretation. A person familiar with a occur when a salient modifier is activated and attrib-
scorpion then can easily interpret the meaning of uted to the head noun. For example, in the com-
scorpion fly. However, unpublished research in Ed bination zebra bag, a salient feature of zebra is
Wisniewskis laboratory suggests that often there is having stripes. This feature is then attributed to
not much explicit context provided for the reader. the head noun bag.
Instead, a person often must determine the meaning James Hamptons attribute inheritance model
or the interpretation of the combination from the applies to hybrids. It emphasizes the emergent fea-
two nouns. According to Greg Murphy, people, in tures that arise from the two nouns when they are
many cases, rely on their background knowledge to combined. For example, Hampton found that in
interpret meanings of combinations. For example, pet bird, pets that are also birds (hybrid) were
a reporter for a newspaper might refer to a novel judged to have the emergent features live in cages
combination such as lima bean casserole without and talk that are false for pets or birds considered
describing its meaning. However, even if a person separately.
may have never heard of lima bean casserole, most All of these models address only one of the three
people are likely to interpret the combination as a different interpretations. However, Wisniewskis
casserole made of lima beans (a relation interpre- dual-process model can account for relation,
tation). For example, most people know that lima property, and hybrid interpretations. One process
beans are food, that casseroles are baked, and so on. produces relation interpretations; another process
They use their background knowledge of the words produces property interpretations and hybrids.
to determine the meaning of the combination.
There are other factors, in addition to back- Conceptual Combination in
ground knowledge or context, that affect how a Another Culture: Chinese
person interprets a noun-noun combination. When
Studies have demonstrated that noun-noun combi-
two nouns of a combination are very similar, people
nation is also a very productive way for generating
are much more likely to give a property interpreta-
new words in the Chinese language. Jing Wu con-
tion to the combination (e.g., whiskey wine inter-
ducted a survey of the Dictionary of Contemporary
preted as a stronger type of wine). One reason for
Chinese New Words. She found that among 15,400
the preponderance of property interpretations for
new words and expressions, 25% of the new phrases
highly similar combinations is that the nouns of rela-
are noun-noun combinations.
tion interpretations have to play different roles. If
Wus study showed that the three major types of
two nouns are very similar, then typically they can-
noun-noun combinations in American English also
not play different roles. In the combination whiskey
characterize those in the Chinese language. Relation
wine, both nouns are so similar that they play the
interpretations are most common, followed by prop-
same role (to drink), preventing a relation inter-
erty interpretations. Hybrid combinations are a rare
pretation and leading to the property interpretation.
type in Chinese, too. For example, the ideograms
meaning lion tiger refer to a cross between a lion
Models of Conceptual Combination and a tiger. Relation interpretations included color
TV wall, meaning a giant thin screen of color TV
A number of models of conceptual combination
installed in a wall), and mothers milk bank, a bank
have been developed by researchers and will be
for storing mothers milk. Property interpretations
briefly described.
included bubble economy, an economy that does not
Christina Gagne and Edward Shoben have devel-
last as long as a bubble, and toad glasses, eyeglasses
oped a model of a conceptual combination that
with large frame and glass that look like the eyes of
focuses on relation interpretations. Their model
a toad.
shows that a combination is easier to understand
based on the frequency of the relation interpreta-
Emergent Features in
tions in language.
Conceptual Combination
Zachary Estes and Sam Glucksbergs interactive
property attribution model applies to property inter- In general, emergent features are not initially pres-
pretations. In their model, property interpretations ent in concepts but arise when these concepts are
Conduction Aphasia 181
combined. These emergent features are constructed Glucksberg, S., & Estes, Z. (2000). Feature accessibility in
or created from existing features represented in the conceptual combination: Effects of context-induced
modifier and head noun. Actual examples of emer- relevance. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7, 510515.
gent features found in studies of novel noun-noun Hampton, J. A. (1987). Inheritance of attributes in natural
combinations include roller coaster dinner, which is concept conjunctions. Memory and Cognition, 15,
often interpreted as a series of courses that alter- 5571.
nate from tasting good to tasting bad, rake pen- Murphy, G. L. (1990). Noun phrase interpretation and
cil, which is sometimes interpreted as a pencil with conceptual combination. Journal of Memory and
Language, 29, 25988.
multiple lead points. (See Hamptons different view
Wisniewski, E. J. (1997). When concepts combine.
of emergent features mentioned above.) Accounting
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4(2), 167183.
for emergent features presents a challenge for all
Wu, J. (2006). Schema theory and the interpretation of
theories of conceptual combination.
noun-noun compounds in contemporary Chinese:
Jing Wus study showed that the creation of A database-driven study (Unpublished doctoral
novel combinations with emergent features is also dissertation). Shanghai International Studies University,
common in the Chinese language. For example, Shanghai, China.
soybean-cake cadre refers to leading cadres that are
in the middle of a hierarchy, between the top leaders
and their staff, and unable to please both sides. This
emergent feature is derived from a property of a CONDUCTION APHASIA
soybean cake, which contains soybean in the middle
of two layers of bread, much like a sandwich. Conduction aphasia is an acquired disorder of lan-
guage typically caused by stroke. Classically, the
symptoms of conduction aphasiaimpaired verba-
Conclusion
tim repetition, phonemic errors in speech produc-
Conceptual combination is an important mecha- tion, and naming difficultyhave been attributed to
nism for expanding a cultures language. These a disconnection between speech reception and pro-
novel combinations often consist of two nouns and duction areas. However, recent work suggests that
the reader must determine their meanings. Cognitive conduction aphasia is an auditory-motor integration
scientists have developed theories about how peo- disorder caused by damage to a cortical network
ple understand these combinations. The emergent in the left posterior Sylvian region. This entry
features produced by the combinations are usually reviews the symptoms and neurology of conduction
the most creative part of the word meanings but the aphasia, the classical interpretation of the disorder,
most challenging to understand. Conceptual combi- and more recent functional-anatomic accounts.
nation is also common in the Chinese language.
Edward Wisniewski and Jing Wu Characterization of Conduction Aphasia
conduction aphasia has been suggested by recent Buchsbaum, B. R., Baldo, J., Okada, K., Berman, K. F.,
studies investigating a sensory-motor integration Dronkers, N., DEsposito, M., & Hickok, G. (2011).
network for speech and related functions. Sensory- Conduction aphasia, sensory-motor integration, and
motor integration has been studied extensively in phonological short-term memory: An aggregate analysis
the visual-motor domain, and a set of brain regions of lesion and fMRI data. Brain and Language, 119(3),
have been identified in the posterior parietal lobe 119128.
of both monkeys and humans that appear to per- Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. R. (1980). The anatomical
form a transform function mapping between visual basis of conduction aphasia. Brain, 103, 337350.
Hickok, G., Erhard, P., Kassubek, J., Helms-Tillery, A. K.,
and motor representations. These areas show both
Naeve-Velguth, S., Strupp, J. P., . . . Ugurbil, K. (2000).
sensory and motor response properties, are densely
A functional magnetic resonance imaging study of the
connected with frontal-motor areas, and are orga-
role of left posterior superior temporal gyrus in speech
nized around particular motor effector systems (e.g.,
production: Implications for the explanation of
eyes vs. hands). Recent work in humans has identi- conduction aphasia. Neuroscience Letters, 287,
fied a similar sensory-motor integration network for 156160.
speech functions (or more accurately, for the vocal Hickok, G., & Poeppel, D. (2007). The cortical
tract motor system). Functional imaging has found organization of speech processing. Nature Reviews
that a left dominant region within the Sylvian fis- Neuroscience, 8, 393402.
sure at the parietal-temporal boundary (area Spt)
exhibits the same response properties found in
sensory-motor integration areas in the posterior
parietal lobe. It has been proposed that area Spt is a
CONFABULATION
central hub in a sensory-motor integration network
that transforms auditory-based representations into One of the Latin roots of the term confabulation is
vocal motor-based representations. fabulari, which became our word fable. When the
Interestingly, the location of area Spt at the pari- German neurologists Karl Bonhoeffer, Arnold Pick,
etal-temporal boundary is in the center of the lesion and Carl Wernicke began using the term in the early
distribution associated with conduction aphasia. 1900s, they applied it to false memory reports, little
Furthermore, Spt activates during the performance fables, created by their patients, who suffered from
of behaviors that are impaired in conduction apha- a syndrome that later came to known as Korsakoffs
sia (repetition, naming, short-term memory). For amnesia. When asked what they did yesterday,
these reasons, and because Spts functional proper- these patients do not remember, but will report
ties show parallels to other known sensory-motor events that either did not happen or happened long
integration areas in the posterior parietal lobe, it has ago. The technical definition of confabulation the
been suggested that conduction aphasia is a deficit early neurologists coined has three components:
caused by damage to area Spt and surrounding tis- (a) Confabulations are false, (b) confabulations are
sue, which disrupts the interaction between sensory reports, and (c) confabulations are about memories.
and motor systems involved in speech. During the remainder of the 20th century, how-
ever, the use of the term was gradually expanded to
Gregory Hickok cover claims made by other types of patients, many
Authors Note: This work was supported by NIH grants
of whom had no obvious memory problems, includ-
R01 DC03681 & R01 DC009659. ing patients who deny illness, split-brain patients
(who have had their hemisphere surgically separated
See also Aphasia; Production of Language; Working to prevent the spread of epileptic seizures), patients
Memory in Language Processing with misidentification disorders (who make false
claims about the identities of people), and patients
Further Readings with schizophrenia, as well as children and normal
Baldo, J. V., Klostermann, E. C., & Dronkers, N. F. (2008). adults in certain situations. Patients who deny that
Its either a cook or a baker: Patients with conduction they are paralyzed have been claimed to confabu-
aphasia get the gist but lose the trace. Brain and late when they provide reasons for why they cannot
Language, 105, 134140. move (My arthritis is bothering me, Im tired
184 Confabulation
of following your commands). Another type of 4. Jan does not know that her thought is ill
patient will deny blindness and attempt to answer grounded.
questions about what he or she sees, producing 5. Jan should know that her thought is ill
what have been called confabulations (Its too grounded.
dark in here). Misidentification patients have been 6. Jan is confident that p.
said to confabulate when asked what the motives
of the impostor are, or why someone would go
through all the trouble to impersonate someone Claiming covers a wide variety of responses by
else (Perhaps my father paid him to take care of subjects, including drawing and pointing. The sec-
me). Similarly, when the left hemispheres of split- ond criterion expresses the sincerity of confabula-
brain patients attempt to answer questions without tors. The third criterion refers to the problem that
the necessary information (which is contained in caused the flawed response to be generated; this
their right hemispheres), this has also been called a problem is the first factor. The fourth criterion refers
confabulation. to the failure of the second phase, the failure to reject
There are thus currently two schools of thought the flawed response (the second factor). The fifth
on the proper scope of the concept of confabula- criterion captures the normative element of our con-
tion: (a) those who remain true to the original sense cept of confabulation. If the confabulators brain
and so believe that the term should only be applied were functioning properly, he or she would not
to false memory reports and (b) those who believe make that claim. The last criterion refers to another
that the term can be usefully applied to a broader phenomenon typically seen in confabulators, the
range of disorders. This possible expansion of the serene certainty they have in their communications,
concept forces several difficult questions. Has the which may be connected to the frequent finding of
concept expanded so much as to become meaning- low or abolished sympathetic autonomic activity in
less? Do the new confabulation syndromes share confabulating patients.
anything significant with the classical memory cases?
Minimally, some confabulation syndromes involve
Types of Confabulation
memory (Korsakoffs, aneurysm of the anterior
communicating artery), whereas others involve per- Confabulations About Memories
ception (denial of paralysis or blindness, split-brain The presence of confabulation is a defining char-
syndrome, misidentification disorders). This entry acteristic of two memory syndromes, Korsakoffs
focuses on the broader concept of confabulation syndrome and a similar syndrome caused by aneu-
and includes a description of confabulations based rysm of the anterior communicating artery, an artery
on both memory and perception. It will also exam- that forms the anterior portion of the circle of Willis.
ine what is known about the neuropsychology of Alzheimers patients will also frequently confabulate
confabulation. about memories, and young children are also prone
to reporting false memories. These four types of
The Broader Sense of Confabulation confabulators (Korsakoffs patients, anterior com-
municating artery patients, Alzheimers patients,
The following definition is based on the idea that and young children) have an initial memory retrieval
confabulation syndromes involve malfunctions in problem, coupled with a failure to check and cor-
different knowledge domains, as well as executive rect their false memories. Apparently the childrens
system damage. prefrontal areas have not yet fully developed, while
Jan confabulates that p (where p is some proposi- the Alzheimers patients prefrontal lobes have been
tion) if, and only if damaged by the amyloid plaque lesions. In contrast,
there exist many memory patients with damage
1. Jan claims that p.
restricted to more posterior parts of the memory
2. Jan believes that p. system (e.g., to the hippocampus or other parts of
3. Jans thought that p is ill grounded. the temporal lobes) who openly admit that they
Confabulation 185
cannot remember and are not prone to producing hemisphere) obeyed the command. Similar sorts
confabulations. of confabulations can be elicited by brain stimula-
tion. For example, the patients cortex is stimulated,
Confabulations About Perceptions causing an arm to move. When asked why the arm
Vision moved, the patient claims he or she felt like stretch-
ing the arm. Hypnotized people may also confabu-
Antons syndrome is a condition in which the late about actions. In a typical case, the subject is
patient is partially or entirely blind yet insists that given a hypnotic suggestion to perform a certain
her vision is fine. The posterior damage site typi- action but then confabulates by offering a different,
cally involves bilateral lesions to the occipital cortex, ad hoc, reason for the action when asked.
causing the blindness, coupled with prefrontal dam-
age, apparently causing an inability to become aware Confabulations About Emotions
of the blindness. Some of these patients appear to
False or ill-grounded self-attributions of emotions
be mistaking hallucinations for actual perceptions.
are another type of confabulation. For example, in
Split-brain patients may also confabulate when the
one experiment, people were given an injection of
left hemisphere is asked about perceptual informa-
adrenaline without their knowledge but attributed
tion contained only in the right hemisphere.
their inability to sleep to things such as uneasiness
Somatosensation about a romantic relationship or nervousness about
what they had to do the next day.
The patients who deny that they are paralyzed
have a condition referred to as anosognosia, meaning
unawareness of illness. They typically have damage The Neuropsychology of Confabulation
to one or more lower level somatosensory systems There are several clues as to the nature and loca-
responsible for representing the affected limb, in tion of the neurological damage in confabulation
addition to frontal damage that may compromise patients: (a) The patients with aneurysms of the
areas capable of making the patient aware of the anterior communicating arterya tiny artery near
damage to the lower level somatosensory systems. the anterior commissure that completes the anterior
portion of the Circle of Willisprovide our best clue
Person Perception
about the locus of the frontal problems in memory
Perceptual confabulations are also issued by confabulation. This artery supplies blood to portions
patients suffering from the misidentification syn- of the posterior orbitomedial cortex known to have
dromes (especially Capgras syndrome, in which the mnemonic functions. (b) Split-brain patients con-
patient claims that people he or she knows well have fabulate about information perceived by the right
been replaced by similar looking impostors). Such hemisphere. The right hemisphere, or lack of com-
patients do not perceive people close to them cor- munication with the right hemisphere, shows up in
rectly and produce confabulations about impostors several of the perceptual confabulations. This may
as an attempt to explain this. These syndromes also indicate that confabulations are created by the left
show a pattern of posterior cortical damage, often hemisphere in the absence of disconfirming informa-
to the temporoparietal cortex, coupled with prefron- tion possessed by the right hemisphere.
tal damage, typically in the right hemisphere.
William Hirstein
Confabulations About Intentions and Actions
See also Amnesia; Anosognosia; Capgras Delusion;
Patients who have undergone a split-brain opera- Delusions; Fregoli Delusion
tion may confabulate about actions performed by
the right hemisphere. In a typical experiment, com-
Further Readings
mands are sent to the right hemisphere only, while
the left hemisphere, unaware of this, confabulates a Berlyne, N. (1972). Confabulation. British Journal of
reason for why the left hand (controlled by the right Psychiatry, 120, 3139.
186 Conscious Thinking
DeLuca, J., & Diamond, B. J. (1995). Aneurysm of the on the problem of how it is that presumably purely
anterior communicating artery: A review of the physical beings such as ourselves can be in states (or
neuroanatomical and neuropsychological sequelae. have brains that are in states) that are about things
Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, or have intentionality and that can bear logical
17, 100121. relations to each other such that sequences of them
Feinberg, T. E. (2001). Altered egos: How the brain creates may be rational or irrational.
the self. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. To say that a mental state is intentional is to say
Hirstein, W. (2005). Brain fiction: Self-deception and the that it has a contentsomething analogous to the
riddle of confabulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
meaning of a sentence. The term intentional is used
Hirstein, W. (Ed.). (2009). Confabulation: Views from
here in application only to so-called propositional
neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy.
attitudes (beliefs, desires, hopes, etc.) and the con-
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
stituent thoughts that render them intentional (what
Johnson, M. K., & Raye, C. L. (1998). False memories and
confabulation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2,
they are about), skirting the issue of the intention-
137145.
ality of perceptual and other sensory experiences.
Kopelman, M. D. (1987). Two types of confabulation. The sentence Blood is red, for example, has (in
Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 50, English) a particular meaning and in virtue of this
14821487. meaning (derived from the meanings of its constitu-
Langdon, R., & Coltheart, M. (2000). The cognitive ent terms) is about blood and says that it is red. The
neuropsychology of delusions. Mind and Language, 15, sentence Mud is brown, in contrast, has a differ-
184218. ent meaning and is about something else and says
Schnider, A. (2009). The confabulating mind: How the something different about it. Further, these sentences
brain creates reality. Oxford, UK: Oxford University have, in virtue of their meanings, truth conditions
Press. that is, they specify the worldly conditions under
Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. which they are true (or false)as well as logical
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. propertiesrelations of consistency, inconsistency,
and entailment to other sentences. The sentence
Blood is red is true if and only if blood is red;
CONSCIOUS THINKING otherwise, it is false; Blood is red and Mud is
brown are logically consistent with each other
This entry addresses the question of the nature of (they can both be true); Blood is red and Blood
thought and its relation to consciousness. Current is brown are not consistent with each other (they
philosophical orthodoxy holds that thought and cant both be true); and Blood is red and mud is
consciousness are only contingently related. Though brown logically entails Mud is brown. Exactly
thoughts may be conscious, it is not in their nature analogous things may be said about the thoughts
to be such. The problem of thought and the problem that blood is red and that mud is brown. Indeed, it
of consciousnessfor most philosophers, how they is a traditional assumption in analytic philosophy of
fit into a naturalistic worldvieware thus wholly language that the meanings of sentences derive from
distinct. Hence, the present intractability of the lat- (or are) the contents of the thoughts they are (by
ter problem does not constitute an in-principle bar- convention) used to express. Thus, thoughts have
rier to a scientific solution to the former. Reasons contents, which determine their truth conditions
are reviewed here for thinking that, on the contrary, and logical relations to each other. (Jerry Fodor has
thought and consciousness are inextricably linked championed the view that we think in a language
and, thus, that the prospects for naturalistic expla- of thought, a system of symbolic representations
nation of thought are not as good as some have with sentence-like structures.)
thought. Naturalism
Philosophical theories of intentionality and ratio-
Intentionality and Rationality
nality have typically been committed to naturalism
Late 20th-century theories of thought and think- (the view that these phenomena can be explained
ing in the analytic philosophical tradition focused in terms consistent with the natural sciencesin
Conscious Thinking 187
particular, neurophysiology, biology, and ultimately, computational (at least in principle) to virtually
physics) and have typically sidestepped the question every mental operation.
of consciousness. Attempts to explain the propo-
sitional attitudes (belief, hope, desire, fear), their Intentionality
contents (what they are beliefs in, hopes or desires The problem of intentionalitythe problem of
for, fears of), as well as the logical relations among how it could be that a physical object could be in
them, have generally not taken account of the fact states that are about thingsis also widely believed
that some of them are conscious. The reason for to have been (as far as philosophers are concerned)
this is twofold. On the one hand, since theres very essentially solved by an approach introduced into
good evidence that there are unconscious thoughts the philosophical literature by Fred Dretske. Dretske
and thought processes, it would seem that what showed how a merely material object could be
makes a mental state a thought has little, or even in states that carry information about the existence
nothing, to do with what makes it conscious. On the or condition of other things and argued that the
other hand, this is a lucky break, since no one has property of carrying information is a kind of proto-
the slightest idea what consciousness is or how to intentionality. The rings of a tree, for instance, repre-
provide an explanation of how it could arise from sent the trees age; the presence of smoke indicates the
brain activity. If intentionality and consciousness can presence of some sort of combustion; the occurrence
vary independently of one another, the latter may of a certain sort of spots on the skin means measles.
safely be ignored when theorizing about the former. These relations, which hold in virtue of lawful rela-
Whatever explanation there may be for conscious- tions of cause and effect between the phenomena,
ness generally may simply be combined with what- are sufficiently like the aboutness of intentionality
ever theories of intentionality and rationality turn (witness the language we use to describe them) to
out to be the right ones in order to explain conscious suggest that they could be the basic materials from
thought and thinking. which genuinely intentional systems such as our-
In addition, there has been widespread optimism selves might be constructed (by, e.g., evolution). The
about the feasibility of naturalistic explanations of basic ingredients of intentionality are ubiquitous in
rationality and intentionality. the natural world.
Of course, trees, clouds of smoke, and skin
Rationality
dont actually think; so theres a good deal more
The conception of the mind as a kind of com- work to be done to explain how these basic ingre-
puter, and of thinking as a kind of rule-governed dients are exploited to produce genuine minds.
symbol manipulation, gained new life in philosophy Characteristically, philosophers disagree, vigor-
through the work of Hilary Putnam, who hypoth- ously, about howand whetherthis is to be done.
esized that the mind is a kind of Turing machine. Quite different theories based on Dretskes basic
Alan Turing showed how a merely material device insight have been proposed by, among others, Ruth
and one of no particularly special or interesting Millikan, Daniel Dennett, Fodor, and Dretske him-
physical typecould engage in characteristically self. The central problem has been to distinguish
intellectual operations such as addition, subtrac- intentional systems such as ourselves, which are
tion, multiplication, and division. By simply read- capable of states that misrepresent the world, from
ing, writing, and replacing symbols, such a machine purely informational systems, which cannot. Since
could convert a representation of any mathematical an effect cannot occur uncaused and is, necessarily,
problem into a representation of its solution. (The caused by whatever caused it, it is not possible for it
construal of thinking as symbol manipulation was to carry misinformation about its cause. To do so, it
also endorsed by Thomas Hobbes.) A thing need would have to be caused by something that did not
not have an immaterial soul in order to have a cause it.
mind. Turing himself argued that a computational These conceptual breakthroughs have been
device that was conversationally indistinguishable a source of excitement and genuine hope that the
from a human being would thereby literally deserve longstanding mystery of what our minds (our cogni-
the honorific thinker. Contemporary cognitive tive minds, at least) are and how it is that we have
science has explicitly extended the realm of the them might be solved within the bounds of natural
188 Conscious Thinking
science. Our phenomenal mindsour conscious chocolate distinguishes it from the taste of garlic.
experiences, with their qualitative charactersmay What makes a conscious mental state a thought
remain a mystery (but see below); yet given that the is its having a distinctive phenomenology of the
cognitive and the conscious are metaphysically dis- cognitive sort.
tinct, we may nonetheless hope for a scientific expla-
nation of a significant portion of our mental lives. Unconscious Thoughts
Given the widely shared (but not inevitable) intu-
Consciousness
ition that in order for a state to have phenomenality
There are those, however, who deny that the prob- (i.e., to be a phenomenal state) it must be conscious,
lem of cognition (intentionality and rationality) and the view that there is an essential phenomenology
the problem of consciousness (qualitative experi- to thinking seems to have the problematic conse-
ence) can be segregated in this way. They persist in quence that there can be no unconscious thoughts
the Cartesian intuition that, somehow, there cannot or thinking. Given what we have learned from
be thoughtor cannot really be thoughtor think- Sigmund Freud and from contemporary cognitive
ing in the absence of consciousness. (Ren Descartes science about the existence and, perhaps, primacy
himself held that consciousness and mentality are of unconscious mentation, however, it seems intel-
coextensive; that is, all and only conscious states and lectually recidivist (at least) to advocate a return to
processes are mental.) John Searle, with his connec- a Cartesian view of the mind. Searle and Strawson
tion principle is probably the best known of these, have attempted to tackle this problemSearle with
though there are others, such as Galen Strawson the view that unconscious intentional states are, nec-
and Charles Siewert. For such philosophers, there is essarily, potentially conscious, and Strawson with
something about what makes a state conscious thats the view that though a particular state need not be
essential to making it intentional. conscious in order to be intentional, an unconscious
state can only be intentional if its a state of a creature
Phenomenology of Thinking capable of being in conscious states. Neither of these
views seems completely satisfactory. (What is the
One way of substantiating the Cartesian intuition is
property that unconscious states have that can ren-
to provide reasons for thinking that there is a phe-
der them intentional? Why should the intentionality
nomenology of conscious thinking, which is essen-
of an unconscious state depend on the consciousness
tial to its identity as thinking. To say that a state or
of some other state?) Though there are other ways
process has a phenomenology is to say that it has
one might try to face down the problem. For exam-
features in virtue of which there is something its
ple, one might simply bite the bullet and deny that
like (in Thomas Nagels phrase) to be in it or to
in general consciousness is necessary for phenom-
undergo it. For example, the experience of being in
enality. This would of course break the connection
pain has a distinctive sort of qualitative character
between thought and consciousness, but not between
(phenomenology), which is quite different from that
thought and something very close to consciousness
of the experience of, say, hearing thunder or tasting
namely, phenomenality, a necessary condition for it.
chocolate: What its like to be in pain is quite dif-
(One might also deny that states conscious in them-
ferent from what its like to hear thunder or to taste
selves need be conscious for their possessor.)
chocolate. The thesis that theres an essential phe-
nomenology of conscious thought holds that there
Representationalism
is something its like to consciously think a thought,
which is distinctively cognitive (i.e., not visual or One popular approach to the phenomenology of
auditory or olfactory or gustatory or . . . ) and which conscious statesrepresentationalism (or intention-
individuates the thought (makes it the thought that alism)might be thought to be of some use here.
it is and distinguishes it from other thoughts), in a Representationalists such as Dretske, Michael Tye,
way analogous to that in which, say, the distinctive and William Lycan hold that the phenomenal con-
auditory phenomenology of the sound of thunder tents of conscious mental states are a species of
distinguishes it from the sound of sleigh bells, or the intentional contents. On this view, the qualitative
distinctive gustatory phenomenology of the taste of features associated with a conscious perceptual state,
Consciousness, Comparative Perspectives 189
those one would mention in characterizing what it is See also Access Consciousness; Causal Theories of
like to be in that state, are the qualitative features of Intentionality; Consciousness and Embodiment;
the thing(s) perceived. They come to be associated Consciousness and the Unconscious; Disjunctive
with the perceptual state in virtue of the latters rep- Theory of Perception; Representational Theory of
Mind; Thinking
resenting them, in a manner not essentially different
from that in which intentional states such as thoughts
and beliefs represent their contents. The styles of rep- Further Readings
resentation may be different (e.g., perceptual repre- Dretske, F. (1995). Naturalizing the mind. Cambridge, MA:
sentations may have an image-like structure, while MIT Press.
cognitive representations may have a sentence-like Fodor, J. A. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA:
structure) but the features that determine which MIT Press.
properties are represented are of the same basic Lycan, W. G. (2006). Consciousness and experience.
type in both cases, namely, tracking or informa- Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
tional relations, of essentially the type suggested by Putnam, H. (2002). The nature of mental states.
Dretske. The qualitative feature one might mention In D. J. Chalmers (Ed.), Philosophy of mind: Classical
in characterizing ones visual experience of the sky at and contemporary readings (pp. 7379). New York,
noon on a clear day, for examplethe bluenessis NY: Oxford University Press.
a property of the sky, not of ones experience. (To Searle, J. R. (1992). The rediscovery of the mind.
maintain otherwise is to commit what U.T. Place Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
termed the phenomenological fallacy.) The only Siewert, C. (1998). The significance of consciousness.
qualitative properties there are, are the qualitative Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
properties of extramental objects; so there is no spe- Strawson, G. (1994). Mental reality. Cambridge, MA:
cial problem of explaining how a mental state could MIT Press.
have conscious qualitative character. Turing, A. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence.
Moreover, the explanation of the qualitative Mind, 59, 433460.
character of experiences on this type of theory is Tye, M. (2000). Consciousness, color, and content.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
independent of the explanation of consciousness.
Typically, consciousness is explained in terms of
first-order representationa creature is conscious of
a thing x if and only if it is in a state that represents
xwhere this first-order representational state need
CONSCIOUSNESS, COMPARATIVE
not itself be conscious (in the sense that its possessor PERSPECTIVES
need not be aware of being in it; such awareness
requires a higher order representation). Thus, on the Do animals have mental experiences or are they
representationalist account qualitative character and closer to robotic zombies? Most animal behaviorists
consciousness are metaphysically independent. these days, at least those steeped in understanding
Representationalist approaches face two seri- evolutionary continuities in brain and mind orga-
ous problems, however, one internal and the other nization, are happy with the provisional conclusion
in application to the present problem. The internal that many other animals, surely mammals and birds,
problem is the explanation of the qualitative char- perhaps even some invertebrates (octopuses), are
acter of dreams and hallucinationsexperiences in conscious beings. However, few would be able to
the absence of instantiated properties to represent. outline how one could credibly (scientifically) study
Though this problem has been addressed (by, among such aspects of animal minds. The perennial prob-
others, Dretske, Tye, and Lycan), its not clear that lem, as noted by ethologist Niko Tinbergen (1951)
its been solved. In the context of phenomenally con- in his seminal treatise, The Study of Instinct, was
stituted thought content, the other problem is the simply Because subjective phenomena cannot be
identification of objective qualitative properties to observed objectively in animals, it is idle to claim
serve as cognitive phenomenal character. or deny their existence (p. 4). With the advent of
modern neuroscience, that statement no longer has
David Pitt the ring of truth that it used to, even though a series
190 Consciousness, Comparative Perspectives
of famous animal behaviorists still tend to subscribe be achieved without illuminating the foundations of
to Tinbergens dictum. subjective experience in the animal kingdom.
Of course, the study of experience in animals
had to wait for the maturation of neuroscience in
Ancestral Sources of MindFrom
the psychological and animal behavioral sciences,
Experience to Awareness of Experience
which started in earnest in the early 1970s. Before
then, compelling experimental strategies could not There are good reasons to suspect that affective
be generated to study the nature of animal experi- consciousness was among the earliest experiences
ences at a scientific-causal level, even though there in BrainMind evolutiona term that will be used
had been abundant treatises considering such issues here interchangeably with MindBrain to highlight
at conceptual-inferential levels (not considered a thoroughly monistic view of mental life. Monism
here). We can now be confident that all mammals acknowledges that mental (mind) experience is
and birds are beings that have internal experiences, bound to brain functionsthey are two aspects of
especially relevant for engendering the qualities the same physical processesas opposed to dual-
of rewards and punishments they encounter ism, which sees the brain and mind as thoroughly
in the world (i.e., affective consciousness, which separate. Abundant evidence now indicates that raw
can be monitored by the rewarding and punishing emotional experiences arise from ancient (subcorti-
states evoked by artificial activation of brain emo- cal) brain networks, shared homologously by all
tions stimulation with direct electrical or chemical mammals and birds, that control primary-process
stimulation of the brain). The existence of their per- emotional behaviorsnamely, brain processes that
ceptual experiences (i.e., cognitive consciousness) is generate what used to be called instinctual emo-
likely but harder to understand neuroscientifically, tional behaviors by ethologists, and unconditioned
since there are no comparable evaluative measures stimuli and responses by behaviorists. This robust
and one has to infer experience simply from an fact led to dual-aspect monism research strategies,
animals capacity to discriminate stimuli. This tells ones that recognize that instinctual emotion behaviors
us little about the experience itself. Thus, this entry are evidence of affective experience. For example, a
will focus on affective consciousnessthe experi- cat that has its ears laid back and is hissing, is not just
enced feeling of emotionsrather than perceptual producing an innate behavior with no corresponding
or cognitive consciousnessthe felt experience of feeling, it is actually experiencing RAGE (we would
the world, since the neuroscientific evidence is much say anger but the use of vernacular terms has many
stronger for the former than the latter. However, problems in cross-species neuroscience). Thus, despite
Don Griffin and Bjorn Merker have made a strong Tinbergens caution, spontaneous (unlearned) emo-
and reasonable case for the conclusion that animals tional behaviors can currently be used as validated
do have subjective cognitive experiences of the proxies for emotional feelings in animals.
world. Another key point, as one takes an evolution-
Why is a resolution of the opening question so ary perspective to basic emotions, is that the brain
important? Perhaps most poignantly, it could modify is the only organ of the body where evolutionary
how we envision animals as fellow creatures, lead- passages (layers of control) remain evident at neu-
ing hopefully to more sensitive practices in animal roanatomical and functional levels. Accordingly,
research, animal husbandry, and our reverence for Jaak Panksepp reasons that levels of human con-
life. Beside such practical and philosophical issues, a sciousness may be fathomed by understanding the
scientific understanding of lower order (more pri- successive waves of brain evolution that provided
mal) core forms of consciousness in animals is cul- for the increasing complexity of animal minds. He
turally important and helps set the stage for deeper argues that many contentious and paradoxical issues
understanding of human consciousness than is cur- in behavioral and psychological sciencesoften
rently possible through research on people, where the caused by the inability to generate adequate agreed-
detailed neuroscientific work simply cannot be done. upon definitions for key conceptsdiminish as we
Thus, a scientifically satisfactory understanding of seriously envision the evolutionary layering of the
higher order consciousness (awareness) may not BrainMind: A multitiered, cross-species BrainMind
Consciousness, Comparative Perspectives 191
approach to consciousness can now envision a tri- animals have affective experiencesfrom pain to
partite gradation of MindBrain evolution. joywithout necessarily knowing that they reflect
Panksepp further posits that we can evolution- on (are aware of) these experiences. Indeed, most
arily divide consciousness (defined as simply hav- other animals may lack the noetic knowledgethe
ing internal experiences) into (a) primary-process self-awarenessthat they are conscious beings. But
core consciousness (e.g., raw brain-bodily feel- this does not make them unconscious.
ings controlled by ancient subcortical processes),
(b) secondary-process consciousness (e.g., experi-
Emotional Feelings in Animals
ences arising from universal learning mechanisms
such as Pavlovian/classical conditioning and instru- However, it must still be noted, the question of emo-
mental/operant learning, and (c) tertiary-process tional feelings in animals remains a contested issue.
experiences, which recruit higher brain mechanisms, Animal behavior specialists working in a more popu-
especially neocortex, allowing individuals to reflect, lar genre, such as Marc Bekoff and Temple Grandin,
think, and ruminate about their experiences, requir- express no doubts that animals experience and act
ing abundant working memory to retrieve and juggle on feelings. They say we can know their emotional
information for higher order reflections and explicit state by their behaviors. Most other researchers
planning of courses of action. now agree that animals have emotional behaviors
Endel Tulving, the great cognitive neuropsycholo- but hesitate to proclaim that those behaviors are
gist, envisioned human consciousness in such terms, expressions of emotional feelings. In Who Needs
with (a) anoetic consciousnessexperience without Consciousness? Marion Dawkins (2001) follows
understanding; (b) noetic consciousnessknowing Tinbergens lead when she states, However plausi-
facts about yourself and the world; and (c) autonoetic ble the assumption that other species have conscious
consciousnessbeing able to use episodic, personal experiences somewhat like ours is, that assumption
memories of life events to time travel backward and cannot be tested in the same way that we can test
forward mentally, to better understand the past and theories about behavior, hormones or brain activity
anticipate the future. These synergistic viewpoints, (p. S28). Similarly, Franz de Waal (2011) encour-
recognizing nested hierarchies in BrainMind orga- ages scientists to study emotions in ways that avoid
nization, as described by Georg Northoff and col- unanswerable questions and to view emotions as
leagues, can diminish disputes among those working mental and bodily states that potentiate behav-
at different levels of control. Both top-down and ior appropriate to environmental challenges since
bottom-up controls exist in the BrainMind. we cannot know what they feel (p. 191). All of
How many of these levels of consciousness do these scientists base their conclusions on behavior-
other animals have? We do not know. However, only evidence, but none have considered the func-
Panksepp and colleagues suggest that other animals tional characteristics of the emotional circuits of the
possess up to all three forms, depending on their level brainnamely, the rewarding and punishing net-
of evolutionary brain development. As they explain, works where primal emotional behaviors originate.
we can have more confidence about the primary- The field of neuroscience has opened up oppor-
process anoetic forms of consciousness, which may tunities to study emotions in the brains of both
be the evolutionary foundation for the rest. Certainly human and nonhuman animals, but many neuro-
many animals exhibit sophisticated learning and, scientists still do not agree on whether animals
hence, probably have secondary-process, noetic con- have feelings. Joseph LeDoux has long proposed
sciousness. Perhaps large-brained higher primates that feelings emerge from dorsolateral prefrontal
and birds (e.g., crows, ravens, parrots) even have ter- cortical working-memory processes, which because
tiary-process autonoetic experiences, but this, they of their modest size in most laboratory animals,
admit, is harder to defend scientifically. However, would presumably mean that animals have no
consider scrub jays that remember who was watch- emotional feelings. Similarly, Antonio Damasio has
ing them when they cached food, and recache their typically claimed that affective feelings are a prod-
treasures when observers are no longer about. In uct of a neocortical read-out process. In his early
any case, Panksepp and colleagues assert that many books, Damasio repeatedly stated that animals have
192 Consciousness, Comparative Perspectives
emotional behaviors but humans have emotional monetary award. However, participants reported no
feelings. More recently, he has acknowledged that conscious decision to squeeze harder. In addition,
animals do have emotional feelings though he still activity increased in brain areas associated with
concludes that they are a neocortical process. While reward processing and action preparation. Using
these conclusions may seem reasonable, they are Panksepps terminology, these brain changes may
not based on causal evidence. In addition, they do represent shifts in primal SEEKING urges. Thus,
not explain the evidence that humans and animals the participants may have experienced an energized
with no neocortex are still fully emotional beings. In feeling of wanting without being conscious of
contrast, Panksepp asserts that both raw emotional increased desire for anything specific, namely the
behaviors and feelings originate within subcortical many objects of desire. Perhaps unreflective (ano-
systems that are homologous in all mammals. Since etic) experiential changes are often hidden under
all mammals have these homologous systems, all what is called conscious awareness. If so, investi-
mammals, human and nonhuman, must also experi- gators cannot reach credible conclusions unless they
ence their emotions, at least as negatively or posi- try to evaluate for the existence of anoetic experi-
tively valenced feelings. ential shifts. As we better appreciate levels of evo-
Panksepp focuses largely on primary-process lutionary control within animalian BrainMinds, we
anoetic consciousness in animals (pure experience, can also better evaluate the levels of consciousness
especially emotional-affective experiencesgood that influence animal and human behavior.
and bad feelings), because the neurobehavioral evi- Efforts to make affectively experienced
dence is robust. By using electrical stimulation of the BrainMind changes prematurely unconscious
brain (ESB) and measuring behavioral responses, have sustained the bias in Western psychology and
Panksepp determined that there are at least seven neuroscience to envision other animals as uncon-
subcortical emotional systems: SEEKING, RAGE, scious agents in the world. But this may be because
FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY. of a focus on tertiary-process (reflective) rather than
The capitalization denotes that these terms are labels primary-process experiences. There are reliable
for specific brain networks that elaborate specific ways to analyze primary-process feelings through
emotional responses to stimuli. When given the animal brain research. The most abundant and
choice, animals turn on ESB to the positive emo- theoretically critical data has been generated with
tional systems and turn off ESB that arouses nega- localized electrical and chemical brain stimulation,
tive feelings. Similarly, they show conditioned place especially of ancient subcortical regions, which
preference or avoidance to locations where positive generate visually observable emotional patterns.
or negative arousing ESB was received. Finally, when Essentially all such types of stimuli are experienced
they receive ESB to these same brain areas, humans since they sustain reward and punishment functions
report overwhelming emotions appropriate to the within animal BrainMinds. That is the empirical
system that was stimulated. Thus, according to gold standard for affective experiences in animals
Panksepp, the evidence indicates that primary-pro- that cannot speak.
cess affective experiences arise from unconditioned Humans stimulated in these, evolutionarily
emotional response systems of the brain. homologous, brain regions, consistently report
powerful affective experiences, consistent with the
types of emotional behaviors seen in animalsfor
Cognitive Processing Without
example, a system that generates RAGE behaviors in
Consciousness?
animals generates angry feelings in humans. People
What may seem unconscious at a high cognitive- experience ownership of these feelings: They are
conceptual-verbal level (namely, our higher levels of ones own, without feeling they were provoked by
awareness) may be experienced at a deep (subcor- external agents. In short, affective anoetic conscious-
tical) affective level. For example, in their review of ness was aroused without any reasonable autonoetic
unconscious goal pursuit research, Ruud Custers rationale. These feelings, when sufficiently intense,
and Henk Aarts discuss a study in which partici- are never deemed unconscious in humans, so sim-
pants squeezed a handgrip harder after receiving a ilar experiences should not be deemed to be without
subliminal cue associating the squeeze with a larger subjectively experienced contents in animals.
Consciousness, Comparative Perspectives 193
Primary-process affective consciousness in ani- understanding the animate world, we can finally
mals is now well established empirically, but even begin to specify the brain-body functions from which
more conceptual clarity is possible: Affective states primary-process experiences arose in evolution.
positive and negative feelingscan be categorized In sum, solid scientific work, with abundant lines
into distinct varieties. The above focused primarily of convergent evidence, now affirms that many
on subjectively experienced emotional affects arising other animals are conscious beings. This research
from the unconditioned emotional behavior systems is providing guidance for systematic inquiries into
of animals. But animals also treat various external the roots of the nested-neural-hierarchies that led to
stimuli as rewards and punishmentsyielding many various higher forms of consciousnessin humans,
sensory affects (e.g., pleasant and disgusting tastes) other great apes, and perhaps cetaceans (porpoises,
that can be studied. We also experience the states of whales) and the like. Whether affective experiences
our bodies through internal receptors concentrated exist in poikilothermic/ectothermic (cold-blooded,
in very ancient regions of our brains, engendering in the vernacular) vertebrates and invertebrates must
feelings such as hunger and thirst. These feelings remain an open issue for the time being. Behavioral
inform our bodies need for food, water, and many and pharmacological data collected by investigators
other worldly resources needed for survival. Thus, such as Robert Huber and colleagues suggests that
we should distinguish among the primary-process affectively rewarding processes may exist in the ner-
emotional, sensory, and homeostatic feelings in vous systems of such vertebrates and invertebrates,
humans, as well as in other animals. but the neural and psychological homologies are
Can animals also have higher level emotional much harder to specify.
feelings? Probably. Recent behavioral research from
Jaak Panksepp
Michael Mendls group strongly suggests that ani-
mals make higher order affective value interpreta- See also Emotion and Psychopathology; Emotions and
tions based on general positive and negative affective Consciousness; Self-Consciousness
mood states. This work has yet to be linked to brain
research, but hopefully it will be, eventually giving us
Further Readings
better models for studying the interactions between
various BrainMind levels of control. Thus, it may Bekoff, M. (2007). The emotional lives of animals. Novato,
eventually provide us with solid scientific paths for CA: NewWorld Library.
data and prediction based arguments about cogni- Clayton, N. S., Bussey, J. T., & Dickinson, A. (2003).
tive forms of consciousness. Can animals recall the past and plan the future? Nature
In sum, we are beginning to understand the Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 685691.
nature of primal affective-consciousness in many Custers, R., & Aarts, H. (2010). The unconscious will:
species of mammals. This may provide a lasting How the pursuit of goals operates outside of conscious
awareness. Science, 329, 4750.
causal scientific understanding of consciousness in
Damasio, A. R. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body
humans. There appear to be many primary-process
and emotion in the making of consciousness. New York,
ways to feel good and bad about what happens to
NY: Harcourt Brace.
us in the world. In MindBrain evolution, these raw
Dawkins, M. S. (2001). Who needs consciousness? Animal
experiences may have set the stage for the evolution Welfare, 10, 1929.
of higher forms of consciousness, which deserve the de Waal, F. B. M. (2011). What is an animal emotion?
term awareness. Raw affective experiences have Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1224,
been philosophically, cognitively, and scientifically 191206.
impenetrable for a long time. However, dual-aspect Denton, D. (2006). The primordial emotions: The dawning
monism strategies (that core affective mentality of consciousness. New York, NY: Oxford University
emerged from the instinctual emotional action sys- Press.
tems of the brain) have finally cut, at least partly, Grandin, T. (2009). Animals make us human. New York,
through the Gordian knot. With solid neuroscien- NY: Houghton Mifflin.
tific evidence, scientists can welcome many other Griffin, D. R. (2001). Animal minds: Beyond cognition to
species into the circle of conscious being. Through consciousness. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
their contributions to our research endeavors and Press.
194 Consciousness and Embodiment
Huber, R., Panksepp, J. B., Nathaniel, T., Alcaro, A., & consciousness in religious terms (i.e., as the soul)
Panksepp, J. (2011). Drug-sensitive reward in crayfish: and attempted to conceptualize it in scientific terms
An invertebrate model system for the study of (e.g., as information), the bodys status as a mate-
SEEKING, reward, addiction, and withdrawal. rial object was basically taken for granted. Now, as
Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 35, 18471853. scholars have increasingly encountered problems
MacLean, P. D. (1990). The triune brain in evolution: Role with scientific conceptualizations of consciousness,
in paleocerebral functions. New York, NY: Plenum Press. some researchers are reexamining traditional mate-
Mendl, M., Burman, O. H. P., Paul, E. S. (2010). An rialist assumptions regarding the body. This reex-
integrative and functional framework for the study of
amination is often referred to as the embodiment
animal emotions and mood. Proceedings of the Royal
movement.
Society, B 277, 28952904.
Merker, B. (2007). Consciousness without a cerebral
cortex: A challenge for neuroscience and medicine. Religious Roots of Scientific Approaches to
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30, 63134. Consciousness and Embodiment
Northoff, G., Wiebking, C., Feinberg, T., & Panksepp, J.
(2011). The resting-state hypothesis of major depressive The beginning of mind-body debate that ultimately
disordersa translational subcortical-cortical gave rise to the current embodiment movement is
framework for a system disorder. Neuroscience & often traced back to the 16th-century French phi-
Biobehavioral Reviews, 35, 19291945. losopher Ren Descartes, who simultaneously
Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The believed in the reality of the material and the real-
foundations of human and animal emotions. New York, ity of the spiritual. According to Descartes, while
NY: Oxford University Press. the former was comprised of substance (i.e., matter)
Panksepp, J. (2005a). Affective consciousness: Core entailing spatial and temporal boundaries, the latter
emotional feelings in animals and humans. (i.e., mind) was infinite and did not possess spatio-
Consciousness and Cognition, 14, 3080. temporal properties. According to such a position,
Panksepp, J. (2005b). On the embodied neural nature of what is most often referred to as dualism, human
the core emotional affects. Journal of Consciousness consciousness falls on the spiritual, subjective side
Studies, 5, 158184. of the dichotomy, while the body falls on the matter,
Panksepp, J. (2011). Cross-species affective neuroscience objective side.
decoding of the primal affective experiences of humans Understanding Descartes dualism and his
and related animals. PLoS One, 6, e21236. motivations for creating it proves important to an
Tinbergen, N. (1951). The study of instinct. Oxford, UK: understanding of consciousness and embodiment,
Clarendon Press. for while his commitment to the reality of the
Velmans, M., & Schneider, S. (Eds.). (2007). The Blackwell spiritual is traceable to his religious convictions, his
companion to consciousness. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
commitment to the reality of matter stemmed from
his scientific convictions. As scholars responded to
Descartes dualism, they either rejected his account
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EMBODIMENT of the spiritual or his account of the material. For
example, Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza, a 17th-
For centuries scholars have attempted to understand century philosopher, rejected the mind-body dia-
the nature of human experience (i.e., consciousness). lectic at the root of Descartes dualism by arguing
For the past 500 years, at least in Western culture, against Descartes notion of substance and against
this issue has revolved primarily around the relation- the idea that the mind and the body were consti-
ship of consciousness to the body. This is because tuted of different types of substance. Spinoza argued
the mind-body question has actually been at that in order for something to constitute substance,
center stage of an even larger debate regarding the it (a) could not rely on anything else for its exis-
basic nature of reality. This entry examines how the tence, (b) could not be caused by anything else,
Western debate regarding consciousness and its rela- and (c) could not be reduced to anything else. And
tionship to the body emerged historically out of the the only thing he believed met all three conditions
struggle between religious and scientific approaches was everything in total. John Locke on the other
to reality. As scholars moved from conceptualizing hand, another 17th-century philosopher, attacked
Consciousness and Embodiment 195
Descartes assertion that the mind was a spiritual With the advent of the cognitive revolution fol-
phenomenon. Specifically, Locke argued the mind lowing World War II, researchers began talking
was a natural phenomenon that entailed all the spa- about internal processes once again. This was due,
tiotemporal properties of any other material object. in large part, to the emergence of computer tech-
As a result, Locke felt that the mind was best under- nology and the mathematics of information pro-
stood via the scientific method. cessing. In short, via the use of new technologies, it
The point of discussing different reactions to became possible to embed certain mathematical and
Descartes dualism is not to assess the viability of any logical processes into the functioning of computer
of the options per se but to point out that although programs. Cognitive psychologists adopted this as
very few modern scholars agree with dualism, the a metaphor for the mind and conceptualized cogni-
debate regarding consciousness and embodiment tive activity (i.e., mental functions such as percep-
continues to be framed in dualisms internal-external, tion, thought, and decision making) as information
subjective-objective framework. For example, since processing algorithms taking place inside the brain.
roughly the middle of the 19th century, the Western Thus, unlike the behaviorists who basically ignored
scholarly community has tended to side with Locke consciousness, cognitive psychology equated it with
and advocate the naturalization of consciousness. internal processing and basically retained the inter-
To naturalize consciousness means to denounce dual- nal-external, subjective-objective distinction that
ism and claim that consciousness is actually part of naturalist approaches to consciousness had inherited
material reality. This move toward naturalism was from Descartes dualism.
fueled primarily by the success of the sciences, and Over time, information processing technology
while it removes the spiritual from scholarly concep- gave rise to computer systems capable of complex
tualizations of consciousness, it still entails dualisms cognitive tasks such as playing chess and recogniz-
division between internal-external and subjective- ing faces and voices. As a result, researchers began to
objective reality. Instead of conceptualizing con- conceptualize mental processes as mental functions
sciousness as an internal, spiritual phenomenon, whose essence had more to do with causal relations
however, contemporary naturalism tends to concep- than the physical brain. That is, what was important
tualize it as an internal, mental function that takes about cognitive dynamics was the causal patterns
place in the brain and allows one to represent the (i.e., computer programs) they entailed. For example,
external world and behave within it. while mentally translating a word from one language
into another, cognitive psychologists assume certain
operations have to be run on specific contents to
Twentieth-Century Scientific Approaches to
find the correct answer. In this functionalist approach
Consciousness and Embodiment
to mind, the series of operations, as well as the con-
Twentieth-century, scientific approaches to con- tents on which they operated, were thought of as the
sciousness and embodiment emerged as either com- formal relations expressed in a mathematical equa-
mitments or challenges to the internal-external, tion or a computer program. Because researchers had
subjective-objective framework entailed in most been so successful at instantiating these patterns of
naturalist approaches to consciousness. Given the causal relations (i.e., algorithms) into media other
naturalist assertion that consciousness constituted an than neural tissue (i.e., in silicon computer chips)
internal process, research in the United States consid- scholars conceptualized the mind as being comprised
ered it a poor scientific variable because it could not of informational properties whose status as mental
be directly observed. One could see another persons operations was independent of the physical proper-
brain (if it were surgically exposed), but one could not ties of the medium in which they occurred. Within
see anothers dreams, thoughts, or perceptions. As a this internalist, informational approach to mental
result, American psychologists developed a science phenomena, the body was conceptualized as a physi-
of behavior known as behaviorism in which scien- cal system that, in the end, was considered irrelevant
tists studied the lawful relationship between external to cognition and consciousness. As a result, the mind
stimuli and observable behavior. Within behaviorism, was constituted of information, and the body, of
the body was considered part of the material world, matter. In a sense, Descartes notion of soul was
and consciousness was basically ignored. replaced by the naturalist notion of information.
196 Consciousness and Embodiment
Some philosophers made this move from com- Other embodiment theorists go even further
putationalism to embodiment theory because and equate consciousness with life. From this per-
computationalism retains the internal-external, spective, consciousness is explained in terms of the
subjective-objective divisions of Descartes dual- dynamics that distinguish living systems from non-
ism. Such divisions are a problem for theories of living systems. Many such theorists conceptualize
consciousness because they beg the question of how living systems as open systems that are able to keep
one can ever be certain ones internal processes accu- themselves far from thermodynamic equilibrium.
rately represent external reality. While Descartes What this means is that living systems sustain their
solved this issue by asserting consciousness corre- integrity by taking in, transforming, and dissipat-
sponded correctly to external reality because God ing energy and doing so in a way that leaves them
had made it so, cognitivists specifically, and natu- with energy stores available for work (i.e., energy
ralists in general, tend to claim the correspondence transformation).
between internal representations and external reality The most prominent version of this view proposes
can be solved via the scientific method. Specifically, that the distinguishing property of living systems is
correspondence theories assume that multiple obser- their ability to give rise to all the processes neces-
vations across multiple researchers in controlled sary to both sustain and replicate themselves. Such
settings will allow us to scientifically determine the systems are referred to as autopoietic. According to
intrinsic nature of external reality, independent of the autopoietic framework, consciousness, what it
observers (i.e., subjectivity). The problem faced by feels like, is a relational property that exists between
correspondence approaches to truth, as has been an autopoietic system and the processes by which it
stated by many scholars since its inception, is that sustains and replicates itself.
once one assumes that truth is measured by the
degree of correspondence between internal represen-
Naturalism, Correspondence,
tations and external reality, regardless of whether
and Embodiment
internal processes are conceptualized as spiritual
or material, one has logically denied oneself access While the theory of autopoietic systems and the
to truth. This is because it is logically impossible to notion of relational properties seem to constitute a
compare experience (i.e., representations) to nonex- naturalist approach to consciousness and embodi-
perience (i.e., nonrepresentations). That is, if con- ment that avoids the subjective-objective, internal-
sciousness is an internal representation, then all that external divide that cognitivism inherited from
consciousness can ever compare is its own represen- Descartes dualism, many contemporary philoso-
tations to its own representations. phers argue that all physicalist theories of conscious-
In the attempt to overcome problems faced by ness face the problem of epiphenomenalism. That
correspondence approaches to consciousness, is, describing consciousness in terms of relational
embodiment philosophers work to explain how and properties still does not grant it any causal efficacy,
why consciousness accompanies brain, body, and because causality resides in physical properties, not
world dynamics. For example, some embodiment relational properties. Thus, while consciousness
scholars focus on the content of consciousness (i.e., might actually exist as a relational property, it plays
the particular collection of items one is aware of at no causal role in describing reality.
any given moment, such as the taste of a scoop of ice One way to challenge epiphenomenalism is to
cream or the color of a rose) and propose antirepre- challenge autopoietic theorys distinction between
sentational accounts of such content. That is, they physical and relational properties. Scholars who
argue that the content of consciousness derives not do so propose that physiology itself is relational, in
from representations of external reality but from the that the dynamics of all living systems are necessar-
sensory-motor knowledge embodied in our neuro- ily about the contexts in which they have evolved
muscular architecture. According to these theorists, and sustained themselves. As a result, it is unneces-
the conscious experience of the color red is not a sary to divide the body into physiological proper-
neural reaction to a wavelength of energy. Rather, ties and relational properties. Instead, the body is
it is the experience of a behavioral possibility, what conceptualized as a self-sustaining embodiment of
ecological psychologists refer to as an affordance. the multiscale contexts (i.e., phylogenetic, cultural,
198 Consciousness and Embodiment
social, and developmental) in which it has sustained dualism. And instead of unifying reality by grant-
itself. From this perspective, what was previously ing primacy to the material realm and trying to find
conceptualized as external reality is now concep- ways to fit consciousness back into reality, as did
tualized as a self-organizing energy-transformation the naturalists, the idealists took consciousness to be
hierarchy. What this means is that living systems an historically emergent form of aboutness and con-
form a hierarchy of systems (i.e., plants, herbivores, ceptualized all of reality as inherently interrelated
and carnivores) that sustain themselves on avail- and, as a result, inherently about. This includes both
able energy. For plants, sunlight constitutes the consciousness and the body. As a result, the mind
available energy. For herbivores, its plants, and for did not relate to external reality via representations.
carnivores, its herbivores. As systems emerge within Rather, the truth of experience was to be gauged by
this hierarchy, their bodies are embodiments of its degree of coherencethat is, the degree to which
the constraints they must address in order to cap- experiences and statements about experience did not
ture available energy. From this perspective, a lion contradict one another.
can be conceptualized as a self-sustaining embodi- The real difference between a coherence and a
ment of the constraints that need to be addressed to correspondence approach to truth is that the latter
sustain a system on the energy entailed in a zebra. promises absolute certainty while the former does
Because such self-sustaining embodiments are neces- not. That is, correspondence asserts the scientific
sarily about the contexts they embody, aboutness method will allow us to overcome the uncertainty of
(i.e., meaning) is constitutive of what they are. And our internal representations and, in the end, describe
consciousness, our phenomenology of what it feels reality as it truly is. Coherence theory, on the other
like, is an evolved form of embodied aboutness. hand, conceptualizes all phenomena as contextu-
Conceptualizing consciousness as a form of about- ally dependent and interrelated. As a result, there
ness prevents one from dividing the body into physi- are no independent, intrinsic properties of things to
cal and phenomenal properties, and later trying to be known. There can only be statements about that
find a way to put the phenomenal properties back in which we are perpetually embedded. Thus, while
into the fully described physical system. coherence theory is compatible with science and
While the attempt to conceptualize consciousness allows for tests of the coherence of experience as
in terms of relational properties or aboutness might well as tests of the coherence of statements regarding
seem unusual, one could argue its actually repre- experience, it does so without the naturalist need for
sents an attempt to unify consciousness and body absolute certainty. While correspondence naturalism
in a way that overcomes the problems introduced is currently the dominant Western framework for
by the 19th-century turn toward naturalism and its conceptualizing reality, truth, and science, the advent
assertion that all statements regarding the constitu- of embodiment theory might provide a context for
ents of reality must be stated in terms of materiality. coherence frameworks to emerge and sustain them-
In essence, naturalism defined itself negatively as a selves. Only time will tell.
reaction to dualism: To say something is material
J. Scott Jordan
is to say it is not spiritual. Embodiment theory, on
the other hand, seems to be working toward holism: See also Explanatory Gap; Idealism; Mind-Body
the belief that all of reality constitutes a unity. From Problem; Mirror Neurons; Physicalism; Reductive
this perspective, all things are inherently interrelated. Physicalism
And it is within this dense web of interrelations that
consciousness resides. Not as a by-product of inde-
pendent physical systems, but as the natural about- Further Readings
ness of reality in general. Barsalou, L. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral
The notion of aboutness as a basic constituent and Brain Sciences, 22, 577660.
of reality was central to a holistic, philosophical Bateson, G. (1972). Steps toward an ecology of mind.
movement know as idealism, most well-known via Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
the writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Just Chomsky, M. (1959). A review of B. F. Skinners Verbal
like naturalism, idealism emerged as a response to Behavior. Language, 35, 2658.
Consciousness and the Unconscious 199
Clark, A. (2001). Mindware: An introduction to the examples of unconscious mentality in a weak, deriv-
philosophy of cognitive science. New York, NY: ative, sense. They count as mental only insofar as
Oxford University Press. they are causes or conditions of something mental.
Glenberg, A. M. (1997). What memory is for. Behavioral A much stronger sense of unconscious mind denotes
and Brain Sciences, 20, 155. a range of entitiesstates or eventswhich them-
Jordan, J. S., & Ghin, M. (2006). (Proto-) consciousness as selves meet the conditions for being mental entities
a contextually-emergent property of self-sustaining but which are not knowable in a direct first-person
systems. Mind and Matter, 4(1), 4568. way. In cognitive psychology, cases of unconscious
Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1980). Autopoiesis and
perception count as mental because they are, in
cognition: The realization of the living. Boston, MA:
some sense, mental states, not simply because they
Reidel.
are causes of mental phenomena. That is, the puta-
Oakeshott, M. (1933). Experience and its modes.
tive unconscious cognitive states are deemed to be
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Gallese, V., & Fogassi, L. (1996).
mental insofar as they have some essential or defini-
Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions.
tive feature of the mind: For example, they are about
Cognitive Brain Research, 3, 131141. objects or situations.
The weaker notion of unconscious mentality
is unproblematic: We cannot deny that there are
unconscious causes and conditions of our mental
CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE life. The stronger sense of unconscious mentality
UNCONSCIOUS is more problematic. From the 17th century to the
beginning of the 20th century most philosophers
The distinction between conscious and unconscious (Gottfried Leibniz was a notable exception) assumed
mind has long exercised philosophers and psycholo- that mentality was essentially bound up with direct
gists. This entry begins by clarifying what uncon- first-person self-knowledge. A mental state, on this
scious mind is and then examines what kinds of view, is one that is known or knowable in a direct
unconscious mental states human beings have. After first person way. While this conception of mind is
noting that some philosophers fundamentally reject consistent with the weaker notion of unconscious
the very idea of unconscious mentality, the entry mind, it renders the stronger conception of uncon-
then turns to the application of the conscious/uncon- scious mentality incoherent because, on that concep-
scious contrast in theorizing about the mind. tion, there are entities that are properly mental but
not knowable in this direct first person way. Rather
than viewing mentality in terms of self-knowledge,
What Is Unconscious Mind? mentality has come to be viewed, by philosophers
Unconscious mind is defined by way of contrast and psychologists, in causal and functional terms:
with conscious mind. But consciousness has been It is widely argued that certain kinds of distinc-
taken to mean many different things. Historically, tive causal properties of creatures or systems are
consciousness has been viewed as the special kind of taken to constitute aboutness or intentionality.
knowledge that we have of our own minds. On this On this conception of mind the stronger notion
view, each of us knows of our own minds in a direct of unconscious mentality is unproblematic, and in
first-person way. Talk of unconscious mind, by way contemporary philosophy and cognitive science it is
of contrast, is talk of aspects of mind that are not typically conscious mentality that is deemed to be
known, or knowable, in this way. Here there is an problematic.
ambiguity. Sometimes the term unconscious mind
denotes a wide range of facts about the mind that
Unconscious Mind: Psychodynamic
we cannot know via introspection: facts about the
and Cognitive Variants
causes, relations, and conditions of mind. For exam-
ple, thoughts occur to us without our knowing why. Although the contemporary causal and functional
The cause of this mental effect is unconsciousthat conception of mind renders the stronger notion of
is, unknownto the thinker. Such causes are only unconscious mentality coherent in principle, this
200 Consciousness and the Unconscious
does not, by itself, tell us whether we have any how they relate to one another and to nonmental
unconscious mental states in this stronger sense, phenomena? Second, given that there are many dif-
nor does it tell us anything about the kind of uncon- ferent psychodynamic theories of unconscious mind,
scious mental states that we have. It is important a second challenge arises: Which, if any, of these
to note that there have been many different claims competing theories is correct, and are any of them
made about unconscious mind, and some are more better than competing nonpsychodynamic models
justified than others. This entry cannot expand on of mind? Third, are particular interpretations, as
the varieties of unconscious mentality in philosophy applied to individual subjects, correct? Each of these
and psychology, but it can focus on two broad ways challenges raises further philosophical questions
of conceiving of unconscious mind and the differ- about the standards by which such claims, theories,
ences between them. and interpretations are to be judged.
First, there is the psychodynamic conception of Functional explanation is central, not just to psy-
unconscious mind, which includes both unconscious chodynamic models of mind but to cognitive sci-
facts about mind (e.g., facts about the nature and ence and cognitive psychology. This brings us on to
origin of emotional conflict) and substantive uncon- our second broad conception of unconscious mind:
scious mental states (e.g., unconscious wishes for the cognitive unconscious. As with psychodynamic
something or attitudes toward something). Whether theories, one key goal of cognitive psychology is
or not there is good evidence for this kind of uncon- to explain sets of data about human psychologi-
scious mind is something that has been debated cal dispositions and competences. But rather than
for over a century. Claims about psychodynamic viewing the mind in terms of dynamic emotion-like
unconscious mind are made by way of explaining flows of mental energy, cognitive science has its
sets of behavioral and psychological data, includ- roots in a different set of metaphors: that of cog-
ing data about irrational behavior, compulsions, nition, computation, and information processing.
dreams, psychological development, and so on. The As with the psychodynamic model, there seem to
argument is that if there are unconscious mental ele- be phenomena that resist explanation in terms of
ments, processes, and structures of the kind posited conscious mentality, where no nonmental explana-
in psychodynamic theories of mind, then we would tion is adequate, but the phenomena are explicable
expect to observe the phenomena that we seek to if we make appeal to unconscious cognitive states
explain. This kind of explanation is known, fol- and processes: examples include blindsight, implicit
lowing Robert Cummins, as functional analysis learning and consciousness, implicit memory, visual
or functional explanation. The psychodynamic masking, and subliminal perception. But the cogni-
theorist argues that for many phenomena, there is tive unconscious is quite different to the psychody-
no available explanation in terms of conscious men- namic one. Cognitive unconscious states and events
tality or in terms of nonmental phenomena, but by play a role in enabling, linking, or facilitating our
introducing unconscious symbols, representations, conscious and rational psychological life rather than
and intentional states into a functional model, being viewed as a powerful competing psychologi-
these phenomena can be explained. cal agency operative within us. Most of these differ-
Although psychodynamic models of mind are ences stem from the fact that unconscious mind only
theories of how the human mind works in general, comes into view as a projection of particular theo-
they are applied in giving interpretations of indi- ries of mind. Not only do psychodynamic theories
vidual events or patterns of behavior in a specific seek to explain different phenomena from cognitive
subjects life (a particular dream or an emotional ones, but they differ with regard to their basic theo-
outburst, say). The aim is to explain this unique retical posits. The issue of what kind of unconscious
eventto give an idiographic explanationin terms mind we have thus hinges on the deeper question of
of the subjects unconscious mind, with an appeal to which theory of the mind is most defensible.
unconscious mental events and processes uniquely
molded by specific events in infancy and emotionally
The Rejection of the Unconscious?
salient events throughout life.
The psychodynamic unconscious faces a num- Some contemporary philosophersJohn Searle
ber of challenges: First, is the model of mind cor- in particularcontinue to fly the flag for the once
rect about what mental entities there are and about standard view of Ren Descartes, John Locke,
Consciousness and the Unconscious 201
Franz Brentano, and William James that the stron- made by each kind of consciousness, the contrastive
ger notion of unconscious mentality is incoherent. analysis is limited by an overly broad focus.
Searle does not simply claim that the definition of The second problem is that contrastive analysis
mind entails consciousness. His argument is more rests on the assumption that cognition is one thing,
subtle: Mentality essentially involves intentionality whereas consciousness is an additional property
(or aboutness). While we can ascribe intentionality over and above cognition. But if Searle is right, the
to all sorts of things that do not have it (we might contrastive analysis cannot take this form. There is
say that the parched lawn wants a drink) Searle no sense in which consciousness is a feature over
argues that the only realrather than derived and above cognition; consciousness is the precondi-
or as ifintentionality is to be found in conscious tion for real intentionality and cognition. This does
mental states. Philosophers and psychologists have not imply that consciousness cannot be explained,
mistakenly inferred from the fact that it is explan- just that it is a mistake to try to explain conscious-
atorily useful to talk as if there were unconscious ness by making appeal to the distinction between
mental states and events, the conclusion that there- conscious and unconscious mentality.
fore there really are unconscious mental states and The third problem is that contrastive cognitive
events. Searles critique has considerable importance theories of consciousness identify consciousness
for our final topic. through the lens of cognitive psychological theory.
But there are other ways of drawing the conscious/
unconscious contrast. In psychodynamic theory con-
Putting the Conscious/Unconscious
sciousness is not a matter of, say, certain kinds of
Contrast to Use
content being available to executive control centers.
It was noted above that consciousness is something Conscious mentality involves fundamentally differ-
that contemporary psychology seeks to explain. The ent kinds of cognitive process, operating accord-
distinction between conscious and unconscious men- ing to different principles of mental functioning.
tality is relevant to this explanatory task. Against the Consciousness is not a matter of unconscious cogni-
background assumption that consciousness is itself tive content playing a different role but a matter of
a cognitive process of some kind and that conscious radically different kinds of psychological processes.
mental states are a species of cognitive state, it seems This brief survey indicates another key contrast
reasonable to deploy a methodology of contras- between conscious and unconscious mentality.
tive analysis. In contrastive analysis the aim is to Where conscious states are familiar to all of us in a
find closely related types of cognitive statesuch as, particularly intimate and direct way throughout our
visual perceptual stateswhere one type is conscious, waking lives, unconscious mind is always a product
the other unconscious. This allows the theorist to of our epistemic and explanatory activities: What
pinpoint the distinct contribution that consciousness the unconscious mind is, and what use the con-
makes, over and above mere cognition. scious/unconscious contrast has for theorizing about
Although this contrastive methodology is ortho- mind, depends very much on which theory of mind
dox in cognitive theorizing about consciousness it is most acceptable.
faces considerable problems. First, there is the prob-
Neil C. Manson
lem that a particular kind of mental state may exhibit
more than one kind of consciousness, whereas the See also Blindsight; Conscious Thinking; Perceptual
closely similar unconscious state may lack more Consciousness and Attention; Self-Knowledge;
than one kind of consciousness. For example, visual Subliminal Perception; Unconscious Perception;
perceptual states are like something for the sub- Visual Masking
ject (they exhibit phenomenal consciousness); they
play a distinctive role in reasoning and action (they
exhibit access consciousness), and they are avail- Further Readings
able to higher order introspective awareness (self- Baars, B. J. (1988). A cognitive theory of consciousness.
consciousness). Nonconscious visual perceptual Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
states (in blindsight or subliminal perception, say) Block, N. (1995). On a confusion about a function of
lack all of these characteristics. Unless examples can consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18,
be found that allow one to pinpoint the contribution 227287.
202 Conversation and Dialogue
Cummins, R. (1983). The nature of psychological implicating both its interpersonal and familial
explanation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. risks. Utterances in conversation (whether spoken,
Freud, S. (1915). The unconscious. In J. Strachey (Ed. & typed, or produced manually using sign language)
Trans.), The standard edition of the complete are contingent on one another, such that interpreta-
psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, tion depends very much on context.
pp. 159216). London, UK: Hogarth Press. (Original Real conversation is spontaneous rather than
work published 1910) scripted in advance; it is shaped by the coordinated
Kihlstrom, J. F. (1987). The cognitive unconscious. Science, behavior of speakers and addressees. For these
237, 14451452.
reasons, it differs considerably from edited texts.
Manson, N. C. (2000). A tumbling-ground for whimsies?
Utterances unfold over time; they are both planned
The history and contemporary role of the conscious/
and interpreted incrementally. Consider this excerpt
unconscious contrast. In T. Crane & S. Patterson (Eds.),
from a telephone conversation between two British
The history of the mind-body problem (pp. 148168).
London, UK: Routledge.
acquaintances (adapted from Svartvik and Quirks
Searle, J. (1992). The rediscovery of the mind. Cambridge,
London-Lund corpus):
MA: MIT Press. Brad: Thanks for ringing
Amanda: rightbye
Brad: bye bye <pause> see you next week
CONVERSATION AND DIALOGUE Amanda: see you
Brad: see you soon
Amanda: m
Conversation is a joint activity in which two or (both): <laugh>
more participants use linguistic forms and nonverbal Amanda: youre hopeless
signals to communicate interactively. Dialogues are Brad: sorry <pause>
conversations between two participants (although Amanda: youre hopeless
the terms dialogue and conversation are often used Brad: well <pause> no more than you
interchangeably). Face-to-face conversation is uni- Amanda: <laughs> no more than usual either
versalengaged in by all human cultures and pro- Brad: no <pause> more <pause> no more than
viding an interactive context in which children learn you I said not usual
their native languages. Conversation may also be Amanda: oh I know <pause> I said no more than
mediated, such as when electronic technology is usual
Brad: ah <pause> Im sorry
used for speech or text. This entry takes an interdis-
Amanda: have you got a new job yet
ciplinary approach to defining conversation and its <etc.>
key characteristics.
A conversation is not simply a sequence of mes- Compared to Juliet and Romeos dialogue, this
sages expressed as speaking turns, produced by excerpt seems rather disfluent, but it is actually the
speakers and received and decoded by addressees. artifact of an orderly coordination process.
Conversations are structured into adjacency pairs, Conversations do not begin and end abruptly but
with first and second parts produced by different with opening and closing routines with which par-
speakers as in this example: ticipants establish that they are willing to begin
Juliet: Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague? interacting or are ready to say good-bye. At first, it
Romeo: Neither, fair maid, if either thee dislike. seems as if Brad is winding down the conversation
by initiating a preclosing routine with thanks for
Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2 ringing. This is followed by Amandas too-abrupt
By itself, Juliets utterance does not yet count as a bye. Apparently Brad recognizes that Amanda is
question; she cannot be sure that the man lurking not serious about hanging up, so he stays on the
beneath her balcony has heard and understood line even after responding with bye-bye. They
her until she has the evidence from his response. proceed to draw things out over the next few
And Romeos answer ends up transforming what turns, culminating in joint laughter that displays
might have been left to stand as a yes/no question mutual awareness of this joint pretense. Amandas
to something highly relevant to their situation, attempt to chide Brad (youre hopeless) fails,
Conversation and Dialogue 203
apparently because Brad doesnt hear her (or per- observes their task-related actions as evidence of
haps cant believe what he is hearing). This leads to what is being referred to. Consider these excerpts
a repair sequence, during which Brad requests from a referential communication experiment in
repetition and Amanda complies. Next, Brad (who which participants A and B can hear but not see each
by now may have figured out that he is being other. The task requires them to match duplicates of
teased) chides her back with no more than you, 12 abstract geometric objects; they do this for the
and Amanda attempts further wordplay (no more first time in Trial 1 and then match the same objects
than usual . . .). But Brad interprets this as her again in Trials 2 and 3 (with many other objects dis-
mishearing him. He attempts a hesitant (and cussed between these excerpted trials).
unnecessary) repair, to which Amanda disclaims,
Oh I know and then recaps her failed pun. Brad Trial 1:
apologizes awkwardly (after an ah displaying
his belated recognition of her little joke). Then the A: Ah boy this one ah boy alright it looks kinda
intrepid Amanda starts up the conversation again. like, on the right top theres a square that looks
Although only the participants know what they diagonal
are thinking moment by moment, even an over- B: uh huh
hearer can recognize from this transcript that flirt- A: and you have sort of another like rectangle shape,
ing is going on. the . . . like a triangle, angled, and on the bottom its
ah I dont know what that is, glass shaped
B: alright I think I got it
Empirical Studies of Conversation A: its almost like a person kind of in a weird way
B: yeah like like a monk praying or something
Conversation Analysis A: right yeah good great
This step-by-step description of how conver- B: alright I got it
sation unfolds is inspired by the sociolinguistic
approach known as conversation analysis. That Trial 2:
approach has been developed by analysts such as
Emanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson, Harvey Sacks, B: 9 is that monk praying
A: yup
Charles Goodwin, and John Heritage. Conversation
analysts provide detailed accounts of the highly
coordinated activities that ensue during naturally Trial 3:
occurring, everyday conversations (the interpre-
tation of Brad and Amandas call provided here A: number 4 is the monk
B: ok
does not begin to do justice to the richness of such
accounts). Conversation analysis has traditionally The common ground that accumulates as a conver-
resisted quantitative analysis (sometimes militantly sation unfolds (whether in a laboratory experiment
so) but has provided many valuable qualitative or an everyday conversation) enables referring to
insights about the structure and coordination of become more efficient over time.
conversation.
Entrainment in Conversation
The Experimental Tradition
In the previous example, convergence on the
A contrasting but complementary empirical monk marks that these partners believe they are
approach to conversation is the experimental tradi- talking about the same thing and are taking a simi-
tion pioneered by Herbert H. Clark and colleagues. lar perspective on it. When partners reuse the same
Typically, language use by pairs of naive subjects is forms, this is known as entrainment; another pair
recorded in a laboratory as they interact in a task discussing the same object in a different conversa-
assigned by the experimenter. Tasks often involve tion is likely to come up with quite a different per-
referential communication in which, in order to do spective. For example, 13 pairs in one experiment
the task, two people must come to believe that they entrained on 13 distinct expressions for the object
are talking about the same thing; the experimenter in Figure 1.
204 Conversation and Dialogue
a bat
said, and monitor one anothers reactions. Partners
share the responsibility for ensuring that they under-
the candle
stand each other well enough for current purposes.
the anchor They flexibly shift the initiative in the grounding
the rocket ship process, providing each other with evidence about
their own understanding or seeking such evidence
the Olympic torch
from their partner (i.e., with a clarification ques-
the Canada symbol
tion). In Clarks terminology, linguistically encoded
the symmetrical one Track 1 messages pertain to the overt purposes
shapes on top of shapes of the conversation, while metalinguistic Track 2
signals (e.g., back channels) provide evidence for
the one with all the shapes
grounding.
the bird diving straight down
the angel upside down with sleeves Human-computer interaction has sometimes
the man jumping in the air with bell bottoms on
been considered to be a kind of conversation, albeit a
constrained and task-oriented one; spoken dialogue
Figure 1 Perspectives vary across conversations systems are computational agents that can interact
with people using speech in limited domains such as
information retrieval and travel planning. In order
to minimize reasoning or speech recognition errors,
By systematically eliciting evidence such as this, such systems often seize most or all of the initiative
the experimental tradition has established that there for directing the dialogue.
is less variability within a conversation than between When people communicate electronically, be it
conversations. by telephone, e-mail, or texting, communication
media enable different Track 2 signals for achieving
Grounding in Conversation
and coordinating shared meanings. How partners
The previous example illustrates another key coordinate the grounding process differs depending
process underlying conversation: grounding. on whether they are copresent in time and space,
Conversation involves more than the exchange of as well as on other characteristics of the medium.
messages in sequences of turns; even utterances about For example, speaking is usually less effortful than
everyday objects can be misunderstood. Because typing, so spoken conversations tend to be wordier
individuals cannot read one anothers minds, they than typed conversations. Because typing to a small
seek and provide evidence from their partners in screen using the thumbs is so cumbersome, texted
order to conclude that they understand one another. messages are usually shorter than e-mail messages.
A single utterance (be it Juliets question, Amandas People on the phone cannot see one another, so
attempt at a pun, or As initial description in Trial they produce more verbal backchannels than when
1) does not by itself constitute a contribution to a speaking face-to-face. Speech is ephemeral, whereas
conversation; it must be grounded with evidence of text need not be; e-mail utterances can be eas-
how the addressee has understood it or taken it up ily reviewed, edited, and quoted. E-mail does not
before it contributes to common ground. Such evi- require senders and recipients to be copresent in time
dence can be verbal and linguistic, in the form of a and space, so in that medium conversation unfolds
relevant reply, or nonverbal or nonlinguistic, as in a over an extended timescale. E-mail often lands in
nod, a puzzled look, or an uh-huh. During face- a mailbox interleaved with other conversations or
to-face conversation, visual and nonlinguistic sig- threads, and so e-mail programs facilitate keeping
nals known as backchannels are often produced and track of conversational context by quoting material
processed simultaneously with verbal turns. This from previous messages. Through their distinctive
means that conversing is a massively parallel activ- affordances for grounding and the variable costs of
ity: Speakers and addressees simultaneously plan using them, communication media play a substan-
their own utterances, process what their partner has tial role in shaping dialogue.
Conversation and Dialogue 205
people to put greater effort into decisions, resulting of generating many alternative outcomes but also
in less bias. finds this thought generation subjectively difficult
Making people feel accountable for judgments to accomplish, he or she may instead infer that the
is another motivational debiasing technique. For known outcome is in fact more inevitable, not less
example, people have a general tendency to be (If it is so hard to generate alternative outcomes
overly optimistic, exemplified by research indicat- then the known outcome must be really inevitable).
ing that the majority of people think they are better In short, the effectiveness of this debiasing technique
than average (statistically impossible), think they may backfire. Knowledge of metacognition along
will complete tasks sooner than they actually do, with cognition is thus necessary to accurately pre-
and think that only good and not bad things will dict when cognitive debiasing techniques might be
happen to them in the future. However, increas- successful.
ing accountability may help lessen at least some of Other cognitive techniques involve education and
these biases. For example, if people expect that they training. For example, people who have learned the
will have to explain their reasoning to others, they correct rule to calculate the area of a parallelogram
are more likely to put greater effort into decisions. simply make fewer errors than those who do not.
When preparing to justify decisions to others, people Similar to mathematics, one presumption is that
seem better able to anticipate possible flaws in their other rules of judgment might likewise be taught,
own reasoning. Thus, going on record, or having to and these may help to debias decisions. For example,
justify ones logic, seems to make peoples judgments once people have learned that large samples repre-
more realistic. Motivations can be social, monetary, sent a population better than small samples this can
or otherwise. be taken into account and potentially lead to more
accurate decisions. One limitation of education and
training is that it may be difficult to get people to
Cognitive Debiasing
fully appreciate that bias is something that indeed
Cognitive techniques focus on changing the ways in affects them personally, and not just other people.
which people think about or conceptualize a prob- Educational training seems to be most effective when
lem. One of the most extensively researched cogni- decision rules are concrete and directly applicable.
tive debiasing techniques requires people to consider
the opposite of their initial impressions before mak-
Technological Debiasing
ing a final decision. In essence, the strategy entails
asking, Are there reasons why my initial judgment Technological advances, notably the widespread
may be wrong? For example, with hindsight bias dispersion of computers, have further increased the
the tendency to believe one knew it all along potential for debiasing. In fact, many decision tasks
after outcomes are knownpeople are most apt to are too complex and time consuming to compute
come up with reasons supporting known outcomes, without the assistance of technology; for example,
and thus those outcomes seem inevitable. Thinking consider the complex calculations necessary to
about the opposite can work as a debiasing inter- launch the space shuttle. Complex decisions are
vention by directing peoples attention to alternative known to be more susceptible to biases and errors.
outcomes that might not have otherwise received It thus seems logical that, at least superficially, com-
adequate consideration. This technique seems to puters can aid complex calculations and help lead to
work especially well when people can easily think of more accurate judgments. Of course, technologies
opposing alternatives. are only as good as the people who use them. The
Metacognitive experiencespeoples thoughts Challenger space shuttle disaster illustrates this. On
about their thoughtsare also critical to debiasing launch day, decision makers at NASA argued over
judgments and decisions. One primary metacogni- whether the cold temperatures would be a problem;
tion is consistent with the availability heuristic, they called up the seven prior launches with O-ring
which refers to the degree to which people experience issues and found no association between failure and
thoughts as either easy or difficult to bring to mind. temperature. However, later on when all 24 previous
For example, if a person tries to debias hindsight launches were taken into account, the expanded
bias by using the consider-the-opposite technique data revealed a 99% possibility of malfunction.
Debiasing 209
program to compare the use of language in true and DePaulo, B. M., Lindsay, J. J., Malone, B. E.,
false stories. Using this approach, Newman and col- Muhlenbruck, L., Charlton, K., & Cooper, H. (2003).
leagues were able to correctly classify liars and truth Cues to deception. Psychological Bulletin, 129,
tellers at a rate of 61% overall. 74112.
Liars word usage differed in three main ways, Ekman, P. (1985/2001). Telling lies. New York, NY:
each of which were consistent with the general Norton.
language patterns described above. First, liars used Newman, M. L., Pennebaker, J. W., Berry, D. S., &
fewer self-references (e.g., I, me, my), indicative of Richards, J. M. (2003). Lying words: Predicting
deception from linguistic styles. Personality and Social
less immediate language. Second, liars used more
Psychology Bulletin, 29, 665675.
negative emotion words (e.g., angry, sad, afraid),
OSullivan, M., & Ekman, P. (2004). The wizards of
consistent with the idea that lying is associated with
deception detection. In P. A. Granhag & L. Strmwall
negative emotion. Third, liars used fewer words
(Eds.), The detection of deception in forensic contexts
that make fine distinctions in a narrative (e.g., (pp. 269286). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
but, except, also), suggesting both shorter and less University Press.
complicated stories.
The key point to studies such as this one is that
they offer insight into the deceptive state of mind
and open the door to new approaches to lie detec-
tion. Rather than getting caught up looking for
DECISION IMPROVEMENT
individual cues, lie catchers can look for signs of TECHNOLOGIES
cognitive and emotional state. Consistent with this
idea, work by Maureen OSullivan has found that We use our minds to process information and to
the most effective lie catchers are those people most make decisions. We make choices individually and
attuned to psychological processes. OSullivan and in groups. Some decisions are personal and others
her colleagues have identified a small group of lie are organizational. Some decisions meet the intended
detection wizards who show near-perfect accu- objectives and produce desired outcomes, but many
racy. These wizards tend to be of above-average do not. We build and use decision improvement
intelligence and are highly motivated to catch liars. technologies because research shows that they ben-
Most notably, many of the wizards are judges and efit us in situations with complexity, extensive data,
psychiatristsoccupations that require an in-depth and rapid change. The term decision improvement
understanding of people and how they use words. technologies is very broad and should be interpreted
In summary, language offers a unique perspective as encompassing any use of computing technol-
on peoples thoughts, emotions, and motivations. ogy to improve individual, group, or organization
Research on linguistic cues to deception suggests that decision making.
what we say is less important than how we say it. The terms decision improvement technologies
Even when talking about the same content, liars will and computerized decision aids refer to a diverse set
tell the story in a simpler, less immediate, and more of tools based on a variety of techniques. Some tools
negative way than truth tellers. Language is just one are complex and sophisticated and hence are clas-
of many tools available for detecting deception, but sified as decision support systems (DSS). Other so-
it is a powerful one, with enormous potential. called computerized decision aids and technologies
are simple (e.g., a web page with information or a
Matthew L. Newman
web-based checklist) and hence are not DSS. A deci-
See also Emotion, Structural Approaches; Folk Psychology; sion aid provides assistance or help in reaching a
Guilt; Lie Detection; Production of Language conclusion and making a choice among alterna-
tives. In general, DSS are a subcategory of decision
improvement technologies.
Further Readings
This entry briefly discusses the need for support-
Adams, S. H. (1996, October). Statement analysis: What do ing decision makers, reviews behavioral decision
suspects words really reveal? FBI Law Enforcement theory and the history of computerized decision
Bulletin, 1220. support, and presents a broad framework for
212 Decision Improvement Technologies
classifying information technology interventions to us struggle more effectively with the challenge of
support decision making. decision making and planning in a rapidly changing,
complex, uncertain, information-rich situation that
we have had some experience with resolving. People
Need for Decision Support
need to grapple with novel, unique decision situa-
Our cognitive abilities differ. People encounter tions as best they can.
complex, multi-causal decision situations that cre-
ate decision-making challenges. Some of us quickly
Decision Support Theory
grasp the facts in a situation and respond in a sys-
tematic, intendedly rational way. We try to identify Research about decision improvement technolo-
a range of alternatives and make a choice that is gies is not based on a single, well-defined theory.
consistent with our values and relevant goals and Behavioral decision theory research has established
objectives. Some of us respond more intuitively and that cognitive biases exist. People are predisposed to
apply our past experiences to cope with the situation make choices by the way information is presented
and respond appropriately. Some decision situations and the way analyses are conducted. Debiasing or
create enormous stress for decision makers, and the unbiased presentation has been a secondary motiva-
chosen response is inappropriate or wrong, which tion for building DSS. Managers accept that some
leads to more stress. Some decision-making behavior people are biased decision makers, but that does not
is difficult to explain and understand. If the conse- mean they accept that their own decision making
quences of a decision are important, then decision may be biased in a situation where a proposed DSS
makers who are concerned about the quality of their will be used. In general, cognitive bias has been an
decisions should use any cost-effective computing issue raised more by academic researchers than by
and information technology to aid, assist, or aug- industry consultants and practitioners. If DSS build-
ment their decision process. ers are consciously attempting to expand the bound-
Some situations recur often enough that we ary of rational decision-making behavior, then they
develop solution methods to assist people in mak- must be familiar with the cognitive biases that can
ing the decision. Typically, these solution methods impact human information processing. Managers
involve using mathematical models or heuristic and technologists must explore how decision
rules. In other situations, information is provided improvement technologies can reduce significant
in a timely way to advise or inform the decision cognitive biases.
maker(s). Decision processes need to be studied Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for
and analyzed to identify the need for a technology Economics for his influential work with Amos
intervention and evaluate what technologies would Tversky on heuristics and biases. Researchers have
improve decision making. identified dozens of heuristics and biases. Systematic
Builders of decision aids and decision support biases have been found in both individual and group
systems assume their intended users are rational and judgment situations. Some biases seem easier to cor-
want to use the technologies. Rationality assumes rect using computing technologies than do others.
people use reasoning capabilities and are knowledge- People generally underestimate how much time
able and logical. Herbert Simon introduced the term is required to complete a specific task. Data can
bounded rationality to describe rational choice be collected and corrections can be made to adjust
behavior that takes into account the limitations of time estimates. Decision makers anchor on the
both knowledge and cognitive capacity. Decision initial information they receive; that influences how
improvement technologies attempt to extend the subsequent information is interpreted. Designers
bounds of human rationality. of reports can attempt to provide opportunities for
No computerized system can ensure that a decision makers to get more detailed data and view
person will act in a rational way when that is not data in various formats like tables and charts. We
the persons goal. No decision support system can tend to attribute successes to our own actions and
guarantee a rational solution to a complex problem abilities but to attribute failures to bad luck and
or guarantee that the correct facts about a situa- external factors. Correcting this bias using technol-
tion will be uncovered or that relevant knowledge ogy is very difficult. Decision makers tend to offer
will be applied to resolve problems. DSS can help causal explanations even when the evidence only
Decision Improvement Technologies 213
suggests correlation. Individuals and groups become weather forecasts to help determine the goods car-
committed to a course of action, and decision ried by fresh produce delivery vans to Lyonss
makers are often constrained by past decisions. United Kingdom shops.
Evidence indicates decision makers do not con- On November 4, 1952, for the first time, a com-
sistently apply the same decision criteria in similar puter application was used to assist in predicting the
decision situations. Decision aids can increase deci- U.S. presidential voting results. The fifth UNIVAC
sion-making consistency. Decision makers often end computer built was programmed to analyze the
their search for evidence quickly and accept the first partial results to anticipate the outcome. Early that
alternative that is feasible. Good retrieval systems evening the UNIVAC for the CBS television network
can reduce premature closure of the data gather- election coverage predicted a landslide victory for
ing process. People tend to remember more recent Dwight D. Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson. CBS
information and either ignore or forget historical producers did not believe the forecasts and dis-
information. Information technology can serve as counted the early results.
a convenient memory aid. We tend to gather facts A few years later, at the Rand Corporation, George
that support our biased conclusions but ignore other Dantzig worked on a linear programming computer
facts that might support different conclusions. Data- application for optimization problems, and Dick
driven decision support systems can create a shared, Bellman developed the associated Simplex method
single version of the truth about results and actions. of computation and dynamic programming. This
When we work in a group with others there is a research demonstrated the feasibility of using software
tendency to avoid conflict and reach a decision with to calculate results for model-based decision support.
limited critical analysis of facts and ideas. Group In the mid-1950s, the first large-scale, data-driven
support tools have been designed to use anonym- DSS was designed by Jay Forrester and George Valley,
ity to increase informed dissent and increase brain- professors at MITs Lincoln Lab. The Semi-Automatic
storming and idea evaluation. Ground Environment (SAGE) air-defense command
Herbert A. Simons classic book Administrative and control system was deployed beginning in 1958
Behavior suggests the following propositions and was fully operational in 1963. The name SAGE,
about using decision improvement technologies. a wise mentor, indicated the decision support nature
First, information stored in computers can increase of the system. Some parts of the system remained in
human rationality if it is easy to access when needed operation until 1983. SAGE was designed to coor-
for making decisions. Second, specialization of dinate radar stations and to help controllers direct
decision-making functions is largely dependent on airplanes to intercept incoming hostile aircraft.
developing adequate channels of communication to In the mid-1960s, Douglas Engelbart and col-
and from decision makers. Third, if a particular item leagues developed the first hypermedia-groupware
of knowledge is needed repeatedly in decision mak- system, called NLS (oNLine System). NLS had on-
ing, an organization can anticipate this need and screen video teleconferencing and was a forerunner
provide the individual with this knowledge prior to to group decision support systems.
the decision to extend the decision makers area of Prior to about 1965, it was very expensive to
rationality. Providing such an item of knowledge is build large-scale information systems. At this time,
particularly important when there are time limits on the IBM System 360 and other more powerful
making decisions. Information technologies can help mainframe and minicomputer systems made it more
direct the attention of decision makers. In summary, practical and cost-effective to develop management
computerized decision support increases rationality information systems (MIS) in large companies.
when it provides relevant, quality information to In 1967, Michael S. Scott Mortons dissertation
decision makers when they need it and want it. at Harvard University was a major historical turn-
ing point. In 1966, Scott Morton had studied how
computers and analytical models could help manag-
History of Computerized Decision Support
ers make a recurring key business planning decision.
Some trace the origins of computerized decision sup- He conducted an experiment in which managers
port systems to the Lyons Tea Shops business use of actually used a management decision system (MDS).
a digital computer in 1951. The computer handled He built, then implemented and tested, an interac-
the companys accounts and logistics. Software used tive, model-driven management decision system.
214 Decision Making, Neural Underpinnings
In a 1971 Sloan Management Review article, analyses and reduce decision biases. Designers can
Anthony Gorry and Scott Morton introduced the reduce inconsistent behavior or inadequate search
term decision support system. in situations where those biases will negatively
impact decision outcomes. In some group decision
Decision Support Framework situations, group technologies reduce conformity
pressures. New mobile technologies are providing
As technology evolved, new computerized decision opportunities for expanding when and how decision
support applications were developed. Currently, aids and DSS are used.
decision improvement technologies include decision Information technologies can augment and sup-
automation systems and communications-driven, port the human mind. Decision aids and DSS can
data-driven, document-driven, knowledge-driven, improve decision-making outcomes and create other
and model-driven DSS. advantageous results. Our challenge is to evaluate
Decision automation refers to computerized sys- when we want to let computers make decisions and
tems that make decisions and have some capability to when we want to keep humans actively involved in
initiate action. Typically decision automation is con- making decisions.
sidered most appropriate for well-structured, clearly
defined, routine, or programmed decision situations. Daniel J. Power
The expanded DSS framework focuses on one
Authors Note: Parts of this entry have been adapted with
major dimension, the dominant component in the
permission from http://dssresources.com.
architecture that provides functionality. Five types of
DSS have been identified: communications-driven, See also Availability Heuristic; Decision Theory,
data-driven, document-driven, knowledge-driven, Philosophical Perspectives; Dissent, Effects on Group
and model-driven. Three secondary dimensions Decisions; Group Decision Making;
are also identified: targeted users, purpose, and Representativeness Heuristic
the enabling technology. The framework helps
describe and categorize a diverse set of systems.
Further Readings
Communications-driven DSS use network and com-
munications technologies to facilitate collaboration, Decision Support Systems website: http://dssresources.com
communication, and decision making. Data-driven Gorry, G. A., & Scott Morton, M. S. (1971). A framework
DSS or business intelligence systems emphasize for information systems. Sloan Management Review,
access to and manipulation of a time-series of inter- 13(1), 5679.
nal company data and sometimes external data. Power, D. J. (2002). Decision support systems: Concepts
Document-driven DSS integrate a variety of storage and resources for managers. Westport, CT: Greenwood/
and processing technologies to provide complete Quorum.
Power, D. J. (2004). Decision support systems: Frequently
document retrieval and analysis to assist in decision
asked questions. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse.
making. Knowledge-driven DSS use knowledge tech-
Simon, H. A. (1947). Administrative behavior. New York,
nologies to suggest or recommend actions to manag-
NY: Macmillan.
ers. Finally, model-driven DSS emphasize access to
Sprague, R. H., Jr. (1980). A framework for the
and manipulation of an algebraic, financial, optimi- development of decision support systems. Management
zation, or simulation model. Some model-driven DSS Information Systems Quarterly, 4(4), 126.
use data for forecasts or prediction and are classified
as predictive analytics. In general, decision support
systems attempt to improve the ability of people to
make more timely and better quality decisions. DECISION MAKING, NEURAL
UNDERPINNINGS
Conclusion
Decision improvement technologies are still changing Our lives are fraught with decisions. Many involve
and improving. DSS can improve the presentation of very simple options, immediate outcomes, and minor
Decision Making, Neural Underpinnings 215
according to positive versus negative valence or discounts very rapidly, and a rational, executive con-
across different reward categories. trol system that wants to obtain the largest reward
and discounts very slowly. Accordingly, whether
Resolving Uncertainty someone makes an impatient or patient choice
In life, most decisions involve uncertainty. Studies of depends on the relative activation of these two sys-
how the brain deals with uncertainty have typically tems. Other research challenges the two-system
investigated riskthat is, when the probabilities of perspective by showing that activation within the
different outcomes are known or can be estimated. brains reward system tracks the subjective value of
Canonical real-world examples of risky decisions a reward, regardless of when it is presented. Recent
include foraging for food, gambling, or investing, work from both human neuroimaging and single-
and thus laboratory experiments often mimic these unit recording in primates has suggested a potential
sorts of situations. While much remains to be inves- resolution. In this new hybrid model, the value of
tigated, converging evidence supports three broad an option is determined by computations within a
conclusions. First, information about probability single brain system (i.e., the dopamine system and its
modulates neuronal responses at all levels of deci- projections in prefrontal cortex). However, regions
sion making: from perception and perceptual judg- in prefrontal cortex important for self-control
ments (e.g., in the visual system), to the evaluation along with perhaps other regionsmodulate the
of rewards (e.g., in the dopamine system), through value system based on goals, traits, and context. As
the selection of actions (e.g., in the parietal cortex). will be discussed in the following section, a similar
Second, several brain regions, including the insular sort of hybrid model has been extended to a wider
and orbitofrontal cortices, appear to carry signals range of decisions.
associated with risk. In neuroimaging studies, acti-
Integrating Decision Variables in Choice
vation in these regions tends to increase when a deci-
sion involves maximal variance in outcomes. Some Under standard economic models, people first com-
recent work suggests that parts of the insular and pute decision variables of the sort described in the
cingulate cortices may signal changes in risk, such previous section, and then combine those variables
as when a situation goes from being relatively sta- to determine the subjective value of each alterna-
ble and predictable to highly volatile. Third, to deal tive. This sort of model, often called compensatory
with uncertainty and make effective decisions, the decision making, has two important implications
brain engages regions that support executive con- for brain function. First, the brain must convert
trol processes. For example, when probabilities are disparate sorts of informationas when we decide
completely unknownin an extreme form of uncer- whether to save money, go out for a fancy dinner, or
tainty known as ambiguitythere is increased acti- buy a new cell phoneinto some sort of common
vation in the lateral prefrontal and parietal cortices. currency for comparison. Second, once each poten-
tial outcomes utility has been converted to a com-
Discounting Rewards Over Time mon currency, they must be weighed against each
Adaptive decision making often requires weigh- other by some sort of comparator mechanism. Note
ing a smaller reward now against a potential larger that neither concept, common currency, nor a com-
reward later. Most individuals exhibit temporal parator mechanism, necessarily reflects the activity
discounting, in that the value of a reward decays of a single neuron nor even of a single brain region.
as the delay until its delivery increases. Considerable Thus, understanding what decision related compu-
research has shown that temporal discounting typi- tations are implemented in the brain is as important
cally does not follow an optimal, continual decay as identifying where those computations occur.
function (i.e., an exponential curve); instead, the
Value Integration in Goal-Directed Choice
value of a reward drops off more steeply over time,
as in a hyperbolic function. One influential frame- Evidence from different methods and experimental
work posits that this hyperbolic effect results from designs now suggests that the brains ventromedial
the interaction of two brain systems: a myopic, prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) plays an important role in
reward-related system that prefers immediacy and computing value signals for a wide range of rewards.
Decision Making, Neural Underpinnings 217
Earlier lesion studies revealed that individuals with decisions, from selecting a college to deciding on
vmPFC damage exhibit abnormal decision making, a course of medical treatment. To make such deci-
even if they have no concomitant impairments in cog- sions, people rarely weigh all possible alternatives
nitive abilities (e.g., memory, language). These indi- and consequences; instead, they simplify the deci-
viduals often fail to integrate information correctly sion problem to a manageable scope by focusing on
in complex decisions, lack insight into the conse- a few attractive alternatives and their most impor-
quences of their actions, and have difficulty learning tant consequences. Understanding how the brain
from prior outcomes. Note that this constellation of deals with such complex decisions presents an ongo-
deficits often, but not always, results in objectively ing challenge. Some research indicates that cognitive
bad decisions. For example, when faced with a series control regions in the medial and lateral prefron-
of choices where risky options have higher value, on tal cortex play important roles in setting up deci-
average, than safer options, individuals with vmPFC sion problems, perhaps by modulating the striatum,
damage may do better than neurologically normal vmPFC, and other reward-related regions. As one
controls because they do not experience regret (and example, a region within the dorsomedial prefrontal
thus become risk averse) following bad outcomes. cortex shows altered activation levels and different
Recent work using single-unit recording in non- functional connectivity to other regions, depend-
human primates and neuroimaging in humans has ing on how a decision problem is represented (e.g.,
examined how vmPFC responds to different sorts of whether someone seeks to maximize gains or mini-
rewards. Strikingly, the firing rate of many vmPFC mize losses). Different people may also set up deci-
neurons increases proportionally to the relative value sion problems in very different ways. For example,
of potential rewards. If a monkey values grape juice individuals with varying levels of self-control (e.g.,
twice as much as water, then a vmPFC neuron will successful vs. failed dieters) show different contribu-
fire twice as frequently when selecting an action that tions of lateral prefrontal cortex to decision mak-
leads to a given quantity of grape juice than one lead- ing. And regions of anterior prefrontal cortex may
ing to the same quantity of water. Functional neu- support exploratory behavior, as when we sacrifice
roimaging studies provide similar evidence for the immediate gains to obtain information that improves
important role of vmPFC in valuation. Within the long-term decisions. New knowledge about frontal
past few years, numerous studies have shown that cortex function will provide important new insights
activation within posterior vmPFC tracks decision about these and other decision processes.
value, or how much someone would be willing to
pay to receive a specific outcome. Notably, this basic
conclusion replicates across a wide range of rewards: Conclusions
consumer goods (e.g., inexpensive electronics), snack Much has been learned about the neural mecha-
foods, wines, risky gambles, delayed rewards, and nisms that support decision making. Important dis-
even subjective experiences such as viewing an attrac- coveries include how dopaminergic neurons signal
tive face. Collectively, these studies indicate that reward information, how a range of brain regions
posterior vmPFC may contribute to the comparator represent aspects of risk and ambiguity, how the
mechanism in decision making. An important area ventromedial prefrontal cortex supports the integra-
of current research, accordingly, is to understand tion of value signals during goal-directed decision
how vmPFC signals are shaped by activity in other making, and how connectivity between regions may
brain regions (e.g., information about others inten- change based on individual differences and contexts.
tions carried within social cognition regions). Studies Over the coming years, new research will extend
using functional connectivity and network analyses these and other findings to a larger set of real-
will be critical for reaching this goal. world problems. Decision neuroscience will provide
increasingly important links between the phenom-
New Models for Decision Making ena studied by economists and psychologists and the
new understanding of brain function provided by
Standard compensatory models are appropriate
cognitive neuroscience.
for decisions such as daily consumer purchases.
Yet they are difficult to apply to some real-world Scott A. Huettel
218 Decision Making and Reward, Computational Perspectives
See also Decision Making and Reward, Computational in which the probability of one choice over another
Perspectives; Decision Theory, Philosophical is independent of the set of third options available.
Perspectives; Neuroeconomics Behaviorism reached the zenith of its influence in
the mid-20th century as well, using B. F. Skinners
Further Readings automated experimental techniques in an attempt
to characterize behavior in terms of its consequences
Delgado, M. R., Schotter, A., Ozbay, E. Y., Phelps, E. A.
for reinforcement. The result was a valuable body
(2008). Understanding overbidding: Using the neural
circuitry of reward to design economic auctions. Science,
of data and a set of robust behavioral regularities
321, 18491852. (such as Richard Herrnsteins matching law) that
Glimcher, P. W. (2003). Decisions, uncertainty, and the continue to constrain theories today. From a contem-
brain: The science of neuroeconomics. Cambridge, MA: porary perspective, though, most theorizing during
MIT Press. this periodespecially behaviorist theorizingwas
Montague, P. R., King-Casas, B., & Cohen, J. D. (2006). noncomputational: That is, it did not involve simu-
Imaging valuation models in human choice. Annual lating or mathematically modeling a causal process
Review of Neuroscience, 29, 417448. of reinforcement-guided behavior at any level of
Platt, M. L., & Huettel, S. A. (2008). Risky business: The physical description, either with a machine or with
neuroeconomics of decision making under uncertainty. pen-and-paper calculations. This changed when the
Nature Neuroscience, 11, 398403. postwar computer revolution encouraged researchers
Rangel, A., Camerer, C., & Montague, to regard cognition as a physical, computational pro-
P. R. (2008). A framework for studying the cess determined by the state of an organisms brain.
neurobiology of value-based decision making. Nature
Reviews Neuroscience, 9, 545556. Reinforcement Learning
Rushworth, M. F., & Behrens, T. E. (2008). Choice,
uncertainty and value in prefrontal and cingulate cortex. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been a powerful
Nature Neuroscience, 11, 389397. force in machine learning, psychology, and neuro-
Venkatraman, V., Payne, J. W., Bettman, J. R., Luce, M. F., science since the 1980s. It blends a computational
& Huettel, S. A. (2009). Separate neural mechanisms approach to decision making with the behaviorist
underlie choices and strategic preferences in risky or classical-economic assumption that agents act to
decision making. Neuron, 62, 593602. maximize, or at least improve, earnings. RL theory
developed from the theoretical foundations estab-
lished in control theory by Richard Bellman in the
DECISION MAKING AND REWARD, 1950s and 1960s, but specifically exploited the
recursive structure of equations for predicting future
COMPUTATIONAL PERSPECTIVES reward as a function of an action policy (specifying
which action to take in every state of the environ-
This entry reviews historical developments in the ment) applied to a discrete state-space representation
study of the role of incentives in decision making, of the world. (A discrete state-space is a representa-
emphasizing recent computational approaches that tion consisting of a list of all the unique states in
model decision makings physical basis. which an agent could find itself; in contrast, a con-
Making a decision means selecting an action from tinuous set, such as the set of real numbers used in
a discrete set of alternatives. The role of reward calculus, is uncountable and could never be exhaus-
in decision making has been a focus of interest in tively written down, even in an infinitely long list.)
psychology at least since the early 1900s, when Using the discrete state-space approach, Richard
Edward Thorndike proposed the law of effect to Sutton and Andrew Barto showed that unsuper-
describe how rewards shape animal behavior. Efforts vised, online learning by trial and error was an effec-
to develop mathematical descriptions of perception tive method for creating artificial agents without
and behavior after World War II, for example, led programming in all possible relevant knowledge
to signal detection theorywhich assumes reward- indeed, without the programmer even having this
maximizing behavior and uses it to characterize basic knowledge. Despite this success, RL approaches to
perceptual abilitiesand to theories of economic decision making are often hindered by their frequent
preference such as R. Duncan Luces choice axiom, reliance on a compound-serial representation of
Decision Making and Reward, Computational Perspectives 219
time: an extremely memory-intensive representation is bright or dim), an agent might initiate two response
in which a binary state variable is assigned to every processes (requiring one real-valued state variable
relevant subinterval of a time period and linked in a apiece). Each process samples the stimulus repeat-
chain (a binary state variable is a memory slot for a edly, thereby accumulating information and racing
1 or a 0, indicating whether the world is in the cor- the other process to a threshold for producing its cor-
responding environmental state). responding response. Accumulation-to-threshold can
be conceived as the tallying of votes in favor of one
hypothesis about stimulus identity over another (e.g.,
Decision Making in Continuous Time
bright vs. dim).
The study of decision making in continuous time, When the two tallies compete with each other
however, has remained a preeminent concern in psy- directlythat is, when a new vote for one hypoth-
chology, since response time (RT) data are continu- esis takes away a vote for the alternativethe dif-
ous. Psychological decision-making models account ference between tallies is a number that traces out
for RT data using a variety of real-time mechanisms. a random walk as it changes over time, much like
Many of these also assume finely discretized time a stock market price over many days of trading.
(time divided into a large number of small subin- The resulting model can implement the sequential
tervals), but unlike compound-serial models, they probability ratio test (SPRT) of statistical decision
do not require a unique representational state vari- theory, which chooses between two hypotheses by
able in memory for every discrete subinterval. For repeatedly sampling a data source. This is appeal-
example, in the case of a two-alternative, stimulus- ing since the SPRT minimizes the average number
discrimination task (e.g., determining whether a light of stimulus samples needed to achieve any given
Bright threshold
Sample path showing the evidence accumulated
in a single brightness discrimination decision
Starting point
Time
RT
So if the coin lands tails on the first toss, you win $2. Table 3 Newcombs problem
If it lands tails on the second toss, you win $4 and Predicted Predicted
so on. The game is played just once and ends when Take Both Take One
the coin lands tails. The expected value of this game
is infinite (i.e., $2 + $4 + 1/8 $8 . . .), so Take both $1,000 $1,001,000
according to decision theory, anyone should be will- Take one $0 $1,000,000
ing to pay any amount of money to play it. But it is
clearly not rational to give up everything you own to
play this game. Table 4 Prisoners dilemma
One response to this paradox is to claim that it He Confesses He Stays Silent
overlooks the diminishing marginal utility of money.
Although this response was historically important You Each get 5 years He gets 20 years,
for motivating the concept of utility, it is ultimately confess you go free
unsatisfying. The reason is that we can simply replace You stay You get 20 years, Both get 6
the dollars won with units of utility. The expected silent he goes free months
utility of playing the game is now infinite, but it is still
not rational to give up everything you own to play.
Another response is to argue that utilities are
bounded. In other words, there is a level of utility so Newcombs problem is a case where the out-
high that no additional utility is possible. But given come partially depends on the actions of someone
the insatiable appetites of humans, this assumption (or something) else. The final two problems are
seems problematic. Moreover, the claim would need more familiar cases where more than one person is
to be that a bounded utility function is a constraint on involved.
rationality, not just a feature of human psychology.
Game Theory
Newcombs Problem and
The outcomes of many of our decisions depend
Causal Decision Theory
on the decisions of others. This interaction is dra-
Perhaps the most important paradox of recent years matized by the Prisoners Dilemma (see Table 4).
is Newcombs problem (Table 3). Suppose you are Suppose you and a partner are charged with com-
faced with a transparent box that contains $1,000 mitting a crime together. Interrogated separately,
and an opaque box that contains either $1,000,000 each of you can either stay silent or confess.
or $0. You may take either both boxes or just the No matter what the other does, each agent is bet-
opaque one. The twist is that there is a predictor that ter off confessing; both confessing is the dominant
you know to have an excellent track record. If this strategy. It is also a Nash equilibrium, meaning that
predictor has predicted you will take both boxes, the neither agent has any incentive to change his action,
opaque box is empty. If it has predicted you will take given the action of the other.
only the opaque box, then that opaque box contains The philosophical significance of this result is that
the million dollars. What would you do? rational agents combine to generate a suboptimal
Traditional decision theory (called evidential deci- outcome. Each would be better if they both stayed
sion theory in this context) says that you should take silent, yet each should confess according to game
only one box, as this maximizes expected utility. But theory. Some philosophers, such as David Gauthier
this is considered counterintuitive by many, as the and Douglas Hofstadter, argue that, in fact, the
million dollars is already either there or not there at rational decision is to stay silent, but this remains a
the moment of decision. This worry has led to the minority view.
development of causal decision theory, which says If the agents face this kind of situation more than
that you should perform the action that causes the once, there is more scope for cooperation. This has
outcomes with the greatest expected utility. Thus, led to research among game theorists into the evolu-
causal decision theory endorses taking both boxes. tion of cooperation and morality.
224 Declarative/Procedural Model of Language
Social Choice Theory animals and humans, this theoretical approach gen-
erates a wide range of well-motivated, specific, and
Whereas in game theory each agent has its own deci-
testable predictions about the neurocognition of lan-
sion and payoff, in many important cases, such as
guage that one might have no reason to make based
elections, a group has to make a decision and live
on the study of language alone.
with the consequences together. The central question
This entry summarizes the two memory systems
of social choice theory is how individual preferences
and their interactions, presents the basic predictions
should be aggregated to result in a group decision.
of the model, provides an overview of the evi-
An important result in social choice theory is
dence, and finally discusses implications and future
Arrows Impossibility Result. This states that no
directions.
voting procedure other than dictatorship can satisfy
certain reasonable requirements, for example, that if
every voter prefers X over Y, then the group prefers The Two Memory Systems
X over Y. One avenue of research this has led to is
finding a voting procedure that best satisfies the con- Declarative Memory
straints we think voting procedures should satisfy. This system underlies the learning, representa-
Darren Bradley tion, and use of knowledge about facts and events,
such as the fact that Paris is the capital of France
See also Allais Paradox; Belief and Judgment; Collective or that you had ravioli for dinner last night. The
Action; Decision Making, Neural Underpinnings; system may be specialized for learning arbitrary
Dutch Book Arguments; Group Decision Making bits of information and associating them together.
Knowledge in this system is learned rapidly and is at
Further Readings least partly, though not completely, explicitthat is,
available to conscious awareness.
Arnauld, A., & Nicole, P. (1964). Logic or the art of The hippocampus and other medial temporal
thinking. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. (Original lobe structures learn and consolidate new knowl-
work published 1662)
edge, which eventually depends largely on neocorti-
Jeffrey, R. (1983). The logic of decision (2nd ed.). Chicago,
cal regions, particularly in the temporal lobes. Other
IL: University of Chicago Press.
brain structures play a role in declarative memory
Joyce, J. (1999). The foundations of causal decision theory.
as well, including a region in frontal neocortex cor-
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ramsey, F. P. (1926). Truth and probability. In D. H.
responding to Brodmanns areas (BAs) 45 and 47
Mellor (Ed.), Philosophical papers. Cambridge, UK:
(within and near classical Brocas area) that under-
Cambridge University Press. lies the selection or retrieval of declarative memories.
Resnick, M. (1987). Choices: An introduction to decision Note that for both declarative and procedural mem-
theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota ory, the DP model refers to the entire neurocogni-
Press. tive system involved in the learning, representation,
Savage, L. (1954). The foundations of statistics. New York, and processing of the relevant knowledge, not just
NY: Wiley. to those parts underlying learning and consolidating
new knowledge.
The molecular basis of declarative memory is
DECLARATIVE/PROCEDURAL beginning to be understood. Declarative memory
is affected by estrogen (higher levels improve it in
MODEL OF LANGUAGE women, men, and rodents) and is modulated by the
genes for at least two proteins, BDNF (brain derived
The basic premise of the declarative/procedural (DP) neurotrophic factor) and APOE (Apolipoprotein E).
model or theory is that language critically depends Other factors also affect it, including sex (females
on two long-term memory systems in the brain: tend to have an advantage at declarative memory
declarative and procedural memory. Perhaps most over males), sleep (memory consolidation is
importantly, because the computational, anatomi- improved by sleep), and age (declarative memory
cal, physiological, molecular, and genetic substrates improves during childhood, plateaus in adolescence
of these systems are relatively well studied in both and early adulthood, and then declines).
Declarative/Procedural Model of Language 225
memory systems they rely on seems to depend on a mental dictionary is part of declarative memory, and
variety of subject-, task-, and item-level factors. For that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural
example, individuals who are better at declarative system. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9(2),
memory (e.g., women vs. men) or worse at proce- 266276.
dural memory (e.g., those with developmental disor- Ullman, M. T., Miranda, R. A., & Travers, M. L. (2008).
ders that affect this system, such as specific language Sex differences in the neurocognition of language.
impairment or with FOXP2 mutations) appear to In J. B. Becker, K. J. Berkley, N. Geary, E. Hampson,
rely more on declarative and less on procedural J. Herman, & E. Young (Eds.), Sex on the brain: From
genes to behavior (pp. 291309). New York, NY:
memory. And consistent with the finding that
Oxford University Press.
declarative memory improves during childhood,
while procedural memory shows a different pattern,
adult second language learners appear to rely more
on declarative than procedural memory for complex DEDUCTIVE REASONING
forms, when such learners are compared to native
language speakers. Deductive reasoning is the kind of reasoning in
which, roughly, the truth of the input propositions
Future Directions (the premises) logically guarantees the truth of the
output proposition (the conclusion), provided that
However, much remains to be examined. For exam-
no mistake has been made in the reasoning. The
ple, there has been little work on the endocrine or
premises may be propositions that the reasoner
genetic predictions of the model. Additionally, the
believes or assumptions that the reasoner is explor-
models pharmacological and pedagogical ramifica-
ing. Deductive reasoning contrasts with inductive
tions may prove important for the rehabilitation of
reasoning, the kind of reasoning in which the truth
language disorders as well as for second language
of the premises need not guarantee the truth of the
learning. Future studies will provide a better under-
conclusion.
standing of the model and its implications.
For example, a reasoner who infers from the beliefs
Michael T. Ullman
1. if the room is dark, then either the light switch
See also Amnesia; Bilingual Language Processing; Gender is turned off or the bulb has burned out;
Differences in Language and Language Use; Memory,
2. the room is dark;
Neural Basis
3. the light switch is not turned off;
Deductive reasoning has been intensively studied A notable finding of this research is that subjects
in cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy. are highly prone to errors in evaluating the validity
There are many important debates concerning the of arguments. For example, a meta-analysis carried
nature of deductive reasoning. This entry surveys out by Walter Schroyens, Walter Schaeken, and Gry
three topicsthe relationship between deductive DYdewalle of 65 studies on conditional reasoning
reasoning and logic, the main psychological mod- found that while 97% of subjects correctly evaluated
els of deductive reasoning, and the epistemology of modus ponens inferences (if p, then q; p, therefore
deductive reasoning. q) as valid, only 72% correctly evaluated modus tol-
lens inferences (if p, then q; not-q, therefore not-p) as
Deductive Reasoning and Logic valid. Worse still, 63% incorrectly identified instances
Deductive reasoning should be distinguished from of the fallacy of affirming the consequent (if p, then
logic. Deductive reasoning is a psychological process. q; q, therefore p) as valid and 55% incorrectly identi-
In contrast, logic does not describe a psychological fied instances of the fallacy of denying the antecedent
process. Logic is the abstract theory of the logical (if p, then q; not-p, therefore not-q) as valid. This
consequence relation, the relation that specifies what research has also uncovered several content effects
follows from what. that influence subjects responses. For example, sub-
While logic does not provide a descriptive theory jects are more likely to mistakenly identify an invalid
of reasoning, it is widely accepted that there is a argument as valid if its conclusion is believable.
normative connection between logic and reasoning. Another important source of evidence comes
Yet it has proved difficult to precisely articulate this from the Wason selection task, a paradigm devel-
connection. On a simple proposal, reasoners ought oped by Peter Wason. In a typical experiment, sub-
to infer the logical consequences of their beliefs jects are shown four cards and told that each card
and ought not to hold logically inconsistent beliefs. has a letter on one side and a numeral on the other.
However, Gilbert Harman and others have pro- The visible sides of the cards show D, K, 3, and 7,
vided several arguments against this proposal. For respectively. Subjects are presented with the condi-
example, in some cases, when reasoners recognize tional claim: Every card that has a D on one side has
that an implausible claim follows from their beliefs, a 3 on the other side. Subjects are then asked which
they should not believe the claim but instead give cards they need to turn over to determine whether
up one of their antecedent beliefs. Harman further the conditional is true. The correct answer is the D
claims that there is no distinctive tie between logic and 7 cards, since the only way to falsify the condi-
and reasoning. This claim, however, is not widely tional is for a card to have a D on one side without
endorsed. Despite the difficulties of precisely articu- a 3 on the other. Very few subjects (typically, around
lating the connection between logic and reasoning, 10%) select these two cards.
the idea that logic provides a normative standard for Interestingly, subjects perform much better on
reasoning is widely accepted. variants of this task. In an experiment carried out
by Richard Griggs and James Cox, subjects are told
The Cognitive Psychology of to imagine that they are police officers observing
Deductive Reasoning people in a bar. They are shown four cards each rep-
resenting a person at a table, with the persons age
Sources of Evidence
on one side and the persons beverage on the other.
The psychological study of deductive reasoning The visible sides show drinking a beer, drinking
has largely focused on investigating its algorithmic a coke, 16 years of age, and 22 years of age.
underpinnings. Experimental evidence has come Subjects are presented with the rule: If a person is
from the performance of subjects, typically under- drinking beer, then the person must be over 19 years
graduate students, on specific reasoning tasks. In one of age. Subjects are then asked which cards they
experimental paradigm, subjects are presented with need to turn over to determine whether the rule is
premises and asked to indicate whether a proposed being violated. Most subjects (74%) correctly select
conclusion follows. In a related paradigm, subjects the drinking a beer and 16 years of age cards.
are presented with premises and asked to generate a Many variants of the Wason selection task have
conclusion that follows, if one exists. been investigated. Subjects do better in certain
228 Deductive Reasoning
variants than others. It is controversial how these rather than language-like representations. In an
cases should be distinguished. Apparently, minor inference, reasoners construct models that represent
changes in wording can have a significant impact. the possible states of the world compatible with the
To a first approximation, however, subjects perform premises. They then formulate a putative conclusion
better on variants involving more realistic rather that is relevant and informative. Finally, they test
than abstract contents and on variants that involve this conclusion to make sure that the models do not
permissions or obligations rather than descriptive provide a counterexample to it.
conditionals. For example, the conditional premise, if p then q,
The data concerning errors made in deductive can be exhaustively represented with the following
reasoning provide the principal way of testing psy- three models, each specifying a possible state of the
chological theories of deductive reasoning. world consistent with the premise:
Mental Logic p q
eliminates the first two models, leaving the single reasoning system. System 2 is a relatively slow, cog-
model: nitively demanding, deliberate reasoning system.
Versions of this theory differ in how the two systems
not-p not-q should be distinguished and how they interact with
This is a model of not-p and so yields the informa- one another. The cognitive mechanism for deductive
tion that not-p follows from the premises. This pro- reasoning is presumably a part of System 2.
cess is more complicated than the process for modus
ponens, thus explaining the greater difficulty of The Epistemology of Deductive Reasoning
identifying modus tollens as valid.
The mental model theory can also explain cer- A central topic in epistemology concerns the nature
tain content effects. For example, the bias in favor of justified belief (roughly, reasonable or rational
of believable conclusions is explained by the lack of belief). Competently performed deductive inferences
motivation subjects have to search for counterex- typically preserve justification. For example, if a
amples to believable claims. thinker forms a belief via a modus ponens inference
applied to justified beliefs, the resulting belief will
Alternative Views typically also be justified. This raises the question of
why competent deductive reasoning preserves justi-
While the mental rules and mental models theo- fication. This is not a skeptical worry about whether
ries have many differences, they both claim that the justification is preserved but rather an explanatory
cognitive mechanism for deductive reasoning is a question about why deductive inference has this
general-purpose reasoning mechanism central to rea- positive normative status.
soning and problem solving. There are several alter- There are several different theories of why deduc-
native views that deny this claim. One view is that tive reasoning preserves justification. On one view,
humans do not possess a general-purpose mechanism the explanation is that competent deduction is a reli-
for deductive reasoning but rather a different kind of able cognitive process. If the premises are true, the
general-purpose reasoning mechanismfor example, conclusion is guaranteed also to be true. This is a
one devoted to probabilistic or explanatory reasoning. version of reliabilism, a view developed by Alvin
A different view is that humans lack general- Goldman. Reliabilism states that a thinker is justi-
purpose reasoning mechanisms (or that such fied in holding a belief if it is the output of a cogni-
mechanisms are not central to reasoning) but instead tive process that either (a) does not depend on any
employ many special-purpose reasoning mecha- input beliefs and tends to yield truths or (b) depends
nisms. This view is often motivated by the perfor- on input beliefs and tends to yield truths when the
mance of subjects in the Wason selection task. The input beliefs are true.
idea is that the greater success of subjects in certain Reliabilism faces several problems. For instance,
variants of the task is explained by the presence of it has difficulty explaining why thinkers who are
a special-purpose reasoning mechanism. Patricia unreliable through no fault of their ownperhaps
Cheng and Keith Holyoak have argued that humans because they are being fed misleading experiences
make use of pragmatic reasoning schemas, sets of by Ren Descartes imagined evil demoncan
learned context-sensitive rules tied to particular nevertheless be justified in many of their beliefs. A
goals. For example, they argue that we possess rules second problem is that there are reliable deductive
for reasoning about permissions and obligations. inferences that do not preserve justification. For
Leda Cosmides has argued that humans possess an example, inferring the conclusion of a complicated
innate special-purpose cognitive module for detect- proof directly from its premises would not yield a
ing cheating in social exchanges. On both of these justified belief. To have a justified belief, one must
views, general-purpose reasoning mechanisms do be aware of the proof. These examples suggest that
not play an important role in cognition. reliabilism has difficulty capturing the intuitive con-
nection between having a justified belief and being a
Dual Process Theories
responsible thinker.
A common view among psychologists is that A second view is that a pattern of reasoning only
humans have two reasoning systems. System 1 is a preserves justification if the relevant thinker has
relatively fast, cognitively undemanding, automatic an appreciation of the fact that the pattern is truth
230 Delusions
conducive. Versions of this view differ on the nature Evans, J., Newstead, S., & Byrne, R. (1993). Human
of this appreciation. On one version, thinkers have reasoning. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
an empirically justified belief that the pattern pre- Harman, G. (1986). Change in view: Principles of
serves truth. On another version, thinkers instead reasoning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
have an a priori justified belief. (This belief may be Johnson-Laird, P., & Byrne, R. (1991). Deduction.
generated by an a priori faculty of intuition or ratio- Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
nal insight.) One difficulty facing this view is that Rips, L. (1994). The psychology of proof. Cambridge, MA:
young children can have justified beliefs arrived at MIT Press.
by deduction even though they are not sophisticated
enough to appreciate that their pattern of reason-
ing is truth conducive. A second difficulty is that DELUSIONS
this view is prone to regress worries. For example,
if the belief that deductive reasoning is truth condu- Delusions are easier to characterize than to define.
cive plays an inferential role, presumably the thinker A deluded individual has a belief (or beliefs) that is
also must appreciate the fact that this more complex held with a degree of certainty unwarranted by the
inference is truth conducive, thus launching a regress. evidence available to that person, that is strongly
A third view connects justification with the resistant to vigorous opposition from others, and
nature of concepts. Versions of this view have been that distresses or preoccupies the person or other-
endorsed by Paul Boghossian and Christopher wise disrupts his or her everyday functioning. While
Peacocke, among others. This view involves two some aspects of this characterization (e.g., the notion
main ideas. The first idea is that to possess certain that delusions are beliefs) have been subject to phil-
logical concepts, thinkers must employ particular osophical debate, this entry will focus on issues of
deductive rules. For example, to possess the concept classification, etiology, and treatment.
of the conditional, thinkers must employ the rule
modus ponens. The second idea is that any rule that
is constitutive of a genuine logical concept preserves Ordinary Versus Bizarre Delusions
justification. This view also faces several difficulties. Among other distinctions (e.g., the thematic sub-
The claim that possessing logical concepts requires type of delusions; the extent to which delusions are
employing particular deductive rules is contentious. circumscribed; the extent to which delusions are
Putting this worry aside, it is plausible that not every congruous with the patients mood), psychiatrists
concept has justification-preserving constitutive distinguish between bizarre delusions, concerning
rules. It is difficult to provide a principled distinction events and situations beyond the realm of possibility,
between concepts that have justification-preserving and so-called ordinary delusions, involving beliefs
constitutive rules and those that do not. Finally, that could conceivably be true but that are highly
this view does not easily generalize to explain why implausible given the evidence at hand. As an exam-
inductive reasoning can preserve justification. Since ple of the former, consider the mirrored-self misiden-
there is presumably a unified account of inferential tification delusion. Individuals with this delusion
justification, this poses a problem for the view. believe that the person they see when looking in
There are many other views of epistemic justifi- the mirror is a strangera state of affairs clearly at
cation. The correct account of the epistemology of variance with ordinary reality. An example of the
deductive reasoning is a matter of ongoing research. latter is the de Clrambault delusion, the conviction
that another persontypically someone important
Joshua Schechter
or famousis in love with the deluded individual.
See also Analogical Mapping and Reasoning; Thinking; Although such a belief may well be implausible, it is
Two-System Models of Reasoning nevertheless possibleit could be true.
The ordinary or bizarre distinction has important
implications for clinical diagnosis, as the occurrence
Further Readings of bizarre delusions is sufficient for a diagnosis of
Boghossian, P. (2003). Blind reasoning. Proceedings of the schizophrenia, while ruling out a diagnosis of delu-
Aristotelian Society, 77, 225248. sional disorder. Note in this connection that delu-
BonJour, L. (1998). In defense of pure reason. Cambridge, sions manifest in a range of both psychiatric and
UK: Cambridge University Press. neurological conditions. While they are a hallmark
Delusions 231
of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia and that contrasts with the motivational formulation
schizoaffective disorder, they are also observed in outlined above. In their account, Capgras delu-
cases of dementia, epilepsy, Parkinsons disease, sion arises when the emotional component of face
and traumatic brain injury, among other so-called recognition is disrupted. Faces that are visually
organic conditions. familiar are subsequently perceived as emotionally
unfamiliar, opening the door to delusional impos-
Theoretical Accounts tor notions. The Capgras delusion is thus conceived
not as a means of safeguarding psychic integrity but
A variety of theoretical accounts of delusions have
as the functionless consequence of a neurocogni-
been proposed. At the cognitive level a general dis-
tive defect. This explanation accords with Brendan
tinction can be made between defense explanations,
Mahers conception of delusions as basically nor-
which conceptualize delusions as purposive con-
mal responses to unusual perceptual experiences.
structions serving emotional functions and deficit
Various authors have identified candidate percep-
explanations, which view delusions as stemming
tual anomaliesunderpinned by various neuropsy-
from functionless disturbances in ordinary cognitive
chological abnormalitiespotentially associated
processes, underpinned by neuroanatomical or neu-
with a range of delusions. For example, Chris Frith
rophysiological abnormalities.
and colleagues have investigated the role of dis-
Defense Explanations rupted self-monitoring in the genesis of alien con-
trol delusions. Patients with such delusions believe
Consider the Capgras delusion. Individuals with that their actions are under the control of some
this delusion believe that a person close to them has external agency, perhaps an alien or god. Frith and
been replaced by an impostor. In an early formula- colleagues have proposed that neuropsychologi-
tion of this condition, Capgras patients were viewed cal disruption to an efference copyan internal
as beset by ambivalent feelings toward the replaced copy of a motor signal, used to predict the sensory
individualperhaps appropriate feelings of familial consequences of an actionleads to a loss of the
love in conflict with unacceptable incestuous desires. normal experience that one has authored the action
The suggestion was that in coming to believe that in question. The suggestion is that such disruptions
the object of their desire was actually a fraudulent underpin the experiences of alien control patients.
impersonator of their family member, such indi- Max Coltheart, Robyn Langdon, and colleagues
viduals had found a way of resolving the tension have incorporated the Maherian perspective into
between their incongruous feelings (sexual desire is their two-factor model of delusions. They agree
not so troubling if the desired individual is merely that an anomalous experience may generate a
impersonating a family member). delusional hypothesis but argue that a second fac-
Richard Bentall, Peter Kinderman, and col- tor is necessary for a delusional hypothesis to be
leagues are more rigorous contemporary advocates adopted and maintained. This second factor is some
of delusion-as-defense explanations. These authors kind of abnormality in the mechanisms by which
focus on persecutory delusions, which are the most belief candidates are evaluated and is most likely
common delusional subtype. An example would underpinned by damage to the right frontal region
be an individual who believes that his neighbors of the brain. Delusional individuals, on this view,
are trying to harm him by pumping poisonous gas are not rational evaluators of unusual experiences
into his house. Bentall, Kinderman, and colleagues but are deficient in both experience and reasoning.
have suggested that such delusions serve the defen- In this connection consider the proposal of Philippa
sive function of preserving overt self-esteem. Their Garety and colleagues that delusions stem from a
formulation is complex, but in essence, the idea is tendency to jump to conclusions, whereby delu-
that in attributing unpleasant events to the malicious sional individuals amass scant evidence when mak-
intent of others, persecutory deluded individuals ing probabilistic judgments and form unwarranted
evade responsibility for their misfortunes and thus conclusions on this basis. This tendency may stem
avoid activating negative beliefs about themselves. from a propensity to attach inappropriate height-
ened salience to the contents of consciousness, a
Deficit Explanations
propensity that Shitij Kapur has suggested results
Hadyn Ellis, Andy Young, and colleagues have from dysregulated dopamine transmission leading
provided a deficit explanation of Capgras delusion to the stimulus-independent release of dopamine.
232 Depth Perception
Treatment closed (pictorial cues) and those that come into play
when the viewer moves or opens the other eye.
Pharmacological treatments have a key role in the
It is hard to imagine perceiving the world without
management of delusions. The only pharmacologi-
a perception of depth. Animals move around contin-
cal property common to all known antipsychotic
ually, receiving changing images as they do. If they
drugs is dopamine D2 receptor antagonism, in
were unable to relate these images to a stable scene
which the activity of a particular dopamine receptor
they could not operate successfully in a 3D world.
is blocked or dampened. While these medications
This may explain why clinical disorders of depth
alleviate psychosis, their limitationsin particular
perception per se are so rare (as opposed to malfunc-
their side effectshave stimulated the investigation
tions of systems that contribute to depth perception,
of alternatives to pharmacotherapy. The sugges-
such as stereoscopic vision).
tion that deficient belief evaluation capabilities are
Generally, in nature, depth vision is a conse-
involved in the genesis of delusions provides a theo-
quence of moving through the world. Most animals
retical justification for treating them with cognitive
have eyes positioned on the side of their head so that
behavioral therapy, and indeed there is evidence for
they can look out for predators; some have a 360
the efficacy of such therapy.
field of view. They are able to recover depth infor-
Ryan McKay mation about the scene by moving. Binocular stere-
opsis (seeing depth with two eyes) is not necessary
See also Capgras Delusion; Confabulation; Fregoli for depth perception and acute stereoscopic vision is
Delusion; Schizophrenia almost uniquely the preserve of carnivores. It allows
them to remain perfectly still in the grass and yet
Further Readings gain the advantages of depth vision.
Bayne, T., & Fernandez, J. (Eds.). (2009). Delusions and
self-deception: Affective influences on belief formation. Pictorial Cues
New York, NY: Psychology Press.
Coltheart, M., & Davies, M. (Eds.). (2000). Pathologies of
Of course, it is possible to perceive depth and the 3D
belief. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
structure of a scene without either moving or using
Ellis, H. D., & Young, A. W. (1990). Accounting for binocular stereopsis. When people look at a photo-
delusional misidentifications. British Journal of graph, which is taken from a single vantage point,
Psychiatry, 157, 239248. they perceive depth in the scene. There are rare
Freeman, D., Bentall, R., & Garety, P. (Eds.). (2008). examples when this perception can be thoroughly
Persecutory delusions: Assessment, theory, and misleading. For example, Figure 1 shows the Ames
treatment. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. room, which appears to be a normal shaped room
Kapur, S. (2003). Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience: even when we know, from seeing the people in dif-
A framework linking biology, phenomenology, and ferent parts of the room, that this cannot be the case.
pharmacology in schizophrenia. American Journal of Assumptions about floors being perpendicular to
Psychiatry, 160, 1323. walls and windows or tiles being rectangular are so
strong that they affect our perception of depth and
size. The Ames room makes clear that we cannot
DEPTH PERCEPTION deduce the depth structure of a scene in a photo-
graph unless we make assumptions about the scene.
Remarkably often, those assumptions prove to be
Depth perception is the ability of observers to dis-
correct but occasionally they can fail.
criminate the distances of objects, particularly their
relative distances, and identify the three-dimensional
Perspective
shape of surfaces. This entry concentrates on sources
of visual information contributing to depth percep- One pictorial cue is perspective. Parallel lines in
tion and separates these into two main types: those the world project to straight lines in the image that
that apply when the viewer stands still with one eye eventually come together at a vanishing point, as
Depth Perception 233
A B Peep hole
C D
Figure 1 A failure of depth perception. (A) Photograph of an Ames room, with added single-point perspective lines.
(B) The diagram shows the true shape of the room as seen from above. Only when viewed through the peephole does
the room appear to be a normal, rectangular shape. One of the factors that fools the viewer is perspective: Many lines
in the image converge to a point as they would if they corresponded to parallel lines in the world. (C) and (D) show
two- and three-point perspective drawings, respectively.
Source: Photograph in (A) by Amy Snyder, Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu. Reprinted with permission.
shown in Figure 1, for example. This is one of the image correspond to parallel lines in the real world.
reasons that the viewer is so convinced by the Ames This is true sufficiently often for perspective to be a
room: It is highly unlikely that a set of lines in the powerful cue to depth.
image would all converge to a point unless the lines
in the world were in fact parallel (but, of course,
Other Pictorial Cues
in the Ames room they are not). Over many cen-
turies, artists have discovered how to use perspec- Other pictorial cues include aerial perspective
tive in paintings. First, they learned to paint lines (more distant objects have lower contrast and a blu-
that recede toward a single vanishing point (in the ish tinge), familiar size (the retinal size of a familiar
15th century, e.g, Masolino), then much later, they object is smaller when it is further away), inter-
painted lines that recede toward two points (in the position (near objects occlude more distant ones),
18th century, e.g., Canalettos pictures of buildings shading (a cue to local surface shape rather than
viewed from one corner), and finally, they drew distance), relative height in the image (very distant
lines that recede toward three vanishing points (in objects, if attached to the ground, are at the height
the 20th century, e.g., M. C. Eschers pictures). For of the horizon), texture gradients (a cue to surface
these perspective cues to be informative, the visual slant and shape), and so on. When artists paint a
system must assume that converging lines in the picture they use many of these cues to create an
234 Depth Perception
Multiple-View Cues
A large trompe loeil picture can be so realistic that
if the viewer shuts one eye and keeps their head still,
it can appear extremely realistic. Opening the other A
eye and moving their head breaks the illusion. Some
pavement artists can create a similar effect: Viewed
from one place, the picture is compelling, but walk
around the picture and the vivid perception of depth
disappears. This example, like the Ames room, illus- B C
trates the fact that multiple views of a scene give
much more information about the 3D structure of a Figure 2 Binocular or motion information without
scene than a single view. If the scene were real, with pictorial cues
objects at different depths, then the image would Note: (A) If you can cross your eyes till the two images
change radically as the viewer moves. Objects would are superimposed then focus on the fused image, you should
be dynamically occluded (move behind one another) see a central square in front of the background, as shown in
as the viewer moves, but this does not happen with a (B). Some people find it easier to look through the two
painting. The change in relative position of features images and gradually bring them into focus, as shown in
in the image is often described as motion parallax. (C). If the same images were shown as a movie sequence,
Binocular stereopsis is just a special case of parallax, the square would move relative to the background.
with the left and right eyes providing two samples
from the much larger set of images that the observer feature matching must occur at a scale as small as
receives as they move. the dots in the Figure 2; otherwise, it would not be
possible to identify the sharp boundary between the
Breaking Camouflage
square and its surround. It is likely, however, that
In everyday life, pictorial cues and multiple view the initial matching up is done between coarser scale
cues coexist in images, but the two can be separated. features than this, which makes the matching pro-
Motion parallax and stereopsis give rise to the per- cess much simpler. The matching process can then
ception of depth without there being any pictorial be repeated at progressively finer scales to refine the
cues present. Figure 2, for example, shows a pair of depth estimate.
images that contain no pictorial cues or, at least, any
pictorial cues that there are indicate that these are Recovering Object Shape
flat surfaces. Yet when the two images are viewed Once features have been matched, their depth
together as a stereo pair or as alternating frames in must be calculated. This can be done in more or
a movie sequence, a shape emerges, in this case a less sophisticated ways. For example, working out
square. The visual system has broken the camou- whether one object is in front of or behind another
flage that entirely obscured the object. Camouflage is easy enough, allowing the observer to detect the
in nature is not usually perfect, as it is here, but it square in Figure 2 or to thread a needle. Some tasks
can be very subtle. Stereopsis or motion parallax is a require more information than this, for example, the
crucial way of overcoming it. observer may need to know the ratio of depths of
features. This is called bas relief depth: For example,
Feature Matching
observers can recognize characters on the Parthenon
To identify depth in the images shown in Figure frieze despite the fact that the depths of the figures
2, the visual system must match up corresponding have been squashed. Finally, if the task requires the
features in the left and right eyes or across time true shape and size of the object to be known, for
in the case of the movie sequence. Ultimately, the example when reaching to pick it up, then more
Depth Perception 235
themselves. They can be defined only via a contex- not satisfy the description. This is the so-called ambi-
tual definition and not directly. guity thesis. In one of Donnellans examples Jones is
Though Russells new theory has become some- on trial, charged with Smiths murder. According to
thing of a paradigm of analytic philosophy, it has Donnellan, if we use Smiths murderer is insane
been challenged on a number of occasions. In On intending to pick out Jones, we might well say some-
Referring Peter Strawson offered reasons for treat- thing true of Jones, even if it should turn out that
ing definite descriptions as referential. His main Smith committed suicide. But if he did, then Russells
charge against Russell was that Russell incorporates theory predicts that we said something false.
aspects of what a description sentence presupposes Saul Kripke, Neale, and Peter Ludlow, among
into what it says. Intuitively, when the presupposition others, have since then offered extensive criticism of
fails, we have a misfire, not, as Russell would have Donnellans theory (and close variants). According
it, a falsehood. For example, the king of France to Kripke, the occurrence of referential uses of
is bald mistakenly presupposes that France is a definite descriptions among English speakers does
monarchy, and so an utterance of this sentence has not disprove that the Russellian analysis is correct
no truth value. As further evidence against Russell, for English. Kripkes argument relies on the notion
Strawson points out that some definite descriptions of pragmatic implication. For example, if I say
denote despite failing to be uniquely satisfied. The the dishes are dirty, I semantically assert that the
book is on the table is perfectly felicitous in many dishes are dirty but I may pragmatically implicate
contexts, but it is not true in the actual world that that I want you to do them. What is pragmatically
there is exactly one book on exactly one table. implicated by a sentence is not determined by the
sentences grammar and the conventional meaning of
Strawsons Critique the lexical items. Kripke thought that, by appealing
to pragmatics, Russellians can explain the phenom-
Many attempts have been made to save Russells
ena associated with referential uses without positing
theory from Strawsons objections. A response to
a semantic ambiguity. Donnellans ambiguity thesis
Strawsons charge that Russell confuses what is
and the pragmatically enriched Russellian account
presupposed by an uttered sentence with what is
thus accommodate the same phenomena overall,
said can be found in, for example, Stephen Neales
even if they accommodate different phenomena at the
book-length treatment of the topic. In recent years
semantic level. In addition, the pragmatically enriched
the problem of incomplete descriptions has been
Russellian account appeals to pragmatic principles
dealt with, for instance, by appealing to quantifier
we at any rate have to posit in order to accommo-
domain restriction; this strategy has been devel-
date our intuitions about various other expressions.
oped by Jason Stanley and Zoltn Szab. On their
Kripke concludes, based on this and other reasons,
account, every bottle is on the table can be true
that the pragmatically enriched Russellian account is
even though not every bottle is on the table, because
preferable to Donnellans ambiguity thesis.
bottle is thought to be associated with an implicit
Neale and Stanley, among others, have later sug-
variable whose value is determined by context. The
gested that Donnellan and his critics might both be
noun phrase together with the completed variable
right. Suppose, for example, that I say (intending to
may denote only, say, the bottles in the kitchen.
communicate a proposition about a person in my
Stanley has argued that the problem of incomplete
visual field) The guy is drunk. It is plausible to
descriptions can be resolved in the same way.
think that what I have said is equivalent to There
is a unique guy x, and x = a, and x is drunk where
Donnellans Ambiguity Thesis
a is a name of the relevant person. So the statement
Another legendary charge against Russell origi- is used both attributively, to pick out the drunk guy,
nated in Keith Donnellans Reference and Definite and referentially, to pick out a.
Descriptions. Donnellan observed that a description
may be used (a) attributively to pick out the object
Descriptions as Predicates
(if any) that uniquely satisfies the description or
(b) referentially to refer to the object the speaker has In recent years further challenges have been directed
in mind, and it may be so used even if the object does against Russells original theory. Delia Graff Fara
238 Descriptions
3. An owner of a Porsche is usually smug. 5. Every one of the students asked questions.
6. The students asked questions.
Sentence 3 can be read as saying that some owner of
a Porsche is smug most of the time, that Porsche Berit Brogaard has argued that plural definite descrip-
owners, in general, are smug most of the time, or tions are best treated as having the semantic import
that most Porsche owners are smug. On Russells of partitives of the form some of the Fs, all of the
theory, only the first reading is available. On the Fs, none of the Fs, and so on. Partitives tell us
predicate proposal, the description occurs predica- how many of the Fs individually or collectively sat-
tively, preceded by the adverbial quantifiers some- isfy the predicate. Every one of the students tells us
times, generally, or usually. So all three readings are that every one of the students satisfies the predicate
available. is an x such that x asked a question. In the case of
Descriptive Thought 239
nonpartitive plural definite descriptions, the force of Donnellan, K. (1966). Reference and definite descriptions.
the quantifier is determined by the speakers knowl- Philosophical Review, 77, 281304.
edge of the lexical nature of the predicate. In the Kripke, S. (1977). Speakers reference and semantic
envisaged context for Sentence 6 the students satisfy reference. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 2, 255276.
the plural predicate asked questions just in case Ludlow, P. (2004, Spring). Descriptions. The Stanford
some of them satisfy the singular predicate is an x encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved from http://plato.
such that x asked a question. stanford.edu/archives/spr2004/entries/descriptions
Ludlow, P., & Neale, S. (2006). Descriptions. In M. Devitt
& R. Hanley (Eds.), The Blackwell guide to the
Generic Uses philosophy of language (pp. 288313). Oxford, UK:
Blackwell.
A further criticism of Russells theory is that it can-
Neale, S. (1990). Descriptions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
not be extrapolated to account for generic uses of
Neale, S. (2005). 100 years after Russells on denoting
descriptions, as in: [Special issue]. Mind, 114.
Ostertag, G. (1998). Definite descriptions: A reader.
7. The dinosaur is extinct. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
can exist at possible worlds at which Burj connection between and Burj Khalifa. However,
Khalifa does not exist. it has proven difficult to make this idea precise, and
counterexamples to the general approach have been
Singular Thought produced (e.g., by Simon Blackburn). In contrast, if
we view thought as uniformly descriptive, we seem
Some theorists have held that, in addition to
to have a straightforward account of aboutness: A
descriptive thought, as exemplified by , there is also
thought is about x solely in virtue of its containing
a category of singular thought. According to such
descriptive information that x uniquely satisfies.
theorists, entertaining a singular thought requires
Another advantage to holding that thoughts are
acquaintance with the object or objects whose prop-
uniformly descriptive is that it offers an explanation
erties and relations determine whether or not the
of how Lois Lane can simultaneously believe and
thought is true. For example, my thought that Burj
disbelieve, of Superman (i.e., Clark Kent), that he
Khalifa is less than one year old seems essentially to
is a superhero: Lois can believe Superman to be a
involve Burj Khalifa. On certain views, it contains
superhero under one description and disbelieve this
Burj Khalifa as a constituent and, moreover, is about
under another description. The singular thought
Burj Khalifa because of this fact.
theorist would seem to be at a loss to explain this
Prima facie, this thought, , has three noteworthy
since, on her view, the thought that Superman is a
features:
superhero just is the thought that Clark Kent is a
One cannot entertain if one is unacquainted superhero. (Some singular thought theorists invoke
with Burj Khalifa. object-dependent, nondescriptive thought compo-
is true at a possible world w just in case Burj nents to explain Loiss cognitive situation. But the
Khalifa exists at w and is less than one year old question we considered above arises here as well:
at w. One might still wonder what makes it the case that
The identity conditions for necessarily involve one of these object-dependent thought components
Burj Khalifa cannot exist at a possible world comes to contain Superman, as opposed to some
at which Burj Khalifa does not exist. other entity or no entity at all.)
In light of these considerations, it has been sug-
Descriptive thoughts are object independent; singu- gested that the appearance of object-dependency in
lar thoughts, object dependent. such cases is illusory and that all thought is descrip-
tive; lets take a closer look at this view.
Doubts About Singular Thoughts
Descriptivist Treatments
No one doubts that there are object-independent of Singular Thought
thoughts, but the very idea that object-dependent
Ambitious Descriptivism
thoughts exist has been controversial. If, as many
have supposed, entertaining a thought involving the Lets use the term descriptivism to designate
concept water requires acquaintance with water, then the view that all thought is in fact descriptivethat,
it seems that one can know that water exists merely appearances to the contrary, there are no thoughts
on the basis of the fact that one has entertained such possessing the characteristics ascribed to above.
thoughts. But it seems doubtful that factual knowl- On this view, the thought that Burj Khalifa is less
edge of this sort can be gained simply by reflecting than one year old is in fact a descriptive thought of
on ones concepts. Another major concern has been the form: The F is less than one year old. On the
whether the singular-thought theorist can adequately most ambitious version of this approach, the descrip-
explain how a thought such as is about Burj tion the F cannot make reference to individuals.
Khalifa, as opposed to some other entity or no entity Otherwise, we merely trade one object-dependent
at all. To claim that is about Burj Khalifa simply (or de re) thought for another; this would hardly
in virtue of the fact that it contains Burj Khalifa as a mark a genuine advance over the original singular
constituent merely raises the question, how it comes thought theory. (For example, claiming that is in
to contain this entity. Some theorists have sought reality the thought that the most famous building
to analyze this containment in terms of a causal in Dubai is less than one year old simply replaces a
Descriptive Thought 241
thought that is object-dependent with respect to Burj Setting aside skeptical worries, the fact that I
Khalifa with a thought that is object-dependent with have de se thoughts is excellent evidence that the
respect to Dubai; no progress has been made.) But self exists (even though having water thoughts is
this ambitious form of descriptivism seems to raise less than excellent evidence that water exists).
the bar too high. As P. F. Strawson has argued, it will, While it is possible for a rational agent to
in almost every case, be impossible to replace what adopt conflicting attitudes to one and the same
appears to be a reference to a particular individual garden-variety singular thought, this is not so in
with purely descriptive conditions and retain the the case of de se thoughts. For example, while
same thought or even a truth-conditionally equiva- Lois can simultaneously both believe and
lent thoughtthat is, one that is true at exactly the disbelieve, of Superman, that he is a superhero,
same circumstances. (This is especially clear in the this is not possible for Superman himself, at least
case of demonstrative thought.) In addition, even if not in the special case where his thought is de se.
it turns out that the strategy works in some cases, That is, Superman cannot simultaneously both
this will not show or make in any way more plau- believe and disbelieve, of himself, that he is a
sible that it will always do so. superhero. (Similar remarks apply to attitudes
involving indexical reference to the current time.)
A Russellian Alternative
Problems With the Alternative Approach
While the prospects for an ambitious descriptiv-
ism appear bleak, a natural intermediate position But even the approach advocated by Russell and
suggests itself, one initially proposed by Bertrand Schiffer appears too strong. Perhaps Im looking at
Russell and subsequently elaborated on by Stephen a tree with thousands of indistinguishable leaves.
Schiffer. On this view, in fact exemplifies a certain Focusing on one, I think to myself, thats green. The
species of descriptive thought, one in which the only antidescriptivist denies that there is a description
object the relevant description makes reference to that counts as a plausible candidate for the relevant
is the self (and, perhaps, the current time). Thus, in thought component. In particular, he claims that
contrast to the suggestion considered abovethat there is no relation, R, such that the content of the
is just the descriptive thought that the most famous italicized sentence is that the x that bears R to me
building in Dubai is less than one year oldthe is green. This is shown, he claims, by considering
current proposal would provide the following: The the following: For every available value of R, I can
building that bears R to me is less than one year doubt whether that one is the x that bears R to me.
old. In this context R might stand for the relation The Russell-inspired descriptivist responds that
that holds between x and y just in case x is the most there is an obvious candidate for Rnamely, the x
salient object currently in ys visual field (note that such that x is a leaf that I currently have my gaze
there is no requirement that R stand for the same fixed on. Surely, I cannot coherently doubt that that
relation in every context). one is the leaf I currently have my gaze fixed on.
Why is reference to the self (or the current time) This, however, changes the subject, failing to cap-
permitted? The answer can be seen most clearly if we ture the content of the thought I recognize myself
consider demonstrative thoughts, such as the thought to have; at best, it provides a truth-conditionally
expressed by my utterance of that man is smoking. equivalent thought (though this is itself doubtful).
The description this thought contains must involve Moreover, some individuals capable of thinking the
reference to me, either directly or indirectly, through original thought may lack the conceptual sophisti-
reference to some item in the context of my utter- cation required to think the suggested descriptive
ance (which is, after all, identified only by reference counterpart.
to the speaker). Of course, this means only that Finally, there is a more general worry that descrip-
self-ascriptiveor de sesingular thoughts are tivism is too liberalthat there is more to thinking
unavoidable; it doesnt show them to be unproblematic. about x than entertaining a thought whose descrip-
But de se thoughts are unproblematic in at tion picks out x uniquely. Consider Smiths belief
least two respects in which garden-variety singular that the shortest spy is less than 6 feet tall. While
thoughts are problematic. it is uncontroversial that there is some individual
242 Desirable Difficulties Perspective on Learning
practice on a task, for example, often leads to rapid concepts and ideas, which will support transfer of
gains in performance but little or no effect on learn- that learning to new settings. Interleaving, rather
ing, as measured by long-term retention or transfer. than blocking, instruction on related topics can
aid in encoding the higher order relationships that
Perspective on Learning capture similarities and differences among those
topics.
That certain difficulties can enhance learning high- It goes beyond the scope of this entry to provide
lights some unique characteristics of how humans a detailed discussion of how each desirable difficulty
learn and remember or fail to learn and remem- might enrich encoding and/or retrieval processes, but
ber. We do not store information, for example, by one common characteristic is that such manipula-
making any kind of literal copy of that informa- tions are likely to induce more transfer-appropriate
tion. Rather, we encode and store new information processingthat is, processes of the types that will
by relating it to what we already knowthat is, be required in postinstruction environments.
by mapping it onto, and linking it up with, infor-
mation that already exists in our memories. New
information is stored in terms of its meaning to us, The Word Desirable Is Important
as defined by its relationships to other information
Finally, it is necessary to emphasize that many of the
in our memories. Storing information, rather than
difficulties that can be created for learners are not
using up memory capacity, creates opportunities for
desirable. Desirable difficulties are desirable because
additional storage.
they encourage encoding and/or retrieval activities
The retrieval processes that characterize human
that support learning. To the extent, in fact, that a
memory are unique, too, and differ markedly from
given learner is not equipped to overcome a diffi-
a playback of the type that might characterize a
culty that would otherwise be desirable, it becomes
typical recording device. Retrieval of information is
an undesirable difficulty. Thus, for example, requir-
inferential and reconstructive rather than literal, and
ing that some information or procedure be gener-
it is also fallible, in part because what is accessible
ated, rather than simply presenting that information
from memory is heavily dependent on current cues,
or procedure, introduces a desirable difficulty, one
including environmental, interpersonal, body-state,
that can foster a learners subsequent ability to pro-
and mood-state cues. In addition, and importantly,
duce that information or procedure, but the learner
the act of retrieving information is itself a potent
must be equipped, by virtue of prior knowledge and
learning event. Retrieved information, rather than
current cues, to succeed in the generationor it
being left in the same state it was in prior to being
becomes an undesirable difficulty.
recalled, becomes more recallable in the future than
it would have been otherwise, and competing infor- Robert Allen Bjork
mation associated with the same cues can become
less recallable in the future. Using our memories, in See also Discrimination Learning, Training Methods;
effect, alters our memories. Memory Recall, Dynamics; Retrieval Practice
From an instruction standpoint, the goal is to (Testing) Effect; Skill Learning, Enhancement of;
Spacing Effect; Spacing Effect, Practical Applications
create conditions that foster storage and enhance
later retrieval, not just at a delay, but also in multiple
contexts. We want, in short, to create durable and Further Readings
flexible access to to-be-learned information and pro- Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on
cedures. Toward achieving that goal, the conditions yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable
of learning need to induce encoding and retrieval difficulties to enhance learning. In M. A. Gernsbacher, R.
processes that are substantial and varied, and incor- W. Pew, L. M. Hough, & J. R. Pomerantz (Eds.),
porating desirable difficulties can induce those pro- Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating
cesses. Using tests or generation activitiesversus fundamental contributions to society (pp. 5664).
presentationsas learning opportunities, for exam- New York, NY: Worth.
ple, exercises retrieval processes that will be needed Bjork, R. A. (1999). Assessing our own competence:
later. Varying the context, examples, and problem Heuristics and illusions. In D. Gopher & A. Koriat
types can lead to a more elaborated encoding of (Eds.), Attention and performance XVII. Cognitive
244 Desire
regulation of performance: Interaction of theory and that is familiar to everyone who has desires. The
application (pp. 435459). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. third type of theory holds that the essence of desire
McDaniel, M. A., & Butler, A. C. (2011). A contextual is its role in causing a certain form of unconscious
framework for understanding when difficulties are learning. This type of theory strongly distinguishes
desirable. In A. S. Benjamin (Ed.), Successful what desires are, in themselves, from the very famil-
remembering and successful forgetting: iar effects that we all assume desires cause.
A Festschrift in honor of Robert A. Bjork
(pp. 175198). London, UK: Psychology Press.
Action-Based Theories
Schmidt, R. A., & Bjork, R. A. (1992). New
conceptualizations of practice: Common principles in Desires obviously play an important role in
three paradigms suggest new concepts for training. action. A sheep will walk from one place to another
Psychological Science, 3, 207217. because it desires to eat grass, and a person will
spend years in law school because she desires to fight
environmental degradation. Action-based theories of
DESIRE desire make this role the essence of desire. One such
theory (defended recently by philosopher Michael
Desiring is a state of mind. Known also as want- Smith) holds that to desire some state of affairs, p,
ing and wishing, this state of mind is one that is a is to be in a state that makes it true that one is dis-
normal cause of coordinated actions, feelings, and posed to take action A if it seems that taking A will
thought processes. For example, a desire that ones bring about p (or make p more likely). Thus, if Katie
father be healthy is a normal cause of reminding him desires to learn quantum mechanics, then she must
to take his medication (and other actions), a normal be disposed to take actions that she believes will
cause of feeling disturbed when one learns he has make her learn quantum mechanics, and if Katie is
developed a cataract and feeling relieved when the disposed to take actions that she believes will make
cataract is successfully treated (and other feelings), her learn quantum mechanics, then it must be true
and a normal cause of paying attention to news that Katie desires to learn quantum mechanics.
items about health care for older men (and other Action-based theories are the most promi-
thought processes). nent philosophical theories of desire; some would
Although desires are commonly associated with say that some version of this theory is an obvious
actions, feelings, and thoughts, there remain two truth, no more disputable than that a bachelor is an
key questions about desires for theorists to answer. unmarried man. Among philosophers who embrace
First, which of these effects (if any) are essential to an action-based theory of desire, the main question
desires and which are inessential? Second, which of is whether all actions are caused by desires (as the
these effects (if any) have normal causes other than theory just proposed requires) or whether some
desires? actions might be caused by something other than a
Desires and related notions (appetites, passions, desire (such as a sense of moral obligation).
and the like) have been discussed by philosophers
Feeling-Based Theories
since at least ancient Greece. It has only been since
the 1980s that advances in neuroscience have made Action-based theories of desire have been domi-
empirical science a substantial partner with philoso- nant from the 20th century until the present, but
phy in the investigation of desire, but already the earlier philosophers often emphasized the connec-
payoffs have been substantial. tion between desires and feelings. Desires might be
one cause of actions, but what is essential to a desire
is the way it makes you feel, according to this sort of
Philosophical Theories
theorist. One such theory (defended recently by phi-
Philosophical theories of desire come in three main losopher Galen Strawson) holds that to desire some
types. One holds that the essence of desire is its state of affairs, p, is to be in a state that makes it true
role in causing actions, and another holds that the that one is disposed to feel pleasure if it seems that p
essence of desire is its role in causing feelings. These and to feel displeasure if it seems that not-p. Thus, if
two types of theories identify desire with something Katie desires to learn quantum mechanics, then she
Desire 245
must be disposed to feel pleasure if she seems to be The obvious objection to a learning-based theory
learning it, and if Katie is disposed to feel pleasure of desire is that learning, even the specific sort of
at the idea of learning quantum mechanics, then it learning in question, does not seem to have any-
must be true that Katie desires to learn it. thing to do with desiring something. Defenders of
Proponents of feeling-based theories can make learning-based theories have pointed out, however,
a distinction not available to proponents of action- that the brains reward-based learning system is the
based theories. The feeling-based theorist can hold unique common cause of the actions, feelings, and
that some people are (for example) kind because thought processes associated with desiring. That is,
they desire to be kind. These (they can say) are the although desires do not seem to have anything to do
people who enjoy doing something kind. Other with reward-based learning, scientific investigation
people are kind only because they feel they have a reveals that the brains reward-based learning system
moral obligation to be so, but they do not desire to causes the effects that we normally think of as the
be kind at all. These (they can say) are the people effects of desires.
who do not enjoy being kind but who do it anyway.
Neuroscientific Underpinnings
Learning-Based Theories Science in general, and neuroscience in particular,
Philosopher Fred Dretske has initiated investi- has been reluctant to develop theories of desire.
gation into a third sort of theory of desire, which Perhaps this has been because there was not enough
can be called a learning-based theory of desire. consensus about the nature of desire in, for exam-
Learning-based theories of desire hold that apparent ple, philosophy in order for scientists to know what
desire satisfaction causes a specific form of learn- exactly they would be looking for (an exception has
ing, known sometimes as reward learning or contin- been the insightful work of Kent Berridge in neu-
gency-based learning. This form of learning causes ropsychology). But in the years since 1980, neuro-
an unconscious shift in an organisms tendencies to science has developed extensive theories of action,
go from one state of mind to another. Specifically, if feelings, and thought processes. It has also devel-
one mental state (such as seeing a light while feeling oped a sophisticated theory of reward learning. So a
hungry) causes another mental state (such as try- researcher who is interested in desire has a great deal
ing to push a lever) and then some reward learning to learn from neuroscience.
takes place (caused, perhaps, by the arrival of some
Neuroscience and Reward Learning
food after the lever was pressed), then the result of
the reward learning will be to increase the power The brain contains a reward-learning system that
of the first mental state (seeing a light while feeling releases dopamine. According to research under-
hungry) to cause the second mental state (trying to taken by Wolfram Schultz and colleagues, this sys-
push the lever). Though this form of learning is best tem releases dopamine at a baseline rate, which can
known from behaviorism, where it is called operant then fluctuate on a short timescale so that dopamine
conditioning, there is nothing specifically behavioral release rises or drops relative to the baseline rate. The
about it, and there have been observations of reward release of dopamine by the brains reward system
learning modifying perceptual and cognitive associa- expresses a simple calculation: actual reward minus
tions as well as behavioral ones. expected reward (where expectations here appear to
A basic learning-based theory of desire holds be unconscious rather than consciously calculated
that to desire some state of affairs, p, is to be dis- and where reward is shorthand for food for hun-
posed to engage in unconscious reward learning if gry organisms, water for thirsty organisms, and so
one believes that p. Thus, if Katie desires to learn on). Thus, a rat expecting nothing at time t, when
quantum mechanics, then she must be disposed to food arrives, displays a rise in dopamine release,
go through reward-based learning when she believes while a rat that fully expects food at time t, when
she is learning it, and if she is disposed to go through food arrives, displays no change at that moment in
reward-based learning when she believes she is dopamine release, and a rat that fully expects food
learning quantum mechanics, then she must desire at time t, when no food at all arrives, displays a drop
to learn it. in dopamine release.
246 Desire
The learning effects of dopamine have been from perception and cognition) with information
documented both by direct observation of neural about reward and (perhaps, though it remains less
connections induced by dopamine released from the well studied) punishment, with this latter informa-
reward system (and connection formation blocked tion arriving from the reward system in the form of
by dopamine antagonists) and by observation of the dopamine. At a high level of abstraction, it can be
existence of distinct learning systems, some of which said that the motor systems of the basal ganglia take
are dopamine dependent and some of which are not. in output about how things stand and how rewarding
As a mediator of reward learning, the dopamine they are, and it produces as output an action selected
released by the brains reward system has incre- from those actions that are possible in context.
mental effects on dispositions to act, perceive, and Interestingly, the power of the reward system to
cognize in certain ways. But the reward system has influence overt action strongly suggests a related
other effects also. influence over thought: Outputs from the basal
ganglia appear to influence voluntary thought as
Neuroscience and Pleasure well as voluntary bodily movement. This is also
One of the effects of the reward system is on suggested by known cognitive impairments caused
pleasure. Dopamine release (or receipt) has been by Parkinsons disease and by experiments linking
observed to be the means by which many pleasure- rewards to modified thought processes.
causing drugs cause pleasure: This is the mechanism
of action for MDMA (ecstasy), amphetamines, Integrating Philosophy and Neuroscience
and cocaine, for instance. Some (such as Carolyn The neuroscientific facts just laid out strongly suggest
Morillo) have suggested that the release of dopamine that the brains reward system is involved in desire
is the same thing as pleasure, but as Kent Berridge in some manner. The reward system is involved in
has argued, this cannot explain the full range of causing action, it is involved in causing feelings, and
facts, such as the fact that certain drugs (opiates and it is involved in affecting thought processes. But
benzodiazepines) appear to affect pleasure indepen- what role should the reward system be given? All
dently of dopamine and the fact that some experi- three philosophical theories of desire remain viable.
mental conditions that stimulate dopamine release To support an action-based theory of desire, a
and behavior appear to be unpleasant. The neural theorist will claim that a desire for some conceiv-
realization of states of pleasure (and displeasure) able state of affairs, p, exists when there is a connec-
is probably causally downstream from dopamine tion between a neural representation of that state of
release, and a number of neural sites (the nucleus affairs, through the reward system, into the action-
accumbens, the ventral pallidum, the insular cortex, production system such that, when the organism
and the perigenual region of the anterior cingulate) thinks some action would lead to p, the organ-
have been suggested. ism tends to take that action. This is the position
defended by Kent Berridge after review of the role
Neuroscience and Action
of the reward system in causing action (wanting)
Another of the effects of the reward system is on and feelings (liking). To support a feeling-based
action. Parkinsons disease reveals how dependent theory of desire, a theorist would claim that a desire
human beings are on the dopamine released by the for p exists when there is a connection between a
reward system for the capacity to act: Parkinsons neural representation of that state of affairs and
disease is caused by excessive death of dopamine- pleasure, whether through the reward system (one
releasing cells in the reward system, and its effects possibility) or otherwise. And to support a learning-
include decreased ability to initiate action and (at the based theory of desire, a theorist would claim that a
limit) complete paralysis of action. desire for p is whatever is the normal common cause
These effects of the reward system are mediated of actions and feelings and also claim that the brains
by a key set of structures in action production known reward system is that common cause.
as the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia appear to Although controversies about desire are far from
coordinate action selection, combining information resolved, it would appear that leading theories of
about what is happening in the world (information desire link it, at least in part, to a common underlying
Dictator Game 247
neural structure. Which part of this structure is most provided to only one of them. The person who
important for desire itself depends on which theory receives money, the dictator, is given an oppor-
is right, and that appears to remain largely a philo- tunity to share this with the person who received
sophical issue. But if philosophical theorizing can go nothing, the recipient. The DG was designed to
forward constrained by scientific knowledge, there reduce complex human behavior to simple steps to
is some hope for progress. test game-theoretical predictions that assume ratio-
nal utility maximization (i.e., maximization of the
Timothy Schroeder
value of the money kept) based on mathematical
See also Decision Making, Neural Underpinnings;
calculations. It was assumed that dictators would
Decision Theory, Philosophical Perspectives; Emotion, not share money with anonymous strangers without
Structural Approaches; Happiness; Philosophy of some enforcement or punishment. It was a great sur-
Action; Reinforcement Learning, Psychological prise to learn that people shared, often splitting the
Perspectives money equally among themselves.
When two people who know each other or are
Further Readings related play the DG, it is expected that they will
share. Standard economic theories, such as the neo-
Berridge, K. C. (1999). Pleasure, pain, desire, and dread: classical theory, for example, do not suggest that
Hidden core processes of emotion. In D. Kahneman, E. when playing with kin, one should maximize wealth
Diener, & N. Schwarz (Eds.), Well-being: The at the expense of that kin. Even if the players dont
foundations of hedonic psychology (pp. 525557). New know each other, if the game is played repeatedly
York, NY: Russell Sage. and if the players identity may be revealed later, eco-
Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. F. (1998). The role of
nomic theory suggests that there is reason to share.
dopamine in reward: Hedonics, reward learning, or
incentive salience? Brain Research Reviews, 28,
309369.
Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining behavior: Reasons in a Dictator Gets $X
world of causes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mink, J. (1996). The basal ganglia: Focused selection and Gives $Y to Recipient
inhibition of competing motor programs. Progress in
Neurobiology, 50, 381425. X > 0; Y 0
Receiver Keeps $Y
This entry introduces and defines the Dictator Game
(DG), a commonly used game in economic experi-
ments. The DG was first used by Robert Forsythe,
Joel L. Horowitz, N. E. Savin, and Martin Sefton in
1994, in which two anonymous players split money Figure 1 Dictator game
248 Dictator Game
Building good reputation is a valuable asset, whose same amount; all participants end up with the same
utility may be maximized. However, when com- money. However, when the recipients were given
plete strangers play a single game (one shot) with the option to take, they took more than they would
forever hidden identity, standard economic theories have been given, often taking more than half of the
assume rational choices and expect the player to endowment away from the dictator. It is apparent
maximize wealth to self and to not share. However, that adding and subtracting have strikingly different
in experiments played in various countries and cul- utilities associated with them in the human brain.
tures around the world, researchers found that the While giving is altruistic, taking is selfish. The act
majority of people share with anonymous strangers of giving and taking activates different decision-
in one-shot games. The game theoretic prediction making processes in the brain. Social consideration
that the dictator keeps everything happens only of sharing in the DG changes when the process of
about 20% of the time. There is some cultural varia- sharing changes.
tion in how much money dictators keep. In some Modern technologies, such as functional mag-
societies, zero offers simply do not exist. Dictators netic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other scanning
typically share between 20 and 50% of the money processes, allow researchers to examine human neu-
with anonymous recipients. The amount of money ral processes while subjects play economic games.
given to dictators as an endowment varies from a It is now understood that neural representations
few dollars to substantial sums, sometimes several of various emotional states as well as genetic influ-
hundreds of dollars. Still, the size of the endowment ences on those states guide human decision making.
seems to make little difference; 80% of the people Receiving small amounts of money is seen as unfair
share regardless how big an endowment they start by recipients and this activates the insula, a region of
with, and the percentage of money shared is stable. the brain that is associated with negative emotional
Because in the DG sharing of the money is vol- states such as disgust, pain, hunger, and thirst. The
untary and the anonymous recipient benefits at the mesolimbic reward center of the brain is a key player
expense of the dictator, this game represent a clas- in decision making. It is activated the same way
sic example of altruistic behavior. There is gender when making donations as when receiving money.
bias in assessing who might behave more altruisti- In other words, giving money voluntarily may feel as
cally in the DG. When two boxes, one labeled from good as receiving money. This explains why players
men and the other from women containing dictator give money to strangers but does not explain the dif-
donations, are placed in front of recipients, 80% of ferences in the amount of money given. Other brain
women and nearly 50% of men recipients prefer regions, such as medial orbitofrontalsubgenual and
to choose from the from women box. Replacing lateral orbitofrontal areas, which play key roles in
human recipients with charities reduces donations. social attachment, are also activated in the donating
This indicates that there is something special about process. This may show the social component and
sharing specifically with people even if they are may help explain why, when people play with com-
anonymous and even if the opportunity to share sur- puter partners instead of human counterparts, they
faces only once. seem less upset by unfair offersthese regions of the
brain may not be activated as intensely when not
playing with a human partner. The need for social
Dictator Game and the Mind
attachment is an important factor in the amount
Some of the factors that make the DG special sur- of money shared, which is reflected by the cultural
faced when the game was modified. Rather than influences over shared amounts.
dictators giving to recipients, recipients were to Emotional states are also guided by hormonal
take as much money as they wanted from the dic- influences. Neuropeptides (hormones in the brain)
tators endowment. If giving and taking can equal play key roles in social attachment. Arginine vaso-
the act of sharing, giving and taking amounts pressin (AVP) is a neuropeptide that regulates social
would be identical. Recipients who take would take attachment and kin protection. In a study by Ariel
about as much as the dictators would have given to Knafo and colleagues, genetic examination of
them. Mathematically speaking there is no differ- AVP receptors showed that people with long vari-
ence between a person giving or another taking that ants of AVPR1a RS3 repeats donate larger sums to
Discourse Processing, Models of 249
recipients in the DG. This then allows us to conclude To exemplify this work, the focus here will be on
that the amount of money shared in the DG is influ- the development and contributions of models in the
enced by genetic, hormonal, and cultural variations. domain of text processing. Contemporary investiga-
tions in this area often take as an inspirational start-
Angela Agnes Stanton
ing point the seminal work of Walter Kintsch and
See also Allais Paradox; Attitudes and Behavior;
Teun van Dijk and their tripartite model of text com-
Emotion and Moral Judgment; Neuroeconomics prehension. According to the model, comprehenders
can encode information they hear or read into
memory in potentially three ways: (a) a surface-level
Further Readings
representation, which stores the exact information
Forsythe, R., Horowitz, J., Savin, N. E., & Sefton, M. presented in a text; (b) the textbase or proposi-
(1994). Fairness in simple bargaining experiments. tional level, which includes the ideas conveyed by
Games and Economic Behavior, 6(347), 369. the surface form; and (c) the situation level, which
Knafo, A., Israel, S., Darvasi, A., Bachner-Melman, goes beyond the text itself to include knowledge that
R., Uzefovsky, F., Cohen, L., . . . Ebstein, R. P. readers might bring to bear on the texts they read.
(2008). Individual differences in allocation of The power of the model comes from its utility in
funds in the dictator game associated with length fostering predictions about the types of mental rep-
of the arginine vasopressin 1a receptor RS3 resentations and concomitant understandings gener-
promoter region and correlation between RS3 ated as a function of, as examples, readers goals,
length and hippocampal mRNA. Genes, Brain and the difficulty of the text, or the familiarity of the text
Behavior, 7(3), 266275. topic. Applications of the model have made impor-
Stanton, A. A. (2007). Neural substrates of decision-making
tant contributions to the study of reader memory,
in economic games. Journal of Dissertation, 1(1).
the types of inferences constructed during reading,
and the rhetorical and structural features that can
enhance learning from text.
DISCOURSE PROCESSING, All such model applications have held, as issues
of core importance, the need to understand how
MODELS OF prior knowledge and unfolding discourse sepa-
rately contribute to and mutually interact during
Everyday discourse experiences are rich and var- linguistic experiences. Based on accumulated empiri-
ied; they include perusals of newspaper headlines, cal evidence, current models (including Kintschs
gossip with friends about recent events, careful construction-integration model and recent iterations
analyses of the results reported in research articles, of memory-based and constructionist views) have
establishing common ground with a new acquain- converged on a two-stage process of knowledge
tance, and relaxing moments immersed in a favorite activation and integration. In the first stage, incom-
novel. Success during these activities necessitates the ing stimuli broadly and automatically activate con-
recruitment of what readers, speakers, and listeners cepts in memory. This initial activation of concepts
already know in the service of extrapolating mean- is unconstrained, which means that both relevant
ing from linguistic constituents. The mental repre- and irrelevant information can be primed by lin-
sentations and cognitive mechanisms that underlie guistic input. In the second stage, relevant concepts
such language- and communication-based activities are selected from the unconstrained group, and the
have been the focus of investigations in the field chosen elements are integrated into the unfolding
of discourse processing. These investigations have mental representation of the discourse. Similar ver-
examined the moment-by-moment processes (e.g., sions of this model have been articulated for lexical
prior knowledge activation) and final products (e.g., access, speech planning and production, literal and
what has been learned) of linguistic experiences. An nonliteral language comprehension, and conversa-
important element of this work has been the develop- tional grounding. A crucial consideration to emerge
ment of conceptual models that describe the nature from this work is the notion that discourse process-
of, and contributors to, discourse comprehension ing is dynamic; concepts in memory wax and wane
and production. in activation over the course of, for example, a text
250 Discrimination Learning, Training Methods
experience, and these activations influence the infor- beneficial for future attempts at describing, explain-
mation that will be integrated into memory for use ing, and enhancing the processes that underlie dis-
after the experience has concluded. course comprehension and production.
The models described thus far have received
David N. Rapp
considerable empirical support, through method-
ologies including think-aloud protocols, tests of See also Conversation and Dialogue; Eye Movements
concept accessibility (e.g., lexical decision and nam- During Reading; Inferences in Language
ing), profiles of cortical activity (e.g., event-related Comprehension; Working Memory in Language
potentials and hemispheric lateralization studies), Processing
recall tasks, and measures of reading latencies. An
additional test has involved building computational
simulations of core model mechanisms and compar- Further Readings
ing simulation performance to human data. One Gernsbacher, M. A. (1990). Language comprehension as
example is the landscape model developed by Paul structure building. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
van den Broek and his colleagues, which simulates Gueraud, S., & OBrien, E. J. (Eds.). (2005). Components
the activation patterns of concepts over the two- of comprehension: A convergence between memory-
stage process described above. The models archi- based processes and explanation-based processes
tecture incorporates processing contributions from [Special issue]. Discourse Processes, 39(23).
current text input, the immediately preceding text Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A paradigm for
input, an episodic representation of all of the previ- cognition. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
ous text information, and the knowledge base of a Rapp, D. N., & van den Broek, P. (2005). Dynamic text
hypothetical reader. These sources are used to cal- comprehension: An integrative view of reading. Current
culate the dynamic activation levels of text concepts Directions in Psychological Science, 14(5), 276279.
both during and after reading. The degree to which van Dijk, T. A., & Kintsch, W. (1983). Strategies of
the calculated output aligns with the data of actual discourse comprehension. New York, NY: Academic
Press.
readers provides one type of existence proof for the
core mechanisms and assumptions of the model.
Simulations can also provide the opportunity to test
novel hypotheses. For example, model architectures
can be changed to vary the reading skill or prior
DISCRIMINATION LEARNING,
knowledge available to the system by constraining TRAINING METHODS
the contributions of input sources. These kinds of
modifications provide an analysis of how the struc- The term discrimination learninglearning to respond
tural components of a model can contribute to dis- differentially to different stimuliencompasses a
course processing. To date, several computational diverse range of different types of learning, such as
models have proved impressive in their simulations perceptual learning, concept learning, and language
of reader performance. learning. The practical goal of discrimination training
Models of discourse processing, both conceptual often involves complex discriminations, such as when
and computational, are also used to consider the loci pilots learn to recognize potentially hazardous pat-
of a variety of processing difficulties. For example, terns on complicated instrument panels. The great-
students in school settings often struggle to compre- est challenge in discrimination trainingaside from
hend classroom discussions and materials. Several the initial problem of perceiving differences between
models have been implemented in consideration of categoriesis to accomplish long-term learning that
whether difficulties are, at least partially, due to fail- transfers across situations and stimuli. Training tech-
ures of particular discourse processing mechanisms. niques that produce good performance can be mis-
Models have also been utilized to suggest approaches leading; difficult training is sometimes more effective
for the remediation of problems through structured than easier training in the long term.
interventions or the design of learning tools (such Discrimination learning occurs at many levels,
as Arthur Graessers AutoTutor). The continued such as perceptual learning, higher level concept and
development and refinement of these models will be category learning, and language learning. A baby
Discrimination Learning, Training Methods 251
experiences all three types of learning: She has to taught to distinguish enemy soldiers from civilians
learn basic perceptual categories (e.g., discriminat- during basic training needs to be able to transfer
ing between ba vs. ga), higher level concepts (e.g., that learning to the battlefield. Training techniques
friends and relatives vs. strangers) and linguistic that make training conditions difficultand thereby
labels for these categories and concepts (e.g., dog decrease performance levels during trainingoften
refers to furry pets but not cats). increase long-term learning and transfer. Such tech-
Learning to discriminate often involves a process niques are referred to as desirable difficulties. In
of differentiation and unitization. Differentiation learning to recognize patterns, for example, increas-
involves learning to separate similar stimuli into ing the variability between members of a category
different categories (e.g., ravens vs. crows); unitiza- during training decreases training performance but
tion involves learning to group stimuli into larger positively affects transfer.
units and to discriminate based on the unit (e.g., Trainers and trainees often mistake short-term
seeing a whole face instead of separate facial fea- performance during training as evidence of long-
tures). Unitization and differentiation may appear term learning and therefore perceive difficulty dur-
to be opposite processes, but both involve learning ing training as an impediment when it is actually
to perceive information at the appropriate level of an advantage. For example, people think they learn
representation. artists styles best when the artists are presented for
study one at a time, whereas in reality mixing various
Real-World Applications artists paintings together enhances categorization of
novel paintings. It is important not to be fooled by
In real-world applications, the usual goal of dis-
training techniques that enhance short-term training
crimination training is to teach people or animals
performance at the expense of long-term learning
complex discriminations. For example, drug-sniff-
and transfer.
ing dogs learn to discriminate among complex
Although difficult training can be vital, especially
odor compounds in order to respond appropriately.
if the goal is to train difficult discriminations, too
Athletes, such as quarterbacks in American foot-
much difficulty can prevent learners from identify-
ball, goalkeepers in hockey, and batters in baseball,
ing categories essential features. For that reason,
need to be able to discriminate very complex and
perceptual training often begins with easy discrimi-
fast-moving patterns of stimuli and respond appro-
nations that adaptively increase in difficulty during
priately. In athletics and more generally, perceptual
training. However, discrimination learning can also
learning works in concert with motor learning,
occur when discrimination is impossibly difficult;
which requires discriminating among internal sensa-
asking people to discriminate between physically
tions, such as the proprioceptive feeling of an ace
identical tones, for example, enhances transfer to a
tennis serve versus a serve that goes into the net.
discrimination task on which tones vary.
In school, learning occurs primarily via direct
At relatively early stages of perceptual process-
instruction: Books and teachers provide informa-
ing, such as learning to make fine distinctions
tion, and students try to understand and remember
between lines at various orientations, transfer is fre-
that information. Direct instruction alone is not
quently difficult to accomplish. Learning does not
sufficient to promote many types of discrimination
necessarily even transfer when an old task is pre-
learning, however, which often requires a combina-
sented in a new spatial or retinal location. However,
tion of instruction and experience. Verbal descrip-
long-term training can increase basic sensitivity in a
tions of a genre of music, for example, may be of
way that can be transferred; for example, violin-
little help compared with actual experience listening
ists show more activity in the sensory cortex when
to the music.
touched on their left hand (i.e., the violin neck
hand) than when touched on their right hand
Factors Affecting Discrimination Learning
(i.e., the bow hand).
In most cases, the goal of discrimination training is Some forms of discrimination learning seem to
long-term transferthat is, teaching learners in a benefit from a period of sleep following training,
way that will be relevant when they encounter novel which appears to aid memory consolidation. In a
stimuli and new situations. For example, a soldier simple visual discrimination task, for example,
252 Disfluencies: Comprehension Processes
people who are allowed to sleep normally show comprehension can be influenced by disfluency.
improvement 3 days after initial training. People Third, disfluencies affect the eventual representation
who are not allowed to sleep for 30 hours follow- of what was said. Listeners may not process them
ing training and are then tested after two nights of consciously, but disfluencies are integral to spoken
sleep show no improvement compared to baseline communication. The entry concludes with a brief
performance. consideration of whether different disfluencies give
rise to different effects.
Nate Kornell
Additional work has used event-related potentials not disfluencies (such as dogs barking) are used at
(ERPs) to examine whether disfluencies routinely potential clause boundaries. However, other studies
affect how listeners process speech. In these studies, have repeatedly led to the conclusion that all disflu-
there is no specific task to carry out or set of objects encies may not be equal. For example, the benefit of
referred to. Participants simply listen to recorded uh in target word identification does not appear to
utterances, which include some target words that extend to um, and the ERP effects associated with
are surprising (difficult to integrate semantically or uh are not completely replicated when the disfluency
acoustically deviant in context). Relative to unsur- is a repetition. At the time of writing, the question of
prising control words the targets give rise to clear whether different types of disfluency affect listeners
ERP effects (an N400 for semantic and a P300 for differently is unresolved.
acoustic surprise), but these effects are attenuated
Martin Corley
when the target words are immediately preceded
by an uh disfluency. These ERP findings implicate
See also Conversation and Dialogue; Planning in
prediction (not being able to predict what comes
Language Production; Prosody in Production; Speech
next may reduce the semantic surprise and hence the
Perception
N400) and attention (the P300 reflects attentional
orientation to input; because attention is oriented
by the disfluency, uh results in a P300 and the sub- Further Readings
sequent P300 is diminished). In other words, disflu- Arnold, J. E., Hudson-Kam, C. L., & Tanenhaus, M. K.
ency indicates that the words that follow may not (2007). If you say thee uh you are describing something
be predictable, which causes listeners to attend more hard: The on-line attribution of disfluency during
closely to what follows. reference comprehension. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33,
Effects on Representation 914930.
When tested subsequent to the comprehension Bailey, K. G. D., & Ferreira, F. (2003). Disfluencies affect
the parsing of garden-path sentences. Journal of
phases of the ERP experiments outlined above,
Memory and Language, 49, 183200.
participants were more likely to recognize having
Corley, M., MacGregor, L. J., & Donaldson, D. I. (2007).
heard target words when those words had been
Its the way that you, er, say it: Hesitations in speech
preceded by an uh, consistent with the view that
affect language comprehension. Cognition, 105,
attention would have been heightened in these cir- 658668.
cumstances. As well as affecting language compre- Swerts, M., & Krahmer, E. (2005). Audiovisual prosody
hension as the process unfolds, disfluencies have and feeling of knowing. Journal of Memory and
consequences for its outcome. Further evidence Language, 53, 8194.
that disfluencies can affect the representation of
what is said comes from experiments in which
participants listened to sentences that sometimes
included disfluencies (uh uh) at potential clause DISGUST
boundaries. In these experiments, participants were
asked to decide whether the sentences they heard
Most contemporary theorists assume that emotions
were grammatical or not. They were less likely to
have evolved because of the adaptive functions they
rate the sentences as grammatical in cases where
provide to the individual experiencing them. Two
the disfluency occurred at a boundary that turned
of the key functions of emotions are first, to facili-
out to be inconsistent with the correct interpreta-
tate rapid responses toward potentially dangerous
tion of the sentence, showing a direct influence of
aspects of the environment, and second, to facilitate
disfluency on interpretation.
social interactions with other individuals. Disgust
plays an important role in both respects: Although
All Disfluencies Are Not Equal it was originally concerned with the avoidance of
Perhaps surprisingly, the grammaticality judg- potentially harmful substances, it is also involved in
ment effect is also found when sounds that are the social enforcement of norms.
254 Disgust
Disgust as a Basic Emotion contaminated, but the reverse is not true, because to
some extent contamination is considered irreversible.
Theoretical debates continue regarding the existence
of a fixed number of basic emotions; however, all
Types of Disgust
proposed lists of basic emotions include disgust as
one of them, usually together with happiness, sad- Three distinct types of disgust have been identified:
ness, anger, fear, and surprise. Disgust is considered first, core disgust; second, animal nature disgust;
to have evolved in the context of food consump- and third, sociomoral disgust. First, the most basic
tion as an emotion that protects from various con- type of disgust, core disgust, describes the function
taminants, such as spoiled food, bad taste, and of disgust that is linked to food and consumption,
unpleasant odors, in order to prevent ingestion of as described above. In addition, animal nature dis-
substances that may potentially be harmful. As is gust describes peoples emotional response of disgust
the case for other emotions, disgust involves a char- and repulsion when reminded of the fact that human
acteristic subjective experience, a facial expression, beings are phylogenetically similar to nonhuman ani-
and some action tendencies. Because it is concerned mals. Consequently, physiological processes related
with appetitive responses related to food consump- to bodily functions, especially those related to bodily
tion, a disgust response consists of literally moving wastes and reproduction, are considered animal-
offensive substances away from the self and can like and therefore disgusting. A strong desire exists
include expulsion of bad substances by spitting them to view human beings as enjoying a special status
out, or, if ingestion has already occurred, vomiting. among other creatures, and people go to great efforts
The disgust facial expression involves the mouth to distinguish themselves from animals by imple-
gaping open, which facilitates food rejection and mentation of social and cultural norms. When the
shutting down sensory intake of offensive smells boundaries between human beings and animals are
by pulling up the nose and raising the upper lip. A blurred, people feel debased. Presumably, the main
subjective feeling of revulsion, and possibly nausea, reason for the discomfort associated with reminders
accompanies this rejection response. In addition of human beings animal nature is that they make
to the avoidance of toxins that might be ingested salient the fact that, just like any other creature,
by mouth, disgust also guards against the touching every human being is mortal and will eventually die.
of contaminated substances and of parasites and As is common in evolutionary history, structures
pathogens that might be harmful by contact, thus that initially developed for one use were co-opted
avoiding potential infection and disease. for other uses. Sociomoral disgust is based on basic
Many emotions can be modified through cogni- physical disgust that was extended to more abstract
tive reappraisal; that is, the subjective experience contexts such that people find situations disgusting
can be altered by cognitive strategies, such as giv- in which moral standards are violated. Thus, disgust
ing a different interpretation to an emotion-eliciting is a reaction to offensive objects, as well as offensive
stimulus. In contrast, feelings of disgust are relatively actions. Supporting the close link between the dif-
immune to cognitive reappraisal, with people finding ferent types of disgust, neuroimaging studies have
it difficult to perceive a disgusting stimulus in a non- shown that the same brain structures are implicated
disgusting way. For example, because of preexisting in the experience of core disgust and sociomoral dis-
associations with disgusting objects, most people will gust. Further, sometimes people can mistake physical
refuse to drink apple juice from a brand-new bed- disgust for moral disgust: In experimental manipu-
pan or eat chocolate fudge in the shape of dog feces. lations, research participants were induced to feel
Further, people tend to engage in magical thinking physical disgust, for example, by being exposed
with respect to disgusting objects and situations, such to a bad smell. Relative to participants in neutral
that perceived contamination is treated as if it were control conditions, participants experiencing disgust
contagious, even if this is not objectively the case. In gave more severe judgments on a variety of moral
addition, objects are often considered to have some transgressions, presumably because they conflated
essence of contamination such that once something experiences of physical and moral disgust. Thus,
is disgusting, it remains so even after intensive cleans- disgust is an emotion that acts as guardian of both
ing efforts. A certain asymmetry exists such that the body and the soul, ensuring that no physical or
any object can easily go from being clean to being moral contamination taints the self.
Disjunctive Theory of Perception 255
solution finally found in the group and to work Mason, R. O., & Mitroff, I. I. (1981). Challenging strategic
together in the same group again. planning assumptions: Theory, cases, and techniques.
New York, NY: Wiley.
Productive Dissent: How Schulz-Hardt, S., Brodbeck, F. C., Mojzisch, A.,
Can We Make It Work? Kerschreiter, R., & Frey, D. (2006). Group decision
making in hidden profile situations: Dissent as a
Dissent effects can be facilitated. Differences in ini- facilitator for decision quality. Journal of Personality
tial opinions only benefit the process and outcome and Social Psychology, 91, 10801093.
of group decision making if they are expressed and,
at least to a certain extent, upheld. Given the mul-
tiple barriers to the expression of dissent that can DISTRIBUTED COGNITION
often be found in real groups such as, for example,
directive leadership or norms that value harmony
(instead of a critical debate), it cannot be taken for The term distributed cognition has been employed in
granted that dissenting opinions will be voiced. a variety of theoretical perspectives, both in a weaker
Therefore, high levels of participation in teams, sense as a metaphor for coordinated social activity,
meaning that group members feel free to and have as well as in more theoretically substantial forms in
the opportunity to contribute their own perspec- which the elements of the extended system act as a
tives, have been shown to facilitate effects of dissent physical architecture for cognition. This entry will
on team innovativeness. cover distributed cognitions historical development
It is not always possible to compose a group in within the social and cognitive sciences, orientation,
a way that prediscussion dissent will be a given. areas of application, theoretical foundations, and
Therefore, so-called dialectical decision techniques methods of investigation.
have been developed that aim at mimicking the
Origins and Orientation
effects of (authentic) dissent by means of installing
a robust debate independent of the members real In its most fully fleshed out form, distributed cog-
opinions. An example is the devils advocacy pro- nition (or DCog) was developed primarily in
cedure, where a group member or a subgroup is University of California San Diegos Department
assigned the role of the devils advocate who has to of Cognitive Science, by Edwin Hutchins at the
systematically criticize the proposals that are made Distributed Cognition and Human-Computer
by the group. As with authentic dissent, such con- Interaction Laboratory. Its development alongside
trived dissent has also been shown to be beneficial human-computer interaction is an important one,
for the quality of group judgments and group deci- and it has been extensively used and promoted by
sions. However, in comparison to authentic dissent, this wider community, most notably by the psychol-
both the benefits and the downsides of contrived ogist and popular writer, Donald Norman. Analyses
dissent seem to be somewhat less pronounced. applying distributed cognition have been carried out
on a variety of systems, including airline cockpits,
Stefan Schulz-Hardt and
air traffic control, ship navigation, computer pro-
Andreas Mojzisch gramming, medical informatics, construction, and
trawl fishing. Distributed cognition is closely related
See also Debiasing; Decision Improvement Technologies;
to activity theory (from which it has developed some
Group Decision Making; Wisdom of Crowds Effect
of its terminology), situated action, and situated cog-
nition. All of these emphasize the importance of the
Further Readings (external) context of the activity to varying degrees.
De Dreu, C. K. W., & West, M. A. (2001). Minority dissent DCog expands the focus of cognitive activity
and team innovation: The importance of participation in away from the individual acting alone and unsup-
decision making. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86, ported, toward a system of people and tools as a
11911201. unit of analysis. In its original conception, it was
Janis, I. L. (1982). Groupthink. (2nd rev. ed.). Boston, MA: developed as a corrective to the forms of cogni-
Houghton Mifflin. tive science prevalent at that time, which focused
Distributed Cognition 259
entirely on the individual mind working in isolation. functional systems operating at a lower level, rather
In opposition to this, DCog attempts to show how like Russian dolls, each of which can be understood
cognition is both a social and a cultural process and as goal-directed systems, interacting sequentially
that traditional cognitive science may be attributing or in parallel with each other to form higher level
intelligence to internal mental structures when this goal-directed systems (albeit with different goals
is not the case. DCog may occur through enlisting to the lower level systems). Naturally, studying
external tools (e.g., through the use of a calculator, distributed cognitive systems can require different
pen and paper, or maps) or by enlisting other actors methods of investigation to more traditional forms
in the problem-solving task. DCog also offers ana- of study, and, rather than laboratory-based experi-
lytic and practical potential, showing how a systems ments, a qualitative, observational approach to
organization and other resources and constraints uncovering naturalistic patterns of behavior, known
are assembled to produce intelligent action; these as ethnography, has been extensively employed.
insights can be utilized in redesigning the structure Drawing from a rich tradition in the social sciences,
and materials of these activity systems. ethnography was developed over the first half of
the 20th century as the dominant form of research
Probing the Sociocultural in cultural and social anthropology with canonical
Components of Cognition works by Bronisaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead,
DCog retains the emphasis on information process- and, more recently, Clifford Geertz. Within DCog,
ing and problem solving developed from cognitive the focus of such (cognitive) ethnographies lies in
science, yet extends this approach to larger and dis- uncovering the organization of distributed cognitive
tributed systems of activity that are situated in the systems, emphasizing the role of representational
real world and sensed and enacted through physi- artifacts (i.e., external to the mind) and the ways
cal mechanisms. One concern dominates this, and that these representations are modified through their
draws from a largely neglected strand in cognitive use and sequences of action.
sciencecultureconnecting the understandings,
A Distributed Cognitive Architecture
roles, and relationships between the human elements
in the activity, or functional, system, and how it is Within the framework of distributed cognition, cog-
shaped by the history of interaction between ele- nition is seen as a computation, with inputs, outputs,
ments (human and nonhuman) within the system, and a process of mapping information through a
drawing strongly from the cultural-historical tradi- variety of coordination mechanisms across represen-
tion of activity theory. In the form of activity theory tational media. Importantly, knowledge structures
developed at the Moscow Institute of Psychology may be external to the mind. In taking the position
by Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria and refined of a DCog analyst, involving new representational
by Alexei Leontev, many psychological processes artifacts or making changes to the practical organi-
are best understood as culturally and historically zation of work does not simply augment the system,
embedded by dint of being activity processes struc- but actively changes the nature of the computation.
tured through communities of practice rather than Seen from such a systems approach, tools do not
as individual decisions determined independently by make people better at tasks; rather they change the
those involved. This perspective is developed further task to one that they are better able to achieve.
in DCog, which claims that most environments have DCog implies that human cognition may dif-
what Hutchins calls a cognitive ecology; that is, fer from the conceptions that psychologists have
they are sociocultural constructions, not arbitrary focused on in the past and have attempted to
natural settings but artificially structured to support examine using laboratory experiments. By reassess-
DCog processes. ing the critical role of external resources in cogni-
This anthropological perspective draws physi- tion, DCog theorists have come to consider that a
cal artifacts, cognitive tools, and other people into core role of mental activity lies in coordinating the
the analytic frame and allows them to be examined various representations (which may be internal or
as component features of the broadened cognitive external) that can be brought into alignment with
system. DCog systems can involve multiple, nested one another to perform some sort of (broadly)
260 Divided Attention and Memory
goal-directed activity; that is, the role of mind is to Zhang, J., & Norman, D. A. (1994). Representations in
shape the extended problem-solving system rather distributed cognitive tasks. Cognitive Science, 18,
than to simply act as a machine to perform the 87122.
computation itself.
The division of labor is an important feature
of distributed cognition, which entails that tasks DIVIDED ATTENTION AND
are broken down and allocated to specialized enti-
ties, and subsequently reincorporated together. In
MEMORY
contrast to social and organizational theory, at an
analytic level, DCog does not differentiate between The dual-task or divided-attention (DA) technique
the division of (cognitive) labor between human can be used to aid our understanding of cogni-
and nonhuman elements. Thus, within the DCog tive functioning by helping us to infer the type of
framework, functional systems may be composed of resources and component processes required for
people and physical artifacts, and of social interac- a particular task. The logic in dual-task studies is
tions between people that may, or may not, involve that by comparing conditions in which attention is
physical artifacts. In this sense, DCog offers a single, divided between two tasks, one can infer by the dis-
unified framework for the analysis of complex ruption in performance, relative to a nondistracting
sociotechnical systems that does not require a range condition, whether the concurrent tasks require the
of analytic or theoretical techniques to be employed. same processing resources or system for representing
For systems that are broadly social in nature, such information. This entry highlights studies that have
complex systems tend to be described as socially dis- used this technique to gain insight into several cogni-
tributed cognitive systems. tive abilities.
Within socially distributed cognitive systems,
elements of the cognitive system lie not just in the Divided Attention Tasks in Perception and
knowledge and skills of individual agents, but also Working Memory Research
in the organization of those individuals, through the
configuration of the tools that they use and their The dual-task technique has been used extensively
environment. Thus, cognition can be and is distrib- to study the general processing capacity of humans.
uted socially, spatially, materially, and over time. Daniel Kahnemans view of human information pro-
At the same time, actors do not passively adapt to cessing, in which attention is described as drawing on
existing structures; they proactively structure these a single, limited, pool of resources, was challenged
environments over time by organizing and reor- based on dual-task research. While some cognitive
ganizing the physical and cognitive artifacts in the tasks were shown to be difficult to combine, because
environment, and generating and transforming the they drained a single pool of attentional resources,
social context. others could be combined relatively easily, sug-
gesting that multiple pools of attention exist. For
Mark Perry example, repeating aloud (shadowing) sentences in
a dichotic listening test is hampered when attention
See also Collective Action; Extended Mind; Group is divided with another task involving comprehen-
Decision Making
sion of simultaneously presented words. In contrast,
Alan Allport and his colleagues found little inter-
Further Readings ference when attention was divided between word
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, shadowing and a task such as playing piano music
MA: MIT Press. or recognizing pictures. Along the same lines, Lee
Norman, D. A. (1993). Things that make us smart: Brooks showed that reading, a visual task, was more
Defending human attributes in the age of the machine. difficult when performed concurrently with another
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. task that required internal visualization (imagery),
Salomon, G. (Ed.). (1993). Distributed cognitions: than it was when combined with one without a visu-
Psychological and educational considerations. alization component. Such results were incompat-
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ible with a single-resource view and led researchers
Divided Attention and Memory 261
to propose that humans have multichannel proces- shown consistently to produce substantial decre-
sors or pools of attention resources; it is only when ments in long-term memory performance, regardless
the same ones are required simultaneously for two of the type of distracting task used to divide atten-
tasks that performance will decline. tion. During initial encoding of information, reduc-
Marcel Kinsbourne and Robert Hicks attempted tions in general processing resources needed for
to understand the results of dual-task experiments conscious awareness, elaboration, and organization
by proposing that the degree of interference from of information have a consistent negative effect on
simultaneous tasks is an inverse function of the func- long-term memory.
tional distance between cerebral control centers. By More counterintuitive is the finding that, in the
contrast, research by Hal Pashler and his colleagues majority of research studies, DA during the retrieval
showed that competition for a central response chan- (test) phase has much less of an impact. This is unex-
nel forms a bottleneck that can account for much pected since most people allege that retrieving infor-
of the slowing that occurs when two tasks, be they mation from memorybe it the name of a movie,
memory, perception, or motor tasks, are combined. familiar face, or answer to an exam questionis
The dual-task technique has also been used to an effortful task often thwarted by distraction.
elucidate the characteristics of working memory, Whether DA at retrieval affects long-term memory
which provides temporary storage and allows the may depend on two related factors: the resource
active manipulation of information necessary for demands of the particular memory test and the
complex cognitive tasks such as arithmetic and read- type of task that is performed concurrently. As at
ing comprehension. The model of working memory encoding, effects of DA at retrieval are large, regard-
first proposed by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch less of type of concurrent task, but only when the
in 1974 was influenced by various DA experiments memory test is one that benefits from executive type
and drew its support from them. The model posits a or strategic processing. Examples of these memory
limited-capacity central executive component, which tests include recall of categorized word lists in which
coordinates operations of two subsidiary storage sorting words into groups, and later recalling the
systems, the phonological loop and visuospatial semantic categories, can boost recall of the word
sketchpad. These subsystems provide temporary list; recall that involves discriminating the source or
storage/representation for verbal and visuospatial context associated with the target memories; and
material, respectively. Support for the model came memory tests that require overcoming interference
from Robert Logies studies showing a greater dis- from other, related, items. Such large general effects
ruptive effect of unattended speech on short-term of DA at retrieval are interpreted as resulting from
memory for words or digits than on memory for competition between the distracting task and the
visuospatial information such as patterns on a visu- memory test for general cognitive resources, pre-
ally presented grid, and vice versa if the task involved sumably mediated by the frontal lobes. By contrast,
visual imagery and the interference was spatial. other memory tests such as free (random order)
recall, and cued recall in which prompts are given
Divided Attention Tasks in Long-Term to guide retrieval, rely less on executive strategic
Memory Research processes mediated by the frontal lobes and more
on direct associative ones mediated primarily by the
The DA technique has also been used to character- medial temporal lobe/hippocampus. On these mem-
ize how humans encode, and later remember, infor- ory tests, numerous studies have shown that effects
mation from the distant past, termed long-term of DA on retrieval are minimal.
memory. It is reasonably intuitive that our long-term
memories will be disrupted easily when attention
Asymmetrical Effects of Divided Attention
is divided between two tasks during learningthe
on Encoding Versus Retrieval
encoding (study) phase. For example, listening to a
conversation, watching images on a TV, or carry- The existence of an asymmetry of DA effects on
ing out numerical calculations while studying a list encoding and retrieval is unexpected on the basis
of words for a memory test all hurt later retrieval of traditional theories of memory, which posit that
of the target word list. DA at encoding has been processes implicated at encoding are recapitulated
262 Divided Attention and Memory
at retrieval. At the neural level, converging evidence task had a more detrimental effect on memory for
from functional neuroimaging in healthy people and spatial patterns than did the rhyme-distracting task,
from lesion studies in patients with brain injury also whereas the rhyme-distracting task had a more det-
support the idea that the same neural pathways acti- rimental effect on memory for words than did the
vated when information is perceived and encoded curved-line distracting task. These results show that
are again reactivated when that information is similarity in processing requirements between the
recovered. Indeed, recent work by Willem Huijbers memory and distracting task influences the magni-
and his team shows that encoding and retrieval com- tude of memory interference from DA at retrieval.
pete for common neural resources. Thus, it is unex- Notably, competition for response selection
pected that DA should create large negative effects mechanisms under extreme time pressure may also
on encoding yet produce relatively little effect on produce large interference effects on retrieval, even
retrieval. for unrelated lists of words regardless of whether
Myra Fernandes and Morris Moscovitch helped the memory task is one that requires strategic pro-
to clarify this unexpected asymmetry between cessing or not. Mark Carrier, Doug Rohrer, and
encoding and retrieval regarding the effects of DA, Hal Pashler showed that when allocation of time to
and in so doing, used the DA technique to specify processing the concurrent tasks leaves little time for
the component processes critical for retrieval. Their implementing retrieval processes, retrieval interfer-
early work showed that substantial effects of DA on ence is observed. They suggest that memory retrieval
retrieval are found when there is overlap between cannot be performed under dual-task, or DA, condi-
the material used in the concurrent tasks. That is, tions due to response-selection demands of a second-
DA effects at retrieval were said to be material spe- ary (distracting) task. Pashler and colleagues showed
cific. For example, they found that during recall of an increase in response time (RT) on cued recall
a list of unrelated words, a visually presented word- and recognition when an auditory-manual task was
monitoring distracting task produced a decrement concurrently performed that also required response
in memory of 30% from full attention conditions,
whereas an equally demanding monitoring task
1
for digit material led to a decrement of only 13%. FA
Unlike the general effect of DA observed at encoding 0.9 DA Rhyme
and during strategic retrieval, this material-specific 0.8 DA Curved-line
interference effect of DA was interpreted as result-
0.7
ing from competition between the word-based
Memory Accuracy
0
Interference Effects From DA at Retrieval
Visuospatial patterns Words
Subsequent work went on to show that DA effects Memory List
on word retrieval are similarly observed on memory
tests for spatial information. Specifically, Fernandes Figure 1 Accuracy (hit rate minus false alarm rate) for
and Emma Guild examined long-term recognition memory of visuospatial patterns and words performed
memory for words or visuospatial patterns under full under full attention (FA), divided attention (DA) rhyme,
or DA conditions with a distracting task requiring and DA curved-line conditions at retrieval
either phonological (rhyme) or visuospatial (curved Source: Fernandes and Guild (2009). Copyright 2009 by
line) processing of letters (see Figure 1). They found American Psychological Association. Reproduced by
an interaction such that the curved-line distracting permission of the American Psychological Association.
Divided Attention and Memory 263
selection. The increase in memory RT indicated that processes in perception, working memory, and long-
retrieval was postponed by the response selection term memory but also for elucidating the compo-
task. Thus, according to Pashlers work, memory nents of the processes themselves. Perhaps the most
retrieval cannot occur in parallel with other cogni- interesting finding has been the discovery that for
tive processes and must be postponed until response- some tasks, such as those involving perception and
related processing resources become available. working memory, interference from DA is material-
While this response selection/retrieval bottleneck specific, whereas for other tasks, such as encoding of
may contribute to the magnitude of the interference information into long-term memory, interference is
on memory-related responses, it may not implicate material general. Unlike effects from DA at encod-
memory retrieval processes that precede and guide ing, interference from DA at retrieval varies depend-
these responses. The other work described in this ing on the demands of the particular memory task,
entry suggests that the type of material and the type with material-general interference effects for tasks
of processing required of the competing, distracting that rely heavily on strategic processes and recollec-
task modulates these retrieval effects. tion, but material specific interference for tasks that
More recent work is now exploring other sce- are based on familiarity and rely less on retrieval
narios in which memory retrieval is disrupted by strategies.
DA. Researchers Jason Hicks and Richard Marsh
Myra Annette Fernandes and
argue that DA will disrupt memory only if control
processes are used during retrieval. They showed Morris Moscovitch
that recognition of words, presented visually during
See also Attention, Neuroimaging Studies of; Attention,
study/encoding, was unaffected by DA at retrieval, Resource Models; Memory, Interference With;
but the hit rate for words initially studied as anagrams Memory, Neural Basis; Memory Recall, Dynamics
(to be effortfully unscrambled by the participant to
reveal a word) decreased under DA conditions. The
Further Readings
authors argued that the words read intact were more
shallowly processed, and, consequently, retrieved by Allport, D. A., Antonis, B., & Reynolds, P. (1972). On the
relatively automatic memory processes unaffected division of attention: A disproof of the single channel
by DA during retrieval. In contrast, words generated hypothesis. Quarterly Journal of Experimental
from anagrams were believed to be more deeply pro- Psychology, 24, 225235.
cessed at encoding and subsequently retrieved using Carrier, L. M., & Pashler, H. (1995). Attentional limits in
more recollective-based recognition processes in memory retrieval. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
which memory for the words is accompanied by rich Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 13391348.
contextual details about the initial encoding episode. Craik, F. I. M., Govoni, R., Naveh-Benjamin, M., &
Thus, it is this enriched quality of memory that is Anderson, N. D. (1996). The effects of divided attention
more susceptible to DA effects at retrieval. Related on encoding and retrieval processes in human memory.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 125(2),
to this, new research by Erin Skinner and Fernandes
159180.
shows that recollection draws on strategic processes:
Fernandes, M. A., & Guild, E. (2009). Process-specific
Dividing attention during recognition led to errors in
interference effects during recognition of spatial patterns
recollecting details pertinent to items stored in long-
and words. Canadian Journal of Experimental
term memory, regardless of the material used in the Psychology, 66, 2432.
distracting task. Interestingly, that work also offered Fernandes, M. A., & Moscovitch, M. (2000). Divided
support for the material-specificity hypothesis, as attention and memory: Evidence of substantial interference
familiarity with studied items could be reduced by effects at retrieval and encoding. Journal of Experimental
DA at retrieval when the concurrent and memory Psychology: General, 129(2), 155176.
task used similar materials. Hicks, J. L., & Marsh, R. L. (2000). Toward specifying the
attentional demands of recognition memory. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Conclusions
Cognition, 26, 14831498.
Dividing attention has proven to be a useful tech- Huijbers, W., Pennartz, C. M., Cabeza, R., & Daselaar, S.
nique not only for showing how attention influences (2009). When learning and remembering compete: A
264 Dutch Book Arguments
functional MRI study. Public Library of Science: unfavorable. The assumption is that for every agent
Biology, 7, 6370. and every proposition, there is some number p that
Klingberg, T., & Roland, P. E. (1997). Interference between counts as her fair price for a bet on that proposi-
two concurrent tasks is associated with activation of tion. What this means is that she is willing to pay
overlapping fields in the cortex. Cognitive Brain any amount less than $p for a bet that wins her $1
Research, 6, 18. if A is true, while she will accept any amount greater
Logie, R. H. (1986). Visuo-spatial processes in working than $p for a bet that loses her $1 if A is true (or
memory. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, similarly $[100p] for a bet that pays $100). These
38A, 229247.
two actions are respectively called buying and selling
Skinner, E., & Fernandes, M. A. (2008). Interfering with
a bet on A. We typically think of gamblers buying
remembering and knowing: Effects of divided attention
bets and a casino selling them, but the Dutch book
at retrieval. Acta Psychologica, 127, 211221.
argument assumes each agent is willing to do either.
This fair price p is then said to be the agents degree
of belief in A.
DUTCH BOOK ARGUMENTS For example, lets say your degree of belief is .6
that it will rain tomorrow in Seattle. The argument
Bayesianism is a movement in epistemology and assumes that you will be willing to pay $59.99 to
the philosophy of science that suggests that beliefs place a bet where you win $100 if it rains tomorrow
come in degrees. Dutch book arguments are a type in Seattle, but you will not be willing to pay $60.01.
of argument showing that rational agents must have However, you will be willing to accept if someone
degrees of belief that obey various principles. These else pays you $60.01 to place a bet where you have to
arguments were introduced by Bruno de Finetti to give them $100 if it rains tomorrow in Seattle. This
show that for a rational agent, her degrees of belief is clearly an idealizationin some cases there will be
in various propositions must obey the three axioms a range of values at which you will be unwilling to
of probability theory. That is, every proposition has either buy or sell, while in other cases there may be
a nonnegative probability, any proposition the agent a range at which you are happy to do either. This is
is certain of has Probability 1, and the probability connected to the phenomenon of risk aversion.
of A or B is the sum of the probabilities of A and B,
if A and B are incompatible. Dutch books have also The Basic Argument
been used to establish further constraints on degrees
of belief and on how agents should update them But if we do accept this idealization, then the Dutch
over time. The basic form of the argument is to find, book argument for the three probability axioms is
for any agent who violates the proposed constraint, straightforward. An agents fair price for any bet
a set of bets that the agent finds individually favor- should never be negative, because then shed be will-
able but that collectively would guarantee that the ing to give away some money to sell a bet that could
agent loses moneythis unfavorable collection of only make her give away more money. If the agent
bets is the so-called Dutch book. This entry outlines is certain that A is true, then her price should be 1.
how Dutch book arguments work, shows how they If its lower, then shes certain she would lose more
can be used to support some of the basic tenets of than shed be willing to sell the bet for, and if higher,
Bayesianism and discusses some of the problems then shed be willing to buy it for more than she
they face. could win. Finally, if A and B are incompatible, then
her price for A or B should be the sum of her prices
for A and B. To see this, consider an example. If
Assumptions your degree of belief that Speedy will win the horse
The background of any Dutch book argument is race is .2, your degree of belief that Dasher will win
the claim that (beyond the standard propositional is .3, and your degree of belief that either Speedy
attitudes of belief, knowledge, desire, and so on) or Dasher will win is .4, then someone can be sure
there is a propositional attitude of degree of belief, to make money off you by making three bets. First,
and an assumption connecting this degree of belief you pay them $19.99 for a bet that wins you $100
to the agents evaluation of bets as favorable or if Speedy wins. Then you pay $29.99 for a bet that
Dutch Book Arguments 265
wins you $100 if Dasher wins. Then they pay you certain of be 1, the logical interpretation requires
$40.01 for a bet that costs you $100 if either Speedy that an agents degree of belief in any logical truth
or Dasher wins. At this point you have lost $9.97. be 1. Different interpretations of guarantee will give
But once the race is over, if either Speedy or Dasher rise to conclusions with different versions of the
wins, then you each pay each other $100, while no axioms for probability. The standard axioms (due
more money changes hands if a different horse wins. to Andrey Kolmogorov) describe a probability func-
Thus, no matter what happens, you lose $9.97. If tion as defined on a collection of abstract sets. The
your price for either Speedy or Dasher will win interpretation suggested here interprets the elements
had been .5 (the sum of your individual prices), then of these sets as epistemic possibilities for the agent
the person could not have made money from you. on which the proposition is true, while the logical
interpretation takes the elements to be logical pos-
sibilities on which the proposition is true.
Worries About the Argument
One worry about this argument is that it only shows
Conclusion
that an agent whose betting behavior violates the
probability axioms has financial problems and not Although there are several worries about Dutch
that she has epistemic problems. But Brian Skyrms book arguments, the basic conclusion that degrees
suggests that the Dutch book actually shows that the of belief must obey the probability axioms (in some
agent values exactly the same situation in two dif- form or other) has been supported by various other
ferent ways and is thereby incoherent. For the first arguments as well. However, there has been less inde-
two cases, this is quite clear, because she must view pendent support for the conclusions of other Dutch
the situation both as a bet that she finds favorable book arguments. (For those who are familiar with
and also as a situation in which she is guaranteed to the notions, Dutch books have been used to support
lose money. The third argument raises further issues versions of the additivity axiom with infinitely many
because it involves multiple bets. disjuncts rather than just two, as well as the Bayesian
The Skyrmsian interpretation of the Dutch book rule of learning by conditionalization, and many
argument also gives a way to avoid the problem of other supposed requirements of rationality for belief.)
risk aversion. Although there may not be any spe- The worries about Dutch books have helped clar-
cific price that divides buying and selling as required ify the nature of degrees of belief and the constraints
for the argument, David Christensen suggests that they ought to satisfy for rational agents. In the basic
an agents degrees of belief must sanction a price cases, these arguments are not the only arguments
as fair, even though the agents risk aversion pre- for the same conclusion, so the worries arent too
vents him from buying or selling in a range around troublesome. But in some cases involving infinity or
that price. Although an agent whose degrees of the change of beliefs in response to evidence, much
belief violate the probability axioms may (if hes risk work remains to be done to show that these argu-
averse) never run into financial problems, he still ments really support the claimed conclusions.
implicitly evaluates a set of bets as fair even though
Kenny Easwaran
they guarantee a loss.
One further difficulty with the interpretation of See also Allais Paradox; Belief and Judgment; Decision
Dutch book arguments is understanding what it Theory, Philosophical Perspectives
means to guarantee a loss. The argument above
interprets this as meaning that the agent herself is
certain that there would be a loss. Another popular Further Readings
interpretation is that the guarantee must be a logical Christensen, D. (1996). Dutch book arguments
guarantee of a lossnote that an agent can be certain de-pragmatized: Epistemic consistency for partial
of things that are not logically guaranteed and may believers. Journal of Philosophy, 93, 450479.
be uncertain of some logical necessities. Changing De Finetti, B. (1927). La prvision: Ses lois logiques, ses
this notion of guarantee changes the conclusion of sources subjectives [Foresight: its logical laws, its
the argumentfor instance, instead of requiring subjective sources]. Annales de lInstitut Henri Poincar,
that an agents degree of belief in something she is 7, 168.
266 Dyslexia, Acquired
make up words in languages and that roughly cor- in selecting the odd word out from a triple such as
respond to alphabetic letters. It was believed that man, pat, fan; and they have difficulty in substitut-
all languages drew on a universal phonetic inven- ing phonemes in Spoonerism tasks (e.g., Bob Dylan
tory of consonant and vowel phonemes. Linguists becomes Dob Bylan). The second is phonological
such as Janet Pierrehumbert proposed that babies memory skills. Children with dyslexia find it diffi-
actually learn language-specific phonotactic tem- cult to remember verbal sequences and show poor
plates or prosodic structures. These templates performance on standardized tests of phonologi-
are essentially phonological patterns that vary in cal memory such as nonword repetition (recalling
sound intensity, pitch, duration, and rhythm. A items such as loddernapish and thickery). The third
common template for English is a bisyllabic pattern, is rapid automatized naming (RAN). Children with
with stronger first-syllable stress (a strongweak dyslexia find it difficult to rapidly produce highly
stress template). The strong first syllable is typically familiar phonological forms such as color names,
louder, longer and higher in pitch than the second object names, digits, and letters. These three areas of
syllable. Familiar words that follow this pattern are phonological processing are usually all impaired in a
mummy, daddy, biscuit, and baby. child who has been identified as having developmen-
As demonstrated in the cross-language review of tal dyslexia.
reading development and dyslexia by Jo Ziegler and
Usha Goswami, phonological representation in a Sensory-Processing Problems?
preliterate child is different from phonological repre-
A number of sensory-processing theories have
sentation in a child who has achieved literacy. This is
attempted to explain these hallmark difficulties with
because learning to read changes the brain. Once the
phonology. Representative theories include theo-
alphabetic code has been acquired, spoken language
ries postulating auditory-processing deficits linked
processing changes fundamentally. The literate brain
to temporal cues such as Paula Tallals rapid audi-
imposes phonemes onto the sound structure of
tory processing deficit theory and Usha Goswami
speech. The preliterate brain does not. Adults who
and colleagues slower temporal modulations the-
have never learned to read perform very poorly in
ory. John Steins theory (with Vincent Walsh) postu-
phoneme awareness tasks such as phoneme deletion
lates visual-processing deficits in the magnocellular
(e.g., deleting the phoneme /t/ in stop to leave sop).
system, while Mark Seidenberg and his colleagues
Both preliterate children and illiterate adults per-
discuss difficulties with noise exclusion in percep-
form well in phonological awareness tasks based on
tual tasks, and Andrea Facoetti and colleagues sug-
larger phonological units, however, such as syllables
gest difficulties with multisensory spatial attention.
and rhymes. Hence, phonological representation
Currently, theories based on auditory temporal
prior to the teaching of literacy appears to be based
processing currently show the greatest convergence
on syllables and the subsyllabic segments of onset
across languages. However, it is logically possible
(any sounds before the vowel) and rime (the vowel
that there may be a variety of causes of dyslexia,
and any sounds that follow it). The onset-rime seg-
with some childrens primary sensory problems lying
mentation of sing, sting, and spring would be s-ing,
outside the auditory realm. It is also logically pos-
st-ing and spr-ing, respectively.
sible that a primary difficulty in the auditory system
may lead developmentally to atypical development
The Dyslexic Phenotype in other systems, such as visual or attentional sys-
tems. This would explain the wide nature of sensory
In developmental dyslexia, there is a brain-based dif- deficits that are typically found when relatively old
ficulty in representing the sound structure of speech. dyslexic children are tested.
This selective difficulty with phonology is usually
characterized by extremely poor performance in
Brain-Imaging Studies
three areas of phonological processing. The first is
phonological awareness of syllables, rhymes, and Current brain-imaging data support the consensus
phonemes. For example, children with developmen- view that the primary weakness in dyslexia involves
tal dyslexia have difficulty in counting the syllables the representation of phonological information. This
in a word such as university; they have difficulty primary weakness does not disappear with age, and
Dyslexia, Phonological Processing in 269
although phonological treatments can be effective in envelope onsets and developmental dyslexia: A new
promoting reading achievement, even well-compen- hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of
sated dyslexic adults show phonological problems Sciences of the United States of America, 99(16),
and read very slowly. Most studies reveal atypical 1091110916.
brain activation in the three important sites for read- Grigorenko, E. L., Wood, F. B., Meyer, M. S., Hart, L. A.,
ing: the left posterior temporal regions, the left infe- Speed, W. C., Shuster, A., & Pauls, D. L. (1997).
rior frontal regions, and the left occipitotemporal Susceptibility loci for distinct components of
regions. These sites suggest problems with both the developmental dyslexia on chromosomes 6 and 15.
American Journal of Human Genetics, 60, 2739.
phonological aspects of reading and with the effi-
Pierrehumbert, J. B. (2003). Phonetic diversity, statistical
cient development of a mental dictionary of word
learning, and acquisition of phonology. Language &
spellingsan orthographic lexicon. The typical
Speech, 46(23), 115154.
underactivation in the core left temporoparietal net-
Sperling, A. J., Lu, Z.-L., Manis, F. R., & Seidenberg, M. S.
works can be normalized with phonological train- (2005). Deficits in perceptual noise exclusion in
ing, and there is evidence that articulatory networks developmental dyslexia. Nature Neuroscience, 8,
may play a compensatory role. 862863.
Stein, J., & Walsh, V. (1997). To see but not to read: The
Genetic Studies magnocellular theory of dyslexia. Trends in
Developmental dyslexia is highly heritable, with Neurosciences, 20(4), 147152.
linkage studies by Elena Grigorenko and colleagues Tallal, P. (2004). Opinionimproving language and literacy
demonstrating important sites on the short arm of is a matter of time. Nature Reviews Neurosciences, 5(9),
Chromosome 6 and on Chromosome 15. Such stud- 721728.
ies depend on a dyslexic phenotype defined on the Ziegler, J. C., & Goswami, U. (2005). Reading acquisition,
basis of a phonological deficit. Genes for cognitive developmental dyslexia and skilled reading across
languages: A psycholinguistic grain size theory.
disorders are not deterministic, because reading is a
Psychological Bulletin, 131(1), 329.
culturally determined activity. Therefore, individuals
at genetic risk for dyslexia who develop in a favor-
able early environment (e.g., children with caregiv-
ers who stimulate their linguistic awareness) may DYSLEXIA, PHONOLOGICAL
be able to compensate for their genetic predisposi- PROCESSING IN
tion. However, levels of association reported so far
in behavioral and molecular genetics are not strong Developmental dyslexia is by definition a disorder
enough to translate into reliable predictors of risk of written language acquisition, despite adequate
for a single individual. Neural markers may offer an intelligence and opportunity, and in the absence of
alternative for the early identification and remedia- obvious sensory, neurological, or psychiatric disor-
tion of dyslexia. der. It primarily affects the acquisition of reading,
Usha Goswami particularly word identification and, secondarily, the
acquisition of conventional spelling.
See also Dyslexia, Acquired; Dyslexia, Phonological
Processing in; Speech Perception; Word Recognition, Underlying Causes of
Auditory; Word Recognition, Visual Developmental Dyslexia
Two main proximal causes have been considered.
Further Readings Historically, the initial hypothesis was that of a
Facoetti, A., Zorzi, M., Cestnick, L., Lorusso, M.-L., visual deficit (congenital word blindness, coined
Molteni, M., Paganoni, P., . . . Mascetti, G. G. (2006). by William Pringle-Morgan in 1896). In the 1970s,
The relationship between visual spatial attention and it became evident that what had been interpreted
nonword reading in developmental dyslexia. Cognitive as visual letter confusions were better explained
Neuropsychology, 23, 841855. by phonological confusions. Over the last three
Goswami, U., Thomson, J., Richardson, U., Stainthorp, R., decades, it has been well established that most cases
Hughes, D., Rosen, S., & Scott, S. K. (2002). Amplitude of dyslexia can be attributed to a subtle disorder
270 Dyslexia, Phonological Processing in
of oral language (the phonological deficit), with those three dimensions of course vary, leading to the
symptoms that happen to surface most prominently possibility of subtypes. Thus, the most prominent
in reading acquisition. It remains likely that a minor- symptoms of developmental dyslexia are diverse but
ity of cases of dyslexia are due to disorders in the united by their involvement of phonological repre-
visual modality, although the precise nature of the sentationshence, the consensus hypothesis of a
deficit remains unclear. The present entry focuses on phonological deficit.
cases of dyslexia with a phonological deficit.
Another important theoretical debate is whether Nature of the Phonological Deficit
the phonological deficit in dyslexia is specific to the
linguistic domain or is caused by an underlying audi- The study of the symptoms of dyslexia has led many
tory deficit. Although there is considerable evidence researchers to hypothesize that dyslexics phonologi-
that a subset of dyslexic children have difficulties in cal representations are somewhat degraded, poorly
a variety of auditory tasks, there have been impor- specified, noisy, lacking either in temporal or in
tant challenges to the view that this is the under- spectral resolution, or are insufficiently attuned to
lying cause of their phonological deficit, hence the the categories of the native language. An alternative
cause of their reading disability. Again, given that view is that phonological representations in dyslexia
both sides of the debate agree that the phonological are intrinsically normal but that the observed dif-
deficit is central to understanding dyslexia, this issue ficulties in certain (but not all) phonological tasks
will not be further discussed here. arise from a deficit in the access to these represen-
tations, a process that is particularly recruited for
Symptoms of the Phonological Deficit short-term memory, speeded retrieval, and conscious
manipulations. The precise nature of the phonologi-
There is wide agreement on the main symp- cal deficit therefore remains to be uncovered.
toms of the phonological deficit in dyslexia: They
include poor phonological awareness, poor ver-
Consequences of the Phonological Deficit
bal short-term memory, and slow lexical retrieval.
Phonological awareness refers to the realization that Beyond the observation that most dyslexic children
words are made of a combination of smaller units have some form of phonological deficit, the hypoth-
(syllables and phonemes) and to the ability to pay esis is of course that this deficit is the direct cause
attention to these units and explicitly manipulate of the reading disability. In particular, phonological
them. Typical tasks include counting the number of awareness is seen as a major cognitive prerequisite
syllables or phonemes in a word, detecting whether for the acquisition of the mappings between graph-
words rhyme, deleting the initial (or final) phoneme, emes (letters or groups of letters) and phonemes,
or performing simple spoonerisms (swapping the which themselves provide the foundation of reading
initial phonemes of two words). Verbal short-term acquisition. Verbal short-term memory and efficient
memory typically refers to the ability to retain and lexical retrieval are also thought to play a role in
immediately repeat verbal material of increasing reading acquisition. Indeed, there is ample evidence
length: sequences of two to nine digits (digit span), that these phonological skills are not only defective
nonwords of two to five syllables (nonword repe- in dyslexic children but more generally predict read-
tition), or even sequences of nonwords (nonword ing ability, both in dyslexic and in normally devel-
span). Finally, lexical retrieval refers to the ability oping children. However, it has been shown that
to quickly retrieve the phonological forms of words reading acquisition itself improves phonological
from long-term memory. In the context of dys- skills so that correlations between the two dimen-
lexia research, this is tested by having participants sions do not unambiguously indicate the direction
name series of 50 objects, colors, or digits as fast of causation. The differences in phonological skills
as possible (rapid automatized naming). Dyslexic between dyslexic and control children could simi-
children are typically found to have poor phono- larly be interpreted as resulting from their different
logical awareness (particularly phoneme awareness), levels of reading ability. Indeed, illiterate adults who
reduced short-term memory span, and slow autom- didnt have an opportunity to learn to read have also
atized naming, although individual profiles along been found to show poor phonological skills.
Dyslexia, Phonological Processing in 271
More definitive evidence for the causal connec- See also Dyslexia, Developmental; Eye Movements
tion between poor phonological skills (and in par- During Reading; Language Development; Word
ticular poor phonological awareness) and dyslexia Learning; Word Recognition, Auditory
has come from several additional lines of enquiry.
In many studies, dyslexic children have been shown
to have poorer phonological skills, not only than Further Readings
normal readers of the same age but also than Lyytinen, H., Aro, M., Eklund, K., Erskine, J., Guttorm, T.,
younger children who have the same reading level. Laakso, M. L., . . . Torppa, M. (2004). The
Furthermore, longitudinal studies beginning before development of children at familial risk for dyslexia:
reading acquisition have established that phono- Birth to early school age. Annals of Dyslexia, 54(2),
logical skills predict reading ability several years 184220.
ahead and that the phonological deficit is present Ramus, F., & Szenkovits, G. (2008). What phonological
in would-be dyslexic children even before they learn deficit? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,
to read. Finally, a few longitudinal studies starting 61(1), 129141.
from birth, using both behavioral methods and Shaywitz, S. E. (2003). Overcoming dyslexia. New York,
event-related potentials, have established that the NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
phonological deficit may have precursors already in Snowling, M. J. (2000). Dyslexia (2nd ed.). Oxford, UK:
the first year of life, in the form of poor categoriza- Basil Blackwell.
tion or discrimination of speech sounds. Vellutino, F. R., Fletcher, J. M., Snowling, M. J., &
In summary, there is overwhelming evidence that Scanlon, D. M. (2004). Specific reading disability
a phonological deficit is a proximal cause of reading (dyslexia): What have we learned in the past four
disability in at least a majority of dyslexic children. decades? Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry,
The precise nature of this deficit remains to be fully 45(1), 240.
Wagner, R. K., & Torgesen, J. K. (1987). The nature of
understood, and its neural and genetic bases are also
phonological processing and its causal role in the
under intense scrutiny.
acquisition of reading skills. Psychological Bulletin, 101,
Franck Ramus 192212.
E
ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICAL STUDIES and MEG and thus bootstraps a physiological lexi-
con of the mind.
OF MIND Because they measure directly and instanta-
neously the currents that perform information
Intracellular neural currents carry inhibition and processing in the human brain, EEG and MEG
excitation from the synapses where neurons commu- have a temporal and physiological accuracy that
nicate to where they decide whether to fire. Those hemodynamic measures, such as positron emis-
same currents give rise directly to the magnetic fields sion tomography (PET) and functional magnetic
measured by the magnetoencephalogram (MEG); resonance imaging (fMRI), lack. However, EEG and
the equal but opposite extracellular return currents MEG have other problems. First, it is impossible to
instantaneously cause potential differences between localize with certainty from extracranial measures
locations on the scalp, which are measured by the where they are generated in the brain. This not only
electroencephalogram (EEG) (Figure 1). The EEG renders problematic the interpretation of ER with
and MEG thus directly and instantaneously reflect respect to neural systems; it also deprives compo-
the computational currents used by the information- nents of an unambiguous defining characteristic and
processing mechanisms of the human brain. thus makes component-based analysis somewhat
Consequently, the EEG and MEG have a sys- circular. Second, most of the information-processing
tematic relationship to different aspects of mental currents cannot be recorded at a distance because
activity, including higher mental functions such as of spatiotemporal cancellation. Action potentials are
attention, orienting, memory, language, face percep- not recorded at all, nor are currents from interneu-
tion, action, error correction, reanalysis, and clo- rons. EEG and MEG arise mainly from relatively
sure. Typically, these relationships are revealed by slow and synchronized currents in the apical den-
averaging the EEG or MEG with respect to repeated drites of pyramidal cells. Third, the polarity of the
cognitive events, yielding event-related potentials EEG or MEG signal does not tell us whether the
(ERP) and event-related fields (ERF), or generically, underlying neural activity is excitatory or inhibitory.
evoked responses (ER). Across thousands of studies, To some degree, these difficulties can be ameliorated
it has been observed that ERs can be described as by combining information from PET or fMRI with
a series of positive and negative peaks with char- that of EEG and MEG, within the context of indi-
acteristic latencies, scalp topographies, and cogni- vidual brain anatomy provided by structural MRI.
tive correlates. These regularly occurring clusters of In certain clinical situations, it is possible to record
mental and physical characteristics have been reified potentials directly within the human brain, yielding
as named components. This approach provides a very high spatial, temporal, and physiological accu-
vocabulary for communicating discoveries in EEG racy; such measures can be used to infer the location
273
274 Electrophysiological Studies of Mind
gencurre ar
era nt
A B
llul
ME s
G
te
ace
extracellular
r
int
current
generates
EEG
ma
gn
etic
flu
x
cor
tica MEG flux contour lines at 400 ms to
l py
ram I like my coffee with bolts minus
ida I like my coffee with sugar.
l ce
ll
Figure 1 (A) Charges entering at a synapse flow inside the apical dendrite of a pyramidal cell. This current (narrow
arrow inside apical dendrite) generates the MEG. The extracellular return current (thick, darker arrow) results in voltage
differences at distant sites, which is the EEG. (B) MEG is measured with superconducting quantum interference devices
(SQUIDs, marked with square boxes) that are kept near absolute zero in liquid helium. EEG is measured with ordinary
voltage amplifiers.
Note: Environmental magnetic fields are about a million times stronger than MEG, which thus must be recorded within an
expensive, shielded room; EEG does not require any shielding.
and physiological meaning of EEG and MEG com- by auditory stimulation and is more visible in MEG
ponents recorded in healthy subjects. than EEG. More generally, rhythms in this domain
Unlike hemodynamic measures that allow a are suppressed by both heightened alertness and by
modern physiological phrenology correlating brain drowsiness. They seem to indicate a state of readi-
locations with mental functions, cognitive ER com- ness in the generating cortex and may modulate
ponents are best thought of as embodying distrib- information processing.
uted cortical information processing modes. It seems It is hypothesized that all parts of the cortex can
that there are only a limited number of such modes generate alpha. The neural circuitry underlying the
and that they occur not only during ER but also dur- alpha is not known but is thought to be the same as
ing the spontaneous brain activity associated with that of the sleep spindle. The sleep spindle consists
sleep and waking, when they can be recognized as of a burst of 10 to 16 Hz activity lasting about a
named EEG or MEG rhythms. In many cases, ER second, occurring hundreds of times every night
result from stimulus-evoked, phase locking of these during Stage 2 of non-rapid eye movement (NREM)
rhythms. sleep (i.e., sleep without vivid, elaborated dreams).
The function of sleep spindles is not known, but
Rhythms and Their Brain States they have been implicated in declarative memory
consolidation. When thalamic cells are hyperpo-
Alpha
larized during sleep, intrinsic membrane currents
The earliest observations of EEG noted the pres- are activated that support burst-suppression firing
ence of a prominent posterior rhythm at about 10 at alpha frequency. This rhythmic firing is rein-
hertz (Hz) that is suppressed by mental effort or forced by an internal thalamic network between
opening the eyes. This alpha rhythm in the visual the thalamocortical projection cells and neurons of
modality has a counterpart in the somatosensory the thalamic reticular nucleus. Alpha frequencies
and motor domain termed the mu rhythm, which are projected from the thalamus to the cortex, but
is suppressed by movement and extends to frequen- the return corticothalamic projection is necessary
cies around 20 Hz. A homologous rhythm in the to synchronize the alpha across the thalamocortical
auditory cortex named the tau rhythm is suppressed network.
Electrophysiological Studies of Mind 275
There are two thalamocortical systems. The core inputs from higher associative cortex and modula-
system relays specific information; the matrix system tory thalamic systems. Thus, the human cortical
synchronizes cortical domains. Each core thalamo- theta may represent an alternating predominance
cortical neuron makes strong synapses in narrowly of external (sensory) and internal (associative) influ-
focused cortical areas; each matrix neuron makes ences on local information processing.
modulatory synapses in widespread cortical areas.
It appears that MEG spindles reflect mainly the Gamma
core system, whereas EEG spindles reflect mainly It is important to distinguish between two kinds
the matrix system. Current evidence suggests that of gamma activity. Gamma oscillations are confined
the core thalamocortical system generates the alpha, to a fairly narrow frequency band that, for any given
but the matrix system may also contribute. instance, may be somewhere between 30 Hz and 80
Hz (or even up to 200 Hz in pathological situations).
Delta Gamma oscillations seem to arise from the synchro-
During deeper stages (3 and 4) of NREM sleep, nous firing of networks of inhibitory interneurons.
the brain alternates every second between near elec- Primary sensory cortices are especially prone to
trical silence because of inward potassium currents, generating such oscillations, which in animals may
called down-states, and cortico-cortical activity provide envelopes of cortico-cortical interaction and
levels close to those of active waking, or up-states. have been hypothesized to play a role in binding (the
This alternation is known in animals as the slow creation of transcortical, resonant cell assemblies
oscillation and in humans as delta or slow wave embodying the various aspects of mental events).
activity. The function of the slow oscillation is again The other kind of gamma activity is broadband.
unknown, but the repeated rebooting of consistent It extends from less than 10 to over 1,000 Hz, and
sequences of cortical neuronal firing during the its power declines approximately as the square of
transition from the down-state to the up-state has the frequency. It represents integrated synaptic
been hypothesized to consolidate their continued activity, with increasing contributions from action
association in waking. During Stage 2 NREM sleep, potentials at higher frequencies. Thus, it is a faith-
an isolated down-state termed the K-complex can be ful measure of the amount of local neural activation
evoked by sensory stimuli that do not wake up the and is strongly correlated with fMRI activation.
subject. Special caution should be taken in gamma
recordings to eliminate contamination from non-
Theta neural sources. Gamma power can be over 1,000
times weaker than power in low frequencies. Muscle
In felines and rodents, the theta rhythm, around activity or micromovements of the eyes are in the
8 Hz, is most prominent in the hippocampus dur- same frequency range as gamma but often have
ing instrumental movement and alert attention. much larger amplitude.
Theta modulates neuronal firing and gamma activ-
ity, and theta phase is related to movement of the
animal through its allocentric cognitive map. In Components
humans, hippocampal theta is less prominent and
A Matter of Definition
more difficult to distinguish from pathological activ-
ity. However, intracranial recordings do support ERP components are commonly defined by their
its presence and its relationship with theta in asso- topography, latency, and cognitive correlates. For
ciation cortex, especially during declarative memory example, the P3 (or P300) is commonly defined
retrieval. It may also be related to sustained working as a positive potential recorded at the top of the
memory operations, where a frontal midline theta is head, peaking at about 300 ms (milliseconds) after
evoked. The cortical theta comprises synaptic cur- stimulus onset, and larger to rare events. However,
rents rhythmically alternating between the middle this definition is inadequate because the P3 can be
and upper cortical layers. Middle cortical layers recorded with other measurement modalities, at
receive inputs from lower level sensory cortex and other locations, at other latencies, and in other cog-
specific thalamic relays. Upper cortical layers receive nitive circumstances. Furthermore, it is clear that the
276 Electrophysiological Studies of Mind
scalp P3 actually is a superposition of different brain and been subjected to controlled processing. P3b
states, and conversely, that brain states not associ- onset occurs at about the same latency as the speci-
ated with the P3 can contribute to scalp potentials at fication of the subjects response, suggesting that the
300 ms latency. To avoid these difficulties, this entry P3b begins when event-encoding activities are sub-
will consider components as particular brain states stantially complete and the brain is ready to move on
rather than as shorthand for particular sensorvalues. to its next task, updating the contents and instruc-
When referring to the measurement, a prefix will be tions in the mental workspace as well as entering
added to the component name indicating the record- the conclusions of the event-encoding process into
ing location or modality. working and declarative memories.
These activities are centered in the interaction
Orienting and Closure: P3 of ventral temporofrontal event-encoding cortices
and Related Components (inferotemporal, perirhinal, and ventrolateral pre-
The P3 indexes at least three generic neurocogni- frontal), association cortices (superior temporal sul-
tive brain states. One state continues earlier modal- cal and posterior parietal), and the hippocampus,
ity-specific processing in the auditory, visual, and where the P3b is generated. Updating may reflect
somatosensory association cortices. A second, the top-down associative circuits that activate GABAb
P3a, is related to the orientation of attention. A third and NMDA receptors in upper cortical layers
state, embodied in the P3b, updates and closes cog- shared with the theta described above. Closure
nitive contextual integration (see below). Typically, may be implemented with voltage-gated potassium
the scalp P3 reflects the superposition of the P3a, channels, as in cortical down-states. Cholinergic
which peaks earlier, and the P3b, which peaks later. and monoaminergic projections are likely to act
The P3a is evoked by rare target and distracter indirectly on thalamus and cortex to encourage the
stimuli, regardless of whether they are overtly different P3 states.
attended. It is only weakly evoked by abstract seman- The P3s are preceded by various components that
tic operations, but instead is evoked by stimuli that generally do not require attention and are modal-
demand processing because of their potential biologi- ity specific. Notable among these is the mismatch
cal significance. It is not modality specific but is more negativity (MMN) evoked by deviant stimuli in a
easily evoked by auditory than visual stimuli, pre- rapid auditory stream and used extensively to study
sumably reflecting their greater ability to elicit orient- the formation and contents of preconscious auditory
ing. Such stimuli also evoke the orienting response, memory. Spatial and cross-modal selective attention
typically measured as various autonomic phenom- both modulates early components and superimposes
ena, including the skin conductance response, which a negativity termed the N2pc. Although controver-
can be highly correlated with the P3a. sial, most evidence indicates that the earliest com-
The P3a is generated in areas that support spa- ponents in primary cortex are not modulated. When
tial attention, including the dorsolateral, prefrontal, the P3b terminates a sustained cognitive context,
and supramarginal cortices, as well as the cingulate that context is often marked by a negativity, the con-
and other paralimbic cortices. Additional weaker tingent negative variation (CNV), which may reflect
diffuse activation may represent the widespread sustained cell firing supporting the maintenance of
polling of cortical areas to arrive at a rapid evalu- items in the mental scratchpad.
ation of the stimulus. The frequency content of the
Material Specific Encoding, Semantic
triphasic sharp waveform that contains the P3a, its
Associations, Syntax, and Reprocessing
cortical distribution, and its close relationship to
attention suggest that it may be generated by the Semantically meaningful stimuli, symbols that
thalamocortical circuits that generate alpha and provide an entry point to rich learned associa-
spindles (see above). tions, evoke a characteristic series of components
The P3b is evoked by stimuli in all modalities and embodying first, template matching, then semantic
even by the absence of an expected stimulus. It only associations, and finally, if necessary, reanalysis.
occurs to attended, task-relevant stimuli. Indeed, the Template-matching components have been mainly
P3b is present if, and only if, independent behavioral studied in the visual modality where they peak at
data show that the stimulus has reached awareness approximately 170 ms in small specialized patches
Eliminative Materialism 277
of the posterior fusiform gyrus: the visual word form markers to words and their articulation, are gener-
area on the left and the fusiform face area mainly on ated in Brocas area prior to speech, but they have
the right. The N170 (N indicates that its a negative- not been studied extracranially.
going voltage peak) encompasses bursts of units fir-
ing gamma, which are projected to the middle layers
Conclusion
of widespread temporofrontal association areas at
approximately 200 ms. This entry has first reviewed the named EEG or
This material-specific template matching deter- MEG rhythms and their associated brain states, and
mines if the stimulus is potentially symbolic or then has discussed the cognitive correlates and neural
semantic, and if so, encodes it and triggers an N400. generators of the major cognitive ER components.
The N400 appears to reflect associative cortico- These phenomena provide a lexicon for the physi-
cortical synaptic currents in upper cortical layers ology of minda means to relate synaptic activity,
of classical language areas (Wernickes and Brocas) neural circuits, and cortical areas to cognitive infor-
as well as the ventral temporal language area, with mation processing.
weaker activity in contralateral and occipitotem-
Eric Halgren
poral sites. Neuronal firing specific for individual
words, people, or semantic categories occur in these See also Attention, Neuroimaging Studies of; Sleep and
areas during the N400. N400s to visual or auditory Dreams
words are generated in mainly overlapping cortical
areas. Once evoked, N400 amplitude is decreased if
Further Readings
contextual information facilitates integration of the
stimulus with the cognitive context. Modulation is Cohen, D., & Halgren, E. (2009).
effective across different sensory modalities, memory Magnetoencephalography. In L. Squires (Ed.),
systems, and semantic domains, suggesting that the Encyclopedia of neuroscience (vol. 5, pp. 615622).
N400 embodies an abstract network interrelating New York, NY: Academic.
these diverse realms. Dale, A. M., & Halgren, E. (2001). Spatiotemporal
Although semantically deep, the N400 provides mapping of brain activity by integration of multiple
rapid associations that may lead to erroneous inter- imaging modalities. Current Opinion in Neurobiology,
pretations. When this happensfor example, during 11, 202208.
garden-path sentences and punsa P600 is evoked, Luck, S. J. (2005). An introduction to the event-related
engaging cingulate and right dorsolateral prefron- potential technique. Boston, MA: MIT Press.
tal as well as language cortices. Complex syntactic Marinkovic, K. (2004). Spatiotemporal dynamics of word
processing in the human cortex. The Neuroscientist, 10,
anomalies can also evoke a P600, whereas word
142152.
category or phase structure violations can evoke
an early left anterior negativity (ELAN) at approxi-
mately 200 ms.
ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM
Response Generation and Monitoring
Prior to movement, perhaps prior even to the This philosophical doctrine is simultaneously opti-
intention to move, a slowly rising negativity termed mistic and pessimistic. First, it is decidedly optimis-
the readiness potential (RP) or bereitschaftspotential tic that the explanatory resources of psychology and
(BP) is generated in premotor and supplementary the several neurosciences will eventually provide an
motor cortices. Just before the movement, the RP exhaustive (physical) account of all mental phenom-
begins to rise sharply over the active motor cortex, ena. In this modest respect, the view lines up with
producing the lateralized readiness potential (LRP). the more familiar forms of philosophical material-
If the response has been in error, a sharp error- ism, such as reductive materialism (i.e., the mind-
related negativity (ERN) peaking approximately brain identity theory) and functionalism. Second, it
100 ms after response onset is generated in anterior is sharply distinguished from these views by being
cingulate and related cortices. Other components, pessimistic that the scientific account thereby pro-
related to the attachment of morphosyntactic vided will preserve, vindicate, or explain the familiar
278 Eliminative Materialism
categories so central to our current commonsense displayed, again, nontrivial explanatory virtues, but
or folk psychologycategories such as believes that it was eventually displaced by the oxidation theory
P, desires that Q, perceives that R, decides that S, of combustion and rusting, a theory that said both
and so forth, where the variables P, Q, R, and so processes involved not the release of something, but
on, stand in for some declarative sentence or other. the ingestion of something: oxygen. Phlogiston was
Instead, the eliminative materialist expects those thus eliminated from our ontology entirely and was
categories, so central to our everyday explanatory replaced by the various elements, compounds, and
and predictive practices, to be superseded by, and transformations of Lavoisiers new chemistry.
eventually eliminated in favor of, a new set of cat- These cases exemplify the sort of conceptual
egories provided by a successful scientific account revolution anticipated by the eliminative material-
of the real kinematics and dynamics of brain ist, but a standard objection is that they are drawn
activity. The central claim is that the propositional from the theoretical stratosphere rather than from
attitudesas philosophers have come to call them the realm of commonsense observables. Can we
are not the fundamental elements of cognition, nor really assimilate the manifest states of our own
are they the true causal determinants of human and consciousness to states that are plainly theoretical?
animal behavior. In fact, the claim continues, strictly The eliminativist replies that people at the time took
speaking, they dont even exist, despite the assump- caloric fluid flow to be eminently observable. Place
tions of common sense. In time, then, the vocabu- a warm stone (or a snowball) in your hand: The
lary that purports to describe them will eventually inflow (or outflow) of caloric was manifest, to the
be eliminated from our explanatory practices. touch, to anyone who possessed the concept. Even
the evanescent phlogiston could be seen leaping
skyward from any fire.
Proposed Illustrative Parallels
These historical examples are all very well, it
The sort of conceptual revolution here contemplated is commonly objected, but why should we expect
is said to have numerous instances in our intellectual that a similar fate awaits the various propositional
history. For example, in the 17th and 18th centu- attitudes, those representational and computa-
ries, classical thermodynamics spoke systematically tional vehicles so central to our folk psychological
of a fluid substance called caloric, supposed to be descriptions and explanations? What comparatively
responsible for all thermal phenomena. Caloric was devastating defects allegedly loom that portend a
said to flow from body to body, was constrained comparably revolutionary fate?
under pressure, participated in chemical reactions,
and made steam engines goit was thought. But
The Presumed Defects in Our
despite its nontrivial explanatory and predictive vir-
Current Folk Psychology
tues, caloric theory became plagued with explana-
tory and predictive failures, and it was eventually Here the eliminative materialist alleges a number
displaced, in the late 1800s, by statistical mechan- of problems. The first worry concerns our folk
ics, a much superior theory that identified heat with psychologys essential reliance on the structural
the motions of submicroscopic molecules rather elements of human languagenamely, the end-
than with a macroscopic fluid substance. Caloric less varieties of declarative sentences that give the
theory simply could not be squared with this new propositional attitudes both their representational
account of the reality underlying thermal phenom- content and their inferential roles within cogni-
ena. Caloric fluid was therefore eliminated from our tion. The problem is said to be that only humans
scientific ontology and from our explanatory prac- display a command of those linguistic structures.
tices. The micromechanical framework simply took No other creature seems able to learn them. And
its place. yet nonhuman animals are no less cognitive crea-
A second alleged parallel concerns the alchemi- tures than we are. They plainly learn, perceive, solve
cal substance phlogiston, long supposed to be the complex problems, anticipate the future, and display
principal element released into the atmosphere dur- highly intelligent behavior. But whatever is going on
ing the burning of any combustible substance or the inside their heads would seem not to be a dance of
rusting of any metal. This pre-Lavoisieran theory sentence-like states, as we commonly suppose to be
Eliminative Materialism 279
taking place inside ours. In sum, it is complained, we vector/matrix processors rather than as sentence
humans seem to have seized upon an idiosyncratic coders and inference-drawing processors. Sentential
form of interpersonal communication, unique to our processing, even for us, would appear to be a deeply
own species, as the model for conceiving the basic secondary or tertiary cognitive skill. This conclusion
elements and operations of cognitive activity for all is consistent with the very high levels of cognitive
the creatures on the planet. skill retained by humans who suffer left-brain global
A second worry derives from our growing sci- aphasia, a familiar malady in which the parts of
entific understanding of how the microstructure of the brain specifically devoted to language process-
brains generally, ours included, actually does sup- ing (roughly, Brocas area and Wernickes area) are
port the activities of representation and computa- selectively destroyed by stroke. These people can-
tion. Experiments in vivo and computer models of not process or manipulate linguistic structures (i.e.,
artificial neural networks both indicate that any propositional attitudes) at all, but their overall cog-
given brain area represents a fleeting reality with a nition is little impaired.
fleeting pattern of activation levels across its entire A third area of worry for the propositional atti-
neuronal population. This is called population cod- tude core of folk psychology concerns its broad
ing or high-dimensional vector coding, and given range of explanatory failures. We spend at least a
the number of neurons typically involved (in the third of our lives asleep, but folk psychology has no
millions), it is extraordinarily powerful. It also has account of what sleep is or why all cognitive crea-
nothing to do with sentences. tures should need it. The nature of mental illness, in
The same experiments indicate that the brain its many forms, remains a mystery from within the
computes (i.e., performs transformations on its kinematics and dynamics of folk psychology. Things
representations) by sending the activation pattern as diverse as autism and schizophrenia receive no
of one population of neurons through a matrix of worthwhile explanation from within folk psychol-
synapses that connect that population to a second, ogy: not of their causes, nor of their natures, nor
receiving population. Those many millions of syn- of their cures. Sigmund Freud famously attempted
apses effect a principled transformation of the initial a story of unconscious propositional attitudes to
activation pattern into a new and different pattern address the wide-ranging phenomena of mental ill-
now displayed across the second neuronal popula- ness, but that story failed utterly to explain the two
tion. This is called parallel distributed processing, severe maladies just mentioned, it was based on no
and it displays prodigious computational powers, systematic experimental testing, and it has since
for it performs many millions of elementary com- proved to be a therapeutic bust.
putations (one at each participating synapse) simul- Our capacity to learnnew concepts, new behav-
taneously and all at once. It is arguably a form of iors, new cognitive skillsalso remains a profound
inference, perhaps, but it too has nothing to do with mystery from within folk psychology. The common
sentence-like structures. suggestion that we are all memorizing sentences
Moreover, the learning of conceptual frameworks and discursive rules does not stand scrutiny. This
and perceptual capacities appears to consist in the is for many reasons, but foremost among them is the
gradual adjustment of the overall configuration of mystery of memory itself as seen from within folk
the synaptic strengths and synaptic connections that psychology. The familiar filing cabinet metaphor
join any neuronal population to any other. Those (i.e., a massive store of sentences) fails to account
adjustments appear to be effected by a microlevel for how we retrieve, almost instantly, the locally rel-
process called Hebbian learning, a process sensitive evant information. It also fails to account for how
to the temporal coincidence of distinct excitations such prodigious storage might be realized in the
arriving at the synapses onto a common target brain in the first place.
neuron. Once again, propositional attitudes seem Our capacity for creative imagination and the
entirely absent from the process. basis of intelligence differences between individuals
In all, concludes the eliminative materialist, are both utterly mysterious from the perspective of
the portrait of cognitive activity contemplated by folk psychology. And these two featuressimilar
modern neuroscience paints all terrestrial cognitive to sleep, mental illness, learning, and memoryare
creatures, humans included, as vector coders and hardly peripheral cognitive phenomena. They are
280 Eliminative Materialism
core dimensions of cognition. The failures here are theory to begin with, it neednt be threatened by the
not peripheral; they are central. sorts of empirical failures cited above, even if they
A fourth worry arises from the massive perfor- are real. This popular response plays down the pre-
mance failures of the research program of classical dictive and explanatory functions of our folk frame-
artificial intelligence (AI), a research program that work for mental states and plausibly emphasizes
aimed to re-create human and animal cognitive its many social, normative, and practical functions
capacities by programming digital computers to instead.
manipulate various sentence-like states accord- A further, and independent, challenge to elimina-
ing to structure sensitive rules. These digital/serial tive materialism concerns the identity and charac-
machines were deliberately built so as to realize pre- ter of the millennial conceptual framework that is
cisely the kind of cognitive kinematics and dynam- expected to supplant our current framework in all its
ics portrayed in folk psychology. Being electronic, many functions. If our current self-conception is an
they also had a millionfold speed advantage over outright mistake (we have a right to ask), what alter-
biological brains. Yet they proved to be surpris- native conception might actually replace it? Here
ingly inept and disappointingly slow at most of the the eliminative materialist must concede at least a
cognitive skills displayed by biological brains. If we temporary embarrassment, for the several cognitive
construe that failed research program as a test of neurosciences are still a long way from complet-
the hypothesis that high-level cognition consists in ing a theory that might be equal to this genuinely
the manipulation of sentence-like states according to demanding task.
structure-sensitive inference rules, then we are here In purely scientific contexts, the vector-coding,
looking at a presumptive refutation of that hypoth- matrix-processing story sketched above may well
esis. Thought, it would seem, doesnt work that way. mature into a general theory of the real nature of all
A fifth and final worry is based on a historical biological cognition. It paints a very different picture
induction. So many of humankinds past theories of the basic nature of representation and computa-
and conceptions of natural phenomena have proved tion within the brain, and it might help us reconceive
to be completely cockeyed: Think of the stories the many other dimensions of cognitive activity as
embraced in antiquity concerning the nature and well, much to our explanatory, predictive, norma-
causes of motion, the structure and makeup of the tive, and manipulative advantage. A parallel result,
heavens, the nature of life, the nature and causes of note well, has already happened in the domain of
disease, the age and origins of the Earth, the behav- our hidden metabolic and biochemical activities
ior of the oceans, and the causes of storms. Given and in our scientific grasp of and control over the
that we were so utterly wrong about all these promi- avowedly normative matter of our health. The four
nent phenomena, runs the argument, why expect humors, the lan vital, and the sundry malevolent
that we would correctly apprehend the essential spirits of medieval medicine have been entirely elimi-
activity of the biological brain, something far more nated from our modern medical ontology. We now
complicated than any of the phenomena just listed? speak regularly of bacteria, viruses, cancers, and
Folk psychology, alone among the folk theories of other microbiological and biochemical matters.
antiquity, survives unchanged to this day and still In social contexts, however, it is much harder to
constitutes our bedrock conception of what cogni- predict what will happen. Conceivably we might
tion consists in. But what are the chances that we someday learn to speak systematically of popula-
got that one right, when we got all the other ones so tion-coding vectors and vectorial transformations
wrong? within our brains, even at the dinner table and in
the marketplace. But this is not immediately plau-
sible. On the other hand, humankind has embraced
Some Criticisms of Eliminative Materialism
new conceptual frameworks before, sometimes
A common response to the preceding considerations eagerly. For example, the Freudian psychoanalytic
is simply to resist the assimilation of our folk psy- framework invaded the conversational vocabulary
chological conceptual framework to a theory and of 20th-century Europe and America, even though
thereby to free it from the evaluative demands that it lacked any genuine scientific credentials. The
an acceptable theory must meet. After all, if it isnt a eliminative materialist leaves off by urging us, if only
Embarrassment 281
in hope, to consider what a framework with real expectations governing behavior. Based on this the-
muscle might do. Reflect once more on the example ory, embarrassment is not due to a person worrying
of modern medicine. about making a bad impression per se but rather is
due to not knowing how to behave. Research sug-
Paul M. Churchland
gests that a single theory probably is not adequate to
See also Folk Psychology; Idealism; Mind-Body Problem;
account for all incidents of embarrassment and that
Realism and Instrumentalism; Reductive Physicalism both of these accounts have merit.
Development of Embarrassment
Further Readings
Embarrassment develops later than many emotions
Churchland, P. M. (1981). Eliminative materialism and
(such as anger, fear, and jealousy), usually emerg-
propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy, 78(2),
ing between 15 and 24 months of life. It appears
6790.
Hannan, B. (1993). Dont stop believing: The case against
to require that a child has some clear knowledge of
eliminative materialism. Mind & Language, 8, 165179.
the self (e.g., shows the ability to recognize that the
Horgan, T., & Woodward, J. (1985). Folk psychology is reflection in the mirror is of the self). The impor-
here to stay. Philosophical Review, 94(2), 197226. tance of the awareness of the self is inherent in the
common description of embarrassment as a self-
conscious emotion.
EMBARRASSMENT Functions of Embarrassment
Embarrassment is an emotion that arises in social Relative to living alone, group living provides many
contexts or when thinking of social situations. The advantages but also has its challenges. According
experience of embarrassment is subjectively unpleas- to several theorists, embarrassment evolved as an
ant and is accompanied by distinct physiological and instrument to help undo or prevent negative social
behavioral changes. In some situations, the desire to consequences in situations where a person has unin-
avoid embarrassment can lead to negative personal tentionally violated a social norm. The basic premise
and social consequences. However, embarrassment is that those who experienced and expressed distress
can also serve important beneficial social functions over concerns with others impressions of them were
and may have evolved to do so. more likely to survive as reproductive members of
the group than those who acted with disregard for
others opinions. Disregard for others reactions
Accounts of Embarrassment
might have led one to be ostracized from the group
There are two prominent accounts of what triggers or perhaps even killed.
embarrassment. According to the social evaluation Embarrassment likely has three basic functions.
model, embarrassment is elicited by the anticipa- First, it serves as an appeasement gesture to others
tion of negative evaluation by others. People become by signaling that the violation was unintended and
embarrassed when they perceive that the social that it will not likely occur again. Second, the intense
image they want to project has been undermined dread of experiencing this emotion likely deters one
and that others are forming negative impressions of from repeating whatever behavior triggered the
them. However, this model does not readily account emotion. Third, embarrassment motivates an indi-
for all cases of embarrassment. For example, embar- vidual to undo the social damage and restore the
rassment can occur in situations that are entirely regard of others.
positive and that do not reflect negatively on the Findings from several studies are consistent with
self in any way, such as when friends sing Happy such functional accounts. For example, displaying
Birthday to You. embarrassment after an accidental mishap can lead
According to another view, the awkward interac- to one being liked more and to children being pun-
tion or dramaturgic account, embarrassment arises ished less by their mothers, which provides some
when one anticipates the disruption of smooth social support for the theory that embarrassment is akin
interaction or when one is unclear about the social to an appeasement gesture, triggering a positive
282 Embarrassment
response in onlookers. Research has also found that at risk. For example, fear of embarrassment may
embarrassment can motivate individuals to engage be involved in the frequent failure of onlookers to
in more prosocial behaviors such as volunteering. intervene during potential emergency situations. The
Other research suggests that expressions of embar- bystander fears looking foolish if he or she responds
rassment may have a cathartic effect. For example, as if the situation is a crisis and then turns out to be
people who were given the opportunity to show wrong. Failing to take action in such situations is
their embarrassment got over it more quickly than irrational. The price paid for not taking action in an
those who were not given such an opportunity. actual emergency far outweighs the minor cost of
Thus, although people dislike showing embarrass- looking silly if the situation is not an emergency. Yet
ment, it may be that once embarrassment is trig- people often wait to respond.
gered, it is difficult to stop feeling uncomfortable Fear of embarrassment also contributes to
until they behave in a functionally appropriate unsafe sexual practices, such as failure to obtain
manner. Further evidence for this idea comes from and use condoms, and dissuades many people from
work that finds that people are particularly likely getting medically recommended exams such as pap
to engage in apologies or acts of remediation after smears, mammograms, and colonoscopies. Some
doing something embarrassing. recent research suggests embarrassment serves as
an obstacle in medical situations far broader than
Nonverbal Expressions and Physiology just awkward medical exams. Despite being wor-
Embarrassment is accompanied by somewhat dis- ried about a potentially serious symptom, one third
tinct nonverbal expressions and physiological indi- of an adult sample reported that they had failed
ces that unfold in a unique fashion over time. The or delayed to seek medical care to avoid looking
embarrassment expression often includes touch- silly if the symptom turned out to have a trivial
ing ones face, frequent gaze shifts, looking down, cause. The symptoms that were most frequently
smiling, and attempts to control or inhibit the smile mentioned in these cases were those that might
(e.g., by pressing the lips together). The smiling that indicate cardiac distress (e.g., chest pain). Delaying
occurs during embarrassment appears different from medical care in such circumstances is especially
that of amusement. During amusement, two muscles unwise since the negative effects of heart attacks
are simultaneously contracted: the zygomatic major, can be greatly reduced by thrombolytic agents and
which pulls the corners of the mouth up, and the emergency angioplasty. However, such procedures
orbicularis oculi, which crinkles the skin around the require rapid treatment to be effective. Thus, it
eyes (often called the Duchenne smile). In contrast, appears likely that delaying or not seeking medi-
during embarrassment, the lips turn up without the cal attention because of fear of embarrassment may
crinkling of the eyes. Blushing frequently occurs dur- be a substantial cause of avoidable morbidity and
ing embarrassment, starting with a sharp increase of mortality.
blood flow that is followed by a slower rise in facial
Christine R. Harris
temperature. The blood flow increase is responsi-
ble for the appearance of the blush. However, ones
experience of blushing is based on perceiving tem- See also Emotion, Cultural Perspectives; Emotional
perature change. Hence, blushing is likely to be seen Recognition, Neuropsychology of; Facial Expressions,
Emotional; Guilt
by others well before the embarrassed person feels it.
Heart rate and blood pressure both initially increase,
but then heart rate tends to drop while blood pres- Further Readings
sure continues to rise. This pattern of changes is dif-
Harris, C. R. (2006). Embarrassment: A form of social
ferent from what is seen in some other emotions and
pain. American Scientist, 94, 524533.
may be unique to embarrassment.
Keltner, D., & Buswell, B. N. (1997). Embarrassment: Its
distinct form and appeasement functions. Psychological
Negative Consequences
Bulletin, 122, 250270.
The desire to avoid embarrassment can lead people Miller, R. S. (1996). Embarrassment: Poise and peril in
to put their best interests as well of that of others everyday life. New York, NY: Guilford.
Emergence 283
cohesiveness equals the property of having mutually Given the preliminary characterization of emer-
attractive parts. Now if we can use physics to predict gence given in the introduction to this article, there
whether and to what extent xs parts attract each will be as many kinds of emergence as there are
other, we will thereby have deduced xs cohesiveness. ways for deducibility to fail. We can usefully divide
We know that water has H2O molecules as parts. To them, however, into two categories: ontological and
deduce the cohesiveness of water from physics, we epistemological. Ontology is the study of what there
need to show that H2O molecules attract each other is; correspondingly, ontological emergentists think
to a degree that explains (for instance) why water is that emergent properties are nondeducible because
a liquid at room temperature. It turns out that we they are something over and above the physical. A
can do exactly this. Owing to their shape, H2O mol- supervenient property meeting either of conditions
ecules are electrostatic dipoles. Coulombs law tells (1) or (2) will be ontologically emergent. Properties
us that H2O molecules will exert an attractive force that meet (1) need not meet (2), and vice versa.
on each other; this is known as hydrogen bonding. Furthermore, (1) and (2) are compatible in that
H2S molecules do not form hydrogen bonds, and so there might be a property that met both conditions,
hydrogen sulfide is less cohesive than water. The so counting as doubly nondeducible. In this entry,
deduction outlined above is a reduction because it the term weak ontological emergence is used for
shows us that the cohesiveness of water is nothing properties that supervene on the physical and meet
over and above the properties and relations of its (1) but not (2), and strong ontological emergence
molecules. for supervenient properties that meet (2), regard-
There are several ways for a property to be less of whether they meet (1). Epistemology is the
nondeducible, corresponding to the ways in which study of knowledge; correspondingly, epistemologi-
functional reductions can fail. Deducibility fails for cal emergentists think that emergent properties are
a Property P if nondeducible because of limitations in our cognitive
and/or conceptual abilities. A supervenient prop-
1. P is not exhausted by its functional role, or erty meeting condition (3) will be epistemologically
2. P has a causal role that is not occupied by a emergent. Certain properties that are nothing over
physical property, or and above the physical might be nondeducible for a
3. neither (1) nor (2) but we cannot complete the range of reasons. For instance, our way of thinking
deduction of P from physics because of our own about a property might make it very difficult for us
conceptual and/or computational limitations. to functionally conceive it, or the complexity of the
physics involved might make it in practice impos-
There may be other forms of nondeducibility, but sible for us to deduce it. We may now appeal to the
conditions (1), (2), and (3) are at least independently three different ways in which deducibility can fail in
sufficient for nondeducibility. Condition (1) will be order to more precisely characterize three distinct
met by properties with fundamentally qualitative kinds of emergence.
natures (whether or not they also have functional
Three Kinds of Emergence
roles). Such properties cannot be deduced by func-
tional reduction because Step (a) of the reduction We will first give a broad characterization of the two
cannot be completed. Condition (2) will be met by kinds of ontological emergence, and through this,
any property that has novel, irreducible causal characterize epistemological emergence. Think back
powers with respect to the physical. Such properties to the case of the cohesiveness of water. Cohesiveness
cannot be deduced because Step (b) cannot be com- is (a) exhausted by its causal role, and (b) physically
pleted. Conditions (1) and (2) are each sufficient for realized, in that physical properties play the causal
nondeducibility in principle; condition (3), on the role that defines it. It is these facts that enable us
other hand, will be met by any property that is in to deduce the cohesiveness of water from physics.
principle deducible (a property that meets neither of The deducibility of cohesiveness makes it transpar-
the two other conditions) but is in practice nonde- ent how it is related to the physical properties of
ducible due to certain facts about ourselves, which H2O and to the physical laws that govern its behav-
facts typically vary from case to case. ior. Once those properties and laws are fixed, we
Emergence 285
get cohesiveness for free, as it is fully realized by powers to their bearers. Let us add a fifth compo-
hydrogen bonding. Physical realization of a Property nent to the existing four. Emergent properties
P thus explains why P supervenes on the physical.
Things are different with ontologically emergent v. contribute powers over and above those
properties. Consider a Property P1 that meets condi- contributed by the physical properties they
tion (1) for nondeducibility. Let P1 be a qualitative emerge from.
property that is defined by its qualitative nature. P1 This contribution of additional powers is typically
is not physically realized since it is not defined by called downward causation and violates the causal
a functional role. The supervenience of P1 on the closure of the physical domain (discussed further
physical therefore requires bridge laws connecting it below). We may now more precisely characterize
to its physical base. Now consider a Property P2 that our three kinds of emergence:
meets condition (2) for nondeducibility. P2 may well
be functionally defined, but it has no physical real- Strong ontological
izer. We also need bridge laws to ground the super- emergence = all of (iv)
venience of P2. Ontological emergentists (both weak
and strong) thus hold, in addition to (iiii) above, Weak ontological
that emergent properties are
emergence = (iiv); not (v)
iv. not physically realized and connected to the
physical by irreducible bridge laws that are Epistemological
not laws of physics. emergence = (iiii); neither (iv) nor (v)
nonphysical to anything physical. Physics forms a Suppose Mary is very clever and also knows all the
closed, complete system such that everything that facts that are deducible from physics. Intuitively,
happens within the physical domain can be fully when she first sees a red tomato, she learns some-
explained without reference to anything outside it. If thingwhat it is like (to borrow Thomas Nagels
physics is causally closed, no properties are strongly [1974] phrase) to see red. Such examples convince
emergent. Even if there is now ample evidence to most philosophers that phenomenal properties are
support closure, it was not always so. The physics of not deducible from physics. It is also widely agreed
C. D. Broads day, for instance, could not explain all that such properties are nondeducible because it
the functional characteristics of complex chemicals, is very difficult (perhaps impossible) to conceive
hence Broads theory that those characteristics were of phenomenal properties, such as the visual red-
strongly emergent. It seemed to Broad as though ness of a red tomato or the painfulness of a pain,
chemical compounds had functional properties that in purely functional terms. Understanding pain as a
were not physically realized, but emerged accord- state caused by tissue damage, which causes you to
ing to irreducible bridge laws, and that made causal say ouch, and so on, seems to leave out the most
contributions in addition to those of their physical important partits painfulness. Emergentists such
components. as David Chalmers say this is because phenomenal
By way of illustration, imagine that the cohesive- properties are importantly different from functional
ness of water is strongly emergent. An easy way properties such as cohesiveness, in that what is
to imagine this is to suppose that H2O molecules essential to them is the way they feel and not the
are not dipolar, so that there is no hydrogen bond- way they behave. The phenomenal emerges from the
ing in water, but that water is nonetheless highly physical according to bridge laws but does not add
cohesivethat is, is liquid at room temperature, anything to it causally. On this view, there is a pos-
has a higher boiling point than H2S, and so forth. sible world physically identical to this one through-
The attractive forces between molecules will not out its historyin which a physical doppelgnger
be due to physical force-generating properties (e.g., of you is reading this articlebut in which nothing
Coulomb forces due to charge) but rather due to the is conscious. Weak ontological emergentists think
emergent cohesiveness of water. Suppose that we that emergent properties are nondeducible because
have physical theories that fully explain and predict they are not functional properties, and this is why
the behavior of hydrogen and oxygen atoms in isola- we cannot conceive them as such.
tion. Those theories will predict that water is a gas at
20 C, just as our current theories tell us that water Epistemological Emergence
would be a gas at 20 C if its molecules were not Type-B physicalists (this term is from Chalmers)
dipolar. Note that we can still complete Step (a) of agree that phenomenal properties are not deducible
our deduction, for even if cohesiveness were strongly from physics and that this is due to our inability to
emergent, we could still conceive it functionally. conceive them in functional terms, but they deny
What we could not do, if cohesiveness were strongly that phenomenal properties are ontologically dis-
emergent, is find a physical realizer for it. The suc- tinct from the physical. On this view, painfulness is
cess of modern physics in reductively explaining the a functional property, similar to cohesiveness. Our
characteristics of complex chemicals is no small part reluctance to accept this is explained by reference
of the reason why Broads emergentism is no longer to the special nature of phenomenal concepts rather
taken seriously. than the properties those concepts represent. We
make a mistake when we think consciousness cannot
Weak Ontological Emergence
be physicalthe kind of mistake Lois Lane makes
Arguably the most plausible candidates for weak when she thinks Clark Kent could not be Superman.
ontological emergence are phenomenal properties. Phenomenal concepts are distinctive ways of think-
Consider Frank Jacksons famous example of Mary ing about the brain, which fool us into thinking that
the color scientist who learns all the physical facts functional analyses of consciousness leave something
about color perception while locked inside a black out. Type-B physicalists think that phenomenal
and white room, without seeing anything colored. properties are nondeducible because phenomenal
Emotion, Cerebral Lateralization 287
concepts make it very difficult for us to conceive of popular, and lively philosophical debates over the
those properties in functional terms. The concept of relative merits of this position and Type-B physi-
pain, for instance, makes it very difficult for us to see calism are ongoing. Since the laws of physics come
pain as a property exhausted by its function. Being out the same either way, it is difficult to see how
in pain, however, is as functional as being a mouse- any amount of scientific progress could help decide
trap. It is our way of thinking about pain that makes this issue. By far the liveliest area of current research
it nondeducible, not the nature of pain itself. Hence, on emergence concerns the various epistemological
the form of emergence here is epistemological. kinds, since these are consistent with the widespread
Type-B physicalism is not the only kind of epis- commitment to physicalism among both philoso-
temological emergence. Not all mental properties phers and scientists.
are difficult to conceive functionallybeliefs and
David Yates
desires, for instance, seem more amenable to such
analyses than phenomenal properties. Still, one See also Anomalous Monism; Explanatory Gap; Mental
might say, even these properties are nondeducible in Causation; Mind-Body Problem; Physicalism;
practice, because of the extreme complexity of the Reductive Physicalism
physics involved. The forms of emergence consid-
ered thus far are synchronicphenomenal proper-
Further Readings
ties, for instance, are taken to be nondeducible from
the physical properties brains have at the same time. Beckermann, A., Flohr, H., & Kim, J. (Eds.). (1992).
Weather systems provide an example of diachronic Emergence or reduction: Essays on the prospects of
epistemological emergence (as do other systems nonreductive physicalism. Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter.
whose dynamics are chaotic). Since the weather at Broad, C. D. (1925). The mind and its place in nature.
any given time is extremely sensitive to slight changes London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
in earlier conditions (the butterfly effect), it is impos- Chalmers, D. (1996). The conscious mind. New York, NY:
sible for us to deduce exactly when, in the future, a Oxford University Press.
weather pattern such as a tornado will appear. The Chalmers, D. (2003). Consciousness and its place in nature.
property of being a tornado is functional, and torna- In S. Stich & F. Warfield (Eds.), The Blackwell guide to
philosophy of mind (pp. 102142). Oxford, UK:
does are nothing over and above the air molecules
Blackwell.
that compose them. Still, we cannot deduce where
Hohwy, J., & Kallestrup, J. (2008). Being reduced: New
or when they will occur. Such patterns are therefore
essays on reduction, explanation, and causation.
epistemologically emergent with respect to physical
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
conditions at earlier times. In general, epistemologi- Jackson, F. (1982). Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical
cal emergence about a domain of properties differs Quarterly, 32, 127136.
from ontological emergence in that it explains the Kim, J. (2005). Physicalism, or something near enough.
nondeducibility of emergent properties by refer- Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
ence to human nature rather than to the nature of Metzinger, T. (Ed.). (2000). Neural correlates of
the emergent properties. In the scientific literature, consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
emergence is almost always used in its epistemologi- Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical
cal sense, and care must be taken not to conflate this Review, 83, 435450.
usage with the far more controversial ontological Papineau, D. (2002). Thinking about consciousness.
variants discussed above. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Conclusion
Progress in science has reduced the appeal of strong EMOTION, CEREBRAL
ontological emergence through mounting evidence
that all causal powers that physical things possess LATERALIZATION
are contributed solely by their physical proper-
ties according to physical laws. Weak ontological The right and left cerebral hemispheres play selec-
emergence about consciousness, however, is more tive, yet complimentary, roles in the perception,
288 Emotion, Cerebral Lateralization
experience, and expression of emotion. The extent Regarding expression of emotion, the left side of
to which each hemisphere contributes to the vari- the face has been found to be more dramatic and
ous components of emotional processing is widely expressive than the right side across all major emo-
debated. Two models of lateralized emotional pro- tion categories (happy, sad, mad, angry, surprised,
cessing have been put forward to explain diverse disgusted) although this finding is more robust for
findings in emotion research: the right hemisphere negative emotions. Patients with RH damage also
model and the valence model, the latter of which demonstrate impairments in expressing emotional
was further developed into the approach-withdrawal prosody in both spontaneous and posed (intention-
model. ally produced) conditions. Additionally, patients
with RH lesions are impaired in their electroder-
mal response to emotional stimuli relative to LH
The Right Hemisphere Hypothesis
damaged patients. Finally, greater right lateralized
The right hemisphere model posits that the right electrophysiological activity is found during self-
hemisphere plays a specialized role in the percep- reported recall of emotional reactions to emotion-
tion, identification, and expression of emotional ally evocative visual material and when individuals
stimuli. It dates back to observations made by neu- are asked to generate emotional imagery.
rologist Charles Mills as early as 1912 that brain-
damaged patients with unilateral right-sided lesions
The Valence Hypothesis and
demonstrate a decrease in emotional expression. The
Approach/Withdrawal
right hemisphere hypothesis was later elaborated by
Guido Gainotti to explain the catastrophic reaction The valence hypothesis posits that hemispheric spe-
of patients with left-hemisphere (LH) lesions and cialization in emotion processing depends on the
the indifferent or euphoric reactions of patients who valence (positive or negative) of the emotion. Positive
suffered right-hemisphere (RH) lesions. Gainotti emotions are associated with greater LH activity and
believed that RH damage led to an inability to emo- negative emotions with greater RH activity. The
tionally appreciate the damage that the patients had valence model was developed to account for the
incurred, while LH lesions resulted in an emotionally finding that the expression of positive emotions is
intact understanding of the amount of damage not as strongly right lateralized as that of negative
hence, a normal secondary catastrophic reaction to emotions, as well as for evidence of an LH process-
a catastrophic event. ing advantage when positive emotional states are
Experimental evidence to support RH special- elicited by video clips, facial expressions, or reward-
ization for emotion perception and identification punishment contingencies.
includes a left visual field advantage for emotional The Wada test provides further evidence that
stimuli, in that stimuli presented to the left side of emotional valence may be a differentiating fac-
the visual field, which leads to predominantly RH tor in selective hemisphere involvement. This test
processing, are responded to more quickly and accu- involves injection of sodium amobarbital into the
rately. Joan Borod demonstrated that patients with carotid artery of either the left or right hemisphere,
RH lesions are more likely to be impaired in iden- which partially disables the hemisphere for a short
tifying emotional stimuli such as faces, emotional period of time so that the functions of the preserved
tone of voice (prosody), and words or sentences hemisphere might be assessed. Patients have been
with emotional content. In split-brain patients, found to react differentially depending on the hemi-
individuals who have had the major pathway con- sphere that is anesthetized. During RH injections,
necting their two hemispheres (the corpus callosum) patients may more commonly display indifference
severed, both hemispheres are found to be equally and euphoria, while depressive, worried mood and/
adept at recognizing facial emotions on standard or crying is more common during LH injections.
tasks. However, there is a RH advantage for dis- The valence hypothesis was later elaborated to
tinctly nonverbal emotion discrimination tasks, include approach or withdrawal related attitudes and
which suggests that RH specialization for perceptual behaviors as a factor that might differentiate selective
discrimination of nonverbal stimuli may also con- hemisphere involvement. Approach behaviors are
tribute to emotion-processing advantages. those that bring an individual closer to an object or
Emotion, Cerebral Lateralization 289
goal, and withdrawal behaviors are those that move experience. Such findings are in line with theories of
one further away. Marcel Kinsbourne and Brenda learned helplessness that posit an association between
Bemporad describe approach behavior as the move- decreased experienced control over a negative situa-
ment to organize and exert active control, not just tion and withdrawal, apathy, and depression. Indeed,
movement toward a desired object. The motivation decreased left-frontal excitability is associated with
for approach might be to exert control over a nega- depression, and stimulation of the left-frontal region
tive situation. This suggests that a selective LH advan- has antidepressant effects. In 2008, the Food and
tage for approach behavior may not always coincide Drug Administration (FDA) approved the applica-
with positive valence. For example, Eddie Harmon- tion of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to
Jones and John Allen demonstrated an association the left frontal region as a treatment for depression.
between trait anger (anger that is dispositional and This highlights the importance of emotion lateral-
personality based) and increased left-frontal activity ization research in developing treatment options for
as demonstrated by lower electroencephalographic emotional disorders. Furthermore, improved under-
(EEG) alpha power. This is explained by individual standing of hemispheric asymmetries in emotional
differences in expectancies of control over a situa- processing can assist families of patients in coping
tion. If an individual feels angry about an expected with changed attitudes and behaviors following a
negative outcome yet also feels competently moti- lateralized brain injury. For example, research has
vated to overcome the situation, then more approach demonstrated a correlation between the side of a
behavior and LH activity is demonstrated. stroke and premorbid/postmorbid attitudes and
Nathan Fox and Richard Davidson demonstrated behaviors, such as greater depression and apathy
an association between approach-related anger and associated with LH stroke.
LH activity in two EEG studies involving infants. The In sum, the behavioral study of hemispheric lat-
first study demonstrated that 10-month-old infants erality in emotional processing has produced incon-
who reached for their mothers during a task showed sistent and sometimes contrasting results. A clear
more left-frontal activation than those who did not. RH advantage in the perception and identification of
Additionally, infants who cried in response to mater- emotional stimuli has been demonstrated; however,
nal separation showed an increase in right-frontal there is ample research to suggest an LH advantage
activation. The second study demonstrated that in the processing of positive or approach-related
10-month-old infants who experienced anger upon stimuli and behaviors. Reasons for the discrepancies
maternal separation without crying showed more in findings might include the difficulty of designing
left-frontal activation. When infants were restrained, an experimental paradigm that is free of confounds
those who had shown visible signs of anger without such as visuospatial processing advantages in the RH.
crying also demonstrated more left-frontal activation. Additionally, RH advantages in the modulation of
Similar findings have been demonstrated in a dif- arousal have been demonstrated, which might bias
ferent paradigm with adults. Eddie Harmon-Jones the RH in the processing of high-arousal emotional
studied 77 undergraduates who independently paid stimuli. Further work is needed to clarify whether
at least one third of their tuition. His group manipu- hemispheric processing advantages might be related to
lated the participants state anger (situational anger) specific components of the emotional experience (per-
by playing them a bogus radio broadcast announcing ception, expression, and experience), stimulus factors
that the university had just voted to increase their (verbal/nonverbal stimuli, low/high arousal), or situ-
tuition by 10%. While being monitored with EEG, ational factors (perceived control versus helplessness).
half of the group was told that they could petition
Karen Blackmon
the decision, while the other half was told that the
decision was certain. Greater left-frontal activity was See also Emotional Recognition, Neuropsychology of;
observed in the group that experienced perceived Facial Expressions, Emotional
control over the situation than the group that did not.
These studies argue against simple valence-based
Further Readings
emotion discrimination as influencing hemispheric
dominance and provide evidence that perceived Borod, J. C., Ciero, B. A., Obler, L. K., Welkowitz, J.,
control is an important component of the emotional Erhan, H. M., Santschi, C., . . . Whalen, J. R. (1998).
290 Emotion, Cultural Perspectives
Right hemisphere emotional perception: Evidence across that are clearly similar have different flavors in dif-
multiple channels. Neuropsychology, 12(3), 446458. ferent cultures. To what extent do cultural practices,
Demeree, H. A., Everhart, D. E., Youngstrom, E. A., & norms, and values affect, evoke, reinforce, and/or
Harrison, D. W. (2005). Brain lateralization of modify emotional tendencies to produce culturally
emotional processing: Historical roots and a future similar or diverse emotional experiences and behav-
incorporating dominance. Behavioral and Cognitive ior? Before describing the results of the studies that
Neuroscience Reviews, 4(1), 320. have begun to answer this question, this entry will
Fox, N., & Davidson, R. (1987). Electroencephalogram briefly define the constructs of emotion and culture.
asymmetry in response to the approach of a stranger
and maternal separation in 10 month old infants.
Developmental Psychology, 23, 233240. Culture and Emotion: Definitions
Gainotti, G. (1972). Emotional behavior and hemispheric
Emotions are responses to personally relevant events
side of lesion. Cortex, 8, 4155.
Harmon-Jones, E., Vaughn, K., Mohr, S., Sigelman, J., &
in ones environment or internal representations of
Harmon-Jones, C. (2004). The effect of manipulated
these events that involve loosely coordinated shifts in
sympathy and anger on left and right frontal cortical attention, subjective experience, behavior, thoughts,
activity. Emotion, 4, 95101. and bodily states. Emotions have the capacity to
Heller, W., Lindsay, D., Metz, J., & Farnum, D. (1991). interrupt ongoing processes and facilitate an indi-
Individual differences in right-hemisphere activation are viduals ability to flexibly and effectively respond
associated with arousal and autonomic responses to to emerging threats and rewards. Emotions also
lateralized stimuli. Journal of Clinical and Experimental involve mapping of these responses onto culturally
Psychology, 13, 95. meaningful emotional categories, such as happiness
Kinsbourne, M., & Bemporad, B. (1984). Lateralization or angst. When emotional responses tap into widely
of emotion: A model and the evidence. In N. Fox & shared and salient concerns, they become encoded
R. Davidson (Eds.), The psychobiology of affective in language and represented as emotional concepts.
development (pp. 259291). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Cultures are systems of widely shared goals,
Nelson, L., Cicchetti, D., Satz, P., Stern, S., Sowa, M., beliefs, norms, and values transmitted across gen-
Cohen, S., . . . van Gorp, W. (1993). Emotional sequelae erations and embodied in artifacts and behavior.
of stroke. Neuropsychology, 7(4), 553560. These systems can affect emotions and in turn be
Root, J. C., Kinsbourne, M., & Wong, P. (2006). Left affected by them. Culture can exert its influence on
hemisphere specialization to positive emotional individuals emotions by fostering norms and ideas
expressions: A divided output methodology. Emotion, 6, about whether or not particular emotions are desir-
473483. able (e.g., a belief that interpersonal harmony can
Terzian, H. (1964). Behavioral and EEG effects of be threatened by expressions of happiness) and by
intracarotid sodium amytal injections. Acta
what features of emotions are important (e.g., a
Neurochirugie, 12, 230239.
belief that emotions affect the body). Another mech-
anism of cultural influence is repeated exposure to
the behavior of others. For instance, although Paul
EMOTION, CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES Ekmans seminal research showed that interpreta-
tions of intense facial expressions of emotions are
Do people in different cultures experience and remarkably similar around the world, recent studies
express emotions similarly? This is no less than one show that in their daily lives individuals from differ-
of the fundamental questions in understanding the ent cultures show dialect-like differences in how they
nature of emotions. Early work has demonstrated express their emotions. These differences are due to
that people around the world largely construct their lifelong exposure to emotional expressions in our
emotional diets from similar ingredients, such as cultures. As a result, it is easier for us to correctly
reacting with rapid heartbeat to danger or wrinkling interpret emotional expressions by people from our
their noses when noticing spoiled food. However, own culture than those of others.
similarity in the basic ingredients does not preclude Because cultures are complex systems, in some
diversity. Using the same staples, human cultures cases emotions are shaped by the interaction
produce marvelously diverse cuisines. Even dishes between multiple aspects of culture. For instance,
Emotion, Cultural Perspectives 291
although emotional expression is valued in Russian consider the example of pride. Because a feeling of
culture, it may be inappropriate for particular actors pride in personal accomplishment and its expression
(e.g., men) or in particular circumstances (e.g., with reflects valued personal competence in European
strangers). Individuals rely on all relevant cultural American culture, European American parents often
knowledge to categorize changes in their experience encourage their children to feel proud. They may
and behavior as instances of particular emotions model celebratory high fives when a child excels (or
and to recruit information about these emotions. even merely participates) in a competition or may
Depending on the nature of the recruited informa- state that they feel proud of him or her. In contrast,
tion (e.g., Is this emotion desirable? Can it harm a feeling of pride under similar circumstances can
ones well-being or ones relationships?), an indi- threaten interpersonal harmony in East Asian cul-
vidual may feel compelled to regulate the experience tures. Thus, Korean or Japanese parents may warn
or expression of the emotion. Of course, people vary their children that it is important to be humble
in their responses to cultural norms and in their and mindful of the feelings of others and discour-
ability and/or willingness to alter their emotions. It age excessive expressions of pride. Over time, these
is, therefore, not surprising that significant within- children are likely not only to adopt their parents
culture variability is observed in experienced and values regarding pride but to also learn to moderate
expressed emotions, even in response to standard- or enhance their feelings in accordance with these
ized emotional tasks. values.
To return to our food metaphor, cultures differ
not only in their favorite emotional dishes (or the
Culture and Emotional Responses
extent to which emotions are considered valuable
and functional in a given culture) but also in default Indeed, culturally desirable emotions, particularly
recipes for emotions (or the extent to which com- positive emotions, are experienced and expressed
ponents such as the presence of others are thought more often. Individuals who live in cultural contexts
to be characteristic of emotions). that value expression of positive emotions such as
pride (e.g., United States) feel and show these emo-
tions more often and more intensely than individuals
Culture and Ideas About
who live in cultural contexts that value moderation
Desirable Emotions
of these emotions (e.g., Japan). Although the asso-
Norms regarding expression and experience of emo- ciation between cultural values regarding emotion
tions and ideas about ideal or desirable emotional and individuals experience of emotion is weaker
states differ across cultures. Cultures foster emotions for negative than for positive emotions, culture also
that are conducive to culturally valued goals and affects the former. For example, the self-conscious
discourage emotions that threaten these goals. For emotions of shame and embarrassment can threaten
example, Western European and North American self-worth in independent cultural settings. The same
cultures foster an independent model of the self that emotions can serve as useful signals of relational sta-
foregrounds the autonomy and privacy of the indi- tus in interdependent cultural contexts. Accordingly,
vidual. These cultures encourage experience and these emotions are experienced less often and less
expression of emotions as a way of asserting ones intensely in independent than in interdependent
individuality. Although these norms apply to both cultural settings. Over a lifetime of living in their
positive and negative emotions, the experience and cultural environments, people become remarkably
expression of positive emotions such as excitement skilled at regulating their emotions in accordance
and pride are particularly valued. In contrast, East with cultural norms. For example, during an inter-
Asian cultures foster an interdependent model of the national competition, it took athletes from different
self that foregrounds interpersonal ties. These cul- countries only about a second to alter their initially
tures encourage moderation of emotions as way to similar expressions of powerful emotions to show
preserve relational harmony. expressions that differed by the culture of the athlete.
Even young children are encouraged to express Culture does not affect all aspects of emotions
(with an implicit goal of facilitating subjective equally. Because what people feel and show on
experience) culturally appropriate emotions. Let us their faces has greater implications for interpersonal
292 Emotion, Cultural Perspectives
relationships and is under greater voluntary con- to a film for Asian American but not for European
trol than bodily responses, cultural norms tend to American individuals.
shape the experience and expression of emotions.
In contrast, cultural groups tend to show similar Somatically Embedded Emotions
patterns of physiological responses to emotional Emotions are also both visceral and psychological.
stimuli. Moreover, not all reports of subjective expe- One can experience feelings of anger or love as pow-
riences are similarly affected by culture. Cultural erful bodily sensations and as psychological states.
norms are more likely to shape global, retrospective, Although emotions are embodied across cultures,
or hypothetical reports of emotion than to shape some cultures emphasize somatic or bodily aspects
instantaneous reports, because the former depend of emotions. This tendency is expressed in emotional
on individuals cultural concepts of emotions more language and in concepts of emotions. For example,
than the latter. Ghanaians and Chinese ubiquitously refer to bodily
In summary, cultural norms regarding emotions signs and sensations such as red eyes or a burning sen-
are reflected in lived experiences of emotions, affect- sation in ones stomach when describing emotional
ing the likelihood that an individual recognizes concepts. Cultural emphasis on somatic aspects of
an instance of emotion, reacts to it, experiences it emotion fosters awareness of ones body during emo-
intensely, and displays it for others to see. tional episodes. It remains to be seen whether these
differences translate into differences in the ability to
Culture and Conceptions of Emotions accurately detect and regulate physiological changes.
Across cultures, emotions affect both individual and Relationship Between Pleasant
interpersonal concerns, regarding both the body and and Unpleasant Emotions
the mind. Cultural context can emphasize some of
these emotional ingredients and de-emphasize Another example of cultural differences in con-
others, thus affecting individuals experience and ceptions of emotions is the relationship between
expression of emotions. seemingly incompatible emotions. In some cultures,
such as European American culture, feelings such as
happiness and sadness are considered to be incom-
Socially Embedded Emotions
patible. On the other hand, East Asian traditional
Emotions express and reproduce the culturally dialectic philosophies view pleasant and unpleasant
normative models of the self and social relationships. feelings as compatible. As a result, individuals from
Although individuals across cultures recognize that East Asian cultures are more likely to co-experience
emotions can play out in the privacy of ones mind opposing feelings than individuals from North
or in heated interactions with others, emotions are American cultures. In bicultural individuals, the
more likely to be construed as personal phenomena ability to tolerate opposing feelings is associated
in independent cultures and as interpersonal phe- with engagement with East Asian cultures.
nomena in interdependent cultures. Individuals from
interdependent cultures are more likely to describe
Conclusion
emotions as interpersonal in nature, characterize
them by interpersonal situations and their effect on Although some basic ingredients of emotions
relationships, use more relationships words when (e.g., differential responses to threats and rewards
describing emotional episodes, take interpersonal or facial expressions used to signal emotional states
context into account when interpreting emotional to others) are similar across cultures, culture does
expressions, experience emotions in response to affect individuals emotions. Individuals around the
interpersonal triggers, share them with others, and world are prepared to keenly attend to the features
feel them intensely for close others than are indi- of their cultural environment and adjust to them
viduals from independent cultures. For instance, the when experiencing and expressing emotions and
mere thought of a family member intensifies the abil- thinking of them. Cultural ideas about emotions that
ity to experience and express emotions in response are considered to be ideal or functional can affect
Emotion, Psychophysiology of 293
of this association when reinforcement is halted can physiological and behavioral routines in response
be assessed. As such, classical fear conditioning pre- to threat. Beyond innate threat processing, previous
sents the opportunity to assess brain and physiologic work indicates that learned contingencies between
responses involved in aversive stimulation, the devel- neutral and aversive stimuli are subserved by synap-
opment of learned fear associations, and the rever- tic plasticity in an interneuronal network connecting
sal or extinction of learned fear associations. As a the lateral and central nuclei of the amygdala. CS+
result, this paradigm has been used extensively to and US information converge in lateral amygdala
study normal functioning of underlying mechanisms and, as a result of their co-occurrence, alter synap-
recruited in fear processing as well as in psychiatric tic connections (via Hebbian plasticity) such that
and neuropsychiatric samples ostensibly marked by presentation of the CS+ in isolation yields similar
disrupted or exaggerated fear response. output from the central nucleus of the amygdala.
Extinction, the process by which learned fear con-
The Amygdala, Innate and Learned Fear tingencies are suppressed when the US is no longer
Utilizing classical fear conditioning as well as other associated with the CS+, is subserved by prefrontal,
experimental methods, several researchers have and specifically medial prefrontal, interconnections
attempted to identify central nervous system mech- with the central nucleus of the amygdala. Excitatory
anisms involved in the initiation and modulation (glutamatergic) projections from medial prefrontal
of the fear response. Studies in nonhuman animals cortex projecting to inhibitory (aminobutyric acid,
have increasingly identified the amygdalae, nuclei in [GABA] ergic) regions of the central nucleus of the
the medial temporal lobes, as being central to the amygdala appear to play a role in extinction by the
processing of threat and resulting fear response. suppression of response to the conditioned stimulus
Amygdala function occurs in the context of direct coordinated in the central nucleus.
and indirect interconnections with other brain
The Hypothalamus: Neuroendocrine
regions that subserve behavioral modulation and
and Autonomic Control
inhibition (prefrontal cortex), learning and memory
(hippocampi), sensory processing (thalamus, sensory One important aspect of the central nucleus of the
and polymodal cortex), and initiation of periph- amygdala lies in its connectivity, together with the
eral physiologic response (hypothalamus). Previous prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, via the bed
work by Joe LeDoux and others has established nucleus of the stria terminalis, to the hypothalamus.
the central role of the amygdala in the processing The hypothalamus projects to the pituitary, through
of threat and in learned fear contingencies. Utilizing which neuroendocrine response is coordinated
regional ablation of amygdala and interconnections (hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal axis [HPA-axis]),
of amygdala to other brain regions, this work has and to the medulla, which is implicated in control
demonstrated that the amygdala is recruited in the of the autonomic nervous system. Each system is
processing of unlearned (i.e., innate) threats as well important in coordinating the organisms response
as in the learned associations of stimuli that are to emotional provocation and threat. In regard to
associated with threat. The amygdala itself exhib- neuroendocrine coordination, in addition to oxyto-
its subregions that appear to be functionally dis- cin and vasopressin, adrenocorticotropic hormone
sociable. The lateral nucleus of the amygdala is a (ACTH) is released into the bloodstream by the
major afferent (input) nucleus that receives sensory pituitary, stimulating the adrenal cortices, which in
information and projects to both basal and central turn secrete cortisol, a stress hormone implicated in
nuclei of the amygdala. The basal nucleus of the the bodys reaction to stress. In regard to medulla-
amygdala projects to brain regions identified with mediated autonomic system modulation, hypotha-
movement and motor programming (striatum), lamic projections to medulla in turn affect both
potentially important in executing motor activ- parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system
ity in response to threat, while the central nucleus activity, influencing homeostatic and fight-flight
projects to key hypothalamic and brain stem sites, responses. The central nucleus of the amygdala
which initiate and coordinate autonomic and endo- exhibits a mostly excitatory role in hypothalamic
crinological processes as well as species-specific function and is instrumental in ACTH secretion
Emotion, Psychophysiology of 295
heart rate respectively. In healthy subjects, stimulus in the study of emotional processing, and specifically
input, such as passively viewing unpleasant or pleas- refers to the use of EMG to measure latency and
ant pictorial stimuli, has been shown to correspond magnitude of eyeblink response (at the orbicularis
with a deceleration of HR, while induction of mental oculi) when the subject is acoustically startled (e.g.,
imagery of arousing pleasant and unpleasant stimuli after presentation of a loud, white noise burst). Prior
corresponds with an acceleration in HR. While HR work demonstrates that the magnitude and latency
measures are informative in regard to collective of the startle response can be manipulated given cer-
sympathetic and parasympathetic involvement in tain emotional or motivational stimulus conditions.
cardiac function, analysis of the variability of heart For instance, using the example of fear conditioning
rate yields important information in regard to spe- above, subjects demonstrate larger and faster startle
cific contributions of each. HRV can be assessed in responses during presentation of the CS+, once its
both time and frequency domains, with variability association with the US shock has been established,
in time assessed by measuring latency between suc- than to the CS, which is not previously associated
cessive beats and variability in frequency assessed with the US. Research on the initiation and modu-
by analyzing the relative power of frequency com- lation of the SER suggests the presence of at least
ponents of the ECG signal. In regard to frequency two basic pathways, with startle initiation subserved
analysis, high-frequency changes are associated with by a pathway from the cochlear nucleus to pontine
parasympathetic modulation of the heart because reticular formation to reflex effectors, while startle
of the relatively fast degradation of acetylcholine, modulation is subserved by a connection between
whereas low-frequency changes are believed to be the central nucleus of the amygdala and the pontine
influenced by both sympathetic and parasympa- reticular formation.
thetic systems. Importantly, respiration rate also
influences HRV (respiratory sinus arrhythmia) with Potential Influence of Psychophysiological
beat-to-beat intervals becoming shorter during inspi- Reactivity on Cognition
ration and longer during expiration. Previous work These peripheral effects of threat provocation and
in posttraumatic stress disorder, a condition marked autonomic nervous system activation have been vari-
by heightened sensitivity to stress provocation, sug- ously implicated in providing a bodily feedback loop
gests resting variability is marked by reduced high to the central nervous system. Changes in physiol-
frequency and increased low-frequency components ogy or behavior attendant to specific emotional pro-
in the PTSD group interpreted as increased involve- cesses has been previously theorized to constitute the
ment of the sympathetic system and reduced modu- feeling and conscious experience of given emotional
lation by the parasympathetic system. states (James-Lange theory of emotion), although
this view has been widely disputed and is no longer
Electromyography
accepted. More recently, Antonio Damasio and col-
Startle has been extensively studied in human and leagues have proposed the somatic marker hypoth-
nonhuman animals and represents the mainly physi- esis, which posits that changes in bodily responses
cal reaction to sudden, unanticipated stimuli. In such to emotional provocation help guide higher order
situations, facial muscles may contract, particularly decision making. This work has utilized findings
around the eyes, together with muscle contraction from individuals with localized prefrontal lesions, in
in the trunk, arms, and legs. Electromyography whom affective and social judgments are observed
(EMG), specifically used to assess the startle to be disrupted, putatively as a result of damage to
response, has been used to assess baseline levels the medial prefrontal cortex. Such individuals have
of startle as well as experimental manipulation of been studied using the Iowa gambling task (IGT)
startle under specific emotional conditions. Facial in which subjects are given the opportunity to pick
EMG measurement refers to a set of measures that from four decks of cards: Two decks give high finan-
are sensitive to changes in the surface (skin) elec- cial reward but higher financial loss over successive
tromagnetic field created by the convergence of trials, while the other two decks give low financial
muscle action potentials in a motor unit. The startle reward but also lower financial loss over successive
eyeblink response (SER), has been used extensively trials. Subjects realize a net financial gain if sampling
Emotion, Structural Approaches 297
is predominantly from the low rewardlower risk participants really know in the Iowa gambling task.
decks and a net financial loss from the high reward Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
higher risk decks. Early in the task, normal subjects United States of America, 101(45), 1607516080.
cannot consciously elaborate the contingency (they McEwen, B. S. (2002). Protective and damaging effects of
cannot report on or describe the chances in the two stress mediators: The good and bad sides of the response
decks), so successful performance relies on intuition, to stress. Metabolism, 51(6, Suppl. 1), 24.
or a gut feeling, rather than on declarative knowl- Rodrigues, S. M., LeDoux, J. E., & Sapolsky, R. M. (2009).
edge about the contingencies. Interestingly, individu- The influence of stress hormones on fear circuitry.
als with medial prefrontal cortex damage perform Annual Review of Neuroscience, 32, 289313.
poorly on this task; they do not adjust their deci- Root, J. C., Tuescher, O., Cunningham-Bussel, A., Pan, H.,
sions as efficiently over learning trials to maximize Epstein, J., Altemus, M., . . . Silbersweig, D. (2009).
their reward, and they exhibit diminished electro- Frontolimbic function and cortisol reactivity in response
dermal reactivity when selecting from high-risk to emotional stimuli. Neuroreport, 20(4), 429434.
Ulrich-Lai, Y. M., & Herman, J. P. (2009). Neural
decks and in response to negative, punishing deci-
regulation of endocrine and autonomic stress responses.
sions. Damasio and colleagues understand this as a
Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 397409.
diminished ability in the patient group to link to and
utilize psychophysiological states resulting from neg-
ative affective experiences in decision making. While
the somatic marker hypothesis has been extensively EMOTION, STRUCTURAL
studied, potential methodological issues and alter- APPROACHES
nate interpretations of these results have been sug-
gested. Still, this work has done much to flesh out Since the time of James and Wundt scientists have
the possible participation of a psychophysiological debated about the most elemental or basic building
feedback loop to higher order cognitive processing blocks of emotional life. How many elements are
and decision making. there? What is their nature? How should they be
James C. Root and Kane Pryor referred to? These are referred to as questions about
the structure of emotion, and this entry surveys the
See also Anxiety Disorders; Emotion and Psychopathology; two main answers that have been offered by psy-
Emotional Recognition, Neuropsychology of chology (discrete and dimensional approaches to
emotion structure). Such questions are important
Further Readings to resolve, because the answers will dictate which
constructs will best support scientific induction and
Bechara, A., Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. R. (2000). allow for the accumulation of knowledge about
Emotion, decision making and the orbitofrontal cortex.
emotion.
Cerebral Cortex, 10(3), 295307.
Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., & Damasio, A. R.
(2005). The Iowa gambling task and the somatic marker Discrete Emotion Approaches
hypothesis: Some questions and answers. Trends in to the Structure of Emotion
Cognitive Sciences, 9(4), 159162.
Cacioppo, J., Tassinary, L., & Berntson, G. (Eds.). (2007).
A discrete emotion approach to the structure of
Handbook of psychophysiology (3rd ed.). New York, emotion argues that certain categories (e.g., those
NY: Cambridge University Press. described by such English words as anger, sad-
Damasio, A. R. (1996). The somatic marker hypothesis and ness, fear, happiness, and disgust) form the most
the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex. basic elements of emotional life. Discrete emo-
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society tion approaches have been consistently criticized
Biological Sciences, 351(1346), 14131420. throughout the history of emotion research because
LeDoux, J. (2007). The amygdala. Current Biology, 17(20), instrument-based measures of the face, voice, body,
R868874. and brain in humans (i.e., measures that do not
Maia, T. V., & McClelland, J. L. (2004). A reexamination require a human perceiver) as well as animal studies
of the evidence for the somatic marker hypothesis: What have not revealed the existence of discrete categories
298 Emotion, Structural Approaches
in nature (for recent reviews, see Barrett and col- more fundamental building blocks, with affect as
leagues). Some studies of cardiovascular measure- one key element. In English, the word affect means
ments, electromyographic activity of facial muscles, to produce a change. To be affected by something
acoustical analyses of vocal cues, and blood flow is to be influenced by it. In science, and particularly
changes within the brain do show consistent differ- in psychology, affect refers to a special kind of
ences between discrete emotion categories, but the influencesomethings ability to influence your mind
larger body of evidence disconfirms anger, sadness, in a way that is linked to your body. Historically,
fear, happiness, and disgust as fundamental men- affect referred to a simple feelingto be affected is to
tal elements. This is because there is tremendous feel something. In modern psychological usage, affect
variability in the patterns observed within a single refers to the mental counterpart of internal bodily
category, as well as low consistency in the patterns representations associated with emotions, actions
observed across categories. Nonetheless, perceiver- that involve some degree of motivation, intensity, and
based measurements (as when one person judges force, or even personality dispositions.
the face or actions of another) often give evidence of Dimensional models describe affect as having
clear categories. the properties of valence and arousal (Russell and
Barrett), valence and intensity (e.g., Lang), positive
and negative activation (e.g., Watson and Tellegen),
Dimensional Approaches to
positive and negative affect (Cacioppo and col-
the Structure of Emotion
leagues), tense and energetic arousal (Thayer), or
A dimensional approach to the structure of emotion approach and withdrawal (e.g., Davidson). The
assumes that the words anger, sadness, fear, and so properties of affect, no matter how they are char-
on name folk categories that divide up the continu- acterized, can be summarized using the affective cir-
ous and contextually sensitive range of mental events cumplex (Barrett and Bliss-Moreau) (see Figure 1).
consisting of highly variable measurable outcomes The circumplex has two parts: a circle, which depicts
(e.g., facial muscle movements, peripheral physiol- the similarity or relatedness between affective ele-
ogy, behavior). These events are constructed from ments (be they words or faces or reports of emotional
High Arousal
Surprise
Excitement
Shame Disgust
Anger Fear Pride
Guilt Happiness
Unpleasant Pleasant
Sadness
Content
Fatigue Calm
Sleepy
Low Arousal
experience), and a set of axes, which are the dimen- calls outer emotional stimulation) or internal
sions themselves and represent the psychological stimulation arising from association or apperception
properties that quantify what is similar and different (i.e., perceiving new experience in relation to past
about the elements. Not all dimensional models of experiencewhat Wundt refers to as psychical).
affect incorporate circumplex assumptions, although Next, an ideational process distinguishes differ-
they are usually depicted in a circular space. And ent emotional feelings from one another. Although
although there are debates over which set of dimen- Wundt did not provide a clear definition of what
sions best describes affective space, all can be incor- an ideational process is, he argued that ideas were
porated into the same circular structure (Carroll and the revival of previous experiences. Finally, there is
colleagues). Dimensional approaches to the structure a terminal feeling, which is basically a more diffuse
of emotion have been criticized because they cannot affective state that remains after the more intense
explain how the instances referred to by the English feelings have dissipatedsimilar to a mood state.
words anger, fear, and disgust are different from one Many models of emotion that are called dimen-
another (for example, these are all unpleasant, high sional actually follow Wundts psychological con-
arousal states). structionist approach, where emotions emerge from
To some extent, dimensional approaches to the the interplay of more basic elements that are thought
structure of emotion have been misunderstood all to be the fundamental ingredients of the mind.
the way back to Wundt. Most modern treatments In modern psychological constructionist
of Wundt focus on his model of simple feelings approaches to emotion (e.g., Barrett; Russell),
what we would now call momentary affective valence and arousal are descriptive, not causal, prop-
statesas having three independent qualities erties of affect. Although it is possible to focus on one
pleasant/unpleasant, arousing/subduing, and strain/ property or the other, people cannot feel pleasant or
relaxation. Some combination of these properties unpleasant in a way that is isolated from their degree
can be found in what are often referred to as dimen- of arousal. Furthermore, similar to Wundt, these
sional accounts of affect and emotion. According to approaches assume that emotions are not different
Wundt, valence, arousal, and intensity are not basic in kind from mental states from thoughts, memories,
ingredients of an affective state but rather descrip- and beliefs. It is presumed that every moment of your
tive features of a unified state that is (or that at waking life is to some degree pleasant or unpleasant
one time was) grounded in the visceral, kinesthetic, with some degree of arousal so that affect is a basic
proprioceptive, and neurochemical fluctuations that property of consciousness (Duncan and Barrett).
take place within the core of body. These three prop- Other dimensional approaches assume that the
erties define a multidimensional affective space that descriptive structure of affect should be isomorphic
people inhabit. Because it was so well developed, with its causal structure, however, so that the best
Wundts dimensional account of affect largely over- affective dimensions are those that are most causally
shadowed his broader psychological construction- plausible (i.e., the dimensions should reflect the pro-
ist approach to emotion (i.e., the approach that all cesses that cause affective states). Accordingly, it has
mental events are constructed out of a common set been claimed that certain dimensions (positive and
of psychological ingredients; for a historical review negative affect or activation, for example) are more
of psychological construction models of emotion see biologically basic, should be the preferred when
Gendron and Barrett; for an example of a modern anchoring a dimensional model of emotion, and are
psychological construction approach, see Barrett or themselves the ingredients that make up emotional
Russell). life. This idea has been heavily debated, however
According to Wundt, emotions are psychical (for a review, see Barrett and Bliss-Moreau).
compounds that are constituted of more basic psy- Although various models disagree on the specif-
chological elements that are simple and irreducible ics, all dimensional approaches to emotion assume
in a psychological sense. One element was affect, that affect is realized in a neural reference space in
and the other was ideation. According to Wundt, the front of the brain (see Barrett and Bliss-Moreau).
emotions begin with an inceptive feeling that is This reference space includes brain areas that are
affective in nature. The inceptive feeling is caused traditionally considered to be emotional, such
either by external sensory stimulation (what Wundt as the amygdala and ventral striatum, as well as
300 Emotion and Moral Judgment
paralimbic portions of prefrontal cortex that until Davidson, R. J. (1992). Prolegomenon to the structure of
recently have been considered cognitive (cf. emotion: Gleanings from neuropsychology. Cognition &
Duncan and Barrett). These areas, along with other Emotion, 6, 245268.
(including insula, thalamus, hypothalamus, and auto- Duncan, S., & Barrett, L. F. (2007). Affect as a form of
nomic control centers in the midbrain brain stem) cognition: A neurobiological analysis. Cognition and
constitute a large-scale workspace that integrates rep- Emotion, 21, 11841211.
resentations of sensory information from the world Gendron, M., & Barrett, L. F. (2009). Reconstructing the
with their somatovisceral impact. This workspace past: A century of emotion theorizing in psychology.
Emotion Review, 1, 316339.
not only participates in the creation of emotion but
James, W. (1890). Principles of psychology. New York, NY:
also infuses every mental state with affective content.
Dover.
When core affect is in the background of conscious-
Lang, P. J., Greenwald, M., Bradley, M., & Hamm,
ness, it is perceived as a property of the world rather
A. (1993). Looking at pictures: affective, facial, visceral,
than as the persons reaction to it. It is under these and behavioral reactions. Psychophysiology, 30,
circumstances that scientists usually refer to affect as 261273.
unconscious. We experience a world of facts rather Russell, J. A. (2003). Core affect and the psychological
than feelings, and affect gives us a sense of confidence construction of emotion. Psychological Review, 110,
in those facts. This is why a drink tastes delicious or 145172.
is unappetizing, why we experience some people as Thayer, R. E. (1989). The biopsychology of mood and
nice and others as mean, and why some paintings are arousal. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
beautiful, whereas others are ugly. When core affect Watson, D., & Tellegen, A. (1985). Toward a consensual
is in the foreground of consciousness, it is experi- structure of mood. Psychological Bulletin, 98, 219223.
enced as a personal reaction to the world: We like or Wundt, W. (1998). Outlines of psychology (C. H. Judd,
dislike a drink, a person, or a painting. Trans.). Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press. (Original work
published 1897)
Lisa Feldman Barrett
example, a person might rush to save a drowning Moral judgments are appraisals of moral value.
child without first reflecting on whether it is the We can appraise an action, a rule, a character trait,
right thing to do. Conversely, there can be moral and so on. There is ample evidence, as we will see,
judgments without moral behavior. A person might that emotions arise in the context of moral judg-
realize that it is wrong to cheat but give in to that ments, but these emotions differ from the ones
temptation. that typically underlie altruism and behavior that
This entry will focus on moral judgments, not we deem virtuous. Altruism is often motivated by
behaviors, but it is important to note that emotions empathy; someone will save a drowning child out
have been implicated in both. Researchers who study of concern for its welfare. But if you judge that this
altruistic behavior widely assume that we are impelled heroic act is good, the feeling associated with that
to help others at personal expense because of our judgment is not empathy but rather gratitude, admi-
emotions. The principal affective response implicated ration, or elevation. These are emotions of positive
in altruistic motivation is empathy or empathetic appraisal. Heroism is less common than misconduct,
concern, which involves either feeling a negative however, so most moral appraisals are negative. We
emotion akin to one you observe in another party condemn those who do wrong.
or feeling bad about another persons suffering. The Emotions associated with condemnation vary as a
term sympathy is sometimes used for responses of the function of the norm that has been violated and the
latter kind, where the felt emotion does not match identity of the culprit. Paul Rozin and his collabora-
the observed emotion. Daniel Batson has shown that tors have shown that we feel angry about crimes that
when people experience this kind of emotional con- violate an individuals autonomy (harms or rights
nection with another party, they do not simply act to violations), we feel contempt for those who disrespect
alleviate their own discomfort but rather work to help social hierarchies and public goods, and we feel disgust
the person in need. When this happens, a person can at acts deemed unnatural, such as sexual taboos or,
be said to have an altruistic motivation for the altruis- in nonsecular societies, crimes that violate divine stric-
tic behavior, meaning that the person is not motivated tures against moral purity. These emotions are directed
by an explicit desire to advance self-interest. In this at other people who violate norms. When we violate
situation, the actor need not make a moral judgment norms ourselves, the emotions felt are usually guilt and
that helping is good; it is enough to recognize that shame. Guilt is usually construed as directed toward
someone else is in harms way. an action, and shame is directed toward the self.
Emotional responses may also play a role in so- There is a link between moral judgments and
called virtuous behavior, independent of moral judg- moral behavior. For example, bad feelings directed
ments. Building on this idea, Aristotle developed an toward others can promote punishment or social
influential approach to ethics, which is now known ostracism, and bad feelings directed toward the self
as virtue theory, according to which the goal of can motivate reparation or withdrawal. But one can
morality should be the cultivation of good character also make a moral judgment without acting on these
traits rather than the internalization of moral rules. emotions, if other motivations are overriding. Thus,
Good traits may include generosity, friendliness, judgment is best defined as an attitude rather than a
courage, self-respect, among others. Aristotle and behavior.
many of his followers think of these traits as involv-
ing emotion regulation. For example, courage may
Theories of the Relation Between
involve having enough fear to avoid being foolhardy
Emotions and Moral Judgment
but not so much as to be a coward. Thus, emotions
are implicated in morality in this view, but virtue There are many theories of how emotions relate to
is presumed to be achieved without explicit moral moral judgment. Most of these were originally artic-
judgments: For example, the virtuous person does ulated by philosophers, but some new proposals are
not act courageously because she judges that cour- also emerging in light of empirical research.
age is good but rather because she has trained her Members of the Scottish Enlightenment developed
emotions to make practical decisions that are coura- a theory called sentimentalism in the 18th century.
geous when courage is called for. According to this theory, emotions are components
302 Emotion and Moral Judgment
of moral judgments. To illustrate, consider the judg- we need to classify it. Is it a case of intentional kill-
ment that killing innocent people is wrong. For the ing? Of dishonesty? Of discrimination? Of torture?
British moralists, this would be defined as a feeling Such questions often require extensive rational
of disapprobation directed toward the idea of killing. deliberation. Sentimentalism does not deny this. It
For Francis Hutcheson such feelings were compa- is committed only to the thesis that once an action
rable to perceptions that pick up on real moral facts. has been classified, emotions arise, and the presence
For David Hume, there are no moral facts, but our of those emotions is necessary for judging that the
feelings make it seem as though there were. Killing action is wrong.
feels like it is intrinsically wrong, but the wrongness The sentimentalist position is opposed by those
resides in us (a view sometimes called projectivism). who think emotions are inessential accompani-
In the 20th century, expressivists adopted the sen- ments of moral judgments. Immanuel Kant argues
timentalist theory, and they added a linguistic thesis that emotions often prompt us to make erroneous
according to which the sentences that assert moral moral judgments. He said that, instead, we should
judgments express feelings rather than asserting base moral judgments on rational decision proce-
facts. A related view, called the sensibility theory, dures. Kants most famous suggestion is that we can
says that moral facts are response-dependent prop- determine which actions are permissible by assessing
erties. A response-dependent property is a property which actions we could will as universal laws. Kant
that depends on subjective responses. For example, admits that this method has, at its foundation, a
to say something is funny is to imply that it causes respect for human dignity, but he does not think emo-
amusement, and to say that it is delicious is to say tions are essential components of moral judgments
that it causes gustatory pleasure. Sensibility theorists and he thinks that we should not make judgments
say that to call something wrong is to say that it based on gut feelings. The theory is normativeit
causes (or merits) emotions of disapprobation, such tells us how we should make moral judgments
as anger or guilt. Expressivism and the sensibility rather than descriptive, but it does entail that we can
theory disagree about the semantics of moral judg- make moral judgments without emotions. Kants
mentswhether they refer to response dependent rival, John Stuart Mill, also emphasizes the possibil-
properties or merely express feelingsbut they agree ity of making moral judgments on rational grounds.
that when we make moral assertions, the underlying He says we should do that which maximizes utility
psychological states are emotional in nature. (i.e., happiness)something we can assess quantita-
Other descendants of sentimentalism have tively without depending on any gut reactions. Both
emerged under the influence of empirical research. theories can be regarded as forms of moral ratio-
Shaun Nichols proposes that moral judgments nalism, because they limit the role of emotions and
express affect-backed rules; each of us possesses emphasize reasoning and rational principles.
normative rules that specify which actions are Within contemporary psychology, several theories
wrong, but these rules take on a distinctively moral try to limit the role of emotions as well. Elliot Turiel
cast only when combined with emotional responses. argues that moral rules are those that are universal,
As a result, moral violations can elicit emotions, independent of authority, and more serious than
and externally induced emotions can make us view mere social conventions. For him and other domain
something in a moral light. Jonathan Haidt has theorists, we assess whether something is morally
developed a social intuitionist model on which the wrong by determining whether anyone has been
experience of gut feelings such as disgust lead us intentionally harmed, not by introspecting about
to judge that something is wrong. Thus, for tradi- our gut feelings. Marc Hauser argues that people
tional sentimentalists, emotions are components assess whether something is wrong by unconsciously
of moral judgments, whereas for Nichols they are classifying actions in accordance with innately con-
essential accompaniments, and for Haidt, they are strained moral rules that specify, for example, that
the causal basis of moral judgments. intentionally killing someone to achieve a good end
Haidt implies that moral judgments often arise is worse than killing someone as a foreseen side
without prior reasoning, but sentimentalists need effect while pursuing a good end. When we judge
not deny that reasoning contributes to moral judg- that something is wrong, emotions arise, but they
ment. To determine whether some action is wrong, are not the causes of our moral judgment.
Emotion and Moral Judgment 303
Between the sentimentalists and their opponents data are consistent with this interpretation but are
lie dual-process theories. According to these, some equivocal since emotions are active in all the moral
moral judgments are based on emotions, and others dilemmas studied, just to varying degrees.
are based on nonemotional processes. One variant To assess whether emotions are causally impli-
of this view says that we use emotions as heuristics cated in moral judgments, psychologists turn to
to decide if something is wrong but that they are behavioral methods. Much of this research focuses
dispensable. on disgust. Simone Schnall and her colleagues have
In summary, emotions are sometimes seen as shown that disgust induction (though filth, disgust-
components of moral judgments, sometimes as ing movies, autobiographical recall, and foul smells)
causes, and sometimes as effects. They are regarded can increase the severity of moral judgments. Similar
as necessary for normal moral judgments by senti- results have been obtained though hypnotic induc-
mentalists, whereas opponents of sentimentalism tion of disgust, and people who are disposed to feel
and defenders of dual-process theories say that they more disgust than others tend to judge mores related
are not necessary. to sexuality more harshly. Jonathan Haidt has shown
that disgust can bolster a moral attitude even when
individuals can provide no rational argument for that
Evidence Relating Emotions
attitude, as when they declare that consensual incest
to Moral Judgment
between adults is wrong. This does not show that
Recently, empirical evidence has accrued to establish reasoning is absent from moral judgment in all cases,
that emotions play a role in morality, and it has been but it suggests that reasoned principles can be absent.
marshaled in support of one or another of the afore- Similar results have been obtained relating moral
mentioned theories. judgments to anger and other emotions, though
In cognitive neuroscience, studies suggest that these have been less actively explored than disgust
moral reflection causes increased activation in brain because they are harder to induce in laboratory
areas that have been independently associated with settings. Research in behavioral economics has
emotion. Jorge Moll has shown that emotions are confirmed that emotions play a role in judgments
active when making judgments of moral wrongness of fairness and in the motivation to cooperate with
compared to factual wrongness and when we look others or punish them for defection. Anger and guilt
at photographs of moral violations. Joshua Greene are theorized to play a role in economic exchanges,
and his collaborators have shown that emotions are but the specific identity of the operative emotions is
active when people consider moral dilemmas com- still under investigation.
pared to factual dilemmas. The finding that emotions influence moral judg-
Such findings are often interpreted as evidence ments is consistent with views that say moral judg-
for sentimentalism, but they do not firmly establish ments contain emotions (varieties of sentimentalism)
whether emotions are causes or effects of moral judg- or that judgments are sometimes based on gut
ments nor whether emotions are necessary. Greene feelings (affect-based rules, social intuitionism, and
found that emotions are much more active when dual-process theories). There is also evidence that a
considering dilemmas that involve physically harm- reduction in emotional response leads to a reduction
ing someone to save lives, compared to dilemmas in moral judgments. Simone Schnall has shown that
in which one causes harm to someone indirectly to hand washing reduces negative affect and thereby
save lives. For example, people show stronger emo- leads to a reduction in judgments of moral severity.
tions when imagining pushing someone in front of a Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno found that
runaway trolley to save five people who are standing watching comedy can make people 3 times more
on the track, compared to imagining diverting the likely to say that it is permissible to kill one man to
trolley to an alternate track, where it will kill one save five others. The impact of emotion reduction
instead of five. Greene uses this to support a dual- can also be measured in clinical populations. James
process theory on which emotions are used to make Blair has shown that psychopaths, who are known
decisions about physical battery, but not in cases to suffer from flattened affect, fail to distinguish
where we can assess moral behavior by just looking between moral and conventional rules. He argues
at the total outcomes of action and inaction. The that members of this population see morality as a
304 Emotion and Psychopathology
feelings characterize mental disease, disorders, or and frank discussions of emotional lives, yielding
problems. Cognitive disruptions are most evident in insights to help establish new levels of emotional
disorders such as the schizophrenias, which are typi- balance in troubled minds. Psychodynamically ori-
cally also accompanied by strange feelings and social ented clinicians often yield the most lasting benefits.
behaviors. Affective disordersmood and anxiety Unfortunately, the temperamental characteristics of
problems reflecting brain emotional imbalances therapists are typically as important in promoting
are also accompanied by cognitive changes, includ- emotional change as the specific therapies under-
ing self-blame and obsessive ruminations about taken. Benefits from interacting with caring oth-
ones hopelessness and worries. ers, who provide sympathetic attention to the lived
Thus, while schizophrenic disorders are char- details of individual lives, are commonly as effective
acterized by thinking and social-relational deficits, as psychopharmaceuticals.
mood and anxiety disorders reflect disturbances of Skilled biological psychiatrists often use pharma-
emotional-affective systems. cological tools to establish affective balance, but a
There are affects other than emotional ones, such judicious blending of psychological and pharmaco-
as those reflecting body-state regulations (homeo- logical approaches (which often allow lower doses
static affects) and the pleasures and displeasures of medications to be used) usually yields optimal
of sensations (sensory affects). But these are not as results. Ongoing enquiries into the neurochemical
important for understanding psychopathologies. nature of brain affective processes, at many levels
Although many modern scholars conflate cogni- of MindBrain processing, are bound to yield more
tive and affective processes of the BrainMind, they powerful and consistently effective drug therapies
also need to be seen as distinct processes (brain and than currently exist. Indeed, a recent multicenter
mind are used interchangeably here, each capital- antidepressant trial (called the STAR*D study) on
ized, to affirm the prevailing monistic view that the efficacy of the most commonly used antidepres-
neural and mental processes are totally interwoven, sants, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors
and neither concept should have priority). Still, from (SSRIs), yielded only a 28% overall remission rate:
a brain perspective, important distinctions between no better than the antidepressant benefits seen from
cognitions on the one hand and emotions or motiva- psychotherapy.
tions on the other do need to be made. Cognitions
rely critically on brain functions specialized to pro-
Affective Emotional Networks
cess information coming into the MindBrain from
in Psychopathologies
the outside world. Affective feelings reflect intrinsic,
within-brain state-control networks that are shaped, To understand affective experience, normal and
but not created, by external events. Affective feel- abnormal, we need to understand the evolutionary
ings are evolutionary gifts for guiding life choices. nature of consciousness and the multitiered struc-
Unfortunately, these gifts can spoil in untold ways, ture of brain organization. The affective BrainMind
yielding mental disturbances and experiential dis- has hierarchical levels of control: (a) primary pro-
tressthe defining characteristic of most psychopa- cesses, which are evolved intrinsic functions of the
thologies. This short essay discusses the emotional brain, (b) secondary processes, which reflect the
foundations of psychopathologies, with a special basic capacity of organisms to learn and thereby link
focus on depression. their bodily feelings to environmental events, and
For future progress in understanding emotional (c) tertiary processes, which are higher brain mecha-
imbalances underlying psychopathologies, affective nisms that control our capacity to think creatively
BrainMind perspectives are essential. Although the on one hand and ruminate about our problems on
role of mind in behavioral, cognitive, and other psy- the other.
chological sciences remains a contentious issue, psy- These systems are nested hierarchies with abun-
chiatrists and psychotherapists must deal with the dant two-way interactions among the three levels
shifting tides of affective experiencesthe dynam- of control. The primary systems generate diverse
ics of the emotional mindto understand and help instinctual emotional behaviors and their cor-
people in distress. Skilled psychotherapists know responding raw feelings. Higher systems regulate
how to use unconditional positive regard, empathy, lower ones, so all levels are coordinated for effective
306 Emotion and Psychopathology
joint actions. In one evolutionary view, this may be Brain evidence across mammalian species
envisioned, metaphorically, as a hierarchical eco- indicates there are at least seven primary-process
nomic/political system, (a) with many hardwork- emotional networks, including reward SEEKING,
ing people (evolutionarily specialized neurons) irritable RAGE, up-tight FEAR, loving CARE,
spread throughout the BrainMind countryside; distressing PANIC/GRIEF, and euphoric PLAY, as
(b) middle-management people, with additional first enunciated by Jaak Panksepp. All these systems
special skills, assuring commerce flows smoothly are readily studied in animal models. The capital-
and effectively; and (c) on top, the monarchical/ izations highlight a new way of speaking: They
pontifical leadership, with abundant powers to assert the existence of brain networks that govern
dictate how the lower levels operate, especially class-similar emotional behaviors, as well as distinct
when times are good. However, when times turn types of affective experiences in all mammals. This
bad (during stress and the resulting emotional dis- terminology helps minimize semantic confusion aris-
tress), the lower systems can revolt, causing chaos ing from the use of vernacular terms, where there
in higher leadership chambers. In this way, emo- is little scientific agreement about the meaning of
tions become disconnected from higher cognitive the words. All investigators who have worked on
regulatory functions. these systems know these primary-process circuits
Much evidence indicates that cognitions and not only trigger instinctual emotional behaviors but
affects are normally in seesaw balance so that also generate affective feelings, since electrical stimu-
cognitions can inhibit emotionality while affective lations of localized areas serve as rewards and
intensity can undermine cognitive thinking. Trends punishments in various learning tasks. However,
toward psychopathological emotional dynamics are it is noteworthy that with the advent of human
commonly evident, in all of us, during the wee hours brain imaging, which is more sensitive at detecting
of the night. People who wake up prematurely, as changes in higher rather than lower brain functions,
is common in depression, often do so with bad many investigators just focus on what in the brain
thoughts. They commonly dwell on the negative is unique to humans. For instance, neuroscientist
side of life, partly because higher cognitive regula- Antonio Damasio has emphasized that many cog-
tory functions are weakened. In part, psychopa- nitive decisions are based on how affects control
thology is the failure of higher cognitive functions higher mental processes.
to regulate these lower, affective ones. When the Since arousal of these brain networks yields both
MindBrain becomes chronically fraught with such instinctual emotional behaviors and corresponding
tensions, emotional disorders and problems wor- affective states in all mammals, we can use animal
thy of being labeled as psychopathologies emerge. models to work out many of the general principles
Ultimately, emotional disorders percolate through- of basic emotions in the human brain. Emotional
out the nested hierarchies of the BrainMind, with a MindBrain systems provide highly relevant endophe-
diversity of nuanced differences that lead psychia- notypes (natural, basic BrainMind functions) for the
trists to split disorders into subforms albeit with no systematic study and understanding of affects that
agreed-upon understanding, yet, of what is broken may be most relevant for understanding disorders
and imbalanced in the brain. such as depression and other affective disturbances.
However, great progress is being made. For Endophenotypes reflect natural processes of the
instance, mood disorders ultimately arise from brainfor example, real networks of the brainas
imbalances or dysregulations in low-level, primary- opposed to conceptual terms, such as most psychiat-
process emotion and mood-generating brain circuits. ric categories.
Most current mind medicines help people because It is especially useful that arousal of these basic
they rebalance diverse brain chemistries, especially at emotional systems can be estimated by monitoring
the primary-process levels of these multitiered circuit emotional vocalizationsdistress calls and happy
activities. On the other hand, most psychotherapies euphoric calls in animal models. This is a large
seek to rebalance emotional lives by providing better improvement on the traditional use of very general
regulatory control from above. When psychological behavioral measures to index depressive changes in
and medicinal treatments are combined, they work animal modelsthings such as decreased sucrose
most beneficially on the affected circuits. intake, reduced exploration and social activity, and
Emotion and Psychopathology 307
diminished struggling in forced swimming tasks. to anticipate and deal with lifes challengesare
These measures do not have dedicated brain systems concentrated in ancient, medial regions of the brain
that are well understood. In emotional vocaliza- stem, especially in the periventricular regions. Most
tions, by contrast, we can be sure that there are spe- cognitive functions reflect activities of more recent
cific networks that participate in emotional feelings. brain developments, situated farther up (more ros-
Hence, we can finally reliably estimate what is trans- trally) and further out (more laterally) in the brain.
piring affectively in the minds of animals subjected The medial location of affect regulation structures
to various stressors that model many aspects of remains true in higher regions of the brain as well,
human depression. regions such as anterior cingulate and frontal cor-
Because of the diversity of emotional networks, tices, known as the default mode network (DMN),
there can be many types of emotional problems, which exhibits elevated activation when peoples
all of which, to some extent, reflect imbalances in attention is not magnetized by external events.
the endophenotypic primary-process emotional sys- DMN arousal often presents when people are dwell-
tems of the brain. For instance, the FEAR system ing on their personal, self-related issues. In depressed
is concentrated in midline neural circuits, extending people, this frequently reflects rumination on terrible
from midbrain hot spots such as the periaqueductal life circumstances and feelings.
gray (PAG) to primitive forebrain regions such as Most of the primal emotional systems converge
amygdala, and it generates much of the awful ten- on medial cingulate and frontal emotion-regulating
sion of anxiety disorders. Antianxiety drugs such as DMN regions, where raw affects blend with cog-
benzodiazepines effectively quell arousal of FEAR nitive processes. It has been shown that depressed
circuitry. Panic attacks, on the other hand, emerge people have unusual activity in these brain regions
largely from other affective systems, perhaps with overactivity in most individuals but also underactiv-
precipitous arousals of certain networks that con- ity in some. Activity in one of these cortical areas
trol social connectedness, such as the PANIC/GRIEF (called the subgenual cingulate, or Area 25) is so
system. However, this system, perhaps with chronic abnormal that neuropsychiatrists have been able to
arousal, also promotes depression. electrically stimulate this brain region and rapidly
Depression, the most common emotional prob- reestablish normal feelings in severely depressed
lem in the world, comes in many forms, but all patients. These are the highest brain regions to
of them tend to be precipitated by chronic stress, which the PANIC/GRIEF system directly projects,
especially by the loss of loved ones when one is in its course from the midbrain (especially the PAG),
young and dependent on them. Thus, chronic feel- through the medial thalamus, to medial forebrain
ings of PANIC/GRIEF, yielding sustained psycho- regions.
logical pain, set the stage for depression in later life. As negative feelings percolate throughout the
Although transitions from normal emotionality to higher affective MindBrain, people begin to obses-
excessive affect remain to be spelled out empirically, sively dwell on their problems. These ruminations
according to theoretical ideas first promoted by John lead the DMN to become superactive and unre-
Bowlby, the psychic pain precipitated by prolonged sponsive to cognitive inputs. This is empirically
social loss (PANIC/GRIEF overarousal, as currently indicated by external stimuli having less effect on
understood) promotes the emergence of unhappi- DMN arousal in depressed than in nondepressed
ness and psychological emptinessthe despair and people. The despair of chronic depression is also
hopelessness which constitute the sustained core of accompanied by dampening of dopamine-mediated
depression. From this vantage point, the key primal SEEKING urges that project to medial frontal
emotional networks we must understand better regions, thereby promoting feelings of helplessness
would be intensified PANIC/GRIEF (and to some and hopelessness. That SEEKING circuitry is pres-
extent RAGE and FEAR), along with diminished ently considered to another area that investigators
LUST, CARE, and PLAY influences, leading gradu- such as Volker Coenen and colleagues feel may be a
ally to diminished reward SEEKING, yielding the target for brain stimulation to obtain antidepressant
hopelessness of depression. effects in treatment-resistant patients.
Where are these basic emotional circuits situated? Since the PANIC/GRIEF system is intensely
Primal emotions and their affectsintrinsic ways inhibited by brain opioidsendorphins and
308 Emotion and Working Memory
Negative emotion can improve performance, differences in working memory capacity influence
whereas positive emotion can impair it. This pat- emotional responsivity and regulation.
tern, known as a double dissociation, aligns well
with some models of hemispheric specialization; evi- Affective Working Memory
dence indicates that language processes and positive The third mode of interaction between emotion and
affect are lateralized to the left hemisphere, whereas working memory involves emotions themselves as
visuospatial processes and negative affect are later- the contents of working memory. Note that distinct
alized to the right. Nevertheless, other studies find from emotional words or faces, emotions as memo-
minimal effects of emotion on working memory. randa are feeling states that are actively maintained
Inconsistent outcomes could be due to weak levels even though the eliciting event has passed. This
of emotional arousal and to differences in methodol- mode motivates the novel concept of a separable
ogy. Emotional states such as anxiety and emotional working memory subsystem for emotion: affective
disorders such as depression can have a broad-based working memory. This affective subsystem is the
impact on many cognitive domains, including work- counterpart to the well-established verbal and visual
ing memory. Future research will need to investigate subsystems. Although the study of affective working
the specificity of these effects and how individual memory is in its infancy, there are data supporting
differences in affective/personality traits influence the constructs viability.
working memory. Specifically, evidence favors the operation of sep-
Working memory performance can also be arable processes that underlie the ability to actively
affected by the emotional valence of the memo- maintain emotional intensity versus brightness inten-
randa. For example, performance may differ when sity (the latter relying on visual working memory);
remembering emotional versus neutral words, faces, secondary cognitive tasks can impair visual main-
or pictures. However, the research results depend tenance and not emotion maintenance, whereas a
on the specific process under investigation and on secondary emotion regulation task can selectively
the emotion of the stimulus: Angry expressions may impair emotion maintenance. In a study testing
enhance working memory for facial identity, updat- age differences, older adults showed a predictable
ing the contents of working memory may be slowed decline in visual working memory but preserved
by negative words, and interference from prior epi- affective working memorysupporting separable
sodes may be reduced by emotional words. Working processes. Interestingly, the valence of the main-
memory ability can also be compromised by unex- tained emotion affected the age groups differently:
pected emotional stimulation, and these adverse Younger adults were better at maintaining negative
effects may be reduced by the operations of special- emotions, whereas older adults were better with
ized brain mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex. positive emotions. Preliminary indications of the
brain regions involved with emotion maintenance
Working Memory Influences on Emotion align well with current knowledge of emotion and
the brain: Orbital frontal cortex is recruited when
The second mode of interaction relates to how cog- actively maintaining an emotion, and the amygdala,
nition can modify, control, or regulate emotion. a subcortical structure central to emotion, shows
Here, emotion is the dependent variable. For exam- activity that varies depending on the intensity of the
ple, does our susceptibility to intruding emotions emotion being maintained. Future research on affec-
depend on how much or how little working memory tive working memory may have implications for
is preoccupied with some cognitive task? Research understanding the mechanisms of empathy and its
on this question is surprisingly sparse. Some evi- disorders, of reflective thought and rumination, as
dence indicates that engaging working memory well as the role of emotions in decision making and
with demanding math problems can reduce nega- the development of wisdom.
tive affect evoked by disturbing pictures. Working
memory might be useful for distracting the mind
Conclusions
from emotional experiences, subsequently regulating
the emotion. Future research is needed to investigate Emotion and working memory have a complex
this mode of regulation and whether individual synergistic relationship that must be investigated
310 Emotion Regulation
with multiple approaches. Extant dataalthough avoid a local establishment for fear of running into a
limitedindicate these interactions may be fun- former romantic partner.
damental to understanding the emotion-cognition Extrinsic emotion regulation has been a major
interface and are an exciting research frontier ripe focus in research examining the development of
with many unexplored possibilities. emotion regulation. For example, when a young
child encounters a stressful situation and becomes
Joseph A. Mikels and
visibly upset, this response is externally regulated
Patricia A. Reuter-Lorenz when he seeks proximity to a parent or caregiver
and subsequently displays lower levels of agitation.
See also Emotion, Cerebral Lateralization; Emotion
Regulation; Working Memory
Especially early in life, parents have incredible influ-
ence over the regulation of their childrens emotions,
given the amount of control they have over their
Further Readings childrens daily routines, including academic and
Gray, J. R. (2001). Emotional modulation of cognitive social schedules, as well as sleep and eating habits.
control: Approach-withdrawal states double-dissociate One important hallmark of development is thought
spatial from verbal two-back task performance. Journal to be the transition from primarily extrinsic emotion
of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 436452. regulation to primarily intrinsic emotion regulation
Jackson, M. C., Chia-Yun, W., Linden, D. J., & Raymond, (e.g., when a child begins to use self-soothing tech-
J. E. (2009). Enhanced visual short-term memory for niques rather than relying on a caregiver).
angry faces. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Intrinsic emotion regulation falls under the
Human Perception and Performance, 35, 363374. more general umbrella of processes referred to as
Levens, S. M., & Phelps, E. A. (2008). Emotion processing self-regulation. Contemporary emotion regulation
effects on interference resolution in working memory. research, which focuses largely on intrinsic emotion
Emotion, 8, 267280. regulation, builds on prior work on psychological
Mikels, J. A., Reuter-Lorenz, P. A., Beyer, J. A., & defenses, as well as stress and coping and mood
Fredrickson, B. L. (2008). Emotion and working regulation. However, it may be distinguished from
memory: Evidence for domain-specific processes for these closely related constructs, as coping specifi-
affective maintenance. Emotion, 8, 256266.
cally targets the stress response and mood regulation
Van Dillen, L. F., & Koole, S. L. (2007). Clearing the mind:
targets more diffuse mood states. Successful emo-
A working memory model of distraction from negative
tion regulation is thought to be a crucially adaptive
mood. Emotion, 7, 715723.
skill that protects against the onset and maintenance
of mood and anxiety disorders and is considered
an important dimension of emotional intelligence.
EMOTION REGULATION Current research has focused on defining different
types of emotion regulation and then comparing
Emotions serve many important intra- and inter- and contrasting them in terms of (a) their success
personal functions. However, emotions also can be in modifying multiple responses associated with the
unhelpful when they are the wrong type or inten- target emotion, (b) the cognitive costs of attempt-
sity for a particular context. At such times, emotion ing to use them, and (c) their component cognitive
regulation is crucial. Emotion regulation refers to processes.
any process that influences the onset, offset, mag- One prominent theory of emotion regulation
nitude, duration, or quality of one or more aspects is the process model of emotion regulation, which
of an emotional response. Emotion-regulatory pro- builds on the modal model of emotion. To set the
cesses may be automatic or controlled, effortless or stage for this analysis, the modal model of emotion
effortful, and unconscious or conscious. Emotion- will be outlined, and the process model of emotion
regulatory processes may diminish, intensify, curtail, regulation that organizes different types of regula-
or prolong positive or negative emotion depending tion strategies will be described in detail. Although
on the goal of regulation. Emotions can be regulated these models are described in reference to intrinsic
extrinsically, as when a parent soothes a crying child, emotion regulation, they can be applied to extrinsic
and intrinsically, as when an individual decides to emotion regulation as well.
Emotion Regulation 311
The Modal Model of Emotion Generation experiencing the emotions of sadness, frustration,
and perhaps anger. This results in an increase in his
Emotions arise when a situation engages an indi-
autonomic activation and an urge to express some
viduals attention, has significance in light of his or
amount of hostility toward Monique. As a result,
her current goals, and produces a coordinated, yet
this might lead to the creation of a new situation:
malleable, multisystem response. In Figure 1, these
a tense and antagonistic professional interaction,
properties are presented as the modal model of emo-
which may eventually trigger a second reaction
tion. This model outlines how an emotion arises over
for example, shame that Jim wasnt able to recover
time. The first element is a psychologically relevant
from this blow to his ego.
situation, which is commonly external. However,
relevant situations also can be internal mental
representations. These situations must be attended The Process Model of Emotion Regulation
to in some way, which allows the individual to assess The modal model of emotion (Figure 1) provides
(or appraise) the situations familiarity, valence, a framework for representing the major points in
and value relevance. If the situation is appraised the emotion-generative process at which individu-
as relevant and valenced, a loosely coupled set of als may intervene to change the emotional response.
changes in experiential, behavioral, and physiologi- In Figure 2, the modal model is redrawn, adding
cal response systems occurs. The recursive arrow five ways that regulation can influence the default
from one emotional response to the next eliciting trajectory of an emotional response. These five
situation in Figure 1 emphasizes that these responses points represent five families of emotion regulation
often change the situations that prompted them. strategies: situation selection, situation modifica-
Consider a concrete example. Jim is an ambi- tion, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and
tious young professional who has just stepped response modulation. This process model provides
off the commuter train when he spots Monique, a framework for understanding the causes, conse-
a colleague who was recently promoted above quences, and mechanisms underlying various forms
him. Jim was hopeful that he would be promoted of emotion regulation.
instead, and they have not encountered one another To illustrate each family of emotion regulation
since her promotion was announced. For Jim, processes, consider how Jims emotional responses
this encounter is a situation that has the potential might be influenced by each type of regulation as he
to cause an emotion. Because they are headed to negotiates through his uncomfortable professional
the same office, they greet one another and walk encounter.
together. As they converse, Jims attention is drawn
to the fact that he had hoped to get the job, which Situation Selection
causes him to evaluate her promotion as a fail-
Situation selection requires mental simulation of
ure to achieve his own goals. At this point, he is
likely future situations, as well as an understanding
of the desirable, appropriate, or unacceptable emo-
tional responses to these situations. Successful use of
this strategy involves balancing the projected short-
term responses to situations with their long-term
consequences, which may have different emotional
repercussions.
Jim is employing situation selection if, on hearing
that Monique has been promoted, he begins driving
Figure 1 The modal model of emotion
to work instead of taking the train. In that case, the
Source: Gross, J., & Thompson, R. (2007). Emotion potential emotional importance of the interaction
regulation: Conceptual foundations. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), is never brought into his attention, never evaluated
Handbook of emotion regulation (pp. 324). New York, in relation to his personal goals, and therefore, no
NY: Guilford Press. Reprinted with permission. physiological or expressive responses occur. The new
Note: The box around attention and appraisal indicates that situation that would have occurred is also altered;
these elements occur internally. if the interaction is avoided, it cannot engender
312 Emotion Regulation
Figure 2 A process model of emotion regulation that highlights five families of emotion regulation strategies
Source: Gross, J., & Thompson, R. (2007). Emotion regulation: Conceptual foundations. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of
emotion regulation (pp. 324). Handbook of Emotion Regulation. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Reprinted with
permission.
subsequent shame. However, a different situation salient aspects of a situation are brought into (or out
is created, and reflecting on his choice to avoid her of) focus. Three commonly used examples of atten-
might have other emotional consequences. tional deployment are distraction, concentration,
and rumination. Distraction focuses attention on
Situation Modification anything besides the potentially emotional aspects
Situation modification refers to adjusting the exter- of a situation. Concentration is the opposite of dis-
nal environment to meet emotional goals. Situation traction and involves focusing attention even more
modification requires the belief that situations are intensely on the emotional features of a situation.
malleable and that one is an effective agent of change Rumination refers to chronic, perseverative focus-
in those situations. Although emotional situations can ing, or the continued redirection of attention toward
be external or internal, situation modificationas ones feelings and their consequences, which can
defined herehas to do with acting on the external, prolong an emotional experience.
physical environment. If situation selection involves Imagine that Jim decides to engage Monique in
overcoming situational inertia, situation modification a conversation that leads to the discussion of her
involves applying force to change the trajectory of the promotion. He might then use attention deploy-
situations momentum. ment to direct his gaze away from her face, to
Jim can use situation modification to avoid an avoid perceiving the smile that indicates her pride
emotional response even after he sees Monique on at the promotion. He can also keep his gaze on her
the platform. He could choose to quickly change face but distract himself by thinking of a pleasant
his path to avoid coming within speaking range of lunch meeting on his schedule, thereby avoiding
Monique. Just as with situation selection, he avoids consideration of the significance of her promotion.
directing his attention toward and evaluating the This would prevent the evaluation of her behavior
emotional significance of the encounter. Likewise, as relevant to his personal goals and therefore no
emotional responses are also avoided, and the subse- emotional responses would result. The subsequent
quent situation is changed, albeit differently than if situation will therefore also be changed, given that
he had used situation selection. Jim might not appear authentically engaged in the
conversation.
Attentional Deployment
Cognitive Change
Attentional deployment occurs when individuals
direct their attention toward or away from emotional An emotional appraisal is an assessment of the
meaning. Attentional deployment can be thought way the situation relates to an individuals current
of as an internal situation modification, when the goals, and specific appraisals are thought to lead
Emotional Recognition, Neuropsychology of 313
The cross-cultural work of Charles Darwin, hemisphere is linked with the control of spontane-
Paul Ekman, Wallace Friesen, and Carroll Izard has ous expression. Dawn Bowers, Russell Bauer, and
supported the existence of primary universal emo- Kenneth Heilman have posited a somewhat different
tions (i.e., happiness, interest, sadness, fear, anger, explanation of these brain-behavior relationships.
contempt, disgust, excitement, and surprise) and Bowers and colleagues suggest that right-hemisphere
cognitively complex emotions (e.g., pride, shame, mediation of nonverbal affect lexicons plays a role
and embarrassment). Acknowledged in several of in the appraisal of emotional stimuli (e.g., face,
these models are affect programs that refer to spe- prosody, and gesture). The lexicons are considered
cific neurological mechanisms mediating the encod- to be a part of a comprehensive cortically based
ing, storage, and output of each emotion type. Based affect-processing network. Last, Joan Borods com-
on these affect programs, discrete emotional labels ponential model proposes that emotional content is
are then derived through an individuals exposure to mapped onto various perceptual stimuli via a central
a specific culture. affective processor. This central processor functions
An alternate perspective, however, posits that irrespective of modality and is distinguishable from
emotional constructs are better explained through more finite cognitive functions. Specific cortical and
dual-system models of emotion that address dimen- subcortical regions subserve the various components
sions of valence (positive versus negative), arousal of each emotional process.
(calm versus excited or high versus low), or pleasure
(pleasant versus unpleasant). These dimensions also Right-Hemisphere Hypothesis
stem from universal or underlying neurological pre- Traditionally, the predominant neuropsycho-
dispositions that are connected to specific learned logical hypotheses regarding emotion recognition
behaviors (e.g., perception, experience, and expres- focused on hemispheric specialization (i.e., right
sion of specific emotions) via cultural influences. hemisphere [RH], left hemisphere [LH], and both
The dimensions can be mapped onto any mode or hemispheres [bilateral]). Early perspectives sup-
channel (e.g., facial [face], prosodic [intonation], ported RH dominance in the recognition of emo-
verbal/lexical [speech content or language], postural tion regardless of the target (i.e., emotion, type, or
[positioning and/or carriage of the body], and ges- valence). This evidence stemmed from work pri-
tural [nonverbal communicative movements of the marily examining recognition of facial emotion and
body and/or limbs]) of emotional recognition and affective prosody in healthy adults and individuals
described using a wide range of terms depending on with unilateral brain damage and psychopathology.
the individual culture. Because of inconsistencies in the above findings,
alternative models were developed suggesting that
Neuropsychological Theories and Models
emotion recognition is mediated by caudal cortices
Based on early lesion studies, Paul MacLean and within the RH. Joan Borod and colleagues reviewed
James Papez hypothesized some of the first neu- the findings from a number of neuroimaging stud-
rological models supporting emotional processes. ies and summarized posterior (i.e., temporal and/
These models focused on structures within the or parietal) cortical activation results for emotion
limbic system as the primary mechanisms of emo- recognition in healthy adults. Examining facial and
tional processing but noted the importance of inter- prosodic channels of communication, there were
connections with the cortex. More recent models more RH findings than LH or bilateral findings. In
of emotion have examined underlying intra- and contrast, for the lexical channel of communication
interhemispheric differences within the brain. For the distribution of findings was relatively equivalent
example, Guido Gainotti and Carlo Caltagirone across these three possibilities (i.e., RH, LH, or bilat-
have posited that various neuroanatomical regions eral involvement). These neuroimaging findings are
mediate certain features of emotional processing consistent with an extensive review of the behavioral
based on automatic components versus control of findings for emotion recognition in healthy adults by
spontaneous emotional expression. In this model, these authors in the same review paper. A somewhat
the right hemisphere is considered important for the disparate model has been proposed that suggests
mediation of the automatic components, and the left RH dominance for stimuli engaging preattentive/
Emotional Recognition, Neuropsychology of 315
unconscious processing of affective stimuli and/or dual-system model proposed by Elliott Ross and
elevated levels of arousal, with LH mediation rel- Ross Buck ascribes hemispheric differences based on
egated to the conscious processing of emotion. a conceptual distinction between a social versus a
self-focused affective system, mediated by the LH
Valence Hypothesis versus RH, respectively.
By contrast, the valence lateralization hypothesis
has posited hemispheric specialization for specific Methodology
emotion types or dimensions. In the original formu- Traditional Experimental Paradigms
lation, the RH was dominant for negative emotions,
and the LH was dominant for positive emotions. During the past four decades, a number of experi-
These findings were based on early studies examin- mental paradigms have been utilized to examine the
ing electroencephalography in individuals viewing recognition of emotion in healthy individuals and
affective stimuli, behavioral findings for individuals clinical populations (e.g., mood disorders, schizo-
with unilateral brain damage, and mood changes in phrenia, stroke, and seizure disorders). Traditional
epilepsy patients undergoing the sodium amobar- neuropsychological methods have included a variety
bital (sodium Amytal) procedure (or Wada test). of behavioral laterality techniques (e.g., dichotic lis-
The Wada test is used to determine which cerebral tening, tachistoscopic viewing, and free-field facial
hemisphere of the brain is critical for particular cog- viewing).
nitive and affective functions. Sodium amobarbital In the typical dichotic listening task, participants
is directly injected into an internal carotid artery or are presented simultaneously with two different
introduced via a catheter in the femoral artery and auditory stimuli (e.g., emotionally intoned words,
anesthetizes one of the two hemispheres allowing for nonsense syllables, or nonspeech sounds), one to
the assessment of functional lateralization. each ear, and are asked to either passively listen to the
A revised version of the valence hypothesis sup- stimuli or attend to specific components of the stim-
ported RH parietal mediation of perception/recog- uli. Participants are then asked to respond in some
nition of emotion, especially for negative emotion. fashion to what they hear (e.g., repeating sounds/
In this version, anterior brain regions (i.e., frontal words or answering questions regarding the content
lobe regions) differentially mediate experience and of the stimuli). In the tachistoscopic viewing task,
expression of emotion (i.e., RH dominance for participants are presented with visual stimuli (e.g.,
negative emotions and LH dominance for positive facial expressions or words used to convey emotion)
emotions). This latter distinction is more commonly to the right and/or left visual fields for a very brief
referred to as the dimension of withdrawal/avoid- period of time. The responses provide information
ance versus approach. regarding lateralization for emotional functions. In
the free-field viewing procedure, developed by Jerre
Levy, individuals are asked to view chimeric faces
Additional Dual-System Models
in both the right and left hemispaces and make a
Neuropsychological models have also been pos- judgment regarding the face (e.g., congruency of the
ited to explain hemispheric differences for experi- facial expressions or the hemiface expressing more
enced emotional processes in relation to motivation. emotion). There are several approaches to creat-
Jeffrey Gray developed the reinforcement sensitivity ing chimeric faces; in some emotional paradigms,
theory that focuses on two motivational systems: stimuli are made by combining photographs of an
the behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and the individual producing two different types of facial
behavioral approach system (BAS). This theory is expressions. The bisected expressions are joined at
used to describe individual differences in personal- the vertical midline.
ity traits. Further, it explores how related emotional Many of the studies using facial stimuli have
experiences are based on the interaction between focused on static/still photographs and have asked
neurobiological predispositions and environmental participants to match, discriminate, or identify spe-
cues. The RH has been associated with the media- cific emotions. Dynamic emotional displays have
tion of the BIS and the LH with the BAS. Another been used to capture emotion recognition as it might
316 Emotional Recognition, Neuropsychology of
occur in real-life situations. Similarly, investigations emotional label. The Victoria Emotion Perception
examining emotion recognition through prosodic Test evaluates the ability to identify and discriminate
and verbal modalities have used static and dynamic emotional categories and intensity levels through
stimuli in discrimination and identification para- facial and prosodic channels.
digms. Opinion differs as to the optimal method for
assessment, in part, because disparate findings have Neuroimaging Techniques
occurred using similar paradigms and stimuli. The rapid emergence of neuroimaging techniques
has facilitated more direct evaluation of brain-
Emotion Test Batteries
behavior relationships and the acknowledgement
Clinically, a number of neuropsychological test that a variety of specific neuroanatomical struc-
batteries are available to assess emotional pro- tures/subsystems and neurophysiological processes
cesses using behavioral techniques. Almost all these are activated during most emotion recognition
batteries include several of the primary emotions paradigms. In these studies, participants are typi-
(e.g., happiness, sadness, and/or anger) and a neutral cally exposed to discrete emotional stimuli within
condition, as well as tasks evaluating the recognition a specific modality/channel (e.g., faces, voices, or
of emotion across single or crossed modalities (i.e., words) while neural and, in some cases behavioral,
meaning stimuli presented in two different modali- responses are recorded. Participants may engage in
ties, for example, visual and auditory). Tests evaluat- explicit recognition (make an explicit judgment of
ing emotional expression and experience, in addition an emotional stimulus) or implicit recognition (pas-
to tests of recognition, are included in several of the sively view emotional stimuli). The task demands
batteries. However, psychometric support for these and approaches to analyzing the data are quite vari-
measures, especially related to construct validity and able, resulting in some degree of difficulty compar-
ecological validity, is limited at the present time. ing the findings from the various studies.
The tests of emotional recognition for each battery Neuroimaging techniques have allowed for
are described below, and the batteries are presented examination of the temporal course (i.e., electroen-
in alphabetical order. The Aprosodia Battery evalu- cephalography [EEG], event-related brain potentials
ates comprehension of affective prosody employing [ERPs], and magnetoencephalography [MEG]), and
identification and discrimination of stimuli using the spatial resolution (i.e., single-neuron recording,
asyllabic and monosyllabic utterances, as well as functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI],
words. The Battery of Emotional Expression and positron emission tomography [PET], single photon
Comprehension includes tests measuring percep- emission computerized tomography [SPECT], and
tion of emotional faces, prosody, and scenes. The transcranial magnetic stimulation [TMS]) of emo-
Comprehensive Affect Testing System allows assess- tion recognition within the brain.
ment of discrimination, identification, and cross- Neurophysiological techniques, including EEG
modality matching of facial and prosodic emotions. and ERP measures, evaluate the summated electrical
The Florida Affect Battery includes subtests evalu- activity of neuronal groups on the scalp during rest
ating the perception and recognition of nonverbal and in response to tasks, respectively. fMRI, PET,
emotional signals via facial and prosodic channels, and SPECT isolate regional activation by examin-
as well as a nonemotional discrimination subtest. ing changes in levels of hemodynamic or metabolic
The New York Emotion Battery examines percep- functions. These latter techniques examine activity/
tion (identification and discrimination) across facial, changes in blood flow and metabolism of ions in
prosodic, and lexical channels using eight emo- response to specific task performance. TMS allows
tions divided across positive/negative valence and for the application of pulsed magnetic fields over
approach/withdrawal dimensions. Nonemotional specific areas of the head and into the underlying
control tasks are included as a feature of this par- neural anatomy. Similar to direct electrical stimula-
ticular emotion battery. The Perception of Emotions tion of brain tissue, TMS can result in temporary
Test assesses emotion across facial, prosodic, and inhibition and excitation of brain areas and in
verbal modalities using a multiple-choice recognition subsequent emotional processes when the device is
format (i.e., four drawings) and the corresponding activated.
Emotional Recognition, Neuropsychology of 317
Functional Neuroimaging Studies cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and posterior supe-
rior temporal sulcus, as well as somatosensory areas
The current neuroimaging literature as applied to
and insular cortex.
emotion recognition has focused on the facial chan-
nel with a paucity of work existing for prosodic and
lexical channels. The majority of the following dis- Substrates for Basic Emotions
cussion is based on work using fMRI techniques. Recent research is also being conducted to identify
dissociable neural substrates for recognizing indi-
Facial Channel vidual basic emotions. Neuroimaging results pro-
vide evidence of a dissociation for fear and disgust.
Neuroimaging paradigms typically either assess
Whereas the insular cortex and basal ganglia are
differential neural activation in response to recogni-
involved in the recognition of disgust but not fear, the
tion of different facial emotional expressions or in
amygdala is involved in the recognition of fear, but
response to neutral versus emotional facial expres-
not disgust. Regarding the recognition of anger, the
sions. The findings from several neuroimaging stud-
cingulate, orbitofrontal cortices, and the amygdala
ies using facial stimuli support the idea that there
have been isolated via neuroimaging studies. Some
are specific neuroanatomical substrates in the RH
evidence further suggests that certain neural regions
that are involved in emotional recognition. Ralph
may be particularly sensitive to characteristic facial
Adolphs, Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel, and
features of a basic emotion. For example, some find-
Antonio Damasio asked participants with focal
ings support the notion that viewing the eye region
brain lesions to judge facial expressions of six basic
of a face producing fear is sufficient to produce acti-
emotions. Using a novel technique, anatomical
vation in the amygdala. Regarding positive emotions
descriptions of surface lesions and task performance
(i.e., happiness), the orbitofrontal cortex, anterior
scores were jointly mapped onto a standard brain
cingulate cortex, basal ganglia, and amygdala have
space. The regions that best correlated with impaired
been connected to the recognition of happy faces.
recognition of emotion were within the right inferior
Furthermore, it has been shown that activity in the
parietal cortex and the right mesial anterior infracal-
left amygdala decreases with increasing happiness.
carine cortex. No impairments in facial emotional
Additional research is needed to validate claims of
recognition were noted in the LH damaged patients.
specific neural substrates for the recognition of hap-
Additionally, several discrete neural mechanisms,
piness and other emotions, including anger, surprise,
which are not necessarily lateralized, have been iden-
and sadness.
tified in response to facial stimuli, especially within
the temporal and frontal areas. Regions in visual
cortices, face selective areas of the fusiform gyrus, The Amygdala and Recognition
of Fearful Facial Expressions
the amygdala, and the orbitofrontal cortex exhibit
greater neural activation to passive viewing of emo- The importance of the amygdala and associated
tional than neutral faces. Several studies have found neural regions for the identification of facial expres-
that the enhancement of activations within the fusi- sions of fear has been a consistent finding in the lit-
form cortex and amygdala in response to emotional erature. Conscious and unconscious perceptions of
facial expressions persists with reduced attention fearful faces consistently elicit significant amygdala
or awareness, as for example, when faces appear responses. Amygdalar activation has been shown to
at task-irrelevant or ignored locations. The findings increase when viewing increasingly intense fearful
from a study conducted by Patrik Vuilleumier and facial expressions. Interestingly, enhanced activation
Gilles Pourtois suggest that the visual system may of fusiform regions in response to fearful faces, com-
prioritize emotional stimuli over neutral stimuli; pared to neutral faces, is reduced in patients with
in fact, emotional faces may capture attention in a amygdala lesions. Activation is observed even when
reflexive manner. Furthermore, enhanced responses using a masked paradigm to present fearful faces,
to emotional versus neutral faces have been observed that is, when fearful expressions are not consciously
in the following regions during explicit processing: recognized. In a masked paradigm, a fearful face is
the orbitofrontal cortex, ventromedial prefrontal presented for a very brief interval and then overlaid
318 Emotional Recognition, Neuropsychology of
with a neutral face so that the participant does not Right lateralized processing of the voice occurs at
have time to consciously recognize the fearful face. the level of the auditory cortex. Additionally, right
As a result, much research is currently aimed at frontoparietal regions have consistently been iden-
understanding what modulates amygdalar activa- tified as structures involved in emotional prosody
tion. Many researchers theorize that more cogni- recognition. However, although the RH seems
tively demanding tasks (such as those requiring disproportionately involved in this process, there
labeling emotional content) reduce activation in the is substantial evidence in the literature to support
amygdala. One study conducted by Ahmad Hariri bilateral processing for emotional prosody recogni-
and colleagues, for example, observed a reduction tion, especially in orbital regions of the prefrontal
in amygdala activity (relative to simply attending cortex and in the amygdala.
to stimuli) when participants reappraised negative Less is known about the specific neural correlates
pictures with various cognitive strategies. Similarly, of emotional prosody recognition. However, Dirk
Stephan F. Taylor and colleagues found that activa- Wildgruber has posited a prosody networkthat
tion in the extended amygdala elicited during dif- is, a processing model in which there are parallel
ferent emotional tasks could be modulated by task projections from the posterior superior temporal
demands and/or cognitive factors. (By extended sulcus to frontal cortical regions. He has examined
amygdala, the authors are referring to the bed the neural substrates underlying successive process-
nucleus of the stria terminalis and its sublenticular ing stages of meaningful emotional prosody. In one
extension into the centromedial amygdala.) study, participants identified and named the emotion
Although many of these effects are robust and expressed by vocal tone. Findings supported activa-
consistent across studies, they must be interpreted tion within the right inferior frontal cortex and the
with caution as the amygdala has also been linked right posterior superior temporal sulcus. A separate
to the recognition of faces portraying sadness and discrimination task compared linguistic prosody
happiness. Additionally, the amygdala is implicated versus emotional prosody. Explicit judgment of
in the response to non-facial displays of unpleasant linguistic prosody (e.g., question intonation) was
emotions, including unpleasant auditory, olfactory, associated with greater activation in the left infe-
and gustatory stimuli. Thus, it is plausible that the rior frontal gyrus, whereas evaluation of emotional
amygdala, as a region sensitive to emotional expres- prosody was associated with activation of bilateral
sions, plays a general role in processing salient stim- orbitofrontal cortex.
uli. Consequently, in examining associations between Data exist to support the notion that the implicit
brain regions and specific emotions, it is important to processing of unattended emotional prosody affects
question whether individual emotions are subserved the explicit judgment of facial expressions. For
by dissociable neural subsystems. example, it has been shown that the middle section
of the right fusiform gyrus shows significantly stron-
Prosodic Channel ger activation when facial expressions are displayed
Behaviorally, certain emotions are more difficult in the presence of a fearful voice compared to a
to identify via the prosodic channel compared with happy voice.
the facial channel (e.g., disgust). Emotional prosody
Lexical Channel
tasks can be categorized as either implicit or explicit
recognition tasks. Typically, in such experiments, par- There is a paucity of neuropsychological stud-
ticipants passively listen to affective speech or engage ies investigating emotion recognition in the lexical
in an active task (e.g., identify the emotion expressed channel. Paradigms typically incorporate emotional
by the tone of voice or make a judgment about the decision tasks by requiring the selection of particular
tone of voice). Similar to emotional facial recogni- pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral words. Matthias
tion, it is hypothesized that simple cues, such as fre- Tabert and colleagues instructed participants to
quency range or amplitude variation, can be used to select the most unpleasant or neutral word from
identify the emotion represented in a stimulus. a lexical set. Activation in the right amygdala was
A number of imaging studies have shown that the greater for unpleasant than neutral word sets, and
RH is important in emotional prosody recognition. the amygdala showed a sustained response to the
Emotional Recognition, Neuropsychology of 319
evaluation of unpleasant words. Additionally, the support for gender-specific lateralization of emotion.
overall peak blood oxygenation level-dependent These studies have identified increased activation in
(BOLD) response in the occipital cortex was strongly specific brain regions, and gender effects are more
positively correlated with the peak BOLD response frequently associated with the valence dimension.
in the right amygdala in response to unpleasant Tor Wager and colleagues applied a meta-analytic
words but not neutral words. approach to examine the relationships between
brain activity, valence, and gender. Their findings did
Developmental Processes not support global RH lateralization for emotion
and provided minimal support for lateralized frontal
The ability to recognize emotion begins in infancy cortical mediation of the valence dimension. Further,
and continues to develop across the life span. Infants their analyses revealed that women more frequently
as young as 4 months are able to discriminate among demonstrated increased activation in the medial
simple facial emotions. The ability to perceive and frontal cortex, thalamus, and cerebellum during
label emotions, which may reflect sophisticated abil- affective paradigms. Activation in inferior frontal
ities to recognize subtle nuances, blended emotions, cortex, dorsal striatum, and posterior sensory and
and/or less intense emotions, appears to increase association cortex was more common for men.
during childhood and adolescence. The develop-
ment of these emotional processes is subserved, Lawrence H. Pick, Erica P. Meltzer,
in part, by maturation of specific brain structures and Joan C. Borod
(e.g., amygdala and prefrontal cortex) and hemi-
spheric subsystems (e.g., frontal-limbic connections) Authors Note: This work was supported, in part, by
throughout adolescence and early adulthood. This Professional Staff CongressCity University of New
neuroplasticity most likely occurs via neural mecha- York Research Awards 62527-0040 & 63746-0041 and
by NIH R01 DC01150 subcontract to Queens College.
nisms, including myelination, synaptogenesis, and
dendritic arborization.
See also Emotion, Cerebral Lateralization;
Explicit recognition of facial affect, especially for Emotion, Structural Approaches; Facial Expressions,
negative emotions (i.e., anger and sadness), appears Emotional
to decline with increasing age. Conversely, the rec-
ognition of disgust and positive emotion improves
with age. Although atrophy in structural volume Further Readings
(e.g., frontal and temporal cortices, basal ganglia, Adolphs, R., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., & Damasio, A. R.
and amygdala) may explain these changes for nega- (1996). Cortical systems for the recognition of emotion
tive emotions, it does not provide support for the in facial expressions. Journal of Neuroscience, 16,
effects on positive emotions. This latter finding may 76787687.
result from the increased social and cognitive adap- Borod, J. C. (Ed.). (2000). The neuropsychology of
tations and experiences that accompany the aging emotion. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
process, which strengthen existing subcortical and Borod, J. C., Pick, L. H., Hall, S., Sliwinski, M., Madigan,
medial prefrontal subsystems. N., Obler, L. K., . . . & Tabert, M. (2000). Relationships
among facial, prosodic, and lexical channels of
Gender emotional perceptual processing. Cognition and
Emotion, 14, 193211.
Behaviorally, women have been reported to recog- Bowers, D., Bauer, R. M., & Heilman, K. M. (1993). The
nize emotional stimuli better than men as well as be nonverbal affect lexicon: Theoretical perspectives from
more emotionally expressive. One possible explana- neuropsychological studies of affect perception.
tion for this finding has been that women respond to Neuropsychology, 7, 433444.
such tasks by attending to the subjective components Buck, R. (1999). The biological affects: A typology.
of the emotional experience, whereas men respond to Psychological Review, 106, 301336.
the same tasks by directing attention to the sensory Davidson, R. J. (1993). Cerebral asymmetry and emotion:
and activation components. Several neuroimaging Conceptual and methodological conundrums. Cognition
studies of emotional processes have provided limited and Emotion, 7, 115138.
320 Emotions and Consciousness
Eimer, M., & Holmes, A. (2007). Event-related brain sometimes thought of as more structurally complex
potential correlates of emotional face processing. mental states that, at least ordinarily, involve the
Neuropsychologia, 45, 1531. former as elementary constituents. Whether con-
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1975). Unmasking the face: sciousness is necessary or matters critically for under-
A guide to recognizing emotions from facial clues. standing emotion, and which variety or form matters,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. depends on the account of the emotions adopted.
Gainotti, G., Caltagirone, C., & Zoccolotti, P. (1993).
Left/right and cortical/subcortical dichotomies in the
neuropsychological study of human emotions. Intellectualist Accounts
Cognition and Emotion, 7, 7193. Propositional Attitudes
Kinsbourne, M., & Bemporad, B. (1984). Lateralization
of emotion: A model and the evidence. In N. A. Fox & There is a long-standing and still popular intellec-
R. J. Davidson (Eds.), The psychology of affective tualist trend to treat emotions as nothing but a spe-
development (pp. 259291). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. cies of propositional attitude. Propositional attitudes
Ochsner, K. N., Bunge, S. A., Gross, J. J., & Gabrieli, J. D. are psychological attitudes of various kinds that
(2002). Rethinking feelings: An fMRI study of the relate thinkers to propositions. The content of such
cognitive regulation of emotion. Journal of Cognitive propositions is paradigmatically expressed in natural
Neuroscience, 14, 12151229. language sentences by that-clauses or content-clauses
Ross, E. D., Thompson, R. D., & Yenkosky, J. (1997). such as, The train leaves Euston at 9:15 p.m. For
Lateralization of affective prosody in brain and the example a thinker, X, can believe, desire, hope, fear,
callosal integration of hemispheric language functions. or recognize p, where the mental state verb denotes
Brain and Language, 56, 2754. Xs attitude and p denotes the propositional content
Sackeim, H. A., Greenberg, M. S., Weiman, A. L., Gur, R. to which Xs attitude relates. Propositions may be
C., Hungerbuhler, J. P., & Geschwind, N. (1982). true or falsefor example, things may or may not
Hemispheric asymmetry in the expression of positive be as the thinker takes them to be. As such, propo-
and negative emotions: Neurologic evidence. Archives of sitional attitudes are thought to be states of mind
Neurology, 39, 210218. that possess or relate to truth-evaluable contents,
Vuilleumier, P., & Pourtois, G. (2007). Distributed and where the term content can refer either to what
interactive brain mechanisms during emotion face is thought aboutfor example, a state of affairs
perception: Evidence from functional neuroimaging.
or object, whether real or imaginaryor the spe-
Neuropsychologia, 45, 174194.
cific manner or way in which that subject matter
is thought about. Depending on ones view of the
nature of propositions, propositional attitudes will
EMOTIONS AND CONSCIOUSNESS be regarded as relating a thinker directly to some
actual or possible state of affairs or indirectly via a
It can seem obvious that there are natural connec- specific mode of presentation or representation. But
tions between emotional states of mind, such as either way, if emotions are thought of as a species
being angry or fearful, and their conscious proper- of propositional attitude, then it is an easy matter
ties, such as feeling anger and fear. However, there to explain how such states of mind enter into ratio-
is currently no agreed-on or settled understanding of nal commerce with cognitive states of mind, such as
the precise relationships between these phenomena. beliefs and desires.
There are a number of reasons for this. A major fac- Understood in this way, emotions are akin to
tor is the plethora of competing accounts about the judgments, thoughts, or contentful evaluations.
nature of emotions, which promote different views Importantly, their authors need not be explicitly
about the importance of consciousness, and specific aware of making such evaluations. For example,
types of consciousness, for understanding the emo- John may be furious at Jane for slighting him
tions. To give a sense of these options, this entry will even if he has misrepresented the facts and even if
describe features of the purer forms of intellectual he is unaware that he is in such a state of mind. If
and experiential accounts. emotions are nothing but propositional attitudes
Emotions have been variously identified with then, like others of their kindsuch as beliefs and
judgments or feelings of bodily changes, and they are desiresthey might be tacitly possessed. In this case,
Endowment Effect 321
there would be no essential or necessary connection lights, nothing would count as an emotion proper
between emotions and consciousness, at least with if it lacked phenomenal qualities altogether. One
respect to this understanding of being consciousness. way to make sense of this proposal is to imagine
that phenomenal qualities are part of the constitu-
Unconscious Attitudes tive content of a propositional attitude. Different
This sort of cognitivism about emotions can theorists attempt to accommodate this idea in dif-
seem to fit well with psychoanalytic accounts, ferent ways. Thus the phenomenal properties could
which invoke talk of unconscious and repressed be thought of as features (of the external world or
emotions. For although the psychoanalytic tradi- oneself) at which subjects are intentionality directed,
tion regards emotions as complex states of mind, or they might be thought to be exhausted by rep-
with both contentful and affective properties, it also resentational properties that explain the intentional
emphasizes that the contentful aspects of emotional directedness at such features. Taking these ideas to
states are precisely those that become inaccessible their extreme, some have argued that emotions are
to consciousness in cases of repression. Thus, while not best understood as being a species of sophis-
emotions still play causally efficacious roles in influ- ticated propositional attitudes but rather as being
encing behavior, their meaning or focus may not be essentially perceptual states of mind. If so, the core
available or fully present to their owners. In such of emotional responding might be understood in a
cases, it seems agents systematically lack what is quite different way than the intellectualist tradition
known as access consciousness to the content of assumesperhaps, depending on the understanding
their repressed emotions. Such states of mind would of perception one adopts, without necessarily requir-
be regarded as unconscious precisely because the ing emotions to be thought of as content-involving
agents in question are unable to manipulate their mental states at all.
emotions by relating them to other mental states so Daniel D. Hutto
as to rationally influence or modify their behavior.
See also Access Consciousness; Intentionality of
Emotion; Unconscious Emotion, Psychological
Purely Experiential and Hybrid Accounts
Perspectives
There is however another form of consciousness
that appears to be more intimately connected with Further Readings
the emotions. Consciousness is sometimes used to
denote a state of mind with a characteristic feel Goldie, P. (2000). The emotions: A philosophical
that is, a state of mind in which there is something- exploration. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
that-it-is-like to occupy it. Mental states that possess Nussbaum, M. (2001). Upheavals of thought: The
this property are said to be phenomenally conscious; intelligence of emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
they have a certain phenomenal or qualitative University Press.
Prinz, J. J. (2004). Gut reactions: A perceptual theory of
character. The phenomenal character of such men-
emotion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
tal states depend on a range of factors, such as the
Solomon, R. C. (Ed.). (2004). Thinking about feeling:
kind of being that enjoys them, the kind of stimuli
Contemporary philosophers on emotions. Oxford, UK:
and circumstances that elicit them, and so on. As
Oxford University Press.
such, experiencing a feeling of itchiness is quite dif-
ferent from experiencing elation or sorrow. While
it is debatable whether or not most propositional
attitudes, such as beliefs or desires, possess phenom- ENDOWMENT EFFECT
enal qualities, it is extremely plausible that emo-
tions typically do and arguable that they must do so, People tend to demand more to give up an object
essentially. than they would be willing to pay to acquire the same
Emotions might be thought to necessarily or inte- object. That is, people value objects that they happen
grally require phenomenal consciousness because to to ownobjects that are part of their endowment
be an emotion of a certain kind necessarily requires more than identical objects that they happen not
the having of certain kinds of feelings. By these to own. This is known as the endowment effect.
322 Endowment Effect
This entry will first review empirical evidence for the assumptions imply that people who happen to be
endowment effect and then discuss its practical and endowed with an object should demand no more to
theoretical implications as well as the proposed psy- sell their object than buyers or choosers would be
chological explanations for the effect. willing to pay to acquire the same object and that
an objects value (i.e., how much money an object
Evidence and Implications is worth) should be independent of the way value is
The endowment effect has been widely replicated measured (i.e., whether one is asked to state a sell-
with many different objects in many different cul- ing price, buying price, or choose between an object
tures and has even been demonstrated in nonhuman and money). In contrast with such assumptions, the
primates. In one study, students who were randomly endowment effect implies that peoples preferences
given a coffee mug emblazoned with their university are constructed in the context of measurement and
logo would not sell their mug for less than $5.25, are contextually contingent.
whereas students randomly assigned to the role of
Theoretical Explanations
buyer would not pay more than $2.50 for the mug,
a price discrepancy that emerged even though both Like many robust psychological phenomena, the
buyers and sellers had previously learned how to endowment effect is multiply determined. One com-
make efficient transactions for tokens in an experi- mon explanation is that when trading, owners view
mental market. In another study, some people were objects in their endowment as losses whereas non-
given coffee mugs and asked whether they would owners view those objects as gains. Because people
sell the mug for various amounts of money; others are more sensitive to losses than to gainsfor exam-
were simply asked to choose between receiving the ple, losing $20 feels more intensely negative than
mug and receiving various amounts of money. The gaining $20 feels intensely positiveowners assign
sellers assigned a median value of $7.12 to the mugs, more value to objects and hence demand greater
whereas choosers assigned a median value of only compensation for their loss, compared with buyers.
$3.12. The psychological basis for this loss aversion may
The endowment effect has important conse- be that owners tend to focus on different attributes
quences for everyday consumer behavior. For than buyers when valuing objects in their endow-
example, the endowment effect produces undertrad- ment. Specifically, both owners and buyers tend to
ing in markets even with zero transaction costs. To focus on and place relatively greater weight on what
illustrate the concept of undertrading, consider an will be foregone in a given exchange. For owners,
experimental market in which a random half of the the endowed object will be foregone and is therefore
people are given chocolate bars and asked if they attended to and valued more; for buyers, in contrast,
would trade their chocolate for a coffee mug; the the expenditures will be foregone and are therefore
other half are given coffee mugs and asked if they attended to and valued more. This attention based
would trade their mug for chocolate. According to explanation helps explain why the endowment
standard economic assumptions, 50% of the people effect is reduced by encouraging people to attend
should trade, given that, on average, half of the to the non-focal attribute; that is, owners focus on
people would have to trade to match the overall money to be gained and buyers focus on the object
distribution of preference for mugs and chocolate. to be gained.
However, the endowment effect reduces trading Another explanation is that owners value objects
rates to approximately 25%, presumably because that happen to be part of their endowment because
the objects are more valuable to people who happen they see those objects as extensions of themselves
to own those objects than to those who do not. and they are motivated to view themselves favorably.
The endowment effect also has important theo- This explanation, grounded in self-enhancement
retical implications for economics and behavioral tendencies, is most often associated with the mere
decision theory. In particular, the endowment effect ownership effect, a phenomenon highly similar to
violates assumptions of standard economic theory the endowment effect, emphasizing personal liking
that people act on well-defined preferences that of an owned object rather than valuing or pricing of
are consistent across measurement context. Such an owned object.
Envy 323
Whatever the processes underlying the endow- Benign Versus Malicious Envy
ment effect, people have limited awareness of how
Scholars are careful to point out two important defi-
the endowment effect influences their own or other
nitional distinctions that are often a source of confu-
peoples behavior. When nonowners predict how
sion about the nature of envy. First, the word envy
they would behave if they were owners, they under-
has two meanings, one referring to a benign feeling
estimate how much they would value the objects
akin to admiration, and the other referring to a hos-
they own and how much actual owners value the
tile, more aversive state. As research by Niels van de
objects they own. Similarly, owners overestimate
Ven and others shows, people admit to benign envy,
how much they would value their objects if they did
and the feeling seems relatively unconnected to ill
not own them and how much actual buyers value
will or aggressive behaviors. Hostile envy, scholars
those objects. The endowment effect is thus perva-
assume, is usually denied in public, and even in pri-
sive and potent but nonobvious.
vate, and is closely linked with a variety of aggressive
Jacob Westfall and Leaf Van Boven inclinations. Benign, admiring envy is an important
emotion to understand, but hostile envy is the proto-
See also Allais Paradox; Decision Theory, Philosophical typical variety and the kind that has been the focus
Perspectives; Dictator Game; Dutch Book Arguments; of literary, philosophical, and religious scrutiny since
Neuroeconomics antiquity.
as evolving beings, had failed to develop an emo- admitting that they are feeling hostile and that they
tion designed to help us keep up with the Joneses, are inferior in some way. Envy is also threatening
perhaps we would have withered away on the to the envying persons self-image. For these rea-
evolutionary vine. sons, people feeling envy often hide their envy and
are motivated to rationalize their hostility. A typical
When Do We Envy? strategy is to construe the envied persons advantage
Envy is not an invariable reaction to noticing another as unfair. In fact, a sense of resentment seems a com-
persons advantage. Empirical work confirms the mon feature of envy, though this type of resentment
insights of Aristotle by showing that people envy should be distinguished from feelings of injustice
those who are similar to themselves. Writers envy based on obviously unfair advantage. In general,
other writers rather than acclaimed athletes, for scholars claim that envy is likely to be repressed, sup-
example. This similarity causes the offending compar- pressed, or transmuted such that the feeling is given
ison to hit home and enables people to imagine what a more socially appropriate label, sometimes fooling
having the advantage themselves might be like. Yet it observers and the self as well. Envy-inspired hostility
is a frustrated sense of what is possible. The imagined may tend to be indirect, taking the form of behaviors
taste is there but with no real sense that the desired such as gossip and backbiting or of feelings such as
advantage will actually come ones way. Now-classic schadenfreude when the envied person fails.
empirical work by Peter Salovey and Judith Rodin
also shows that people envy others who have advan- Envy and Unhappiness
tages on domains that are linked to their self-worth.
It has long been claimed that envy is a frequent cause
Envy and Aggression of unhappiness. Comparative standards for self-
evaluation are prescriptions for discontent because
It is important to highlight that scholarly tradi- there will always be someone who compares better.
tions link envy of the hostile kind with aggression. Scholars suggest that an envious disposition works
One can find this link in religious thinking (Cains against seeing the intrinsic value in praiseworthy
slaying of Abel), analyses of historical events (the things and marvelous attributes possessed by oth-
Nazis hatred of and desire to annihilate the Jews) ers. Accomplishments that deserve to be celebrated
and classic fiction and drama (Shakespeares depic- may be, instead, cause for a sour, invidious mood.
tion of Caesars assassination, led by the envious Also, help from others may be resented because it
Cassius). Empirical work supports this link as well. suggests ones inferiorityand the helpers supe-
Studies in experimental economics by Daniel Zizzo riority. Indeed, research by Robert Emmons and
suggest that envy may cause people to give up their Michael McCullough show that feelings of grati-
own highest outcomes as long as an envied others tude, so often associated with positive and healthy
outcomes will suffer relatively, thereby burning interactions with others, are largely missing from
the rich. Also, some empirical work demonstrates the envious persons emotional palate. Envy can be
that envy can cause people to feel schadenfreude, or understood as a kind of poison in the system that
pleasure at another persons misfortune, if an envied precludes positive emotions and fosters rancor, bit-
person suffers. This evidence points to the many terness, and resentment. Envy may be an inevitable,
undesirable consequences of hostile envy. However, adaptive human emotion, but it is unlikely to be an
the hostile aspect of envy may serve an especially emotion to cultivate. Otherwise, the chances are that
valuable function by creating an effective incentive happiness goes out the window.
for self-seeking behavior. In the long run, failing to
seek out prospects for superiority and the advan- Richard H. Smith
tages that result from superiority may have led to
See also Emotion Regulation; Jealousy; Resentment
reproductive oblivion, as noted above.
Salovey, P., & Rodin, J. (1984). Some antecedents and areas. The structures themselves, as well as the
consequences of social-comparison jealousy. Journal of connections between them, have different rates of
Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 780792. development. The temporal lobe structures impli-
Smith, R. H. (Ed.). (2008). Envy: Theory and cated in the encoding and consolidation of memory
research. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. traces (e.g., hippocampus and surrounding cor-
Smith, R. H., & Kim, S. H. (2007). Comprehending envy. tices) develop from infancy through the preschool
Psychological Bulletin, 113, 4664. years, with less pronounced changes thereafter. The
Smith, R. H., Turner, T., Leach, C. W., Garonzik, R., prefrontal cortex, which is involved in retrieval,
Urch-Druskat, V., & Weston, C. M. (1996). Envy and
undergoes a longer period of development, through
schadenfreude. Personality and Social Psychology
adolescence. The time course of development of this
Bulletin, 22, 158168.
temporal cortical network is consistent with known
behavioral changes in event memory.
EVENT MEMORY, DEVELOPMENT Event Memory in Infancy
This entry covers changes in both neural process- In infancy, imitation-based tasks are used to assess
ing and behavior that are related to developments event memory. Props are used to produce novel
in event memory from infancy through the school sequences of action that result in a goal or outcome.
years. The study of event memory from a develop- Infants are encouraged to imitate the sequences
mental perspective entails investigation of age-related immediately, after a delay, or both. Use of this task
changes in memory for ordered sequences that con- has revealed age-related changes in the robustness,
sist of actors, actions, and objects interacting with reliability, and temporal extent of memory through-
each other to achieve a goal. Event memory emerges out infancy. Infants as young as 6 months can
by the end of the first year of life and undergoes sub- reproduce the actions of sequences after 24 hours.
stantial development for years thereafter. Age-related By 20 months, the robustness of recall increases
changes are due to a number of factors, ranging from such that infants recall the actions of events after
developments in the neural substrate of memory to as many as 12 months. There also are increases in
the social-cultural environment in which develop- recall of the temporal order of sequences. After a
ment takes place. The result is both normative age- delay of 1 month between encoding and retrieval,
related changes and individual and group differences. 50% of 9-month-olds, 75% of 13-month-olds, and
Until the 1970s, it was thought that children 100% of 20-month-olds recall sequences in cor-
under 2 years of age lacked the ability to remem- rect temporal order. Over this same space of time,
ber the past. Even beyond infancy, children were ERPs reveal age-related differences in both encod-
thought to have poor memory abilities based on ing and consolidation of memory traces, with older
their lackluster performance on laboratory tasks, infants exhibiting more robust encoding and more
such as word and picture list learning. New meth- successful consolidation relative to younger infants.
ods and approaches developed since that time have Differences in ERPs correlate with variability in
revealed substantial memory abilities even in infancy. behavior.
Similarly, when they are asked to recall meaningful
material, preschoolers provide relatively detailed and Event Memory in the Preschool
organized reports. Application of neural imaging and School Years
methods (e.g., event-related potentials or ERPs and Age-related changes in event memory continue
functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI) throughout the preschool and into the school years.
complement behavioral paradigms (e.g., imitation, Based on their verbal reports, it is clear that children
verbal reports) and illustrate a protracted course of as young as 3 years of age form, retain, and later
memory development from infancy through child- retrieve memories of past events. In fact, younger
hood and into adolescence. children provide the same amount of accurate infor-
mation about their experiences as older children,
The Neural Substrate of Event Memory even after long delays. Their recall is more dependent
The memory processes of encoding, consolidation, on scaffolding in the forms of questions, cues, and
storage, and retrieval rely on a network of brain prompts, however. Moreover, across the preschool
326 Exercise and the Brain
and into the middle childhood years, event mem- remembered years later, even when experienced by
ory reports become more elaborate, complex, and preschoolers.
complete. They also become increasingly evaluative
Patricia J. Bauer, Marina Larkina,
and self-reflective and thus more autobiographical.
These age-related changes may be associated with and Jacqueline S. Leventon
development of the temporal-cortical memory net-
See also Concepts, Development of; Memory, Neural
work that continues throughout childhood and into Basis; Representations, Development of
adolescence. Neuroimaging techniques, including
fMRI and ERPs, are being used to examine relations
between developments in the neural substrate of Further Readings
memory and behavioral changes in recall. Bauer, P. J. (2007). Remembering the times of our lives:
Memory in infancy and beyond. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Nelson, K., & Fivush, R. (2004). The emergence of
Individual and Group Differences
autobiographical memory: A social cultural
in Event Memory
developmental theory. Psychological Review, 111,
Substantial variability has been observed in the 486511.
quality and quantity of memory reports, especially Oakes, L. M., & Bauer, P. J. (Eds.). (2007). Short- and
for events that are personally significant or auto- long-term memory in infancy and early childhood:
biographical. Gender differences are observed as Taking the first steps toward remembering. New York,
early as the elementary school years. Girls tend to NY: Oxford University Press.
produce longer, more coherent, and more detailed
narratives than boys of the same age. In addition,
girls include a greater number and variety of emo- EXERCISE AND THE BRAIN
tion words in their memory reports. Socialization
practices, especially maternal reminiscing style, are a Much has been written over the ages about the ben-
strong predictor of gender and individual differences efits of exercise. For example, Marcus Tullius Cicero
in childrens memories. Reminiscing style also dif- stated that it is exercise alone that supports the spir-
fers across cultures. For example, Asian mothers are its, and keeps the mind in vigor, and John Adams,
less elaborative than American mothers. In turn, the the second president of the United States, suggested
autobiographical narratives of children from Asian that exercise invigorates, and enlivens all the fac-
cultures are less detailed. These gender and cultural ulties of body and mind. . . . It spreads a gladness
differences are reflected in the timing of the offset and satisfaction over our minds and qualifies us for
of infantile or childhood amnesia (the relative pau- every sort of business, and every sort of pleasure
city among adults of memories from the first years (de Mooy, 2003, p. 46). This review moves beyond
of their life and the sparse distribution of memories opinions and conjecture to examine the scientific
until 7 or 8 years of age): Women and individuals findings of exercise on brain and cognitive function.
from Western cultures tend to have earlier first mem-
ories. Cognitive and neural factors also are impli-
Animal Studies
cated in the explanation of childhood amnesia. For
example, use of the cue word technique (reporting a An emerging literature has documented the benefits
memory in response to a word such as ice-cream) to of physical activity on brain and cognitive function.
examine the distribution of autobiographical memo- This research has been prompted, in part, by ani-
ries suggests different rates of forgetting of events mal studies, which report that running influences
by children and adults. Differential rates of forget- brain function on at least three different levels. First,
ting, in turn, may be related to developmental differ- rodent studies have shown that wheel running accel-
ences in the temporal-cortical network that supports erates learning rates. In tasks such as the Morris
event memory. Despite childhood amnesia, some water maze and other hippocampal-dependent spa-
events are remembered over long periods of time. tial tasks, exercising rodents perform better than
Emotionally charged events, such as painful medical their sedentary counterparts. Second, exercising ani-
procedures and natural disasters (e.g., tornadoes), are mals show robust differences in brain morphology
Exercise and the Brain 327
compared to sedentary controls. Exercise induces often entails nonaerobic activity such as toning and
neurogenesis, or the proliferation and survival of stretching. Training is usually conducted for an hour
new neurons, and angiogenesis, or the proliferation a day for several days a week and can last several
of new capillaries. Although the functional signifi- months. Cognition, and sometimes brain function
cance of neurogenesis remains controversial, behav- and structure, is examined prior to and subsequent
ioral performance improvements associated with to the intervention.
exercise suggest that newborn cells might facilitate The results from randomized trials gener-
learning and memory. Finally, exercise enhances ally find that people in the exercise groups show
levels of important molecules in the brain, includ- improvements in cognitive function, while those in
ing neurotransmitters and neurotrophic factors. the control groups show either stability in cognitive
For example, exercise increases the production and function or even a slight decline. These studies also
secretion of molecules promoting the formation of report that cognitive functions that are supported
new blood vessels such as insulin-like growth fac- by the prefrontal and parietal cortex are enhanced
tor and vascular endothelial growth factor. Brain- more than cognitive functions that are less reliant
derived neurotrophic factor is also upregulated with on these brain regions. Empirical studies, meta-
exercise treatments and is necessary for long-term analyses, and reviews have reported that exercise
potentiation, a neural analog of long-term memory regimens improve cognitive function across a num-
formation, and for the growth and survival of new ber of domains and populations, including older
neurons. adults and children, and in individuals with demen-
tia and depression.
Some studies have addressed whether exercise
Human Studies
training can positively influence the human brain
In humans, the effect of exercise on brain and cog- using neuroimaging techniques. A number of cross-
nitive function tells a similar story. Three types of sectional studies have now reported that high-fit
experimental designs have been used to test this individuals have greater gray matter volume in
relationship: prospective-epidemiological, cross- the prefrontal, parietal, and temporal regions and
sectional, and randomized trials. A review of the greater white matter volume in the genu of the cor-
epidemiological literature suggests a significant pus callosum than their less fit counterparts. The
relationship between physical activity and cogni- hippocampus, a brain region involved in memory
tive function in late adulthood. In a typical study, formation, shows a rapid rate of deterioration in
men and women are asked to report the number of individuals with Alzheimers disease, but it is larger
times per week that they perform different aerobic, in people who are more aerobically fit. Higher fit-
or physical, activities. These individuals are then fol- ness levels are also directly related to better memory
lowed for 5 to 10 years and the risk for disease is function that is supported by the hippocampus.
examined in relation to the frequency of self-reported Recent studies have also demonstrated that these
physical activities. These studies have found that the effects generalize to individuals with dementia. That
incidence rate for Alzheimers disease and other neu- is, higher aerobic fitness levels are associated with
rological diseases is significantly higher for individu- the preservation of brain tissue in individuals with
als who are infrequent exercisers compared to those dementia.
who exercise more frequently. Fewer neuroimaging studies have been conducted
Epidemiological studies have provided intrigu- in randomized trials of exercise, but the few that
ing support for the relationship between physical have been conducted have shown that 6 months
activity and neurocognitive function. However, of exercise is enough to reverse age-related cortical
such studies cannot establish causal links between decay in people over the age of 60. In at least one
these constructs. Over the past several years, there study, aerobic training (walking) increased gray mat-
have been a relatively small but increasing number ter volume in the frontal and superior temporal lobe
of randomized trials in which relatively sedentary and increased white matter volume in the genu of the
individuals, often over the age of 60, are random- corpus callosum, while the control group underwent
ized to an aerobic training group (i.e., walking, a slight decline in cortical volume. These results sug-
swimming, bicycling) and a control group that gest that even relatively short exercise interventions
328 Experimental Philosophy
can begin to restore some of the losses in brain vol- and empiricalare brought to bear on questions
ume associated with normal aging. of philosophical relevance. This entry explains why
In addition to changes that occur in the morphol- experimental philosophers have often focused on
ogy of the brain, functional changes also occur in intuitions. It then examines the principal methods
specific brain regions. For example, studies using used by experimental philosophers. Finally, it illus-
functional magnetic resonance imaging have found trates the two main research programs in experi-
that aerobically trained older adults, but not con- mental philosophy with various examples.
trols, show increased neural activity in the frontal
and parietal regions of the brain and a reduction Experimental Philosophy and Intuitions
in activity of the anterior cingulate cortex, an area Experimental philosophers typically rely on the
sensitive to behavioral conflict. Similar neurophysi- methods of experimental psychology to study peo-
ological changes have been observed in individuals ples intuitionswhich, by stipulation, they take
with multiple sclerosis and in the hippocampus of to be relatively fast, automatic, nonreflective judg-
middle-aged adults. More recently, research has ments that apply concepts to particular objects,
demonstrated that academic achievement scores and actions, events, or situationsabout philosophical
brain activity tend to be higher in more physically issues (causation, reference, free will, consciousness,
active children. right, what is permissible, etc.). Intuitions are used in
In sum, research on exercise and the brain has various ways by philosophers, including as support
convincingly demonstrated a protective and profit- for conceptual analysis, as claims about common
able effect of physical activity on brain morphology sense, and as premises of arguments. The methods
and function. of experimental philosophers can be brought to bear
Kirk Erickson on all these uses.
While experimental philosophers are typically
See also Aging, Memory, and Information Processing concerned with understanding the psychological
Speed; Memory, Neural Basis; Meta-Analysis; sources of intuitions (What mechanisms generate
Working Memory some specific intuition?), whether a given intuition
is widespread (Does everybody have a given intu-
Further Readings ition?), and whether an intuition-producing mecha-
nism is reliable (Does it deliver accurate information
Cotman, C. W., & Berchtold, N. C. (2002). Exercise:
that can be used in philosophical theorizing?), they
A behavioral intervention to enhance brain health and
may also study behaviors, provided that these are
plasticity. Trends in Neuroscience, 25, 295301.
of philosophical relevance. For instance, in a 2009
de Mooy, K. (2003). The wisdom of John Adams.
Charleston, SC: Citadel.
attempt to examine whether philosophical training
Erickson, K. I., & Kramer, A. F. (2009). Aerobic exercise
in ethics promotes moral behavior, Eric Schwitzgebel
effects on cognitive and neural plasticity in older adults. has shown that ethics books are more likely to be
British Journal of Sports Medicine, 43, 2224. stolen from university libraries than comparable
Hillman, C. H., Erickson, K. I., & Kramer, A. F. (2008). Be books in other fields of philosophy.
smart, exercise your heart: Exercise effects on brain and
cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9(1), 5865. The Methods of Experimental Philosophy
Kramer, A. F., & Erickson, K. I. (2007). Capitalizing on
Experimental philosophers usually begin by con-
cortical plasticity: Influence of physical activity on
structing one or several vignettes (hypothetical
cognition and brain function. Trends in Cognitive
stories). They then present the vignette(s) to par-
Science, 11, 342348.
ticipants, analyze the data, and consider what the
judgments made by the participants reveal about the
intuitions under investigation. The use of vignettes
EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY is not the only way to study intuitions, however.
Adam Arico, Brian Fiala, Robert Goldberg, and
Experimental philosophy is part of a growing trend Shaun Nichols have measured reaction times to
in philosophy, whereby scientific methodsformal show that people use low-level cues to classify an
Experimental Philosophy 329
entity as an agent and attribute conscious mental (i.e., have an affective component). Philosophers
states to the entity. Examining what distinguishes and psychologists also often hold that the function
philosophers skills from nonphilosophers skills, of folk psychology (the capacity to ascribe mental
in 2010 Jonathan Livengood, Justin Sytsma, Adam states to oneself and to others) is to predict and to
Feltz, Richard Scheines, and Edouard Machery explain behavior (particularly, others behavior). If
relied on a social-psychological questionnaire (the this were true, then the ascription of mental states to
Cognitive Reflection Test) to highlight an aspect of an agent should not be influenced by the moral sig-
philosophers temperaments: These tend to be more nificance of her behavior. However, in 2006, Joshua
reflective than equally educated nonphilosophers. Knobe provided a wealth of evidence suggesting
The work of psychologists such as Mark Alicke, that the attribution of mental states to an agent on
Fiery Cushman, Joshua Greene, Tania Lombrozo, the basis of her behavior is influenced by the moral
Jen Wright, and Liane Young is also closely related nature of her behavior: Different mental states are
to the interests of experimental philosophers; these ascribed depending on the moral significance of
psychologists routinely use methods that go beyond the behavior. For instance, when judging whether
recording the judgments elicited by vignettes. For someone intentionally brought about a foreseen side
instance, Greene and colleagues have used brain effect, people judge that harmful, but not helpful,
imagery and cognitive load methods (in which peo- side effects are intentional. It would thus seem that
ple are asked to complete a task while doing another folk psychology is essentially tied to our moral sense.
distracting task) to examine the nature of the pro- Finally, incompatibilist philosophers, who hold that
cesses leading to moral judgments. free will determinism and determinism are incom-
patible, have argued that compatibilism (according
to which free will and determinism are compatible)
The Goals of Experimental Philosophy
is a counterintuitive position. However, in 2006,
Although experimental philosophers share much Eddy Nahmias, Steve Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer,
in common, there are some important differences and Jason Turner provided evidence that ordinary
among them regarding the role that intuitions people do not think that free will is incompatible
should play in philosophy. Roughly, revisionists do with determinism.
not challenge the use of intuitions in philosophy but Other revisionists are concerned with how intu-
hold that experimental methods can make philoso- itions are generated, often to argue that some intu-
phers use of intuitions more reliable, while elimina- itions (but not others) are produced by unreliable
tivists are skeptical of the role of at least some types mechanisms. Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobes
of intuitions in philosophy. The entry will discuss 2007 results suggest that people tend to have com-
some prominent examples of each approach in turn. patibilist intuitions when thinking in concrete,
There are several types of revisionist projects. emotional terms but that they tend to have incom-
Some revisionists uncover what intuitions people patibilist intuitions when thinking in abstract, cogni-
actually have and use these intuitions to make tive terms. They then argue that the compatibilist
philosophical arguments. For example, philosophers intuitions should be discarded on the grounds that
commonly hold that phenomenal consciousness is they are biased by emotions.
an obvious aspect of our mental lives. If this were Eliminativists are concerned with uncovering a
true, then people would distinguish those mental variety of unwanted psychological influences on
states that philosophers think have phenomenal some types of intuitions, and they use their empiri-
properties (pain, olfactory and auditory experi- cal findings to argue that these intuitions cannot
ence, colors, etc.) from those mental states that are serve as reliable evidence in philosophical theoriz-
thought not to have such properties (e.g., beliefs). ing. In 2004, Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun
However, in 2010, Justin Sytsma and Edouard Nichols, and Steve Stich showed, for example, that
Machery provided some evidence that people do intuitions about the reference of proper names
not do this; rather, people distinguish different kinds vary across cultures: East Asians are more likely
of mental states depending on the extent to which to have descriptivist intuitions (they judge that a
these mental states (seeing a color, smelling an odor, proper name refers to the individual that satisfies the
having an emotion, feeling pain, etc.) are valenced description associated with the proper name), while
330 Explanation of Action
Westerners are more likely to have causal-historical Nichols, S., & Knobe, J. (2007). Moral responsibility and
intuitions (they judge that a proper name refers to determinism: The cognitive science of folk intuitions.
the individual that is historically linked to current Nous, 41, 663685.
uses of this name, whether or not this individual Schwitzgebel, E. (2009). Do ethicists steal more books?
satisfies the description associated with the proper Philosophical Psychology, 22, 711725.
name). Since intuitions about reference appear to Swain, S., Alexander, J., & Weinberg, J. M. (2008). The
be influenced by a factor that arguably should not instability of philosophical intuitions: Running hot and
matter (viz., culture), and since there is no principled cold on Truetemp. Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 76, 138155.
way to privilege certain intuitions, one might rea-
Sytsma, J. M., & Machery, E. (2010). Two conceptions
sonably doubt that intuitions about reference should
of subjective experience. Philosophical Studies, 151,
have a role in the philosophy of language. Another
299327.
way to assess the reliability of intuitions is to see
whether they are subject to context and ordering
effects. In 2008, Stacey Swain, Joshua Alexander,
and Jonathan Weinberg thus provided some evi- EXPLANATION OF ACTION
dence that peoples disposition to ascribe knowledge
sometimes varies depending on whether the situa- Certain explanations are characteristic of purposive
tion is contrasted to a clear case of knowledge or action. The question, Why did Ayesha poke the
whether it is contrasted to a clear case of ignorance. chimpanzee? could be answered by citing Ayeshas
Thus, widespread disagreement and context, order- desire to retrieve her glasses and her belief that pok-
ing, and demographic effects can all be used by ing the chimpanzee would make it return them to
the eliminativist to show that certain intuitions are her. Explanations such as this one seem to be char-
unreliable and should thus be eliminated from philo- acteristic of actions such as Ayeshas. This entry pur-
sophical practice. sues two questions. First, which features distinguish
Edouard Machery and David Rose explanations characteristic of action? Second, what
is the nature of such explanationsare they causal,
See also Access Consciousness; Concepts, Philosophical are they teleological, and are they instrumental?
Issues; Emotion and Moral Judgment; Folk The term action can be used in a broad sense or
Psychology; Freedom of Action a narrow sense. In the broad sense, action encom-
passes reflex actions, motor actions, arational
Further Readings actions (such as jumping for joy), and more. A nar-
row sense of action restricts the term to purposive
Knobe, J. (2006). The concept of intentional action: A case actionsthat is, to actions that are attempts, suc-
study in the uses of folk psychology. Philosophical
cessful or unsuccessful, by an agent to achieve some
Studies, 130, 203231.
end of theirs. In this entry, the term action is used in
Knobe, J., & Nichols, S. (2008). An experimental
this narrow sense. A paradigm case of action in the
philosophy manifesto. In J. Knobe & S. Nichols (Eds.),
narrow sense is Ayeshas poking the chimpanzee to
Experimental philosophy (pp. 314). New York, NY:
retrieve her glasses from it.
Oxford University Press.
Livengood, J., Sytsma, J. M., Feltz, A., Scheines, R., &
Machery, E. (2010). Philosophical temperament. Which Features Distinguish Explanations
Philosophical Psychology, 23, 313330. Characteristic of Action?
Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. P. (2004).
Semantics, cross-cultural style. Cognition, 92, B1B12. An explanation characteristic of action is one with
Nadelhoffer, T., & Nahmias, E. (2007). The past and future a certain combination of features that is only found
of experimental philosophy. Philosophical Explorations, in explanations of why actions happened and not in
10, 123149. explanations of why other types of events happened.
Nahmias, E., Morris, S. G., Nadelhoffer, T., & Turner, J. Which features make up this combination? One is
(2006). Is incompatibilism intuitive? Philosophy and an appeal to reasons that may rationalize the action.
Phenomenological Research, 73, 2853. Another feature of explanations characteristic of
Explanation of Action 331
action is arguably that they invoke psychological question all by itself. But the explanation above,
states such as beliefs and desires. even if factually accurate, could not be an adequate
answer to the why question all by itself. In general,
Reasons where a partial explanation provides operative rea-
Explaining why any event occurred involves giv- sons that are not normative reasons, merely citing
ing reasons that explain why the event happened. those reasons does not produce an explanation that
We can answer the question, Why did the apple stands alone. This suggests the role of reasons in
fall? by giving a reason, as in Because it was ripe. explaining action may be linked to their rationaliz-
That the apple is ripe is a reason that explains why it ing role.
fell. A distinguishing feature of explanations charac-
Beliefs
teristic of action is that they involve reasons that not
only cause but may also rationalize the action. When explaining an action, it is common to
Philosophers distinguish between two notions of include falsehoods as operative reasons. Operative
reason for action, normative reasons, and opera- reasons for Ayeshas poking the chimpanzee include
tive reasons. To illustrate, consider the proposition the proposition that poking it will cause it to return
that poking the chimpanzee may cause it to return her glasses. As it happens, this is false. No amount
Ayeshas glasses. Whether this is an operative reason of poking would cause this particularly stubborn
depends on whether this proposition plays any role chimp to cooperate. But how can a falsehood
in explaining why Ayesha did in fact poke the chim- explain anything? In general, it is not possible to
panzee. By contrast, whether it is a normative rea- explain why an event happens by citing falsehoods.
son for Ayesha to poke the chimpanzee depends on If an apple is not ripe, you cannot explain why the
whether this proposition has the potential to ratio- apple fell by appeal to the proposition that it is ripe.
nalize her actionthat is, on whether the truth of Why are explanations of action apparently different
this proposition would support the conclusion that in this respect?
it was rational for Ayesha to poke the chimpanzee The leading view is that operative reasons explain
given all the reasons she has for and against so act- an action only by virtue of standing in some rela-
ing. Normative reasons are not invariably operative tion to the contents of the agents beliefs or other
reasons; sometimes propositions that would ratio- psychological states. When we explain why an apple
nalize an action are not relevant to explaining why fell by giving a reason (e.g., that it is ripe), the reason
the agent acted, and conversely, operative reasons is explanatory by virtue of being a fact. But when we
are sometimes not normative reasons. explain why an action occurred by giving an opera-
That operative reasons are sometimes also nor- tive reason, the reason explains by virtue of being
mative reasons distinguishes explanations charac- the content of a belief. Ayesha poked the chimpan-
teristic of action. Explanations of events other than zee not because poking it would in fact cause it to
actions involve reasons that are not even potentially return her glasses but because she believed this to
normative reasons for those events (i.e., the ripeness be so. This is how a proposition can be an operative
of the apple is not even potentially a normative rea- reason for her action despite its falsity.
son for its fall).
Where operative reasons are also normative Desires and Other Pro-Attitudes
reasons, it is plausible that their explanatory role Many actions are in part a consequence of the
depends in some way on their normative role. agents desires. Ayesha pokes the chimpanzee only
Contrast the following explanation with that offered because she wants her glasses back. Had she wanted
at the start of this entry: the chimpanzee to retain them, she wouldnt have
poked it. But apparently not all actions involve
Why did Ayesha poke the chimpanzee? Because she
desires. It is natural to think agents sometimes act
believed it might bite her, and she wanted a drink.
out of pride or conviction as opposed to desire. The
The explanation offered at the start of this entry notion of a pro-attitude enables us to avoid the con-
stands alonealthough not a complete explanation, notations desire carries. A pro-attitude is an atti-
it could serve as an adequate answer to the why tude toward an action that, like a desire, disposes an
332 Explanation of Action
bring about fertilizing and (b) cutting leaves occurs cited in such explanationsconsists in their having
because it tends to bring about fertilizing. In general, a certain instrumental value.
Wright holds that a behavior occurs to bring about All such views face objections. One line of objec-
an outcome just if (a) behaviors of that type tend to tion hinges on the idea that explanations of action
bring about this type of outcome and (b) the behav- appear to have significance beyond any predictive
ior in question occurred because of (a). value. There is also a simple, nondecisive reason
Explanations of action resemble teleological for taking explanations of action as described here
explanations in appealing to outcomes. To say that to be genuine explanations. Answers to why ques-
Ayesha poked the chimpanzee because she wanted to tions about action that appeal to beliefs and desires
retrieve her glasses is to explain her action by appeal- appear to be good answers. If what makes them
ing to the outcome she wanted. This has suggested good answers is that they are genuinely explanatory,
to some philosophers that explanations of action are instrumentalism regarding explanations of action
teleological. There is a difference, of course. In para- must be false.
digm cases of teleological explanation, the outcome
Stephen Andrew Butterfill
appealed to is a type of outcome that has occurred in
the past. In explanations of action, by contrast, the See also Action and Bodily Movement; Action Slips;
outcome is one the agent wants or intends to bring Belief and Judgment; Decision Theory, Philosophical
about. The relation between explanation of action Perspectives; Folk Psychology; Phenomenology of
and teleology is controversial and there are differ- Action; Philosophy of Action; Teleology
ent views on how the beliefs and desires invoked in
explaining actions are accommodated in teleological
Further Readings
explanation.
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957). Intention. Oxford, UK:
Instrumental Blackwell.
Audi, R. (1993). The structure of justification. Cambridge,
The behavior of a telephone exchange might be
UK: Cambridge University Press.
given an explanation of the type appropriate only
Bratman, M. (1987). Intentions, plans, and practical
for actions: reasoning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Why did this call to New York get routed via Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on actions and events. Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press.
Panama? Because the exchange wanted to assign it
Dennett, D. (1987). The intentional stance. Cambridge,
the shortest route and believed that there was no
MA: MIT Press.
direct line.
Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining behavior. Cambridge, MA:
It is plausible that this fails as an explanation because MIT Press.
the telephone exchange lacks beliefs and desires. For Parfit, D. (1997). Reasons and motivation. Supplement to
comparison, you cannot explain the behavior of an the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 71, 99130.
electronic calculator by appealing to the movement Taylor, C. (1964). The explanation of behaviour. London,
UK: Routledge.
of its cogs and ratchets simply because it has none.
Velleman, D. (1989). Practical reflection. Princeton, NJ:
Notwithstanding their incorrectness, such attempts
Princeton University Press.
at explanation may have instrumental value. For
Wright, L. (1976). Teleological explanations. Berkeley, CA:
instance, they may enable people to predict the
University of California Press.
behavior of the telephone exchange and calculator.
Some hold that explanations of action are merely
instrumental. That is, attempts at explanation in
terms of beliefs and desires are not correct but may EXPLANATORY GAP
be useful for predicting behaviors. In a related view
associated with the philosopher Daniel Dennett, The term explanatory gap was first introduced
the correctness of explanations of actionand thus by Joseph Levine in 1983, though the problem to
the existence of any intentions, desires, and beliefs which the term refers is quite old. Consider a quite
334 Explanatory Gap
ordinary conscious experience, such as seeing the leaf? The obvious place to look for an answer is to
color of a leaf in the fall. We know quite a bit about the scientific story about the mechanisms from the
the causal mechanisms responsible for the experi- retina through the visual system, how each neuron
ence, starting from the light being reflected from responds to the input from its neighbor upstream
the leaf, the light then hitting the retina, and then the and transmits the relevant impulse to its neighbor
subsequent neural activity in the visual areas of the downstream. But here is the problem. It seems that
brain. The problem is that when one focuses on just the most we can get from an account of the neural
what its like to view the bright orange color of the mechanisms in the visual system is an explanation
leaf, it doesnt seem as if the information about the of how the functional role played by a visual expe-
neural activity in the visual system at that moment rience is carried out. In other words, a description
adequately explains why the leaf looks just the way of the physical properties of the neural mechanisms
it does. This gap in our understanding about how explains how they are caused to operate as they do
the neural mechanisms in the visual system result in and how their operations cause the downstream
the conscious visual experience of the leafs color is effects on cognition and behavior. It is unclear how
the explanatory gap. knowledge of the physical mechanisms in the visual
system can explain anything other than how they
Functional Versus Intrinsic Properties are caused and what they cause in turn.
To appreciate the force of the problem, its necessary However, when we consider the qualitative char-
to distinguish between a mental states functional acter of an experience, such as seeing a bright orange
properties and its intrinsic properties. The func- fall leaf, it certainly doesnt seem that we can capture
tional properties of a mental state, such as a visual what it is like purely in terms of the causal, or func-
experience, are determined by the role that that tional, role played by the experience. There seems
state plays in the overall functioning of the subject. to be an intrinsic, nonfunctional character that we
So, for example, visual experiences of color carry want explained. One way to see this is through the
information concerning the surface properties of the inverted spectrum hypothesis. The idea here is to
objects viewed and also contribute to determining imagine a creature whose color experiences were the
the behavior of the subject in the relevant circum- complements of those of normal perceivers. They
stances. By distinguishing red from green surfaces, had greenish experiences where others had reddish
we often thereby distinguish ripe from unripe fruit, ones, and bluish experiences where others had yel-
which helps us decide whether its advisable to eat lowish ones. Because all the relations among the
whats in front of us. color experiences would be maintained, the func-
Notice that a functional role is a rather abstract tional, or causal, roles of their experiences would
characterization that tells us, as it were, what job match normal perceivers. They would call ripe fruit
is done, but not how its done, or what precisely it red and unripe fruit green, just like the rest of
is thats doing it. We identify how a role is carried us, only the quality of their experiences would be
out by appeal to a states intrinsic properties. In the different. The problem, then, is how to explain why
case of the visual system, the bio-chemical properties our experiences are reddish where theirs are greenish
of the neural circuits that fire in response to light in terms of the differences in our neural mechanisms.
stimuli explain how discriminations between red What makes one neural mechanism constitute a red-
and green surfaces, for example, are made. This is dish experience and another a greenish one? Since
similar to the way that descriptions of the hardware the difference in the intrinsic character of the experi-
circuitry of a computer explain how the functional ences isnt a difference in their causes and effects,
roles defined by the programs its running are car- there is no way for the descriptions of the underlying
ried out. neural mechanisms to explain the difference. That
Now we can see the relevance of the distinc- is, there is an explanatory gap between the physical
tion for the explanatory gap. Consider again the level and the level of conscious experience.
qualitative character of an experience of viewing a
The Problem of Alien Minds
bright orange leaf in the fall. The question is, what
explains this particular qualitative character? Why The import of the explanatory gap is evident in the
is it like this and not some other way, to see the following conundrum as well. Suppose we encounter
Extended Mind 335
alien life that is constituted by very different physi- description in a way that allows me to see how they
cal materials than we are but nonetheless manifests amount to the same thing.
the same functional profile, just like two comput- So far the debate over materialism and the
ers with different hardware are able to run the same explanatory gap continues without any philosophi-
programs. Now imagine we and the aliens are look- cal consensus over the best response, whether it be
ing at the same bright orange leaf. After learning one of the two materialist strategies mentioned or
our language, the alien can describe it as orange. the rejection of materialism about conscious experi-
But is the alien having an experience just like ours? ence altogether.
How would we know? What information could
Joseph Levine
decide this question? Now, if we could explain the
qualitative character of our experience in terms of See also Access Consciousness; Consciousness and
the relevant underlying physical mechanisms, we Embodiment; Emergence; Mind-Body Problem;
would be able to tell, since we could look for just Neural Correlates of Consciousness; Physicalism;
those features in the alien that are responsible for Realism and Instrumentalism; Reductive Physicalism
the quality of our experience in us. However, since
we dont know what it is about our visual system
Further Readings
that explains the quality of our visual experience, we
dont know what to say about the alien. We know Chalmers, D. (1996). The conscious mind. Oxford, UK:
the alien can make the same discriminations as us. Oxford University Press.
What we dont know is what it is like for the alien, Levine, J. (1983). Materialism and qualia: The explanatory
what the quality of the aliens experience is. gap. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64, 354361.
Levine, J. (2001). Purple haze: The puzzle of consciousness.
Consequences for Materialism New York, NY: Oxford, UK University Press.
Loar, B. (1997). Phenomenal states. In N. Block, O.
Materialism is the doctrine that mental states and Flanagan, & G. Gzeldere (Eds.), The nature of
properties are, at bottom, physical states, and prop- consciousness (pp. 597617). Cambridge, MA: MIT
erties. The explanatory gap is a problem for mate- Press.
rialism because it casts doubt on the claim that
conscious experiences are ultimately physical states.
Materialists have responded to the explanatory gap
in two ways. First, some have argued that in fact the EXTENDED MIND
qualitative character of an experience is reducible to
some aspect of its functional rolemany say its a The extended mind (EM) is a radical thesis about
matter of the visual states informational content. If the constitution of minds. Minds are constituted by
this reduction to functional role goes through, then neural, bodily, and environmental states and pro-
we can close the gap since we have already seen that cesses. EM theorists believe that minds are hybrid
descriptions of underlying physical mechanisms are entities assembled from the continuous and dense
well suited to explain how functional roles are car- interactions between brains, bodies, and the local
ried out or realized. environment. The theory has been developed by
The second materialist strategy for addressing cognitive scientists from a wide variety of disciplin-
the explanatory gap is to concede its existence but ary backgrounds, including philosophy, psychol-
argue that it stems from a feature of our cognitive ogy, and cognitive anthropology. The theory was
architecture that is fully consistent with material- given its name in a famous paper by Andy Clark
ism. The idea is that we are cognitively structured and David Chalmers and this has been taken to be
in a way that we cannot integrate information from the core theoretical statement. However, the theory
the third-person perspective from which scientific was also developed in slightly different ways by Ed
descriptions of our mental activity are derived with Hutchins as distributed cognition, Susan Hurley as
information we get in the first-person mode. So vehicle externalism, Robert Wilson as wide compu-
when I consider the character of my experience as tationalism, Mark Rowlands as environmentalism,
I experience it, the representations involved can- and Richard Menary as cognitive integration (some
not be connected to those I obtain from a scientific of these will be described below). The first section
336 Extended Mind
will outline the original thesis as presented by Clark coupled process is part of a system when the inter-
and Chalmers in their article. The second section action between the states in the coupled process
will provide some of the standard criticisms that the controls some behavior of the system. These kinds
position has attracted, and the final section will out- of coupled processes in dynamical systems can be
line some of the alternative ways that the thesis has found throughout the natural world but also in arti-
been developed by others. facts such as the Watt flywheel governor. It is now
easy to see that the organizing processes that involve
internal states and external states constitute
The Original Thesis
a coupled process that controls problem-solving
Clark and Chalmers begin their article by articulat- behavior of a cognitive system. It is important to
ing an active externalism. This is a novel form of note that EM theorists are not committed to the
externalism about the mind; traditional external- view that artifacts and tools are themselves cogni-
ism claims that the contents, or meanings, of mental tive or mental, nor that a simple causal interaction
states such as beliefs are determined by the nature between two states X and Y makes X part of Y;
of the external world. Active externalism concerns these are mistaken caricatures of the position.
the role of the environment in driving our cognitive The article also makes use of a principle of par-
processes. Active externalism is committed to the ity to identify external processes that might qualify
idea that some cognitive processing is constituted as cognitive processes. The parity principle tries
(in part) by active features of the environment. The to motivate the idea that the location of a process
idea can be illustrated by the use of David Kirsch should not, by itself, discount a process from being
and Paul Maglios concept of an epistemic action. cognitive. The parity principle can most clearly be
Pragmatic actions are aimed at achieving a noncog- stated as the following: If an external process leads
nitive goal, such as a full stomach. Epistemic actions directly to the completion of a cognitive task, and
are aimed at achieving a cognitive goal such as solv- if we would call the external process cognitive if it
ing a problem by directly manipulating the environ- were an internal process, then the external process is
ment. For example, experienced Tetris players rotate part of our cognitive processing of the task. This is
zoids as soon as they appear to determine where because the only relevant difference is that the pro-
they fit best. The rotations are not directly tied to cess does not occur in the brain. If we claim that the
the goal but alter the task space so as to make reach- only factor by which we deny the process cognitive
ing the goal easier, or more achievable. Similarly, status is its nonneural nature then we commit some
when experimental subjects are allowed to physi- form of neural chauvinism.
cally rearrange tiles in a game of scrabble they create This principle is in tension with the account
more words than those who are not. The EM theo- of coupled processes that has been given above,
rist takes examples of epistemic action to be cases because in that account coupled processes involve
of active externalism. Why though should we draw interacting states that are both bodily internal and
this conclusion? Kirsch and Maglios research shows bodily external, whereas the parity principle focuses
that our problem-solving routines are often distrib- on bodily external processes without putting them
uted, or extended, across brain, body, and environ- in the interactional setting of a coupled process.
ment. If we think of the problem-solving space as a An example of the parity principle at work is the
state space (a state space can be thought of as a finite now famous Otto thought experiment, introduced
number of state variables, which define the state of in Clark and Chalmerss article. Consider Inga: she
the system at a particular time), then bodily inter- hears that there is a Rothko exhibition on at the
nal organizing processes (i.e. neural ones) and Museum of Modern Art and she decides to go to it.
bodily external organizing processes (i.e., physi- Inga recalls the location of the Museum of Modern
cal manipulations of the environment) are all states Art from a long-standing biological memory, which
in the same problem-solving space. To understand causes her to go to 53rd street. Now consider Otto:
this better, we need to look at the idea of coupled He has a mild form of Alzheimers and carries a
processes. notebook for the retrieval of information. He has all
A coupled process is one where there is a recip- sorts of useful information about places and people,
rocal causal interaction between two states. The addresses, and names, and so forth. Otto takes his
Extended Mind 337
notebook with him wherever he goes and refers to damage or remove X or Y, Zs behavior will change.
it frequently. On hearing about the same exhibition Take Otto. Ottos memory system is constituted
as Inga, he decides to go, but Otto retrieves informa- by the fragmentary processes in his brain and the
tion from his notebook concerning the location of manipulation of written vehicles in his notebook. If
MOMA. This causes him to go to 53rd street. we remove Ottos notebook we will have changed
The EM theorist holds that Ottos notebook the behavior of his memory system: In fact, he will
plays the role of a dispositional memory in Inga (a be unable to recall where MOMA is located. Adams
memory that is available to consciousness but can and Aizawas criticism could still be reformulated in
be acted upon without being consciously accessed), a way that is damaging to the EM theorist, because
and as such the two cases are on a par. We should the EM theorist appears to think that the coupling
count the process of Ottos retrieving information between X and Y make them a part of Z, so the
from his notebook as a cognitive process (or part of fallacy would be that a coupled process involving
a coupled process) even though that process is not a reciprocal interaction between X and Y could not
located in his brain. This is the case only if Ottos constitute (even in part) a wider system.
notebook plays the same role for Otto that biologi- However, coupled processes such as this often
cal memory plays for Inga. We might be inclined become constituents of a wider system. Take intes-
to think that the information in Ottos notebook is tinal flora for example. We acquire them after birth
reliably available to him and guides his actions in and they have an immediate and ongoing effect
just the sort of way that beliefs are usually supposed on the behavior of our digestive system. Indeed,
to. The information is available and functions just without the constant dynamic interaction between
like the information that constitutes nonoccurrent intestinal flora and our digestive organs we would
beliefs (occurrent beliefs are those of which we are not be able to digest certain kinds of carbohydrates.
currently aware); the only difference is the location According to Adams and Aizawas fallacy, intestinal
of the information. Taken in this way, EM turns out flora should not be counted as part of our digestive
to be a species of functionalism: It is function, not system.
physical constitution, that matters to mentality. As
long as information plays the relevant role (or func-
The Mark of the Mental
tion) it is a belief regardless of location. Hence, the
mind is extended into the world. Is there a mark of the cognitive or the mental
that all cognitive and mental states must have to be
Criticisms and Responses considered cognitive or mental? Such a mark if it
could be determined, would allow us to determine
There are a number of criticisms that have been lev- whether the inscriptions in Ottos notebook could
eled at EM; the two most prominent are the causal really be part of his memory system. Adams and
coupling fallacy and the mark of the mental. Aizawa stipulate that the mark of the cognitive is
representations with underived content (or mean-
The Causal Coupling Fallacy
ing); they are very careful to say that a cognitive pro-
The objection was first stated by Fred Adams and cess must involve at least some underived content.
Ken Aizawa: When some object or process is cou- This means content that is not derived from another
pled to a cognitive agent in some way, the EM theo- mental or cognitive state. Examples of representa-
rist slides to the conclusion that the object or process tions with derived content are external representa-
constitutes part of the agents cognitive apparatus. tions such as written sentences or road signs which
Schematically the fallacy looks like this: Just because get their contents from mental or cognitive states.
X is causally related to Y, it does not follow that In other words, for a written sentence or a stop sign
X is a part of Y. Given the definition of a coupled to mean anything there need to be minds that inter-
process above, it is hard to see how EM theorists pret the sentence or the stop sign to mean what they
are guilty of such a simple fallacy. For the reciprocal do. By contrast, your thoughtthat it is a sunny
causal interaction of X and Y is part of a wider sys- day todayis not derived from some other mind;
tem Z. We identify X and Y as parts of Z because of that thought is underived. It then becomes clear
their contribution to Zs behavior. For example if we that the written sentences in Ottos notebook have
338 Eye Movements During Reading
only derived content and therefore lack the mark Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the mind. Oxford, UK:
of the cognitive. There are several things to note Oxford University Press.
about this objection. The first is that it is unusual Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind.
for a science to have articulated a mark of its subject Analysis, 58, 719.
matter; it is unclear exactly what the mark of the Hurley, S. (1998). Consciousness in action. Cambridge,
physical or the biological might be, and physicists MA: Harvard University Press.
and biologists have been doing very well without Menary, R. (2007). Cognitive integration: Mind and
one. The second thing to note is that as a stipulation cognition unbounded. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.
the proposed mark has no independent motivation
Menary, R. (Ed.). (2010). The extended mind. Cambridge,
and such a motivation is required. The final thing to
MA: MIT Press.
note, before looking at a response to the objection, is
Rowlands, M. (1999). The body in mind: Understanding
that the concepts of representation and content are
cognitive processes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
highly contested, and there is no real agreement on University Press.
what the criteria are for representation, nor for how
a representation gets its content determined.
There is an easy response to the mark of the men-
tal objection, which is to accept the stipulation and EYE MOVEMENTS DURING
allow that in a coupled system such as Ottos there READING
are both representations with underived content and
representations with derived content. Therefore, This entry briefly details what is known about eye
as long as a coupled process involves at least some movements during reading. It includes an overview
underived content, Adams and Aizawas objection is of properties of the eye, types of eye movements,
met. A more restrictive application of the objection commonly used eye movement measures, research
would be that only a process involving representa- methodologies, a discussion of visual and linguis-
tions with underived content can count as cognitive. tic factors of words that affect eye movements dur-
ing reading, and a brief mention of a computational
Other Formulations model that attempts to simulate these influences.
Other formulations of EM center on the concepts
of complementarity, integration, and manipulation.
Eye Movements and Properties of the Eye
Rowlands develops his version of EM by propos- When we read, our eyes dont glide smoothly across
ing a manipulation thesis in which some cognitive the page. Rather, we make a series of eye move-
processes involve the manipulation of external infor- ments (called saccades) separated by fixations. Eye
mation-bearing structures. The manipulation thesis movements are tightly linked to cognitive process-
is entirely consistent with EM as developed by Clark ing and offer the opportunity to rigorously test
and Chalmers; however, it does not depend upon hypotheses about how the mind operates during
the parity principle as a motivational tool. Menary reading. The reason we move our eyes is so that we
takes the key to EM to be a matter of the integra- can place the foveathat part of our retina with the
tion of internal and external manipulations, which is highest acuity (resolution)over the text we wish
also consistent with EM as presented above. Sutton to process. The fovea extends 2 degrees of visual
has stressed the complementary roles of internal and angle around fixation and outside of this area acu-
external resources drawing on the work of Merlin ity drops off rapidly in the parafovea (25 degrees)
Donald. and periphery (5 + degrees). Saccades, which typi-
cally last 25 to 60 milliseconds (ms) (depending on
Richard Menary
their size), are considered to be ballisticso that it
See also Anti-Individualism About Cognition; is difficult to change trajectory once initiatedand
Distributed Cognition; Mind-Body Problem take approximately 175 ms to plan and execute if
no other cognitive processing must be completed.
Further Readings Between the saccades, our eyes are in relatively
Adams, A., & Aizawa, K. (2001). The bounds of cognition. stable statesfixationswhich last approximately
Philosophical Psychology, 14, 4364. 225 to 250 ms. Information is obtained during
Eye Movements During Reading 339
fixations as we are essentially blind during sac- character. In these experiments, as the eyes are moni-
cades because of saccadic suppression. For the tored the text is manipulated so that the fixated and
most part, overt attention (where the eyes fixate) surrounding letters are revealed and the rest of the
and covert attention (where the mind attends) are letters are masked (e.g., replaced with Xs). The size
tightly linked in reading. of the window (revealed letters) can be varied until
In reading, the average saccade extends 7 to 9 reading is equivalent to reading without a window
letter spaces. Letter spaces are the appropriate indi- to determine the size of the perceptual spanthe
cator of how far the eyes move since regardless of area from which information is obtained. In English,
the reading distance of the text (which modulates the perceptual span extends three to four charac-
text size on the retina), eye movements extend the ters to the left of fixation and 14 to 15 characters to
same number of letter spaces, not the same degree of the right of fixation; readers obtain no information
visual angle. Not all saccades move forward in the from text on the lines above and below the currently
text; 10% to 15% of saccades are regressions, which read line. Furthermore, moving mask experiments
means they return to previously read or skipped where the fixated and immediately surrounding let-
text. More difficult text leads to more regressions as ters are masked and the rest are availableshow
well as shorter saccades and longer fixations. that it is nearly impossible to read when the fovea
cannot be used to obtain information. The percep-
Eye Movement Measures tual span varies with skill so that more skilled read-
ers have larger perceptual spans than less skilled
Although the abovementioned metricsglobal mea- readers.
sures of processingare important, researchers more
often discuss local measures of processing, such as
Properties of Words That
first fixation duration (duration of the first fixation
Affect Eye Movements
on a word), single fixation duration (duration of the
fixation on a word when the word was only fixated The amount of time spent fixating a word is influ-
once, excluding regressive fixations), and gaze dura- enced by many linguistic factors, such as frequency,
tion (the sum of all fixations on a word before the predictability, lexical ambiguity, age of acquisition,
eyes move to another word). These measures are familiarity, and so on. Even when a word disappears
more useful because they are more robust to skip- or is masked 50 to 60 ms after it is fixated, the time
ping and regressions, whereas global measures have spent fixating on that word is highly influenced by
the implicit assumption that all words are fixated frequency and is very similar to reading time when
once. Approximately a third (31%) of words in text the word does not disappear. However, when the
are skippednot directly fixated. In general, these following word disappears at the same time as the
words are short, high-frequency words with little fixated word, reading is greatly disrupted, indicating
semantic content (e.g., the, in, and) or words that that the word to the right of fixation is important
are highly predictable from prior text. Conversely, for normal reading.
words likely to be refixated (i.e., fixated more than
once before the eyes continue) tend to be longer and Computational Models of Eye
less frequent. The abovementioned local measures Movements During Reading
are useful to estimate how long it takes to process a
word. A number of computational models of eye move-
ments in reading have been proposed over the past
few years. Space does not permit a discussion of
Useful Methodologies
these models here, but a comprehensive review can
Although the region of highest acuity is the fovea, be found in a special 2006 issue of Cognitive Systems
some information can be obtained from outside the Research. Most models can account for all the previ-
fovea. Research using the gaze-contingent moving ously mentioned data, accommodating both global
window paradigm introduced by George McConkie and local measures. One of the most influential
and Keith Rayner has demonstrated that readers and robust models is the E-Z Reader model, which
obtain little or no information from characters out- can predict fixation durations, which words will be
side a relatively small window around the fixated skipped, and which will be refixated.
340 Eyewitness Memory
decrease the magnitude of postevent information a lineup in which the actual perpetrator is not
effects. For instance, postevent information effects present. When the actual culprit is not in a lineup,
are more pronounced when the original memory is eyewitnesses tend to select someone who looks the
weak rather than strong. Hence, it tends to be easier closest to their memory of the culprit than do the
to find postevent information influences on periph- remaining lineup members. Based on this research,
eral details of an event than on central details of an eyewitness scientists recommend that police conduct
event. Likewise, postevent information effects tend sequential lineups, which encourage eyewitnesses to
to be stronger when the witnessed event was in the make more absolute judgments about each lineup
more distant past. Furthermore, postevent informa- member. In a sequential lineup, eyewitnesses only
tion is more likely to be incorporated into memory see one lineup member at a time and must decide yes
testimony when the postevent information is plau- or no before moving on to the next lineup member.
sible rather than implausible. Because eyewitnesses do not know how many lineup
members they will see, they cannot simply pick the
Identification Testimony closestthe next lineup member may be the actual
perpetrator. This can reduce the likelihood of a
A considerable amount of the work on eyewitness mistaken identification when the perpetrator is not
testimony in recent years has been concerned with present, as witnesses would likely get through the
eyewitness identification testimony. Identification entire lineup without identifying anyone. Another
testimony refers to a claim by an eyewitness that type of identification procedure is called a showup.
a specific person was seen committing a particular Whereas a lineup presents the eyewitness with the
act. In cases where the identified person was pre- suspected person embedded among known-innocent
viously known to the eyewitness (e.g., a relative), distracters, a showup presents the eyewitness with
accuracy of identification is not usually an issue. But only one person (the suspected person). Showups
in cases where the perpetrator is a stranger, the issue are not considered to be good tests of eyewitnesses
of mistaken identity is often a concern. Experiments memories because they tend to be suggestive, and
on eyewitness identification from lineups follow- because identification errors cannot be distributed to
ing simulated crimes have illustrated that mistaken known-innocent distracters.
identification is not at all uncommon. Numerous
factors have been shown to hamper the ability of
Eyewitness Confidence
eyewitnesses to accurately identify someone from a
lineup. For instance, other-race identifications are One of the central issues in the scientific literature
less reliable than same-race identifications, stress on eyewitness testimony has been the confidence
during witnessing impairs eyewitness identification with which eyewitnesses testify about their memo-
performance, changes to a perpetrators appearance ries. Trial simulation studies have shown that the
(perhaps because of disguise) are highly problem- confidence with which an eyewitness asserts some
atic for later identification, and the use of a weapon fact (e.g., Number three in the lineup is definitely
tends to draw the witnesss attention away from a the person I saw or I am positive that the man
perpetrators face and toward the weapon. came through the rear door) is a primary reason
Many eyewitness psychologists have focused their why people will accept the statement as being accu-
research specifically on system variables, which are rate. However, witnesses can give highly confident
the parts of the investigatory process affecting the testimony on matters for which they are mistaken.
accuracy of eyewitness identifications over which Dissociations between confidence and accuracy
the justice system has control. For instance, instruc- appear to occur in large part because some of the
tions given to eyewitnesses prior to their viewing a variables that affect confidence do not also affect
lineup, the composition of a lineup, and the verbal accuracy. For instance, repeated recall of a mis-
and nonverbal behaviors of a lineup administrator taken memory tends to inflate confidence but does
can each influence both eyewitnesses identification not enhance accuracylike wearing a path into a
decisions as well as the certainty that they express patch of grass, repeated recall entrenches the mem-
in their identification decision. A particularly dif- ory so that the witness is confident while traversing
ficult situation for eyewitnesses is when they view the path, even though the path might be the wrong
342 Eyewitness Memory
direction to take. Also, confirming feedback for a eyewitness identification accounts for more DNA
mistaken memory (e.g., Good, you identified the exonerations of innocent people than all other causes
right person) inflates confidence and leads wit- combined, the American legal system has begun to
nesses to think that they were positive all along show increased receptivity to what psychological
when, in fact, they had doubts when they first made science has to offer on the issue of eyewitness testi-
their identification. mony. This includes an increasing tendency to permit
expert testimony regarding eyewitness issues at trial,
Miscarriages of Justice Based on Mistaken and an increasing tendency for law enforcement to
Eyewitness Testimony follow recommendations from eyewitness scientists
Since the advent of forensic DNA testing in the and adopt lineup procedures that lower the chances
1990s, DNA testing has been used to assess the of mistaken identification.
innocence claims of some convicted felons for whom Gary L. Wells and Elizabeth A. Olson
DNA-rich, biological evidence had been collected
and preserved after trial. This has resulted in over See also Emotion and Working Memory; Face
230 exonerations (as of May 2009) based on DNA Perception; Memory, Interference With; Memory,
proof of actual innocence. Slightly over 75% of these Neural Basis; Memory Recall, Dynamics
convictions turn out to be cases of mistaken eye-
witness identification testimony. These real-world, Further Readings
mistaken, eyewitness cases tend to have the charac-
teristics that eyewitness researchers have described Clark, S. E., Howell, R., & Davey, S. L. (2007).
Regularities in eyewitness identification. Law & Human
in their experimental studies, such as an overrepre-
Behavior, 32, 187218.
sentation of other-race identifications, highly con-
Cutler, B. L., & Penrod, S. D. (1995). Mistaken
fident trial testimony, suggestive procedures, and
identification: The eyewitness, psychology, and the law.
identifications from lineups that did not contain the
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
actual perpetrator. Lindsay, R. C. L., Ross, D. F., Read, J. D., & Toglia, M. P.
Almost all DNA exoneration cases are cases that (Eds.). (2007). The handbook of eyewitness psychology:
involved sexual assault; these are among the only types Memory for people. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
of cases for which there is biological evidence that can Toglia, M. P., Read, J. D., Ross, D. F., & Lindsay, R. C. L.
provide definitive proof of innocence. Although 230 (Eds.). (2007). The handbook of eyewitness psychology:
such cases is not a large number, few claims of inno- Memory for events. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
cence based on mistaken identification can actually be Wells, G. L., Memon, A., & Penrod, S. (2006). Eyewitness
tested because, for the vast majority of cases, no DNA evidence: Improving its probative value. Psychological
is available that could trump an eyewitnesss account. Science in the Public Interest, 7, 4575.
As a result, there is no way to know the actual num- Wells, G. L., & Olson, E. A. (2003). Eyewitness
ber of wrongful convictions based on faulty eyewit- identification. Annual Review of Psychology, 54,
ness identifications. Nevertheless, because mistaken 277295.
F
attractiveness and emotional expressions. Finally,
FACE PERCEPTION the entry examines the neural mechanisms underly-
ing face perception, and how damage to these can
As Humpty-Dumpty observed in Lewis Carrolls result in acquired prosopagnosia.
(1871) classic, Through the Looking Glass and
What Alice Found There, all faces share the same Face Recognition
basic configuration. On encountering Alice, Humpty Dumptys complaint illustrates one of the
Humpty-Dumpty complained, central challenges in recognizing individual faces.
Youre so exactly like other people, . . . the two eyes, Unlike many other visual objects, we do not dis-
so (marking their places in the air with his thumb), tinguish faces by their parts alone or even by the
nose in the middle, mouth under. Its always the basic arrangement of these parts. Rather, success-
same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side ful face recognition depends on sensitivity to subtle
of the nose, for instanceor the mouth at the top spatial relations between facial features, sometimes
that would be some help. (p. 133) referred to as configural coding. Unlike most other
objects (except perhaps words), faces are also coded
Faces are also highly animated, with changing holistically, with little explicit coding of component
expressions and other movements resulting in a vari- features. Turning faces upside down disrupts recog-
ety of views. This combination of structural similar- nition of faces far more than other mono-oriented
ity and dynamic variation creates challenges for objects, and this disproportionately large effect is
visual analysis and recognition. Yet we readily likely due to inversion dramatically reducing our
extract a wealth of social information from the face, sensitivity to spatial relations (see Figure 1) and dis-
determining the individuals identity, gender, age, rupting our holistic coding of faces.
attractiveness, emotional state, and direction of Some faces are easier to remember than others,
attention. We can also use remarkably subtle cues, and this may be a consequence of how the simi-
such as the skeptical elevation of an eyebrow or an larities and differences among faces are represented.
inviting glance, to adjust our social interactions. Individual faces can be thought of as points in
And, unlike Humpty Dumpty, we do all this rapidly a multidimensional space. At the center of face
and with little apparent effort. Over the last three space lies an average face, representing the central
decades researchers have discovered much about the tendency of all the faces experienced. Typical faces,
cognitive and neural mechanisms that make all this which are harder to remember, are located close to
possible. This entry reviews what is known about this average, while more distinctive faces, which tend
how we recognize faces and how this capacity devel- to stick in our memory, are located further away (see
ops during infancy and childhood. It also considers Figure 2). Recent evidence suggests that the aver-
the perception of other aspects of faces, such as their age face functions as a perceptual norm for coding
343
344 Face Perception
Dan
Jim
Average
Anti-Dan
Note: It is easy to detect that the two upside-down faces in produce little neural response with large responses
Row A differ, but harder to see that the two in Row B
reserved for novel faces, resulting in an efficient
differ. Turning the faces up the right way makes the task
form of coding that may be used more generally in
easier, particularly for the pair in Row B, which differ only
in how close the eyes are to the nose. It is likely that our
the visual system.
sensitivity to the spacing of facial features is tuned to work
best for upright faces because most of our experience with Development
faces is in orientations close to upright. Newborn infants can detect and visually orient to
face-like patterns, and within days of birth they can
identity, highlighting what is distinctive about each discriminate faces, preferring their mothers face to a
face. The norm appears to be continuously updated strangers, attractive to unattractive faces, and faces
by experience. A curious but telling side effect of this looking at them rather than away from them. These
updating is that viewing a face biases us to see the observations suggest that newborns have some innate
opposite face, the so-called identity aftereffect (see face-processing mechanisms, perhaps an innate face
Figure 2). Norm-based coding may be implemented template or prototype combined with mechanisms
by pairs of neural populations, one tuned to above- that detect and orient visual attention toward stimuli
average and one to below-average values, for each that fit this template. Such mechanisms could direct
dimension of face space. Common or typical faces face-like inputs to areas in the brain that become
Face Perception 345
specialized for face processing (see below). The ques- femininity in female faces), a pleasant expression,
tion of whether such areas have innate specialization good grooming, and youthfulness. Traits such as
for faces remains controversial. averageness, symmetry, and sexual dimorphism have
During the first year of life, face-processing mech- been linked to disease resistance and developmental
anisms appear to be tuned by exposure to faces. stability, and preferences for these traits may have
This results in perceptual narrowing analogous to evolved by sexual selection. In this case, the repro-
the loss of sensitivity to phonemic differences that ductive success of individuals who choose partners
are absent from the infants language environment. with these traits could be enhanced by direct benefits,
In the case of faces, 6-month-olds can discriminate such as reduced risk of contagion and better parental
familiar from unfamiliar monkey faces as well as care from a healthier partner, and/or indirect genetic
human faces, but by 9 months they can no longer benefits, such as heritable resistance to disease in off-
discriminate monkey faces. A similar loss of sensitiv- spring. However, preferences for symmetry and aver-
ity occurs for faces of unfamiliar races. In both cases, ageness extend beyond faces and potential mates,
exposure to other-species or other-race faces pre- suggesting a contribution of general information-
vents the loss. Disruption of early visual experience processing mechanisms to such preferences.
by cataracts produces deficits in holistic face process- People readily assess personal traits, includ-
ing and sensitivity to feature spacing that persist into ing intelligence, health, competence, dominance,
adulthood, even when the cataracts are removed and trustworthiness based on facial appearance.
before 6 months of age. These deficits suggest that Although not always accurate, these attributions can
there are sensitive periods during which exposure to be useful predictors of behavioral outcomes. Indeed,
faces is essential for normal development. one recent study found a substantial correlation
Face recognition performance continues to between attributions of power-related traits in the
improve throughout childhood. There has been faces of company CEOs and company profits.
considerable debate about whether this improve- Faces also provide cues to underlying emotional
ment reflects development of face-selective coding states, such as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, dis-
mechanisms or general cognitive mechanisms (mem- gust, and surprise. These basic expressions can be
ory, executive function, attention). However, recent recognized across cultures, although some have
evidence linking improved face recognition during argued that only broader dimensions, such as valence
childhood with expansion of face-selective cortex (pleasure-displeasure) and activation (sleepy-hyper-
(see below) supports a face-selective component. activated), are universally perceived. Moreover,
performance is often far from perfect, and emotion
recognition is generally more accurate for faces of
Reading Other Information From Faces
the same race and cultural group as the perceiver,
Faces are assessed on a variety of dimensions that similar to the own-race advantage typically found
modulate our social interactions. A salient one is for face recognition. Facial expressions not only
attractiveness, which is assessed rapidly and with reflect genuine emotional experience. Expressions
powerful consequences. Attractive faces activate may be posed to provide social cues (e.g., polite
reward centers in the brain and motivate sexual smiles) or to intentionally deceive (e.g., masking a
behavior and same-sex alliances. They also elicit negative emotion with a smile). Our ability to detect
positive attributions and treatment in a variety of deception from the face alone may be more limited
settings (the attractiveness halo effect). than we generally realize, with performance often
Contrary to a long-held belief that beauty is in only slightly above chance.
the eye of the beholder and reflects arbitrary cultural
conventions, recent evidence suggests that there
Neural Mechanisms
is a biological basis for face preferences. People in
different cultures show substantial agreement on The discovery of so-called face cells, which respond
attractiveness, and preferences emerge early in devel- primarily to faces, in the inferotemporal cortex of
opment, before cultural standards of beauty operate. monkeys, was an important milestone in the study
Attractive facial traits include averageness, symme- of specialized neural mechanisms. More recent
try, sexual dimorphism (masculinity in male faces, functional neuroimaging studies of the human brain
346 Face Perception
suggest that face-selective tissue is distributed across for faces, since recognition may be unimpaired for
occipitotemporal cortex, forming a core face-pro- nonface objects (e.g., birds) that, like faces, share a
cessing network (Figure 3). The occipital face area common structure and with which the person has
(OFA) in lateral occipital cortex (inferior occipital considerable perceptual expertise (e.g., for a bird
gyri in Figure 3) may form an initial, feature-based, watcher). In contrast, object agnosia can occur in the
face representation, which is projected to the fusi- absence of face-recognition deficits. This double dis-
form face area (FFA) and superior temporal sulcus sociation between prosopagnosia and object agnosia
(STS). The FFA may individuate faces, whereas the suggests that distinct mechanisms may underlie face
STS codes changeable aspects of faces, such as emo- and object processing. Double dissociations have also
tional expression and gaze direction. The proposed been observed between deficits in recognizing iden-
network is consistent with the effects of brain dam- tity and expressions, implicating distinct mechanisms
age, with damage to distinct regions producing defi- for identity and expression processing (in FFA and
cits in different aspects of face processing (see below). STS, respectively), although these may operate on the
The core network interacts with an extended same initial visual representation (perhaps computed
network of other cortical and subcortical areas to in OFA). There may also be distinct neural substrates
interpret the social cues available in faces (Figure for the perception of different emotional expres-
3). Subcortical structures are particularly important sions, with selective deficits in fear, disgust, and anger
for rapid (less than 100 milliseconds), and probably observed after damage to the amygdala, insula, and
automatic, perception of emotional expressions, as basal ganglia, respectively. Damage to these areas
well as rapid detection of faces. generally affects the experience, as well as the percep-
tion, of emotions, and this dual role may underlie our
spontaneous mimicry of expressions and capacity for
Impaired Face Perception
emotional empathy. Abnormal amygdala function is
Damage to the core face perception network can also seen in autism, another disorder associated with
result in acquired prosopagnosia, where previously face processing and social cognition difficulties.
familiar faces, even ones own, can no longer be Deficits in face processing can also occur with-
recognized. This deficit can be remarkably selective out apparent brain injury, in developmental or
Intraparietal sulcus
Spatially directed attention
Auditory cortex
Superior temporal sulcus
Prelexical speech perception
Changeable aspects of faces
perception of eye gaze, expression,
and lip movement
Inferior occipital gyri Amygdala, insula, limbic system
Early perception of Emotion
facial features
Lateral fusiform gyrus
Invariant aspects of faces
perception of unique identity Anterior temporal
Personal identity, name, and
Core system: Visual analysis biographical information
Extended system:
Further processing in concert
with other neural systems
Figure 3 Model of the distributed human neural system for face perception
Source: Reprinted from Haxby, J. V., Hoffman, E. A., & Gobbini, M. I. (2000). The distributed human neural system for
face perception. Trends in Cognitive Science, 4(6), 230, with permission.
Face Recognition in Humans and Computers 347
congenital prosopagnosia. It is not yet clear whether Tsao, D. Y., & Livingstone, M. S. (2008). Mechanisms of
this constitutes a single disorder, because there is con- face perception. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 31,
siderable variation in deficits. Nor is it clear whether 411437.
it reflects an underlying pathology or simply the end
of a broad distribution of face processing ability.
Developmental prosopagnosia can run in families, FACE RECOGNITION IN HUMANS
exhibiting a simple pattern of inheritance consistent
AND COMPUTERS
with a single dominant autosomal gene. Sex-linked
genes are also implicated in human face perception,
with deficits in face processing and social cognition The development of computer-based face recogni-
occurring in the chromosomal disorder Turner syn- tion algorithms has intersected intermittently and
drome (X-monosomy). productively with the study of human face recogni-
tion. Algorithms have offered insight into theories
of human face recognition, and findings about the
A Caveat characteristics of human performance have filtered
Although we can recognize many thousands of back into the development of algorithms. A primary
familiar individuals, sometimes even decades after point of intersection between human and machine
seeing them, recognition can be poor for faces we studies has involved the question of how to repre-
have seen only once or a few times, with serious sent and quantify the information in human faces.
repercussions in forensic settings. For example, Jean Evaluations of the strengths and weaknesses of both
Charles de Menezes tragically lost his life when he human and machine recognition have contributed to
was mistaken for terrorist suspect Hussain Osman our understanding of the computational challenges
and was shot dead by Scotland Yard officers on the involved in face recognition.
London Underground in 2005.
Representing Faces
Gillian Rhodes and Linda Jeffery
Image-Based Representations
See also Emotional Recognition, Neuropychology of; Face recognition for both humans and machines
Face Recognition in Humans and Computers; Facial begins with an image projected onto the retina or
Expressions, Computational Perspectives; Facial
sampled by a camera. Early approaches to machine
Expressions, Emotional
recognition operated by extracting and quantifying
the discrete features of faces (e.g., eyes, nose). A fun-
Further Readings damental shift in this strategy occurred in the early
1990s with the use of principal component analysis
Adams, R. B., Jr., Ambady, N., Nakayama, K., & Shimojo,
(PCA) applied to face images. PCA is a statistical
S. (in press). The science of social vision. New York,
analysis that derives feature vectors from a set of
NY: Oxford University Press.
input stimuliin this case, a set of faces. The first
Calder, A. J., Rhodes, G., Haxby, J. V., & Johnson, M. H.
measures used were simply pixel values extracted
(Eds.). (in press). The handbook of face perception.
from face images. Applied to a population of faces,
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Carroll, L. (1871). Through the looking glass and what
PCA creates a representation of individual faces
Alice found there. London, UK: Macmillan. Retrieved in terms of a set of global features derived from
from Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia the statistics of the face set. These global features
Library. consist of images that can be combined linearly to
McKone, E., Kanwisher, N., & Duchaine, B. C. (2006). construct individual faces. From a psychological
Can generic expertise explain special processing for perspective, the connection of the feature set to the
faces? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 815. face population analyzed defines the experience
Peterson, M. P., & Rhodes, G. (Eds.). (2003). Perception of of the computational model. The global features
faces, objects and scenes: Analytic and holistic act as face descriptors that can specify categorical
processing. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (e.g., sex, race) and identity information about a
Rhodes, G. (2006). The evolution of facial attractiveness. face. The computational components of PCA, there-
Annual Review of Psychology, 57, 199226. fore, implement a psychologically grounded face
348 Face Recognition in Humans and Computers
space model of recognition. By this account, faces female), and for expression (i.e., adaptation to a sad
are represented as points in a space, with the axes face makes a neutral face appear happy). Moreover,
of the space defining features. The computationally these effects occur for face opposites with exposure
implemented face space accounts for important find- to a synthetically created opposite face, a so-called
ings in human recognition. The other-race effect, for anti-face, to facilitate the perception of the original
example, is the well-known advantage people have face (see Figure 1). Opponent adaptation effects are
in recognizing faces of their own race over faces of consistent with face representations that directly
other races. This occurs because the space optimally code the deformation of an individual face from the
represents faces similar to those used to derive the average face.
feature set (i.e., own race faces), consequently con-
straining the representation of other-race faces to be Humans Versus Machines
less than optimal. Periodic international competitions for state-of-the-
art face recognition algorithms organized by the U.S.
Morphable Models
government demonstrate an order of magnitude per-
An important computational innovation came formance improvement for algorithms between the
from changing the PCA input from images to image- face recognition vendor test (FRVT) in 2002 and the
based representations that are aligned with an aver- FRVT in 2006. These algorithm evaluations require
age or prototype face. This representation supports face identity matches for hundreds of millions of
morphing between individual faces and is therefore image pairs. To date, although the performance of
able to create faces that have particular properties algorithms across changes in viewing parameters
useful for experimental manipulations. The align- (e.g., illumination) has improved, three-dimensional
ment of faces is carried out using a set of landmark viewpoint changes are currently beyond the capabili-
feature points (e.g., corners of the eye, tip of the ties of most commercial face recognition algorithms.
nose). The shape of the face is coded in terms of the
deformation of its landmark features from the aver- Quantitative Comparisons
age face. The reflectance or pigmentation informa- The level of accuracy achieved by humans rec-
tion is analyzed separately in an aligned (shape-free) ognizing faces is considered the gold standard to
image space. A PCA is applied independently to the which algorithms should aspire. A recent com-
shape and reflectance information from a set of faces. parison between humans and the algorithms from
This representation supports morphing between the FRVT-2006, however, showed that the best
faces both in the reflectance and shape spaces allow- algorithms surpassed human accuracy at identity
ing for the creation of synthetic morphed faces at matching over changes in illumination conditions.
arbitrary points in the space. The approach has been
extended to operate on laser scans of faces that mea-
sure the three-dimensional shape of a head directly
along with its reflectance map.
Psychological Results
Face representations based on deformations from
an average face predict recently discovered high-
level adaptation effects in human face perception.
Face adaptation occurs after viewing a distorted face
(e.g., expanded horizontally) for a few minutes, or
less. The result is a bias to perceive a subsequently
presented normal face as distorted in the opposite Figure 1 Example of a face (left) and its synthetically
direction (e.g., contracted horizontally). Opponent created opposite (i.e., anti-face)
adaptation effects have been found also for the Note: Exposure to the face facilitates the perception of the
sex of a face (i.e., adaptation to a male face biases anti-face and suggests that human face representations
the perception of an androgynous face to appear reference an average or prototype face.
Facial Expressions, Computational Perspectives 349
largely veridical, while at other times they can be sets of principal components were generated, some
quite deceptive. Much more flexible decoding mech- coding for identity, some for expression, and some
anisms are then required, to be honed by individual for both. In this account, it does not appear neces-
experience through learning and memory. Whatever sary to resort to two anatomically separate systems
system is used to interpret fine details in the visual to explain the independent perception of identity
input, based on a meaning-driven representation of and expression demonstrated in previous studies,
repertoires of facial expressions, this system has to because both sets of properties can be extracted by
be continuously updated. a single, multidimensional system. The dissociation
between them, in fact, may result merely from their
Are Facial Emotions and Facial Identity distinct statistical properties, across an ecological
Processed Separately? range of face stimuli.
The functional model proposed by Vicki Bruce and Apart from PCA, another image-analysis
Andy Young in 1986, one of the most popular box approach to facial expression recognition uses
models from that period, had a strong influence Gabor filters, with different frequencies and orien-
on the study of face recognition, in particular with tations. These units, which are assumed to model
respect to the localization of perceptual mechanisms neurons with response properties similar to com-
in the brain. The authors put forward the notion that plex cells in the visual cortex, perform nonlinear
facial expressions and facial identity are processed edge detection at different scales and orientations.
along distinct pathways, which diverge early on in Methods have also been proposed that include in
the visual stream. The system devoted to expression different layers Gabor filters, PCA, and categoriza-
analysis receives inputs from an early stage where the tion, to yield a more complex and hence presumably
fine structural properties of the visual stimulus are more biologically plausible model of facial expres-
already extracted, whereas a separate route is fol- sion recognition.
lowed to abstract an expression-invariant description
of the face, which will lead to the attribution of iden- A Contribution From Attractor Dynamics
tity and other semantic information. This seemingly Whatever conclusion is reached in the localization
reasonable functional distinction between processing debate, localizing processes in the brain does not,
facial identity and emotion has since been assigned per se, clarify their nature. Similarly, describing the
an anatomical basis, with the identification of cor- analysis of afferent (incoming) visual signals in terms
tical regions that are differentially involved in the of either PCA or Gabor filters tells us little about any
visual analysis of distinct aspects of faces. Static (or decoding mechanism based on information that has
perhaps virtually invariant) features of faces, includ- been deposited in the cortex by previous experience.
ing identity, seem to be especially encoded by the Such information is likely stored in interconnected
lateral fusiform gyrus, whereas the superior tempo- neurons in a given cortical area (recurrent con-
ral sulcus seems to be involved in the representation nections), or in top-down connections from more
of dynamic, changeable properties of faces, which advanced to earlier cortical areas, rather than in the
include emotions, eye gaze, and lip movements. feed-forward connections that filter afferent signals.
Within a cortical area, the general notion is that
Insights From Image Analysis Techniques
clusters of statistically frequent or otherwise salient
The complete divergence of these two systems at stimulus configurations produce corresponding
an early stage of the visual stream has been called attractor statesthat is, preferred activity states
into question by the observation that emotion and toward which the network evolves. Such attractor
identity might partially share their neural represen- states would be carved in the dynamics of local
tations. This more fully articulated notion is also recurrent networks by Hebbian (i.e., associative)
supported by image-analysis approaches, based on synaptic plasticity, in an unsupervised, effectively
the idea that techniques, such as principal compo- self-organizing learning process. This notion, at
nent analysis (PCA) may simulate neural mecha- variance with the dominant connectionist paradigm
nisms of face perception and categorization. When of supervised (back-propagation) learning, has
such analysis was performed on a sample of faces been investigated extensively with the aid of more
with different identities and expressions, different brain-based network models, but only recently has it
Facial Expressions, Emotional 351
received some empirical support in the observation See also Computational Models of Emotion; Face
of convergent single-unit activity. After passively Perception; Face Recognition in Humans and
representing a graded afferent signal for a few tens Computers; Facial Expressions, Emotional
of milliseconds, single neurons are seen to converge
in these experiments toward a more categorical
Further Readings
response, putatively reflecting collective attractor
statesstates that attract the network to a unit of Akrami, A., Liu, Y., Treves, A., & Jagadeesh, B. (2009).
meaning. In the particular case of facial expres- Converging neuronal activity in inferior temporal cortex
sions, their graded intensity may often change over during the classification of morphed stimuli. Cerebral
time, leading the network to slide along continu- Cortex, 19, 760776.
ous attractors, using the same neural mechanism Bruce, V., & Young, A. (1986). Understanding face
that has been proposed to underlie spatial naviga- recognition. British Journal of Psychology, 77, 305327.
tion. If the network slides faster than the sensory Calder, A. J., Burton, A. M., Miller, P., Young, A. W., &
Akamatsu, S. (2001). A principal component analysis of
signal changes, it will anticipate the forthcoming
facial expressions. Vision Research, 41, 11791208.
expression (or the forthcoming location, in navi-
Dailey, M. N., Cottrell, G. W., Padgett, C., & Adolphs, R.
gation). Such a capability for prediction likely has
(2002). EMPATH: A neural network that categorizes
high survival value. The superior temporal sulcus,
facial expressions. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience,
implicated in expression decoding, is also known 14, 11581173.
to be implicated in biological motion perception, Ekman, P., & Oster, H. (1979). Facial expressions of
and it has been interpreted as a generic generator of emotion. Annual Review of Psychology, 30, 527554.
real-time predictions of forthcoming stimuli. In this Furl, N., van Rijsbergen, N. J., Kiebel, S. J., Friston, K. J.,
account, expression perception might engage com- Treves, A., & Dolan, R. J. (2009). Modulation of
mon cortical anticipatory processes, which predict perception and brain activity by predictable trajectories
the direction of the changes. of facial expressions. Cerebral Cortex. Advance online
publication. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp140
Morris, J. S., Ohman, A., & Dolan, R. J. (1999). A
Beyond Cortical Decoding subcortical pathway to the right amygdala mediating
Cortical visual mechanisms, however, might not be unseen fear. Proceedings of the National Academy of
the only ones responsible for the identification of Sciences USA, 96, 16801685.
facial expressions. Subcortical visual pathways are Stringer, S. M., Trappenberg, T. P., Rolls, E. T., & de
believed to carry out a faster and coarser processing Araujo, I. E. T. (2002). Self-organizing continuous
of faces, perhaps contributing to establish their cor- attractor networks and path integration: One-
dimensional models of head direction cells. Network:
tical representation or perhaps largely bypassing the
Computation in Neural Systems, 13, 217244.
cortex to reach, for example, the amygdala.
More broadly, theories of embodied cognition
propose that recognition of an emotional stimulus
engages mental processes highly overlapping with FACIAL EXPRESSIONS, EMOTIONAL
those involved in the experience of the emotion.
Brain regions that are commonly activated dur-
The term facial expression refers to contraction of
ing an emotional state, including the amygdala,
the facial muscles to produce an observable change
somatosensory, and motor areas, might then partici-
compared to the appearance of a persons face when
pate in the recognition of expressions of emotions.
muscles are relaxed. Emotional facial expressions are
Impairments in the production of an emotion can in
the facial muscle contractions occurring in the con-
fact co-occur with deficits in expression recognition,
text of an emotional experience. Paradoxically, emo-
and experimental disruption of neural activity in
tional facial expressions are referred to as expressions
somatosensory areas impairs discrimination of facial
but they are far from a reliable readout of a persons
expressions. It is doubtful, therefore, that we will
internal subjective state. A person may experience
be able to understand the decoding of facial expres-
strong emotion without displaying any facial move-
sions as if it were an isolated module of the mind.
ment. Conversely, a person may display an emotional
Valentina Daelli and Alessandro Treves expression without feeling a corresponding emotion.
352 Facial Expressions, Emotional
In most facial expression studies, a substantial propor- and interpret expressions may have coevolved. He
tion of people display little facial activity, even under stated that expressions arise from associated habit
extreme circumstances. People frown when angry but and coordinated physiological arousal and proposed
also when concentrating on a difficult task; thus some a theory of antithesis in which certain involuntary
facial movements do not have unique or invariant actions exist because they are the distinct opposite
meanings. To further complicate matters, emotional of other actions with survival value. Certain facial
facial expressions are not strongly correlated with expressions may be lingering vestiges of behaviors
physiological measures of emotional experience or that previously held survival value, such as eye wid-
with eliciting events and contexts. Nevertheless, emo- ening during surprise or fear, originally to enhance
tional facial expressions are treated as meaningful vision but evolving into a signal to others.
by observers, and they clearly regulate interpersonal Published in 1872, Darwins volume had little
relationships, making their study important to social impact for over 100 years. Despite their reliance
psychologists. on the universality of smiling, frowning, and other
Inability to interpret the emotional meaning expressive behavior when meeting new people in
of certain basic emotional facial expressions is an unfamiliar cultures, anthropologists such as Ray
important symptom of social dysfunction or cogni- Birdwhistell and Margaret Mead insisted that facial
tive impairment, an indicator of degenerative dis- expressions were socially learned behavior whose
eases, such as Parkinsons or Huntingtons disease. meaning varied from culture to culture. This view
Recognition tests have been incorporated into prevailed until psychologists Paul Ekman and
measures of social competence, emotional intelli- Carroll Izard, encouraged by Silvan Tomkins, con-
gence, and neurological functioning. Dysfunctional ducted separate studies demonstrating that certain
decoding of emotional expressions is also a symp- emotional facial expressions were recognized con-
tom of disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. sistently across widely varying cultures, including
Impairment of expression and interpretation of remote people in Papua New Guinea, isolated from
expressions go hand in hand. Selective impairment Western influence. To date, hundreds of studies have
of functioning suggests that the recognition of emo- replicated these first universality studies, finding
tional expression is localized in the brain indepen- highly consistent cross-cultural recognition of a set of
dent of recognition of facial identity. basic expressions portraying surprise, joy, anger, sad-
This entry reviews the historical importance of ness, and disgust. Expressions of fear and contempt
emotional expression, current theories, and the sci- produced less consistent results. In the 1990s, meth-
entific study of emotional expressions. odological challenges were raised by James Russell,
but replications addressing Russells criticisms sup-
ported Ekmans claims, and most theorists have now
History
accepted the universality of the basic expressions.
Early physiognomists studied the face in order In the 1970s, recognizing that systematic study
to relate facial characteristics to aspects of per- would be difficult without a uniform way to describe
sonality. In the late 1800s, several neurologists, the properties of facial expressions, Paul Ekman and
including Pierre Gratiolet, Sir Charles Bell, and Wallace Friesen developed the facial action cod-
Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne, ana- ing system (FACS). Using FACS, observers assign
lyzed musculature and traced the anatomy of facial numeric codes to distinct, observable combinations
expression, describing the appearance of the face of muscle contractions, called action units (AUs).
during certain emotional states. Charles Darwin By systematizing description of the face, researchers
relied on their work in his volume, The Expression have better controlled stimuli and better measured
of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwins facial activity, resulting in a rich literature on facial
work is considered the earliest systematic explora- behavior. While FACS was not the first or only cod-
tion of emotional facial expression. Darwin con- ing system, it had the advantage of coding observed
sidered emotional facial expressions to be innate, behavior rather than inferred emotional states and is
arising from evolutionary processes. He suggested now widely used to study a variety of facial activity.
that there is survival value in the ability to signal Similar coding systems for infant and primate facial
important states to others, thus the ability to display expression have been developed. FACS has been
Facial Expressions, Emotional 353
motor cortex produce voluntary, deliberate facial states ourselves via motor mimicry. Infants have
expressions. These dual pathways produce a com- been found to mimic facial expressions from birth,
plex array of facial behavior. For example, a spon- and this may be important to early learning, both
taneous smile might be dampened or controlled via to control affect and to guide infant attention to
pressing the lips together. A voluntary smile may be the importance of the face during social interaction
superimposed on muscle movement characteristic and communication. In adults, the mere presence
of anger. Although the face is the channel of non- of another person can calm a distressed individual,
verbal behavior most readily managed, people are making social coping an effective method of regulat-
rarely aware of what is happening on their faces ing affect.
from moment to moment. Deception can sometimes
be identified via leakage of involuntary or spon-
Sex Differences
taneous muscle movements evoked by emotion. In
contrast to the dynamics of voluntary expressions, Despite stereotypes, men and women are both emo-
dynamics of spontaneous expressions tend to be tionally expressive, although cultural norms may
slightly different (more symmetrical, of shorter dura- influence expression of certain emotions, such as
tion), making it possible to detect deception if one is fear for men or anger for women, especially cross-
looking for it. However, there is little evidence that culturally. Voluntary smiling is required in certain
people use such cues in daily interaction, suggest- occupations frequently held by women and has been
ing that most facial deception goes unnoticed. Paul found to occur more frequently among those with
Ekman has demonstrated that people can be trained lower social status and power. In general, when
to recognize subtle facial movements (microexpres- experiencing the same emotional states, there are few
sions). Robert Rosenthal has found that commenting differences in emotional facial expressions between
upon such nonverbal deception during social interac- the sexes beyond those attributable to socialization
tion is generally considered invasive and thus rude. within a culture.
Nancy Alvarado
Emotional Contagion and Facial Feedback
During social interactions, an observer is likely to See also Emotion Recognition, Neuropsychology of;
unconsciously mimic the facial activity of a com- Facial Expressions, Computational Perspectives;
panion. Studies suggest that when the facial muscles Mirror Neurons
assume the position that occurs during an emotional
expression, an individual will experience the cor- Further Readings
responding emotional state. For example, if some-
Darwin, C. (1872/1998). The expression of the emotions in
one sees another person laughing, he will laugh too
man and animals (P. Ekman, Ed.). New York, NY:
and feel enjoyment as a result of the laughter, even
Oxford University Press.
when there is no obvious reason for the laughter.
Ekman, P. (2007). Emotions revealed: Recognizing faces
This phenomenon has been long recognized and was
and feelings to improve communication and emotional
explained by Carroll Izard as the result of neural life (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Owl Books.
facial feedback. Robert Zajonc suggested that mus- Ekman, P., & Rosenberg, E. (1998). What the face reveals:
cle movement might cause alterations in blood flow Basic and applied studies of spontaneous expression
to the brain resulting in the changes in mood expe- using the facial action coding system (FACS). New
rienced by those changing their facial expressions. York, NY: Oxford University Press.
More recently, the discovery of mirror neurons may Erickson, K., & Schulkin, J. (2003). Facial expressions of
provide an alternative explanation for the activa- emotion: A cognitive neuroscience perspective. Brain
tion of emotional states via facial expressivity. Such and Cognition, 52, 5260.
neural mechanisms are now believed to be impor- Russell, J., & Fernandez-Dols, J. M. (1997). The
tant to empathy and social regulation of affect. As psychology of facial expression: Studies in emotion and
with language, our interpretation of the emotional social interaction. New York, NY: Cambridge University
states of others may rely upon reexperiencing those Press.
Flynn Effect: Rising Intelligence Scores 355
Scores on the Stanford-Binet IQ test and vari- offered putative explanations that spanned a spec-
ous other mental ability tests have shown a com- trum of possibilities ranging from improved nutrition
parable rate of increase over time, but scores on to the influence of television and personal computers.
Ravens Progressive Matrices (RPM) test have risen Flynn has criticized all the explanations as inadequate
at twice that rate. The unadjusted score increases for to account for the persistence and pervasiveness of
Wechsler, Stanford-Binet, and Raven tests are illus- the rising scores. He has proposed instead that dif-
trated in Figure 1. This differential rate of increase ferent factors have contributed to IQ increases at
provides some insight into the mechanism or different times. Specifically, he has suggested that IQ
mechanisms underlying the Flynn effect. Scores on increases in the United States prior to World War II
culture-reduced teststhat is, tests with relatively can be attributed to the substantial increase in the
low demand for learned skills and knowledgehave quality and average duration of formal education
increased much more rapidly than scores on tests that occurred in the country during the early 20th
that measure primarily the degree to which individu- century. On the other hand, Flynn attributes more
als have acquired word knowledge and other cul- recent increases in test scores to an evolving empha-
ture-specific information. Accordingly, scores from sis on on-the-spot problem solving, as required in
the nonverbal (performance) part of the Wechsler IQ the contemporary workplace and in other realms of
tests have been increasing about twice as fast (4 IQ modern culture. According to Flynn, the importance
points per decade) as scores from the verbal part of of these dynamic and flexible mental skills (some of
the same tests (2 IQ points per decade). which are tapped by the Ravens test) has overshad-
There is no simple and universally accepted expla- owed the value accorded traditional knowledge.
nation for the rise in IQ. In a book about the Flynn At this time, no one can specify the factors
effect edited by Ulric Neisser in 1998, several authors responsible for the Flynn effect, but Flynn and most
130
125
x
IQ Scores Relative to Reference
o
120 x
o
115 o
ox
110
Wechsler and
Stanford-Binet o x
105 x
o
Ravens Matrices
100
o x
1932 1942 1952 1962 1972 1982 1992 2002
Year Data Collected
Figure 1 Differential rate of increase in unadjusted mean scores for the Ravens Matrices test versus the Wechsler and
Stanford-Binet tests during the middle and late 20th century
Source: Neisser, U. (1998). Introduction: Rising test scores and what they mean. In U. Neisser (Ed.), The rising curve:
Long-term gains in IQ and related measures (pp. 322). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. The use of
APA information does not imply endorsement by the APA. Copyright 1998 by the American Psychological Association.
Adapted with permission.
Flynn Effect: Rising Intelligence Scores 357
other commentators agree that the underlying causes the rising test scores. The central theme is that intel-
must be environmental. The effect manifests itself as ligence cannot be what it traditionally is thought
a difference between children and their parents and to benamely, a unitary intellectual attribute that
between children and their grandparents. Even if IQ remains constant across the life span of an indi-
were determined largely by genes, it is difficult to vidual and across generations of a population.
imagine a genetic mechanism that could produce a Instead, intelligence is a dynamic set of attributes
one-standard-deviation change in average IQ within that shift over time to reflect changes in the preva-
three generations. This is perhaps the most intrigu- lent culture. Flynn points out that the Industrial
ing and consequential aspect of the Flynn effect: An Revolution set into motion a cascade of events that
unknown set of environmental variables is produc- altered the world in many ways. Not only did more
ing a massive and ubiquitous rise in IQ. people receive more and better formal education,
but thinking itself evolved from concrete, presci-
Implications entific modes to the more abstract and concep-
The rapidly changing test scores necessitate caution tual modes that were stimulated by the growth of
in interpreting IQ test results if the norms are even science and its spreading influence on the entire
a few years old. Moreover, the reach of the Flynn population. Brains did not become biologically
effect transcends IQ tests, as average performance better, but a rapidly changing culture demanded
on certain neuropsychological tests and memory that each successive birth cohort meet a higher
tests also has increased rapidly. Age-group norms for standard of abstract and conceptual thinking.
adults on IQ tests and subtests, which are almost Earlier cohorts were left behind the rising curve,
invariably cross-sectional, are confounded to vary- and they still are.
ing degrees by the Flynn effect. Relatively low nor-
mative scores for older people may reflect largely Continuation Into the Future
their early birth dates rather than age-related loss of Despite signs that the Flynn effect has diminished
cognitive ability. Consequently, IQ tests have over- in Scandinavia, it is too early to predict a general
stated the rate at which cognitive skill deteriorate flattening of the rising curve. If Flynns analysis of
during the life span. the effect is correct, mental abilities will continue
Whereas some of these difficulties are of concern to change over the long term to accommodate the
primarily to clinical psychologists, other ramifications changing demands of culture.
are more general. For example, the provision of spe-
cial education to a child may depend on whether the Merrill Hiscock
childs IQ falls below a certain level, and the childs IQ
may depend on the recency of the norms for the IQ See also Heritability; Intelligence, Neural Basis;
test. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited Intelligence and Working Memory
the execution of convicts with intellectual disabilities,
the Flynn effect has become critically important in Further Readings
certain capital murder cases. The fate of a convicted
Flynn, J. R. (1987). Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What
individualexecution or imprisonmentmay hinge IQ tests really measure. Psychological Bulletin, 101,
on whether his or her IQ falls within the range of 171191.
intellectual disability. The obtained IQ, in turn, Flynn, J. R. (1999). Searching for justice: The discovery of
depends on the currency of the norms for that test. A IQ gains over time. American Psychologist, 54, 520.
current IQ test with up-to-date norms might cause the Flynn, J. R. (2007). What is intelligence? Beyond the Flynn
individual to be classified correctly as a person with effect. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
intellectual disabilities. An older test with obsolete Flynn, J. R. (2009). The WAIS-III and WAIS-IV: Daubert
norms would yield an inflated IQ, and that inflated motions favor the certainly false over the approximately
IQ might cause the convict to be classified as not true. Applied Neuropsychology, 16, 98104.
mentally disabled and thus eligible to be executed. Neisser, U. (Ed.). (1998). The rising curve: Long-term gains
In his 2007 book What Is Intelligence? Flynn in IQ and related measures. Washington, DC: American
examines theoretical dilemmas brought about by Psychological Association.
358 Folk Psychology
we should accept that people do not, in fact, have have certain beliefs, desires, ways of thinking about
beliefs, desires, and so forth. These are merely use- things, and so on. The final result of a simulation is
ful fictions. This idea, known as eliminative mate- usually thought to be a mental state attribution or
rialism, is not generally accepted, although most an action prediction. Because you change your per-
philosophers accept that mental states are probably spective at the end of a simulation, simulating others
somewhat different from how folk psychology con- does not make you want to act like you imagine they
ceives of them. would want to act; it merely gives you information
Theory theory is closely related to the represen- about how they would act. There are, however, some
tational theory of mindthat is, the theory that suggestions in the literature that simulating others
mental states are representational states. In the devel- emotions leads to empathizing with them, which sug-
opmental literature, people, like Alison Gopnik and gests that simulation often goes beyond giving you
Andrew Meltzoff, have argued that one can observe information about others.
theory change in childrenthat is, the transition Simulation theory has been criticized, among
between a picture of the mind as passively reflecting other things, for its reliance on pervasive similarities
reality to one in which the mind actively represents between simulators and targets. The trouble is, some
the world. This is particularly striking once children say, that simulation would have us be wrong about
come to pass the false belief task, which tests a per- others very often because others simply are not that
sons ability to understand that someone else could similar to us. But there are reasons to think that we
have a false beliefa belief that does not correspond are wrong about others. According to William Ickes,
to reality. Some detractors argue that children have we are only accurate in our psychological ascrip-
a representational theory of mind very early, and tions to strangers 20% of the time. We also tend to
failure to succeed on the false belief task is a ques- overestimate the degree to which others are similar
tion of application or performance, not competence. to us. Other criticisms focus on the apparent reliance
Children may, for example, have problems inhibit- on the introspective availability of psychological
ing the default response to belief questions, which states, which someone like Sellars famously denied.
is to ascribe to the agent beliefs that correspond to But most modern theory theorists are likely to hold
reality as they see it. that we arrive at self-ascriptions via a different route
than third person ascriptions anyway, and it is not
so clear that this route would prove unavailable to
Simulation Theory
simulation theorists.
Originally proposed as an alternative to theory the- Where traditionally theory theory and simulation
ory, simulation theory maintains that we ascribe psy- theory were competing positions, most proponents
chological properties to people by putting ourselves are now willing to grant that both accounts are
in their shoes, imagining what we would think and descriptively true; sometimes we simulate others to
feel under those circumstances and then ascribing understand them better, and sometimes we use the-
those thoughts and feelings to others. Proponents of ory. There are a variety of different accounts about
this theory include Jane Heal, Robert Gordon, and how the two differ, when the different approaches
Alvin Goldman. Simulation does not require us to are used, and so on. Only some insist that simula-
have anything like knowledge of a theory, or at least tion is absolutely essential to understanding others.
not knowledge of a psychological theory. In the sim-
plest case, we project ourselves wholesale into the
Alternative Theories of Folk Psychology
position of the other and through this imaginative
step come to have certain thoughts, desires, and emo- More recently, a number of philosophers have
tions, all within the scope of the simulation. Once we expressed discontent with the traditional concep-
have acquired the information that we are interested tions of folk psychology just mentioned. Many theo-
in, we end the simulation and take up our own per- rists now doubt that our ability to think of others in
spective again. In more complex cases of simulation, terms of their thoughts, desires, feelings, and inten-
we import into the simulation information about rel- tions is required for the variety of social interac-
evant differences between us and the target. We then tions that we engage in on an everyday basis. One
imagine, within the context of the simulation, that we problem is that many animals that do not have such
360 Freedom of Action
knowledge are perfectly capable of engaging in quite Having said that, few accounts reject theory theory
sophisticated interactions with conspecifics (i.e., and simulation theory outright. The move is rather
others of the same species). Another is that it does toward more eclectic approaches.
not seem true to everyday experience. Our every-
Heidi L. Maibom
day predictions and explanations of others often
do not seem to rely on ascriptions of psychological See also Eliminative Materialism; Realism and
states at all. It is therefore now increasingly popular Instrumentalism; Representational Theory of Mind;
to claim, as Jos Bermdez does, that psychological Social Cognition
ascriptions are usually only pressed into use when
people act in problematic or unexpected ways. The
Further Readings
rest of the time, we make use of other structures.
For instance, we may make use of our ability to Churchland, P. (1981). Eliminative materialism and the
see behavior as goal directed (perceptual animacy) propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy, 78, 6790.
without thereby having to ascribe desires to people. Goldman, A. (2006). Simulating minds: The philosophy,
We may also use our knowledge of social systems psychology, and neuroscience of mindreading. Oxford,
to predict what someone is going to do in virtue of UK: Oxford University Press.
his embeddedness in a social structure, as Maibom Gopnik, A., & Meltzoff, A. (1997). Words, thoughts, and
has argued elsewhere. For instance, we think that theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
someone is going to give us a menu, not by reflecting Gordon, R. (1986). Folk psychology as simulation. Mind
on any of his beliefs or desires, but by observing that & Language, 1, 158171.
Heal, J. (1986). Replication and functionalism. In J.
the person is a waiter.
Butterfield (Ed.), Language, mind and logic
While some proponents of alternative theories are
(pp. 135150). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
happy to keep room for traditional psychological
University Press.
ascriptions playing some role in explanation and pre-
Maibom, H. (2007). Social systems. Philosophical
diction, people, like Kristin Andrews, claim that such Psychology, 20, 557578.
ascriptions only help us understand others, but not Morton, A. (2003). The importance of being understood:
because they provide accounts that bear any interest- Folk psychology as ethics. London, UK: Routledge.
ing resemblance to explanations or predictions as we Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2003). Mindreading: An integrated
find them in the sciences. By contrast, Adam Morton account of pretence, self-awareness, and understanding
argues that if we were to base our decisions of what other minds. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
to do on predictions of others actions, it would lead Sellars, W. (1963). Empiricism and the philosophy of mind.
to insoluble problems, since often what others are In Science, perception and reality (pp. 127196).
likely to do depends on what they think we are likely London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
to do and so on. There are, therefore, many reasons Wellman, H. (1990). The childs theory of mind.
to think that social interaction does not rely on psy- Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
chological ascriptionswhether arrived at by theory,
simulation, or something elseto the extent that
people used to think. It should be noted, however,
that some such alternative accounts take themselves FREEDOM OF ACTION
to be modern forms of more traditional accounts
for example, theory theory accounts. It is commonly supposed that human beings have a
In conclusion, the landscape of folk psychological unique ability to freely control their actions and deci-
theorizing is changing. Primarily, people are propos- sions and can be held responsible for their actions
ing less intellectualized accounts. That is, rather than on account of this capacity. But there has been
assuming that relatively advanced knowledge of much debate about what such freedom involves and
psychological states lie behind our social prowess whether it even exists. This entry will examine the
in general, the more popular view now is that what nature of freedom and the potential threat posed to
underwrites this prowess are often much simpler it by determinism and will go on to look at the two
abilities, most or many of which do not deploy any- main opposing viewpoints within the debate: the view
thing like representations of psychological structures. that freedom and determinism are compatible with
Freedom of Action 361
one another and the view that freedom and determin- lack of freedom would be too quick. Some further
ism are incompatible with one another. assumptions are required to generate this threat.
These assumptions tend to rest on claims about the
The Debate About Freedom relation between freedom and alternative possibilities.
If determinism is really to threaten freedom, then
The dispute arises when we consider what is meant we need to accept the following claims:
by freedom and what is required for humans to pos-
sess it. 1. Freedom requires alternative possibilities.
2. Alternative possibilities are ruled out by
The Concept of Freedom
determinism.
When we use words such as freedom, we seem to
have a number of related concepts in mind. Consider These assumptions may instead be stated in terms of
the following three: an ability to do otherwise:
1. Free agents are generally taken to possess a 1. Freedom requires the ability to do otherwise.
capacity to choose between various alternatives, 2. The ability to do otherwise is ruled out by
or to have futures that are open. determinism.
2. Free agents are generally taken to have a
particular sort of control or autonomy, which Given the plausibility of these further claims,
allows them to decide for themselves: You might along with the plausibility of determinism and our
suppose the future is not merely open, but its natural conviction that our actions are free, the
up to you which actions you perform and hence problem might be stated as a dilemma. We have
which of those alternative futures really occur. the following, seemingly plausible claims, which
3. Freedom is often thought to ground our view cannot all be true at once:
that agents are the source of their own actions in
a certain way: It allows us to attribute actions to 1. Alternative possibilities are ruled out by
agents in a way that is often said to ground an determinism.
agents responsibility for those actions. 2. Freedom requires alternative possibilities.
3. Determinism is true.
Threats to Freedom 4. Humans act freely.
Various phenomena might be thought to threaten
The various different stances within the free will
our freedom, but in recent years, the debate has
debate can be seen as possible ways of resolving this
focused almost solely on the potential threat from
dilemma.
causal determinism: This is the theory that prior
One way to deal with the dilemma is to claim
causal conditions, along with the laws of nature,
that determinism does not really pose any threat to
causally determine all future events; that the future is
freedom at all. This stance is known as compatibil-
fixed by the past and the laws of nature.
ism. The compatibilist generally focuses on denying
If we had a complete statement of all the facts
either the first or second of the claims above: those
about the universe at some moment in the past and
that are needed to generate the threat to freedom
a complete statement of all the laws of nature, then
posed by determinism.
the theory of causal determinism asserts that these
But some theorists accept that freedom is threat-
statements together would entail every true state-
ened by determinism and try to resolve this dilemma
ment about present and future facts.
by denying the third or fourth claim. These theorists
are known as incompatibilists. Those who deny that
The Threat of Determinism
determinism is true and maintain that we do in fact
While many people find it intuitive to suppose have freedom are known as libertarians. Those who
that if determinism is true, then human action cannot instead deny that we have freedom are sometimes
be free, any direct inference from determinism to a called pessimistic incompatibilists.
362 Freedom of Action
To understand the debate about freedom, it will But this objection seems to invoke a broader sense
help to consider these basic stances on the problem of able to do otherwise, which is not the sort that
in more detail. compatibilists accept as relevant. Traditional com-
patibilists argue that the important point is about
whether the agents can act on the basis of their own
Compatibilism
will, and not about whether their will could be dif-
Compatibilists tend to deny either Claim 1 or Claim ferent in the first place.
2 above: They deny either that alternatives are ruled Whether this really does capture the ability we
out by determinism or that they are necessary for care about when we ask questions about an agents
freedom. freedom, however, continues to be a moot point.
Incompatibilists typically differ from traditional
Traditional Compatibilism compatibilists in seeing the freedom of our actions
Traditional compatibilists claim that agents are as being explained, ultimately, by a freedom to
free so long as they can do what they want to, unen- decide or will differently and not by a capacity to
cumbered by constraints and impediments. This is merely act on the basis of our predetermined will.
the sense in which it must be possible for agents to There is much dispute about this, and both com-
do something else: There must be no external con- patibilists and incompatibilists claim that their own
straints stopping them from performing such an view captures our ordinary conception of freedom
action if they want to. more accurately.
This condition could be met even if determinism
is true, so this form of compatibilism denies the first Frankfurt-Style Examples
of our claims: that determinism rules out alternative
possibilities. Alternatives of the sort this view takes A more recent trend within compatibilism has
to be relevant are not ruled out. been to accept Claim 1 above and to deny Claim 2:
Some compatibilists appeal to a conditional to accept that determinism rules out alternative pos-
analysis in support of this. On such an analysis it is sibilities but deny that alternative possibilities mat-
argued that the following claims should be consid- ter for freedom. This is supported by a certain type
ered equivalent: of thought experiment first constructed by Harry
Frankfurt and often called Frankfurt-style examples.
a. The person could have done otherwise. A typical Frankfurt-style example goes as follows:
b. The person would have done otherwise, if he or Black wants Jones to perform a certain action. He
she had wanted to. has an ingenious device that will manipulate Joness
nervous system and brain processes, making him
Sometimes wanted is swapped for chosen or intended perform the action in question. But Black is excel-
or decided. But the basic claim is that there is a sense lent at judging peoples intentions, and he will only
of able to do otherwise where this is conditional bother doing this if he judges that Jones is not going
on the wishes or the choices of the agent. And this to perform the act of his own accord. However,
sense of able to do otherwise is not ruled out by Jones decides to perform the act of his own accord,
determinism. so theres no need for Black to intervene.
Incompatibilists often express dissatisfaction with In this example it looks as if Jones is freeor at
this analysis, arguing that agents will only genuinely least responsibledespite the lack of alternatives.
be able to do otherwise if, further to the fact that Hence alternative possibilities seem to be irrelevant.
they would have done otherwise if they wanted to, In response to this, incompatibilists tend to
the following is also true: question whether this example really does rule out
alternative possibilities. If Black can judge what
c. They could have wanted to do otherwise.
Jones is intending, and he chooses to manipulate
If the agents could not possibly have had different him based on this, is it not still possible for Jones
desires or made different choices to begin with, it is to intend something else in the first place? If so,
asked how it could be true that the agents are able then there is still an alternative possibility present,
to do otherwise? since Jones could form an alternative intention. The
Freedom of Action 363
incompatibilist can appeal to this alternative possi- prior causes, but its not clear whether they could
bility in explaining our intuition that Jones is free. be free if they simply happen by chance either. This
Compatibilists tend to question whether such nar- seems hard to reconcile with the sort of control we
row alternativesoften called flickers of freedom ordinarily suppose free agents to possess.
could be enough to ground a significant ability to
do otherwise: What if Black puts a device in Joness Pessimistic Incompatibilism
brain that responds to minute differences in earlier Other incompatibilists accept that determinism
patterns of neuron firings and can predict (and pre- is true and that it rules out freedom. They instead
vent) his decision on this basis? Would flickers of reject Claim 4 and argue that human actions are not
this minute sort constitute a robust enough ability free after all.
to do otherwise? But its common to suppose that such a view
Many incompatibilists argue that they would. would require us to give up some very fundamen-
There is very little agreement about which kinds of tal commitments. For instance, we would perhaps
alternative should count and why. So the success of have to get used to a world in which no agent could
Frankfurt-style examples remains a matter of dispute. ever be held responsible for his or her actions and in
which praise and blame are considered irrational. It
Incompatibilism can be difficult to imagine how standard social and
Incompatibilists accept both that freedom requires legal institutions would function in the absence of
alternatives and that such alternatives are ruled out concepts such as praise and blame or punishment
by determinism, and hence freedom and determin- and reward.
ism are not compatible with one another. They are Some philosophers argue that it makes no sense
therefore committed to denying Claim 3, that deter- to try to give up concepts of this sort, because
minism is true, or Claim 4, that we are free. they are so deeply ingrained in our attitudes to one
another: Arguably, even the most basic social interac-
Libertarians tions require that people see one another as respon-
sible agents. However, others have questioned both
Libertarians argue that human actions are free whether this is really the case and whether such a con-
and that determinism is false. clusion could justify our attributions of responsibility.
Agent causation accounts maintain that agents
must be the cause of their own actions, as opposed Nadine Elzein
to those actions being caused by prior events, some
of which are external to the agent. But such accounts See also Explanation of Action; Mental Causation;
are often criticized for invoking a rather strange con- Phenomenology of Action; Philosophy of Action;
Voluntary Action, Illusion of
ception of causation: In nature generally, only events
tend to cause other events. In this view, substances
can cause events, and this seems difficult to square Further Readings
plausibly with an ordinary conception of causation.
Chappell, V. (Ed.). (1999). Hobbes and Bramhall on liberty
Not all libertarians see freedom in terms of agent
and necessity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
causation, however. Noncausal views deny that the
Press.
ability to act freely is a capacity to cause ones own Kane, R. (Ed.). (2002). The Oxford handbook of free will.
actions at all, as opposed to a power of some other New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
sort. Event-causal views deny that we have to give Pereboom, D. (Ed.). (1997). Free will. Indianapolis, IN:
this sort of causal role to agents themselves rather Hackett.
than to prior events but nonetheless maintain that Pink, T. (2004). Free will: A very short introduction. New
alternative possibilities are important for freedom. York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Libertarians all seem to run into another prob- Watson, G. (Ed.). (2003). Free will (2nd ed.). New York,
lem: Its sometimes questioned whether freedom can NY: Oxford University Press.
be reconciled with indeterminism any more than it Widerker, D., & McKenna, M. (Eds.). (2003). Moral
can be reconciled with determinism. Perhaps human responsibility and alternative possibilities. Aldershot,
actions could not be free if they are determined by UK: Ashgate.
364 Fregoli Delusion
of delusions more generally. Cognitive neuropsychi- It prevents small differences in factors such as appear-
atric hypotheses suggest that these specific beliefs ance, lighting conditions, or anomalous feelings of
could derive from defects at different stages of an familiarity from interfering with proper identifica-
information-processing model for face recognition, tion. Delusions of misidentification are therefore
which was introduced to explain prosopagnosia regarded as an identification disorder. In the Fregoli
(the inability to recognize faces of significant oth- delusion in particular, according to this hypothesis,
ers). In contrast with the Capgras delusion, which misidentifications could be triggered by various situ-
is considered to occur when people lack affective ations independent of the persons around the patient,
confirmation of the person they see while receiving such as feelings of significance, altered affect, or asso-
the appropriate semantic information, in the Fregoli ciational memories. Fregoli patients may trust these
delusion, hyperfamiliarity feelings or heightened misidentifications and not see an alternative since
affective responsiveness while seeing a stranger is they appear to lack the healthy ground that serves
considered to be of major importance. the identification process and aims to counterbalance
these experiences.
The Model of Face Recognition These explanatory hypotheses and models should
be tested to advance our understanding of the for-
Cognitive neuropsychiatric explanations of the
mation of this fascinating delusion.
Fregoli delusion employ an information-processing
model of face recognition that deconstructs the
operation into three essential stages: (a) an ini- Management and Treatment
tial structural encoding, (b) the excitation of units Management and treatment of the Fregoli delu-
sensitive to the unique characteristics of each face, sion, as in the rest of the delusional misidentification
and finally (c) links to other multimodal nodes that syndromes, requires a thorough investigation aimed
access biographical and episodic information about at identifying an organic lesion or a more wide-
people. The genesis of the Fregoli delusion has been spread pathology. Treatment is mainly symptomatic
hypothesized to lie in the last stage. At this stage, and includes antipsychotic medication, as well as the
hyperactive person nodes are said to fire in the pres- treatments for the underlying condition, whether
ence of other similar people. psychiatric or organic.
Maria M. Margariti
The Two-Factor Account
The above-mentioned hypothesis stumbled on its See also Capgras Delusion; Delusions; Face Perception;
inability to explain why the patient does not reject Face Recognition in Humans and Computers
the idea of transformation or substitution as irratio-
nal or illogical, which would normally happen when
Further Readings
a person without delusions misidentifies someone
else. Since this model alone cannot explain the delu- Courbon, P., & Fail, G. (1927). Syndrome d illusion de
sion, another factor, which is responsible for evaluat- Frgoli et schizophrnie [Schizophrenia and the
ing decisions, seems requisite. This second factor, the syndrome of Fregoli delusion]. Bulletin de la Socit
decision-making stage, is considered to be defective Clinique de Mdecine Mentale, 15, 121125.
as well. The two-factor account has been used to Davies, M., Coltheart, M., Langdon, R., & Breen, N.
explain a number of monothematic delusions, aside (2001). Monothematic delusions: Towards a two-factor
from the delusions of misidentification. account. Philosophy, Psychiatry, Psychology [Special
issue], 8(2, 3), 133158.
The Identification Disorder Hypothesis Ellis, H. D., & Szulecka, K. (1996). The disguised lover: A
case of Fregoli delusion. In P. W. Halligan & J. C.
Other hypotheses suggest that the main distur- Marshall (Eds.), Method in madness: Case studies in
bance in the case of these delusions is not in the face cognitive neuropsychiatry (pp. 3950). East Sussex, UK:
recognition process but rather in a stage responsible Psychology Press.
for attributing a unique identity to surrounding per- Hudson, A. J., & Grace, G. (2000). Misidentification
sons and objects. This stage is considered to be indis- syndromes related to face specific area in the fusiform
pensable for integrating past and recent information gyrus. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery &
to allow identification to be constant over time. Psychiatry, 69, 645648.
366 Frequency Effects in Word Recognition
Margariti, M., & Kontaxakis, V. (2006). Approaching such as reading and following spoken instructions to
delusional misidentification syndromes as a disorder of interact with objects in a visual display. In reading,
the sense of uniqueness. Psychopathology, 39(6), for example, fixation time on a word is inversely
261268. proportional to its frequency. Frequency can also
Oyebode, F. (2008). The neurology of psychosis. Medical influence performance on processing speech sounds.
Principles and Practice, 17(4), 263269. For example, categorical perception of a spoken
phoneme continuum such as /b/ to /p/ shifts if the
continuum is between a high- and a low-frequency
FREQUENCY EFFECTS IN WORD word, as in best-pest (shift toward /b/) versus
RECOGNITION pray-bray (shift toward /p/). Frequency also
interacts with other lexical characteristics such that
effects of other variables (e.g., spelling-sound regu-
A words frequency is a measure of how com-
larity and neighborhood) are more pronounced in
monly it is used. Most often, it is expressed as a
low-frequency words than in high-frequency words.
relative frequency, such as occurrences per million
words in a large corpus of written or spoken lan-
Basis
guage. Generally, higher frequency words are rec-
ognized more quickly and/or accurately than lower A very basic question about the basis of frequency
frequency words, although processing is simulta- effects is whether the causal factor is cumulative fre-
neously affected by many lexical characteristics quency of exposure (as implied by using corpus esti-
(such as word length, spelling-sound regularity, and mates) or some aspect of experience. For example,
number of phonologically and semantically similar high-frequency words also tend to be words that
words). While corpus frequency provides only an are acquired early by children, suggesting that early
estimate of the average persons experience, it cor- age of acquisition might afford a privileged status in
relates strongly with an individuals subjective fre- memory and raising the possibility that frequency
quency estimates and is one of the best predictors of effects might best be understood as effects of age of
word recognition facility. This entry briefly reviews acquisition. However, behavioral studies and simu-
basic phenomena of frequency effects and mecha- lations with connectionist models have established
nisms proposed to account for them. that age of acquisition and cumulative frequency
both influence lexical representations. A related
Phenomena question concerns the impact of long-term cumula-
tive frequency versus that of recent changes in fre-
In a basic study of frequency, the experimenter tests
quency. Although changes in recent experience can
performance on sets of low- and high-frequency
make frequency effects disappear quickly (e.g., as
words. The experimenter must operationalize low
low- and high-frequency words in a closed or fixed
(perhaps 1 to 10 occurrences per million words) and
set are repeated, performance on low-frequency
high (perhaps greater than 50 or 100 occurrences
words quickly catches up to performance on high-
per million, but specific levels vary between studies).
frequency words), such effects dissipate without con-
Log frequency predicts performance better than raw
tinued support for short-term changes in frequency.
frequency, such that the effect of a constant differ-
This suggests differential weighting of long-term and
ence in raw frequency diminishes as word frequency
recent experience.
increases (e.g., a difference between 1 and 20 per mil-
lion has a stronger effect than a difference between 101
Three Classes of Proposed Mechanisms
and 120 per million). One can also study frequency
using a regression approach and test performance on One possibility is that frequency constantly and
words with a continuous distribution of frequencies. directly affects a words availability. For example,
In such studies, frequency tends to account for 5% to the lexicon might be organized like a file drawer
15% of the variance in performance when other lexi- with entries sorted by frequency. Similar behavior
cal characteristics are controlled. would be predicted in a connectionist framework
The basic frequency effect is easily replicated, by making the resting level (default level of acti-
both in the rarefied conditions of isolated word pro- vation in the absence of bottom-up support) of the
cessing as well as in more ecologically valid tasks, node or network representing a word proportional
Frequency Effects in Word Recognition 367
to frequency. Availability mechanisms predict con- First, a method for tracking the time course of spo-
stant frequency advantages throughout the time ken language processing was developed by Michael
course of processing a word. Tanenhaus and his colleagues. In their visual world
A second possibility is that experience connec- paradigm, subjects eye movements are tracked as
tions from phonemes or letters to words could be they follow spoken instructions to move objects in
proportional to each words frequency (so the con- a visual display. Fixations are remarkably strongly
nection from b to bed would be stronger than its time locked to fine-grained phonetic details, with
connection to bench). Such a mechanism can be only about a 200 milliseconds delay between a pho-
instantiated in a connectionist network with hard- netic detail and its impact on gaze. When this tech-
wired connections, and frequency advantages of nique was applied with low- and high-frequency
this sort also emerge naturally in learning networks words, the time course was like that predicted by a
(where connections are strengthened whenever they connection strength mechanism: Frequency effects
are used). Like availability, a sublexical-lexical con- were immediate but initially subtle and strengthened
nection strength mechanism predicts a frequency as a word was heard. Converging evidence has been
advantage throughout the time course of word reported for both visual and spoken word recogni-
processing but with the subtle difference that the tion in a dual-task paradigm where frequency effects
magnitude of a frequency advantage depends on the are present prior to the occurrence of a dual-task
amount of bottom-up activation flowing through bottleneck (the point where performance on each
the frequency-weighted connections. So in the task begins to suffer from interference from the
early time course, the frequency advantage will be other). Performance prior to such a bottleneck is
modest because the bottom-up activation passing presumed to depend only on highly automatic pro-
through sublexical-lexical connections is still weak. cesses, suggesting an early and automatic locus of
As bottom-up support increases (either as more of a frequency effects.
spoken word is heard or as more time elapses during
James S. Magnuson
reading), so will the frequency advantage.
A third possibility is that rather than being an See also Word Recognition, Auditory; Word
intrinsic part of the mechanisms for lexical access, Recognition, Visual
frequency is integrated at a decision stage after the
evidence for a word has been perceived. Such propos-
Further Readings
als treat frequency like knowledge that is retrieved
as a result of lexical access and subsequently acts Cleland, A. A., Gaskell, M. G., Quinlan, P. T., &
as a decision-level bias. If frequency effects cannot Tamminen, J. (2006). Frequency effects in spoken and
kick in until a word form has substantial bottom- visual word recognition: Evidence from dual-task
up support, such proposals predict that frequency methodologies. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
effects should be absent in the early time course of Human Perception & Performance, 32, 104119.
word processing. Dahan, D., Magnuson, J. S., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Hogan,
E. M. (2001). Tracking the time course of subcategorical
Temporal Locus mismatches: Evidence for lexical competition. Language
and Cognitive Processes, 16(5/6), 507534.
Note that the three mechanisms make distinct pre- Harley, T. (2008). Psychology of language: From data to
dictions about when, during processing, frequency theory (3rd ed.). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
effects should be detectable. A decision mecha- Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K.
nism predicts late effects, availability predicts con- M., & Sedivy, J. E. (1995). Integration of visual and
tinuous effects of a fairly constant magnitude, and linguistic information in spoken language
connection strength mechanisms predict constant comprehension. Science, 268, 16321634.
effects that strengthen as a word is processed. Two Zevin, J. D., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2002). Age-of-
recently developed techniques have made it possi- acquisition effects in reading and other tasks. Journal of
ble to examine these predictions at a fine time scale. Memory and Language, 47, 129.
G
perhaps the best and only well-documented example
GENDER DIFFERENCES IN of sex-exclusive linguistic practices. However, even
LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE USE there, women and men can understand and some-
times speak their partners primary language; the
This entry reviews the distinction between sex- restrictions are social ones related to appropriate-
exclusive and sex-preferential differences in lan- ness of use.
guage, then considers how preferential differences in The vast majority of gender differences in lan-
language use acquire social meaning. Typical trends guage use are not sex exclusive; instead, they are sex
of gender differences in language variation and lan- preferential. That means male and female speakers
guage change are outlined and possible motivations make more or less use of the same pool of linguistic
considered. resources. What is perceived as gender differences
reflects our perception about the probability with
Sex-Exclusive Versus which a given form is likely to be produced by a
Sex-Preferential Differences female or male speaker and/or social ideologies about
whether a particular way of pronouncing a word,
In the study of womens and mens ways of talking, the expression of particular interpersonal stances
it is common to distinguish between gender (which through language, or the use of a particular speech
is considered a social construct) and sex (a biologi- act is normative for men or women. These gener-
cal fact); this entry will try to be consistent with this alizations speak of typical patterns across a wide
distinction. In practice, researchers often blur the range of men and women in a speech community; it
two; for example, they generalize about gender dif- is therefore unsurprising that there is intraindividual
ferences based on samples that have been selected on and interindividual variation. Speakers may use
the basis of sex differences. phrases or pronunciations that are normatively
There are very few sex-exclusive differences (i.e., associated with their sex with different frequencies
cases where men and women use completely differ- in different social contexts, and some speakers use
ent forms or languages at all times) in language use linguistic forms and routines considered normative
anywhere in the world. Early European reports from of their gender more often than others do.
the Caribbean about communities where the sexes
spoke different languages reflected misunderstand-
Social Meaning of Gender Differences
ings of the linguistic variation in those communities.
in Language Use
Communities such as the longhouses of the Vaupes,
where linguistic exogamy is practiced (marriage Research on gender and language has moved
partners are chosen on the basis of speaking a dif- through several stages: from a focus on gender dif-
ferent language from their partners community), are ference, to a focus on the politics of dominance, to
369
370 Gender Differences in Language and Language Use
a focus on the social meaning of expressions of both misleading generalization that women are linguis-
difference and dominance. This reflects an increasing tically more conservative than men applies only to
appreciation of the complexities of difference and some, but not all, stable variablesthat is, parts
power as social and interpersonal phenomena. For of the linguistic system where the variation is not
example, supposedly mens and womens forms involved in change. This is true for the stable alterna-
in Japanese can in fact be used by either sex (in other tion between an alveolar and a velar nasal in finding
words, so-called womens language is a misnomer). [fandn] versus [fand]: The standard velar vari-
A more economical and comprehensive analysis of ant is generally produced more by women than by
these forms is in terms of the social stance the forms men; the vernacular alveolar variant is more likely
express. Because some forms are associated with to be produced by men. But even this generalization
stances of assertiveness and others with stances of interacts intimately with social factors such as level
softness, and because Japanese culture normatively of education. Work on stable variables in Arabic-
associates softness with women and assertiveness speaking communities finds the reverse: Classical
with men, the use of the variants tends to be associ- Arabic forms are more likely to be produced by men
ated with speakers of that sex. However, men can than women.
use soft variants if the social context requires it, and
women can use assertive variants for a particular Motivations for Gender Differences
social effect. Recent research in the framework of The reasons why women typically lead men in
evolutionary psychology is a notable exception to ongoing change are unclear. One proposal is that
the trend toward understanding social meaning; its because women continue to be the primary care-
focus on difference (even where gender differences givers for small children, children perceive what
are slight) and the deterministic framing of differ- women do to be the norm and perpetuate this.
ence as evolutionary necessities have been criticized However, this account leaves the fairly steady
by sociolinguists. Deborah Cameron argues against pace of language change across generations a mys-
accepting evolutionary accounts of differences in tery. It might explain why little boys end up using
womens and mens language because (a) they often more advanced variants than their fathers,
presuppose the object of enquiryfor example, that but its less clear how it explains why little girls
women talk more than men (notwithstanding plenty also end up using more advanced variants than
of evidence to the contrary)and (b) they selectively their mothers. Another proposal is that language
frame such generalizations; for example, the pro- serves as a more potent symbol of social capital
posal that men talk less because prehistoric hunting for women than it does for men; that is, language
patterns required silence ignores the fact that hunt- skills are a tool for accruing social status. Women
ing large game was probably a (rare) group activity often have a wider range of styles than men (at all
requiring as much social organization as the more levels of linguistic structure: intonation, pronun-
common (female and male) activities associated with ciation, grammar, and discourse/pragmatic styles).
gathering. But it is misleading to characterize women as a
group as leaders in language change. The profiles
Common Patterns of Gender Difference of leaders crosscut social class and age, as well as
in Variation and Change gender. They also crosscut style or genre. Much
current work on gender differences in language
Notwithstanding inter- and intraspeaker variability, use explores what it is that unifies this disparate
we can draw some generalizations about gender dif- set of factors in order to better understand what
ferences in language. These are most useful when specific linguistic variants mean to the users and
they illuminate core problems of linguistics, such as how social and linguistic structure are dynamic
the relationship between social structure and lan- and interrelated systems.
guage change. All languages are constantly chang-
ing. A well-attested pattern is for female speakers Miriam Meyerhoff
to lead men in ongoing changes; women use more
of the innovative variants that are used most often See also Conversation and Dialogue; Production of
by younger speakers. The much-quoted and highly Language
Genes and Linguistic Tone 371
Further Readings smaller than the average. Several genes have been
Cameron, D. (2007). The myth of Mars and Venus: Do identified that, in deleterious mutated forms, cause
men and women really speak different languages? specific types of microcephaly. Two such genes are
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Abnormal Spindle-like, Microcephaly-associated
Holmes, J., & Meyerhoff, M. (Eds.). (2003). The handbook protein (ASPM) and microcephalin. Not all muta-
of language and gender. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. tions of ASPM or microcephalin cause pathological
brain reduction, and recently, two such nondeleteri-
ous variants have been identified, one for each gene
(named the derived haplogroups and denoted in
GENES AND LINGUISTIC TONE the following as ASPM-D and MCPH-D). These
variants are of interest for the following reasons:
It is usually assumed that the language spoken by a Neither is uniformly distributed across the human
human community is independent of the commu- species (e.g., both are rare in sub-Saharan Africa);
nitys genetic makeup, an assumption supported by both are of relatively recent origin (within the last
an overwhelming amount of evidence. However, the 50,000 years); and both seem to be under positive
possibility that language is influenced by its speak- natural selection, meaning that at least in some
ers genes cannot be ruled out a priori, and a recently environments their effects confer some evolutionary
discovered correlation between the geographic advantage compared to other variants of the genes.
distribution of tone languages and two human However, these advantageous effects have yet to be
genes seems to point to a genetically influenced bias identified; it is known that ASPM-D and MCPH-D
affecting language. This entry describes this specific do not correlate with head/brain size in normal indi-
correlation and highlights its major implications. viduals, with altruism, or with schizophrenia. It is
Voice pitch has a variety of communicative func- possible that any advantageous effects are related
tions. Some of these are probably universal, such as to the cellular functions of the two genes and not to
conveying information about the speakers sex, age, their involvement in brain growth and development.
and emotional state. In many languages, including The geographic distributions of non-tone
the European languages, voice pitch also conveys languages and of the two derived haplogroups
certain sentence-level meanings such as signaling ASPM-D and MCPH-D tend to overlap, in the
that an utterance is a question or an exclamation; sense that those populations having high frequen-
these uses of pitch are known as intonation. Some cies of both ASPM-D and MCPH-D tend to speak
languages, however, known as tone languages, use predominantly non-tone languages, those popula-
voice pitch in ways that are comparable to the use tions with low frequencies of both tend to speak
of vowels and consonants: to distinguish words or tone languages, while other populations seem not to
grammatical structures. In Mandarin Chinese, for show any preference. This correlation is statistically
example, the sequence nian when pronounced with highly significant, even after taking into account the
rising pitch means year and when pronounced two most important confounding factors: common
with falling pitch means read. The number of history and contact. Common history means that
tones distinguished in such languages, like the num- populations descending from a common ancestor
ber of vowels and consonants in all languages, is vari- tend to share not only genes but also languages:
able but is normally between two and about seven. If the common ancestor happened to speak a tone
Probably a slight majority of the worlds languages language and have low frequencies of ASPM-D
are tone languages, though it is difficult to be precise and MCPH-D, all its descendants will tend to do
in part because there are borderline cases that are the same, creating a spurious correlation between
difficult to classify as tonal or nontonal. What is cer- population genetics and language typology. As for
tain, however, is that the geographical distribution of contact, populations in geographical proximity tend
tone languages is patterned: They are predominantly to become more similar both genetically (through
found in sub-Saharan Africa, continental and insular migration or intermarriage) and linguistically
Southeast Asia, and Central America and Amazonia. (through borrowing of words, sounds, or grammar),
Microcephaly represents a group of pathologies giving rise to another important source of spurious
whereby the head (and brain) size is significantly correlations.
372 Gesture and Language Processing
While it is possible that despite careful controls Mekel-Bobrov, N., Gilbert, S. L., Evans, D., Vallender, E. J.,
the correlation between non-tone languages and Anderson, J. R., Hudson, R. R., . . . Lahn, B. T. (2005).
ASPM-D and MCPH-D is just a coincidence, a Ongoing adaptive evolution of ASPM, a brain size
plausible alternative explanation is that these two determinant in Homo sapiens. Science, 309, 17201722.
genetic variants somehow cause languages to be Yip, M. (2002). Tone. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
(non-)tonal. However, given that any normal child University Press.
acquires the language of its community, irrespective
of which variant of ASPM and microcephalin it has,
any such causal relationship cannot be determinis- GESTURE AND LANGUAGE
tic at the level of the individual. Instead, the causal PROCESSING
relationship must take the form of a very small bias,
whose effects are not manifest during everyday lin-
guistic behavior but become visible only in language When people talk, they often gesture with their
change, as language is transmitted across genera- handsprobably more than they realize. Speakers
tions over time. The proposal is that in populations are generally aware of what they are saying. But
with enough individuals biased against tone but when we gesture, we may not know that were ges-
originally speaking a tone language, each new gen- turing, or we may be unaware of the information
eration may develop a slightly simplified tone system our gestures contain. Because co-speech gestures
leading in the end to a non-tone language. are prevalent but often unconscious, they can pro-
This type of genetically based linguistic bias vide a window into how people think and commu-
would allow a better understanding of the biological nicate. This entry describes the basic types of hand
bases of language and its evolution from our prelin- gestures that typically accompany speech, provides
guistic ancestors, as well as deeper reconstructions an overview of their cognitive and communicative
of past languages. But probably the most important functions, and illustrates how gestures vary across
effect would be on the way we conceptualize the languages and cultures.
complex interactions between culture and biology,
helping to move beyond the simplistic and mis- Types of Gestures
leading nature versus nurture debate toward an
integrated view. Not only do genes influence culture, Gestures vary in form, function, and in how they
and not only does culture have an impact on genes, relate to language. Emblems have highly convention-
but genes need culture in order to have any effect in alized forms and stable meanings, much like words
the first place. in signed or spoken languages. Common emblems
include waving the hand to say hello and giving the
D. Robert Ladd and Dan Dediu thumbs-up to show approval.
Iconic gestures depict some aspect of an object or
See also Language Development; Music and the action and are less conventionalized than emblems.
Evolution of Language; Music Perception Whereas emblems can be understood independent
of language, iconic gestures are often ambiguous
Further Readings without the accompanying speech. A speaker tracing
an arc in the air with her fingers could be depicting a
Dediu, D., & Ladd, D. R. (2007). Linguistic tone is related
to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups
rainbow, a dome, the hump of a camel, the flight of
of two brain size genes, ASPM and microcephalin. a soccer ball, or the rise and fall of a civilization. The
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the latter would be an example of a metaphoric gesture,
United States of America, 104, 1094410949. a special kind of iconic gesture that represents an
Evans, D., Gilbert, S. L., Mekel-Bobrov, N., Vallender, E. J., abstract idea. Civilizations cannot literally rise or fall
Anderson, J. R., Vaez-Azizi, L. M., . . . Lahn, B. T. (2005). in space, but we talk about them as if they do and
Microcephalin, a gene regulating brain size, continues to gesture accordingly.
evolve adaptively in humans. Science, 309, 17171720. Deictic gestures refer to objects or locations in
Ladd, D. R., Dediu, D., & Kinsella, A. R. (2008). physical or conceptual space and often complement
Languages and genes: Reflections on biolinguistics and deictic language. Telling the clerk at the donut shop
the nature-nurture question. Biolinguistics, 2, 114126. that you want that donut may not yield the desired
Gesture and Language Processing 373
result unless the spoken phrase is combined with a description and gesture a selective depiction of an
point to the pastry you have your eye on. Deictic idea, each highlighting certain aspects. Together,
gestures can convey aspects of a speakers meaning speech and gesture form a composite communicative
that are difficult to express in words. signal.
Beat gestures, by contrast, may carry no mean-
ing at all. Speakers frequently make simple motions Gesturing and Thinking
with the hand or fingers, often repeated, and timed
with prosodic peaks in speech. The cognitive and But is gesture only for communicating? If so, why do
communicative functions of beats are not well people still gesture when theyre on the telephone?
understood. Some beats appear to add emphasis to In principle, gesturing when nobody can see us could
ideas expressed in speech, others to serve discourse be a vestige of gesturing during face-to-face commu-
functions, and others to reveal the speakers emo- nication. Yet communicative habits cannot explain
tional state: Fast, staccato beats may show agitation; why congenitally blind children gesture similarly to
precise beats can show determination or sincerity; sighted children in some contexts, even though they
large, forceful beats may show either frustration or have never seen gestures and have no experience
enthusiasm. The significance of beats can only be with their communicative function.
interpreted in the context of the gesturers language, Gestures serve cognitive functions for the speaker,
posture, or facial expressions. independent of their impact on the listener. In
Gestures rarely fit neatly into one category or classroom settings, gestures can aid learning. More
another. Their functions blend and overlap. A ges- generally, gestures help with tasks that require
turer might beat in the rhythm of their speech while maintaining or transforming spatial and motoric
pointing or vary the speed or size of an iconic gesture information in memory.
to endow it with metaphorical significance. As such,
the gesture types described here should not be con- Cross-Linguistic Variation in Gesture
sidered mutually exclusive. Multifunctional gestures
that confound any simple typology are the rule, not The way information is packaged in a languages
the exception. grammar affects how its speakers gesture. For
example, in languages such as English, clauses that
describe motion events typically encode informa-
Gesturing and Speaking
tion about both the manner of motion (e.g., swing-
Why do we gesture when we speak? One reason may ing, rolling) and the trajectory (e.g., down, across).
be that gesturing helps speakers retrieve words more In other languages, such as Turkish and Japanese,
efficiently, particularly words with spatial meaning. manner and trajectory are packaged into separate
Preventing people from gesturing makes their lan- clauses. Gestures by speakers of these languages dif-
guage production less fluent. Gestures supplement fer accordingly: Speakers of languages that separate
the meaning of speech in at least two ways, matching manner and trajectory syntactically are more likely
and mismatching. If a speaker cups her hand around to express these aspects of motion events in separate
an imaginary glass while saying a glass of wine, this gestures.
constitutes a match (i.e., overlap) between the con- Although some emblematic gestures are recog-
tent of speech and gesture. If instead, the speaker nizable across language communities, others are
holds her thumb and forefinger parallel, about an language specific. French and Italian speakers use
inch apart, to indicate that it was only a small glass the my eye gesture, pulling down the lower eyelid
of wine, this would constitute a speech-gesture mis- with the index finger to indicate skepticism about
match, because size was not mentioned in the phrase what someone is saying, but this action has no
a glass of wine. The term mismatch, as it is used conventional meaning for English speakers. Other
by gesture researchers, does not necessarily suggest gestures have strikingly different meanings across
any incongruity between speech and gesture; rather, communities. The horns, made by extending the
a mismatching gesture provides information that is pinkie and index finger while making a fist, is used
not available in the co-occurring speech. Whether to ward off the evil eye in traditional Mediterranean
matching or mismatching, speech and gesture are cultures. Variants of this gesture were used in
never fully redundant. Speech provides a selective Elizabethan England to accuse a man of having an
374 Group Decision Making
although also not very different from the rest of the own potential efforts divided between too many, the
group. In the sports scenario, then, discovering dur- effort does not seem warranted. For these reasons,
ing the group discussion that one is actually at about many group settings lead not to greater efficiency
the group average would cause one to slide toward but to social loafing.
being a bit braver, and so the whole group would
move in that direction. Overcoming the Limitations
Social comparison processes can impact group
decisions in ways other than risk tolerance, and There are ways to reap the benefits of group deci-
many major decisions that were not only demon- sion making while reducing the costs of social com-
strably wrong but also should have been identifi- parison biases and motivational deficits. It is often
able as wrong at the time they were made have possible to aggregate independent positions rather
been ascribed to the operation of group processes. than have group discussions and thus keep the ben-
There are several ways that group processes con- efits of independence or uncorrelated error. Sharing
tribute to such faulty decision making. One is that peoples opinions or input and then having people
peoples desire to remain in the group can prevent reconsider, again as individuals, can allow for cross-
them from voicing negative impressions of possible pollination and inspiration while still limiting nega-
decisions. This self-censoring of concerns will be tive social comparison effects. Some biases can also
especially strong when membership in the group is be overcome by the appointment of a devils advo-
very precious, as is often the case with plum political cate, and it has been shown that the breaking of the
appointments. Another process is that people will unanimous faade by a member is effective even
judge the appropriateness of voicing concerns by when that members position is not one with which
comparison with the other members of the group. others agree. It is only necessary that the person
Thus, there can arise an impression of unanimous demonstrate that not all agree and thus that it is pos-
support, even though each member secretly harbors sible to express that disagreement. Biases can also be
grave doubts. reduced by reducing the insularity in the group and
by allowing in outside voices for whom the motiva-
Motivational Effects tion to remain in the group is not present and the
norm of implicit unanimity is not established. The
In addition to allowing people to respond to each motivational effects can be limited by making indi-
others behavior and modify their own position as a viduals responsible for particular outcomes rather
result, a group can also change the motivation and than allowing responsibility to be diffused across the
efficiency of its members. The start of this work goes group.
back over a century to investigations of the effects
on performance of the presence of others. In some Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld
cases, performance is enhanced, but in others, it is
See also Dissent, Effects on Group Decisions; Social
impaired, and the dividing factors appear to be the
Loafing; Wisdom of Crowds Effect
complexity of the task and whether individual or
collective group output is identifiable. For many
sorts of group decisions, both of these factors would Further Readings
work to prevent optimal outcomes, as the deci- Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison
sions are often hard and the outcome collective. For processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117140.
many brainstorming situations, for example, which Janis, I. (1982). Groupthink: Psychological studies of policy
also tend to have difficult tasks and do not iden- decisions and fiascos (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Houghton
tify individual contributions, the evidence suggests Mifflin.
that the net result is to reduce the number of ideas Mackay, C. (1841). Extraordinary popular delusions and
and their quality. Part of this is due to coordination the madness of crowds. London, UK: Harriman House.
lossesforgetting ones idea while others are talk- Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds: Why the
ing. Part is due to the fear of embarrassment. But a many are smarter than the few and how collective
good part is due to some diffusion of responsibility; wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and
with others available to take up the slack, and ones nations. New York, NY: Random House.
376 Guilt
by acting to repair the damage to social relations tend to experience more empathy toward others,
caused by ones previous (or potential) actions or which appears to serve as an important mediator
inactions. For example, when guilt occurs after the to the link between guilt proneness and inhibition
performance of an action that is perceived to have of aggression. In sum, guilt proneness, unlike shame
damaged some aspect of ones social relations, this proneness, appears to be associated with positive
psychological state can serve as a powerful incen- impacts on social functioning. Although there has
tive to remove ones unpleasant feeling state by per- been a trend toward an increasing focus on more
forming some act of compensation directed toward pernicious moral sentiments such as anger and dis-
the offended party. Several studies have found that gust, research on guilt continues to represent about
inducing an irrelevant state of guilty feelings can 15% of all research on moral emotions.
compel individuals to avail themselves of the next
Timothy Ketelaar
available opportunity to cooperate with another.
One early study showed that inducing individuals to See also Emotion and Moral Judgment; Rationality
accidentally break the experimenters camera caused of Emotion; Self-Consciousness
participants to be subsequently more inclined to
help an unrelated third party. More recent research Further Readings
suggests that the tendency for guilty feelings to
motivate helping behavior also occurs under more Hirshleifer, J. (1987). On the emotions as guarantors
of threats and promises. In J. Dupre (Ed.), The latest
natural circumstances in which feelings of guilt are
on the best: Essays on evolution and optimality
endogenous to the situation at hand. These findings
(pp. 307326). Boston, MA: MIT Press.
suggest that guilty feelings may have their stron-
Ketelaar, T., & Au, W. T. (2003). The effects of feelings of
gest impact on individuals with preexisting pro-
guilt on the behavior of uncooperative individuals in
social motives, the very same individuals who are repeated social bargaining games: An affect-as-
least likely to engage in noncooperative behavior in information interpretation of the role of emotion in
the first place. Another focus of empirical research social interaction. Cognition & Emotion, 17, 429453.
on guilt has been on guilt proneness, or the ten- Smith, A. (2000). The theory of moral sentiments. New
dency to experience this emotion across a range of York, NY: Prometheus. (Original work published in
situations as a stable feature of ones disposition. 1759)
In this regard, guilt-prone individuals have been Tangney, J. P., & Dearing, E. (2002). Shame and guilt.
found to be less likely to respond aggressively when New York, NY: Guilford.
angered, compared to less guilt-prone individuals. Tangney, J. P., Stuewig, J., & Mashek, D. J. (2007). Moral
Consistent with the ostensive prosocial functions of emotions and moral behavior. Annual Review of
guilt, these studies reveal that guilt-prone individuals Psychology, 58, 345372.
H
HAPPINESS Outer Qualities Inner Qualities
Life chances Livability of Life ability of
The study of happiness has long been a playground environment the person
for philosophical speculation. Because of a lack of
Life results Utility of life Satisfaction
empirical measures of happiness, it was not possible
in the past to check propositions about the matter. In Livability of the Environment
the late 20th century, survey research methods intro-
duced by the social sciences brought a breakthrough. This phrase denotes the quality of living condi-
Dependable measures of happiness were developed, tions. Different disciplines emphasize different
by means of which a significant body of knowledge aspects of the environment. Natural conditions
has evolved. This entry presents an overview of that are emphasized by ecologists who describe livabil-
knowledge and discusses (a) the concept of happi- ity in terms of pollution, global warming, and the
ness, (b) the measurement of happiness, (c) the prev- degradation of nature. The built environment is
alence of happiness, (d) the conditions for happiness, emphasized by city planners who associate livability
and (e) the promotion of happiness. with such things as sewer systems, traffic jams, and
ghetto formation. Society is central in the sociologi-
cal view on livability, both the quality of society as
What Is Happiness?
a whole and the relative position one has in society.
The word happiness is used in many meanings. The Livability is not the same as what is called happiness
different meanings are presented in the schemes in this entry. It is a generic term for environmental
below. preconditions for happiness, and not all these are
equally conducive to happiness.
Four Qualities of Life
Life Ability of the Person
Quality-of-life concepts can be sorted using two
distinctions, which together provide a fourfold The next phrase denotes how well we are
matrix. The first distinction is between chances and equipped to cope with the problems of life. Individual
outcomes, that is, the difference between opportuni- capability involves in the first place absence of func-
ties for a good life and the good life itself. A second tional defectsthat is, health in the limited sense,
difference is between outer and inner qualities of sometimes referred to as negative health. A second
life, in other words, between external and internal aspect is optimal functioning, commonly referred
features. In the first case the quality is in the environ- to as positive health and associated with energy and
ment; in the latter, it is in the individual. resilience. In that line, capability is also placed in a
379
380 Happiness
which an individual judges the overall quality of was observed in Denmark (8.4) and the lowest in
his or her own life as a whole favorablyin other Zimbabwe (3.3). The world average is about 6.0, so
words, how much one likes the life one leads. Ed most people are happy. Still not everybody is equally
Diener defines subjective well-being (SWB) in much happy. For example, 13% of Americans rated 5.0 or
the same way. lower, while 16% ticked 10. All research findings of
this kind are in the collection Happiness in Nations
How Do We Assess How Happy We Are? in the World Database of Happiness.
In evaluating their life, people draw on two
sources of information: (a) how well they feel most What Determines Happiness?
of the time and (b) to what extent they perceive that
their life meets current standards of the good life. Most of these differences in average happiness across
These subappraisals are referred to as components nations are due to the quality of society. Not surpris-
of happinessrespectively, the affective and cogni- ingly, people live happier in nations that provide a
tive component. The affective component is called good material standard of living, safety, freedom,
hedonic level of affect. It is commonly assumed that and justice. What may be a surprise is that people
affective experience draws on the gratification of are happier in modern, individualistic societies
needs, which are part of human nature. The cogni- rather than in traditional, collectivistic societies and
tive component is called contentment and is seen to that average happiness is not lower in nations where
depend on culturally variable wants. The available income disparities are great. Together, these societal
data suggest that the affective component dominates characteristics explain about 75% of the observed
in the overall evaluation of life, which implies that differences. Social conditions for human happiness
happiness depends more on needs than on wants. are fairly universal.
Social factors explain less of the differences in
Measurement of Happiness happiness within modern western societies. Only
some 10% can be attributed to income, education,
Since happiness is something we have in mind, it and social rank. Some 15% seems to be due to
can be measured using single direct questions. An strokes of good or bad luck, while about 30% is
example of a survey question on overall happiness is due to genetic makeup. A big deal of the difference
the following: seems to be in learned art-of-living skills, such as
Taking all together, how satisfied or dissatisfied are social intelligence. The new positive psychology
you currently with your life as a whole? aims at identifying these aptitudes and finding ways
to enhance them. Research results are summarized
in the collection Correlational Findings, part of the
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 World Database of Happiness.
Dissatisfied Satisfied
Can Happiness Be Fostered?
Components of happiness can be measured in Some believe that happiness is relative and that
this way. Hedonic level of affect can further be chasing after it will get you as far as a mouse in a
measured using multimoment assessmentfor treadmill. Others say that happiness is a fixed trait
instance, the experience sampling method (ESM), and as such is practically unchangeable. Research
in which people who have been given beepers shows, however, that happiness can indeed be raised
record how happy they feel at the moment they are lastingly. Average happiness has gone up in most
beeped. All measures of happiness are listed in the of the contemporary nations over the last 40 years,
collection Measures of Happiness in the World though long-term follow-up studies have shown that
Database of Happiness and linked to research we do not adapt to everythingfor example, the
findings obtained with these. loss of a child.
The analysis and representation of sounds in the stapes, collectively known as the ossicles) into the
auditory system inner ear, which includes the cochlea. Within the spi-
The relative roles of analysis at peripheral and ral-shaped cochlea, there is a kind of ribbon, called
central levels of the auditory system the basilar membrane, which runs from the tip of the
Processes involved in the masking of one sound spiral (the apex) to the outer end of the spiral (the
by other sounds base). The ribbon is surrounded by fluids. When a
Perceptual interpretations and auditory illusions sound enters the ear, the basilar membrane moves
How the auditory system analyzes mixtures of up and down. Each place on the basilar membrane is
sounds to derive percepts corresponding to tuned to respond best to a limited range of frequen-
individual sound sources cies. Low frequencies produce their biggest response
How the perception of auditory objects can toward the apex of the cochlea, and high frequencies
remain stable despite changes in the conditions produce their biggest response toward the base.
of listening Lying on top of the basilar membrane are special-
ized sensory cells called hair cells. These run in rows
along the length of the basilar membrane. One type
How Information About Sound Is
of hair cell, called the inner hair cell, responds to the
Carried in the Auditory System
movement of the basilar membrane by generating an
The basic structure of the early stages of the audi- electrical signal that in turn leads to the release of
tory system is illustrated in Figure 1. Sounds are a neurotransmitter that triggers activity in the neu-
transmitted through the outer ear (the pinna and ear rons of the auditory nerve. Each neuron derives its
canal, or meatus) and middle ear (which includes response from the vibration at a specific place on the
three very small bones, called the malleus, incus, and basilar membrane.
Figure 1 Schematic illustration of the structure of the peripheral auditory system, showing the outer, middle, and
inner ear
Source: From Moore, B. C. J. (2012). An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing (6th ed.). Bingley, UK: Emerald.
Copyright B. C. J. Moore. Reprinted by permission of the author.
384 Hearing
Information about the characteristics of sounds neural firing rate) and differences in the time of
is carried in the auditory nerve in three basic ways: arrival of sounds at the two ears (conveyed mainly
by subtle differences in the exact timing of nerve
1. By the rate of firing of individual neurons, spikes) play a strong role in determining the per-
which will be referred to as the amount of neural ceived location of sounds.
activity. The more vibration there is at a given
place, the greater is the amount of activity in neu-
rons connected to that place. It is commonly Place Versus Temporal Information
believed that the subjective loudness of a sound is A classic debate in hearing theory is concerned
related to the amount of neural activity evoked by with the relative importance of place and temporal
that sound, although this idea has been disputed. information. Originally, this debate revolved mainly
around the relative role of place and temporal infor-
2. By the distribution of activity across neu-
mation in the perception of the pitch of pure and
rons. Each neuron is tuned so that it responds most
complex tones. The debate about pitch continues to
strongly to a specific frequency, called the charac-
this day, but most researchers now believe that pitch
teristic frequency (CF); the tuning reflects the tun-
perception involves the use of both place and tempo-
ing of the place on the basilar membrane that
ral information; indeed, it may be the case that there
drives the neuron.The distribution of the amount
has to be a correspondence between the two types of
of neural activity as a function of CF is called the
information for a clear pitch to be perceived. More
excitation pattern. The excitation pattern conveys
recently, researchers have proposed that both place
place information since the CF at the peak of the
and temporal information play a role in several other
excitation pattern is related to the place on the
aspects of auditory perception, including masking
basilar membrane that is excited most.
(the process whereby one sound is rendered inau-
3. By the detailed time pattern of the neural dible by the presence of another sound) and speech
impulses and especially the time intervals between perception.
successive nerve impulses. This form of informa-
tion is known as temporal information. Neural Peripheral Versus Central Processes
impulses tend to be evoked at times corresponding
to a specific phase of the waveform on the basilar Peripheral processes in hearing are those occur-
membrane (for example, at the peaks of the wave- ring in the outer and middle ear, in the cochlea,
form), an effect called phase locking. As a result, and in the auditory nerve. Central processes are
for a periodic sound, the time intervals between those occurring at stages of the auditory system
successive nerve impulses are approximately inte- following the auditory nerve. Many theories and
ger multiples of the period of the sound. For models of auditory perception are based on rela-
example, if the sound has a frequency of 500 hertz tively peripheral processes. For example, models
(Hz), the period is 2 milliseconds (ms), and the of loudness perception take into account the effect
time intervals between successive nerve impulses of the outer and middle ear on the sound trans-
would be close to 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, . . . ms. Phase mitted to the cochlea as well as the processing of
locking breaks down at high frequencies (above sound within the cochlea. However, the processing
about 36 kHz [kilohertz] in most mammals), but that occurs in the central auditory system has been
the upper limit in humans is not definitely known. largely ignored. Early theories of pitch perception
Studies of pitch perception suggest that phase were also largely based on the information that was
locking is very weak for frequencies above about present in the auditory nerve. Only in the case of
5 kHz. sound localization, which requires comparison of
the neural signals from the two ears, were central
In addition, information about sounds is con- processes considered. The trend over the last 20
veyed by the differences between the two ears in all years has been to consider the role of central pro-
the above. In particular, differences in intensity at cesses in much more detail, both at the physiologi-
the two ears (primarily conveyed by differences in cal and the psychological level.
Hearing 385
Energetic and Informational Masking effects confirms that the masking is not determined
by peripheral processes but depends on limitations
An example of the increasing consideration of
in central mechanisms, which can partly be over-
central processes comes from studies of auditory
come by training.
masking, which is the process by which one sound
(the masker) makes it difficult or impossible to
Veridical Perception and Auditory Illusions
hear another sound (the signal or target). Many of
the cases of masking studied in the laboratory, for Many researchers in the field of perception take the
example, the detection of sinusoidal tones in white view that our sensory systems are designed to help
noise, can be explained largely in terms of pro- us determine the true nature of the outside world.
cesses occurring in the cochlea and auditory nerve. When such veridical perception fails, the percept is
There are models of masking that can predict the often described as an illusion. For vision, it is usu-
detection thresholds of typical human listeners for ally relatively obvious what the correct perception
such cases with high accuracy. Masking of this type ought to be; for example, a straight line ought to be
is sometimes called energetic masking, and it perceived as straight. For hearing, it is often much
occurs when the response of the auditory nerve to less obvious how a sound ought to be perceived,
the masker-plus-signal is very similar to the response and it is often not clear whether an auditory percept
to the masker alone. In other words, the signal is should be described as an illusion.
masked because the information conveyed by the Consider as an example the perception of the
auditory nerve is inadequate for its detection. pitch of a complex tone. Tones produced by musi-
When a masking sound is highly similar in some cal instruments are usually composed of a series
way to the signal and/or when the properties of of sinusoidal components, called harmonics. For
the masker vary in an unpredictable way from one example, for a specific note the frequencies of the
stimulus to the next, there may be much more mask- harmonics might be 200, 400, 600, 800, 1,000, . . .
ing than would be expected from energetic masking Hz. The lowest harmonic (200 Hz) is referred to as
alone. This extra masking is called informational the fundamental component. The complex tone is
masking. It is assumed that informational masking heard as having the same pitch as a single sine wave
occurs because the signal is confused with the (also called a pure tone) with a frequency of 200 Hz.
masker, or because attention is directed to an inap- However, if the fundamental component is removed
propriate aspect of the sound. from the complex tone, the pitch is not altered. In
When the task of a listener is to identify the other words, the pitch corresponds to the funda-
speech of one talker (the target) in the presence of mental frequency, even when the sound contains no
another talker (the background) with similar char- component at the fundamental frequency. This is
acteristics, informational masking may play a strong called the phenomenon of the missing fundamental.
role. Under these conditions, the amount of infor- In the early days of research on pitch, this effect was
mational masking is greatly influenced by whether sometimes described as an illusion. Nowadays, the
or not the target and background are perceived to phenomenon is simply assumed to reflect the way
come from the same location in space. Informational that pitch perception normally works. The pitch of a
masking is reduced by a difference in perceived loca- complex tone is usually determined by components
tion of the target and background. (higher harmonics) other than the fundamental fre-
Informational masking, and the conditions under quency. It became inappropriate to refer to the phe-
which it occurs, has been an area of increasing nomenon as an illusion once better theories of pitch
research activity over the last 20 years. One find- had been developed.
ing of this research is that there are large individual As another example, consider the so-called conti-
differences; some people appear to be much more nuity illusion. When a Sound A is alternated with a
susceptible to informational masking than others. Sound B, and B is more intense than A, then A may
There can also be considerable learning effects, with be heard as continuous, even though it is interrupted.
informational masking decreasing over many weeks For perceived continuity to occur, the gaps in A must
of daily training. The existence of such large learning be filled by the Sound B, and B must be a potential
386 Hearing
masker of A (if they were presented simultaneously). conditions of lighting, despite the fact that the
Although the continuity effect is often described wavelength of the light being reflected from the face
as an illusion, the auditory systems interpretation may be dramatically different. Perceptual constancy
of A as being continuous is perfectly reasonable. If has been studied intensively for the visual system
A were continuous, the pattern of neural activity but has received relatively little attention for the
evoked by A plus B would not be detectably different auditory system. Consider the case of loudness per-
from the pattern evoked by the alternation of A and ception. The physical intensity of the sound reach-
B. Generally, the auditory system seems to create a ing a listeners ears depends partly on the sound
percept that corresponds to the most likely or most intensity emitted by the source and partly on the
plausible interpretation of the sensory information. It distance of the listener from the source. It remains
is thus not clear whether it is appropriate to describe somewhat unclear whether loudness is related more
the continuity effect as an illusion. to the intensity at the ears or to the intensity of
the sound emitted by the source. However, at least
Auditory Scene Analysis and the Concept when the sound source is visible, a form of con-
of Auditory Events and Objects stancy sometimes holds; the intensity at the source
plays a stronger role than the intensity at the ears.
It is hardly ever the case that the sound reaching
In other words, the auditory system appears to base
our ears comes from a single source. Rather, there
loudness mainly on the properties of the source, the
are often several sources active simultaneously. The
distal stimuli, and not the properties of the sound
auditory system is faced with the task of analyzing
reaching the ears, the proximal stimulus. For exam-
the complex mixture and deriving a perceptual rep-
ple, when the sound intensity at the ears is held
resentation of each individual sound source. The
constant, judgments of loudness are influenced by
task is immensely difficult and complex, and most
the perceived distance of the source, as determined
computational methods that have been developed
visually.
to perform the taskoften described using the term
Perceptual constancy may also play a role in the
computational auditory scene analysisperform
perception of the timbre of sounds, which refers to
much more poorly than human listeners.
their characteristic quality. If two tones have the
Albert Bregman has emphasized the distinction
same loudness and pitch but are perceived as differ-
between two concepts: source and stream. A sound
ent, then the difference is described as a difference in
source is some physical entity that gives rise to
timbre. Timbre depends partly on the shape of the
acoustic wavesfor example, a person talking.
spectrum of sounds. In many everyday situations,
A stream is the percept of a group of successive
the sound reaching the ears is composed partly of
and/or simultaneous sound elements as a coherent
sound coming directly from the source and partly
whole, appearing to come from a single source. For
of sound that has been reflected from nearby sur-
example, it is the percept of hearing a person talking.
faces and reaches the ears after a delay. The inter-
Some researchers have argued that the auditory sys-
ference of the direct and reflected sound changes
tem has evolved primarily to allow it to accomplish
the spectrum of the sound at the ears relative to
the task of deriving streams when multiple sources
the sound emitted by the source. The influence of
are active. Millions of years of evolution have led to
the reflected sound has been studied extensively in
the superiority of human listeners over machines in
terms of its effects on sound localization, which are
performing this task.
surprisingly small. However, the effect on timbre
perception has received little attention. One might
Perceptual Constancy
expect the reflected sound to have a strong influ-
Perceptual constancy refers to the fact that the per- ence on perceived timbre, but everyday experience
ceived properties of objects remain relatively con- suggests that this is not the case. Rather, perceptual
stant despite changes in the conditions of viewing or constancy seems to operate. For example, the sound
listening. For example, the shape of a coin does not quality of a familiar persons voice does not seem
appear to change when it is viewed from an oblique to differ markedly when listening to them outdoors
angle, and the perceived color of a persons face and in a reverberant room. The studies of Anthony
does not change markedly when viewed in different Watkins and colleagues suggest that listeners are
Hearing, Philosophical Perspectives 387
However, empirical research on spatial hearing spatial discontinuity may be neither necessary nor
suggests that audition does have spatial content. sufficient for distinct audible individuals.
Subjects auditorily discern direction and distance in Some philosophers have argued on these grounds
a way that suggests perception rather than working that auditory objects are complex individuals with
it out. temporal rather than spatial structure. Others, in
Nevertheless, vision and audition differ with part on the basis of pitch, have challenged whether
respect to space. Following P. F. Strawsons example, the role of time in audition is analogous to that of
some philosophers hold that audition, unlike vision, space in vision.
is not intrinsically or inherently spatial. On such an
account, audition may have some spatial content, Speech and Hearing
but it inherits that content from another spatial No discussion of hearing is complete without con-
modality, such as vision or tactile-kinesthetic percep- sidering speech. Three questions are of philosophical
tion. So a purely or exclusively auditory experience interest.
would not be spatial. Perhaps this is because audi- First, what accounts for the phenomenological
tion lacks visions inherent spatial structure. difference between listening to speech in a language
An alternative account rejects that audition is you know and in one you do not know? The dif-
inherently aspatial. The difference between vision ference might be just that in the former case you
and audition, instead, is said to be one of degree. grasp or understanding the meanings associated
Visions spatial content is more fine-grained and with the sounds you hear. The phenomenological
accurate than auditions. difference thus is entirely cognitiveit stems from
Furthermore, the spatial characteristics of the the phenomenology of understanding. Or the differ-
objects of vision and audition differ. Visions objects ence might be at least partly perceptual. One might,
include cohesive three-dimensional items akin to for instance, hear meanings or auditorily represent
material objects. Not only do they seem located in semantic properties. Or one might hear language-
space relative to each other, but they also have a rich specific attributes such as phonological features.
internal spatial structure. While auditions objects On an austere perceptual account, just the audible
include individual items located in three-dimensional acoustic features of the sounds of speech might dif-
space, they do not seem to have the rich internal spa- fer once you know a language.
tial structure of visions objects. Visions objects are Second, what are speech perceptions objects? The
perceptually individuated and identified in terms of traditional account is that hearing speech involves
their spatial features, while space is less important to hearing sounds, then grasping their associated con-
individuating and identifying auditions objects. ventional meanings. Speech perception and ordi-
nary nonlinguistic audition thus share objects. But
Hearing, Time, and Pitch
empirical evidence indicates that speech sounds, such
How are auditions objects individuated and iden- as phonemes, do not map in a consistent way onto
tified? Two kinds of features are most important. features of the acoustic signal. Some authors there-
First, time plays a role in audition analogous to fore reject the view that speech perception and ordi-
space in vision. Sounds are temporally extended, nary audition share objects. Antirealists argue that
and they are individuated and identified in terms apparent speech sounds are mere mental constructs.
of their temporal structure. The sound of a spoken Others suggest that, unlike ordinary audition, speech
word, a melody, or a police siren is individuated in perceptions objects include articulatory gestures of
part by its patterns of change in time. the mouth and vocal tract. This realist account is bol-
Second, pitch also plays a role in individuating stered by the fact that visual cues about mouth ges-
auditions objects. Distinct pitches from a single tures impact the perception of speech, as shown by
source (such as a loudspeaker) frequently are heard the famous McGurk effect, in which a visual presen-
as two distinct audible individuals. Tones of the same tation of a moving mouth alters how a voice sounds.
pitch from different sources frequently are heard as Third, to what extent is the capacity to perceive
one audible individual, as when two loudspeak- speech distinct from ordinary audition? Some
ers play the same pitch. In audition, unlike vision, hold that speech perception involves a dedicated
Heritability 389
perceptual modality. Others hold that speech percep- intelligence) for a specific population. It tells us how
tion is a variety of ordinary audition, whose objects much of the variance (a measure of the extent of
and perceptual resources are continuous with ordi- differences between people) in a population is due to
nary hearing. This requires an account of the special genetic factors. It is a population statistic (describes
significance of speech sounds for humanseven a population, just as the mean of a trait is descriptive
neonates prefer speech to nonspeech sounds. of a population) and does not apply directly to indi-
viduals. It is useful to distinguish between broad
Casey OCallaghan
heritability and narrow heritability.
See also Hearing; Nave Realism; Smell, Philosophical
Broad heritability tells us the proportion of total
Perspectives; Speech Perception phenotypic (measurable) variance (2p) in a trait that
is due to all genetic influences (2g). It can vary from
sample to sample, environment to environment, and
Further Readings
age to age. Thus the formula:
Blauert, J. (1996). Spatial hearing. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press. h2broad sense = (2g) / (2p).
Bregman, A. (1990). Auditory scene analysis. Cambridge, This formula should be read as broad herita-
MA: MIT Press. bility = all genetic variance/phenotypic variance.
Casati, R., & Dokic, J. (1994). La philosophie du son The term h2 is the symbol for heritability and is not
[The philosophy of sound]. Nmes, France: Chambon. to be interpreted to mean the value is to be squared.
Liberman, A. (1996). Speech: A special code. Cambridge,
We know from Mendelian theory that genes
MA: MIT Press.
act in a number of ways. Many act additively: The
Nudds, M., & OCallaghan, C. (Eds.). (2009). Sounds and
more genes positive for the trait the more the trait
perception: New philosophical essays. Oxford, UK:
expresses itself (height is a good example). The idea
Oxford University Press.
is that these additive genes, each of small effect,
OCallaghan, C. (2007). Sounds: A philosophical theory.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
sum up to influence a trait. In addition, some genes
Strawson, P. F. (1959). Individuals. New York, NY: dominate other genes (Mendelian dominance). This
Routledge. is a form of interaction (nonadditivity) between two
genes at the same place (locus) on the paired human
chromosomes. Another form of nonadditivity is
epistasis, the interaction between genes at different
HERITABILITY loci on the chromosomes. Additive genes create simi-
larity between relatives in a straightforward manner.
The concept of heritability comes to us from pop- Nonadditive effects work in a much more complex
ulation genetics. The idea was developed but not way and their effects are difficult to estimate with
named by the geneticists Sewall Wright and Ronald precision in human studies.
Fisher. Both were theorists and applied their ideas Narrow heritability includes only the proportion
to both agricultural and human psychological traits of variance because of genes that act in an additive
(i.e., intelligence). Wright developed the method of manner. This is called the additive genetic variance
path analysis, which is now widely used in behavior (2a). Thus the formula:
genetics to compute heritability coefficients. These
h2narrow sense = (2a) / (2p).
methods are very flexible and have been modified
to incorporate modern molecular genetic findings. As in the previous example, this formula should
This entry outlines the purpose of the heritability be read as narrow heritability = additive genetic
formula, describes its various components, provides variance/phenotypic variance. Again the term h2 is
some examples of how the heritability of a trait is the symbol for heritability and is not to be inter-
computed, and discusses some of the limitations of preted to mean the value is to be squared.
the concept (what it does not tell us). Environmental sources of variance are, of
The heritability coefficient indexes genetic influ- course, conceptually important. One such source is
ence on a quantitative trait (i.e., height, weight, called shared environmental variance or common
390 Heritability
environmental variance (2c). This environmental If the heritability of adult IQ is .74 (there is dis-
influence is what has been thought to make twins agreement about this value and figures range from
and siblings similar (similar child rearing, same .50.85) depending on varying assumptions, the
home, parents with the same educational back- common environment is .12, and the reliability of
ground, etc.). For a long time psychologists thought IQ tests is about .90, then the remaining (nonshared)
that common environment was an extremely impor- environmental influence is about .04.
tant source of twin and sibling similarity, but behav- For some traits, there are sources of variance that
ior genetic studies have shown that it is of minor depend on both genetic and environmental factors
importance for many traits measured in adulthood. taken together. These include genotype environ-
For a number of traits (i.e., intelligence and social ment interactions (2g,e) and genotype by environ-
attitudes), shared environment is very important in ment correlations (2g*e). These sources of variance
the early years but much less so in adulthood. We are difficult to study, but with new genetic tools
can estimate the importance of shared environment becoming available almost daily, it is likely they will
in a number of ways, but two are particularly simple. prove to be an important addition to our under-
Both use correlation coefficients. The correlation standing of the various sources of variance, and they
coefficient used in twin and adoption studies can may well change current views of how genes and
run from zero to one and can, in the example below, environment transact and interact.
be interpreted as a percentage of variance. In most It is important to realize that the methods dis-
other contexts, a correlation coefficient must be cussed above give us a picture of the effects of genes
squared to interpret the results as a percentage. This and environments in terms of variance in the traits
point is widely misunderstood. Consider monozy- studied. This is a common method in psychology
gotic twins reared together (MZT), often incorrectly where analysis of variance is used extensively. It
called identical twins. They have all their genes in is, however, a particular level of analysis; there are
common. Consequently, the correlation between other levels of analysis. Heritability does not tell us,
them on a trait such as intelligence reflects all the for example, about how genes or the environment
effects of genes (additive and nonadditive) plus the actually work. It is also important to realize that the
similarity because of being reared in the same fam- expression of a trait can increase in a population
ily (shared environment). Monozygotic twins reared even though the heritability of the trait is quite high.
apart (MZA), if they were placed in adoptive homes Most of the variation in stature is genetic, but there
randomly, would be similar only because they had has been a continuing increase in stature in industri-
all their genes in common (additive and nonaddi- alized populations for many years. There has been a
tive effects). Thus the MZA correlation would similar increase in the raw scores on IQ tests, widely
directly estimate the broad heritability. The differ- known as the Flynn Effect.
ence between the two correlations (MZT MZA)
Thomas J. Bouchard Jr.
would estimate shared environmental influence. The
IQ correlation between MZT twins, in adulthood, See also Flynn Effect: Rising Intelligence Scores;
is about .86. The IQ correlation for MZA twins Intelligence, Neural Basis
(almost all adults) is .74 (weighted mean of five stud-
ies). The difference suggests a shared environmental
influence of .12. The second method of estimating Further Readings
shared environmental influence is to examine the Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (2009). Genetic influence on human
similarity of unrelated individuals reared in the intelligence (Spearmans g): How much? Annals of
same home (URT). For childhood data the URT Human Biology, 36, 527544.
correlation is .26 (weighted mean of 14 studies). Glahn, D. C., Winkler, A. M., Kochunov, P., Almasy, L.,
In adulthood the URT correlation is .04 (weighted Duggirala, R., Carless, M. A., . . . Blanjero, J. (2010).
mean of five studies). This method suggests a shared Genetic control over the resting brain. Proceedings of
environmental influence of .04. Other methods yield the National Academy of Science of the United States of
estimates between these two figures and also show America, 107, 12231228.
a strong age effect, with genetic influence increasing Johnson, W., Turkheimer, E., Gottesman, I. I., & Bouchard,
with age. T. J., Jr. (2009). Beyond heritability: Twin studies in
Heritage Language and Second Language Learning 391
behavioral research. Current Directions in Psychological The field of second language acquisition,
Science, 18, 217220. which has evolved considerably since the 1960s,
Sesardic, N. (2005). Making sense of heritability. is generally concerned with understanding the lin-
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. guistic development of the second language from
Visscher, P. M., Hill, W. G., & Wray, N. R. (2008). initial state to ultimate attainment in child and
Heritability in the genomic era: Concepts and adult learners, the internal and external factors that
misconceptions. Nature Reviews Genetics, 9, play a role in the process, and the ways input can
255266. be manipulated through instruction. Much research
in this field has been guided by drawing compari-
sons with the field of first language acquisition. It is
HERITAGE LANGUAGE AND SECOND typically assumed that monolingual children even-
LANGUAGE LEARNING tually became native speakers of the language and
achieve full linguistic competence in both the struc-
tural (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics)
In a bilingual context, an individual is exposed to
and the communicative functions of their language
and learns two or more languages. Different types of
(contextually appropriate). However, the degree of
bilingualism are defined by the sociopolitical status
success in the second language is typically variable:
of the languages (majority vs. minority language),
Not every second language learner achieves native-
the order of acquisition of the languages (first vs.
like knowledge and fluency. Age of acquisition
second), and the degree of exposure to and use of
(before and after puberty), cognitive development,
each language in different contexts throughout the
type/amount of input, and affective factors, among
life span. Second and heritage language learning are
others, affect the eventual outcome of the learning
just two examples.
process. While children learning their first language
in a monolingual context overcome typical gram-
Second Language Learning matical errors, many second language learners do
Second language learning typically refers to the not, displaying what Michael Long has termed fos-
acquisition of a second language after the structural silization or stabilization. Some persistent errors in
foundations of the first or native language are in second language acquisition are caused by trans-
place. Second language learning can occur in child- fer or interference from the first language at the
hood between the ages of 4 and 12 or in adulthood cognitive level.
(around and after puberty). Immigrant children who
arrive in a host country are considered child second
Heritage Language Learning
language learners. For example, immigrant children
in the United States are second language learners, If the language of the host country is the second lan-
whereas English-speaking children receiving second guage in children of immigrant families, their family
language instruction a few hours a week at school language is the heritage language. Heritage language
are foreign language learners. The amount and qual- learners are bilingual children born in the host coun-
ity of input, the reasons for learning the language, try or children of immigrants who speak a minority
as well as the opportunity to use the language on language at home and learn a second language in
a daily basis differ in a foreign language versus a the wider community and at school. The emerging
second language context, when the second language field of heritage language acquisition is concerned
can be the majority language spoken in the wider with language maintenance and loss at the individ-
speech community. Immigrant children must learn ual level and with how to teach speakers who pos-
the second language to thrive socially and academi- sess different degrees of proficiency in their heritage
cally in the new society. By contrast, for majority language. Like many adult second language learners,
language-speaking children, learning a foreign lan- adult heritage language speakers do not reach native-
guage is a choice. Adult second language acquisition like attainment in their heritage language. In fact,
can also occur in a second language environment, the range of variability spans from mere receptive
again in the case of immigrants, or in a foreign lan- knowledge to fully fluent speakers with advanced
guage context through schooling. literacy skills and all the shades in between. Among
392 Human Classification Learning
the possible reasons for why heritage speakers fail Further Readings
to develop their minority language, Silvina Montrul Long, M. (2003). Stabilization and fossilization in
and Maria Polinsky have proposed that reduced interlanguage development. In C. Doughty & M. Long
exposure to and use of the language during child- (Eds.), The handbook of second language acquisition
hood and beyond leads to incomplete acquisition (pp. 487533). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
and to attrition of their native language. Incomplete Montrul, S. (2008). Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism:
acquisition refers to the fact that a given feature of Re-examining the age factor. Amsterdam, Netherlands:
the language, which is present in the linguistic rep- John Benjamins.
ertoire of native speakers of that particular linguis- Polinsky, M., & Kagan, O. (2007). Heritage languages: In
tic variety, is not mastered at age-appropriate levels. the wild and in the classroom. Language and
For example, many adult Spanish heritage speak- Linguistics Compass, 1(5), 368395.
ers make gender and verbal agreement errors typi-
cal at age 2 or 3 in Spanish-speaking children but
are not common in adult speakers. It is possible
that agreement was not fully mastered by age 4, HUMAN CLASSIFICATION
when most children cease to make these errors in LEARNING
Spanish. Attrition, on the other hand, implies that
a given structure reached a certain degree of mas- Human classification learning is the process of
tery but was subsequently lost. If a child had learned learning to distinguish between different types or
the future tense at age 5, at the same level as mono- groups of things in the world. Humans are often
lingual children of the same age, but showed very presented with various situations in which people
high error rates 2 years later, then one can establish (friend or foe), objects (edible or toxic), and places
through a longitudinal research design that attrition (safe or dangerous) must be correctly classified to
took place. survive. Classification allows us to respond to these
Thus, as immigrant children go through the situations appropriately and further allows these
process of assimilation to mainstream society and situations to be identified and incorporated into
learn their second language, their heritage language groups, categories, or concepts based on similar
learning is often severely compromised. Many properties. This entry will further define human
heritage language speakers develop full linguistic classification learning as well as highlight different
competence in their second language (especially if ways in which classification can be studied. Finally,
they were born or arrived in the host country in the entry will briefly introduce the neural architec-
early childhood), but linguistic development in their ture underlying human classification learning.
heritage language lags significantly behind. In fact, To group or categorize various types of objects
although their heritage language learning started and situations, learners can either learn the group
in childhooda key factor in successful language membership of each object or situation individu-
learningtheir linguistic development, the types ally or can generalize by finding common attributes
of grammatical errors they make, and the general within a group of objects, with the aim of being
outcome of the linguistic process have much more able to apply the same action to these distinct,
in common with second language acquisition than yet similar, objects or situations in future encoun-
with first language acquisition. At the same time, ters. Classification learning can have several uses.
by virtue of language learning in a naturalistic set- Classification allows us to bypass the process of full
ting, many heritage language learners lack the identification of a stimulus, to quickly generalize
highly developed metalinguistic and literacy skills of across objects or situations in our environment on the
instructed second language learners. basis of simple dimensions, and to respond appro-
Silvina Montrul priately to the environment. Classification allows us
to quickly and efficiently distinguish among a wide
See also Bilingual Language Processing; Bilingualism, range of objects even without the benefit of prior
Cognitive Benefits of; Language Development experience. In addition, classification enables us to
Human Classification Learning 393
easily group different objects so that more com- the stimuli to be classified. Formally, trial and error
plex grouping structures within specific categories learning and instructed learning are both types of
can be abstracted. In other words, classification is supervised learning, whereas free sorting is a form
the initial process by which objects are parsed into of unsupervised learning; the theoretical differences
separate groups before category membership can be between these two approaches are beyond the scope
determined, a necessary step one must go through of this entry.
to access information acquired through category
learning. Neural Substrates of Classification
Though similar, human classification learning During the past decade our knowledge regarding the
should not be confused with category learning or neural substrates of human classification has grown
even concept learning. Overall, classification empha- by leaps and bounds. Recent research suggests that
sizes the processes involved in assigning stimuli to classification learning relies heavily on the basal gan-
groups, whereas concept learning emphasizes the glia, particularly the striatum. Because of its loca-
mental representations of our semantic knowledge tion, the striatum receives and integrates input from
of the world. Categorization often combines the the majority of the cortex. In addition, the striatum
process of classification with the mental representa- sends information back to the cortex, making the
tions of concept learning. However, at times these striatum essential for many different cognitive pro-
terms have been used interchangeably, so research- cesses, including classification. However, the stria-
ers and students in this area should take care when tum is not a homogeneous structure that plays a
reading the scientific literature. single role in classification. Rather, the striatum is
comprised of subsections that each plays a distinct
Experimental Approaches
role in human classification.
Because of its wide scope, human classification learn- Learning to classify, especially by feedback, can
ing can include any task that requires the learner to be broken down into several different steps thought
make distinctions between the group membership of to depend on different functional regions of the stri-
two or more stimuli. Despite this, classification is typ- atum. Studies indicate that the nucleus accumbens,
ically studied experimentally using three approaches. or ventral striatum, is essential for the detection of
One approach is known as trial and error learning, or feedback as part of the reward system. Similarly, the
feedback-based learning. In a typical study, the goal head of the caudate nucleus in conjunction with pre-
of a learner is to produce an appropriate response for frontal cortex is involved in integrating the executive
any stimulus without the benefit of previous training functions involved in classification with feedback
examples. To achieve this, the learner must view the and reward-related information and possible motor
stimulus, then make an initial response, and finally responses. Furthermore, research shows that the
receive feedback. Based on the resulting feedback, the body and tail of the caudate and the putamen are
learner must abstract sorting criteria and generalize implicated in learning to correctly classify stimuli:
these rules to new stimuli in some reasonable way. The body and tail of the caudate in conjunction
Eventually, this trial and error method will enable with temporal lobe cortex may subserve perceptual
the learner to produce the correct response more and aspects of classification, whereas the putamen in
more frequently. A second approach is instructed conjunction with motor cortex may be involved in
learning, or paired-associate learning. Learners are selecting and executing motor behaviors appropri-
initially told how each stimulus should be classified, ate for the stimuluss class. The midbrain dopamine
with the goal of eventually being able to classify stim- system interacts with the striatum via ascending and
uli without being given the answer. A third approach descending loops that connect striatal regions in a
is known as free sorting. This approach requires hierarchical fashion and support coordination of
learners to partition stimuli along one or more these separate functions that subserve classification
dimensions without information about whether their learning.
response was correct or incorrect. Learning has to Besides the striatum, various neural areas make
rely on the distinguishing attributes of the stimuli for significant contributions to classification depending
394 Hypochondria
on task structure and/or stimulus complexity. For Nature and Origin of Hypochondriasis
example, regions of the prefrontal cortex, such as
Hypochondria (also written as hypochondriasis)
medial frontal and ventrolateral cortices, have been
is characterized by unjustified fears or convictions
implicated in mediating classification learning, espe-
that one has a serious and often fatal disease, such
cially in tasks involving feedback but not in those
as heart disease, cancer, or AIDS. The main com-
involving paired-associate learning. Alternately,
ponent is health anxiety, and in contemporary writ-
paired-associate learning tasks may recruit the hip-
ing this more neutral term is often preferred over
pocampus and other medial temporal lobe regions,
hypochondria(sis). Patients frequently seek reassur-
such as extrastriate visual areas, as the need for stor-
ance in medical consultation, check their bodies,
ing mental representations of stimuli arises. Because
and avoid illness-related triggers (such as bodily sen-
classification is such a diverse process, many other
sations and medical information). Merely inform-
cortical regions are likely involved, and identifying
ing the patient of the absence of a disease process
the roles played by these regions is an important
or explaining the benign nature of the symptoms
goal of continuing research in this area.
results in temporary reassurance followed by
Carol Seger and renewed worry over symptoms and continuing over-
Dan Lopez-Paniagua use of medical services. Hypochondria is thought
to be quite common, and a number of studies esti-
See also Categorization, Neural Basis; Categorization, mate its prevalence in the general population as
Psychological Perspectives; Category Learning, between 4% to 7%, with equal numbers for men
Computational Perspectives; Decision Making, and women. The course is often chronic, but remis-
Neural Underpinnings sion (also known as transient hypochondriasis) also
occurs, and it has been found that about one in three
Further Readings patients no longer meet criteria for hypochondriasis
after a 5-year follow-up period.
Ashby, F. G., & Spiering, B. J. (2004). The neurobiology
Traditionally, hypochondriasis (an ancient Greek
of category learning. Behavioral and Cognitive
word meaning below the cartilage) was considered
Neuroscience Reviews, 3, 101113.
Estes, W. K. (1994). Classification and cognition. New
to be a special form of melancholia (i.e., depressed
York, NY: Oxford University Press. mood) resulting from an excess of black bile. In the
Poldrack, R. A., Clark, J., Pare-Blagoev, J., Shohamy, D., 17th century, scientists argued that hypochondriasis
Creso Moyano, J., Myers, C., & Gluck, M. A. (2001). occurred only in men and was equivalent to hysteria
Interactive memory systems in the human brain. occurring in females. Around the turn of the 20th
Nature, 414, 546550. century, the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud
Seger, C. A., & Cincotta, C. M. (2005). The roles of the suggested that hypochondria was the consequence
caudate nucleus in human classification learning. of an imbalance in sexual energy that would build
Journal of Neuroscience, 25, 29412951. up and result in physical symptoms. Other early
psychological theories on hypochondriasis suggested
that physical symptoms developed in individuals
defending against low self-esteem because a sick
HYPOCHONDRIA body is attached to fewer stigmas than a sick mind.
These early theories were overly speculative, lacking
This entry provides a brief overview of the concept empirical support from research.
of hypochondria and its historical background; this
disorder plays an important role in psychological
Theoretical Perspectives
and somatic health care systems. The entry also
discusses recent theoretical models, which have led At the end of the 20th century, more specific cog-
to an empirically supported series of psychologi- nitive-behavioral models were formulated in which
cal treatments, including those using a cognitive- great emphasis was placed on the patients misinter-
behavioral frame of reference. pretation of innocuous bodily sensations. A number
Hypochondria 395
of studies on the information processing features of experiences, by selective attention to illness related
hypochondria supported these models. It was shown information, and by confirmatory reasoning bias
that selective attention to illness information, risk (i.e., only attending to support of the hypochon-
perception, misinterpretation of benign symptoms, driacal assumptions). It is generally believed that
and cognitive responses to medical reassurance are the age of onset for hypochondriasis lies in early
maintaining factors. It has also been found that hypo- adulthood, although, in individual patients, any
chondriacal individuals hold distinct (catastrophic) age may be the start of the disorder. A few studies
assumptions about health and illness. However, it have concentrated on a genetic and familial compo-
has not been convincingly demonstrated that trig- nent in hypochondriasis, suggesting that there is, at
gering these assumptions (e.g., by exposure to illness best, only a moderate genetic contribution. Several
related stimuli) leads to increased hypochondriacal researchers have suggested that exposure to disease
concerns. Several studies found a substantial positive in the familyin combination with parental atti-
correlation between hypochondria and the tendency tudes toward illnessinfluences the development
to experience a broad range of bodily sensations of hypochondriacal concerns in children. It has
as noxious, intense, and disturbing. Far less atten- also been found that an insecure (fearful) attach-
tion has been paid to specific conditioning models ment style is positively related to hypochondriasis.
regarding the onset and maintenance of hypochon- Finally, sexual traumatization also has been linked
driasis, although theories of excessive health anxiety to the development of excessive health anxiety. In
stipulate that internal cues (e.g., pain sensations or a sample of hospital outpatients, hypochondriacal
stomachache) perceived as predictors of threat and adults recalled more childhood trauma (parental
bodily harm (unconditioned stimulii.e., naturally upheaval, sexual trauma, and victimization by vio-
threatening circumstances) can serve as conditioned lence) before the age of 17 than a control group of
stimuli (i.e., originally neutral stimuli that acquire patients.
the meaning of the naturally threatening stimuli). In
the presence of these stimuli, individuals will exhibit Treatments
so-called conditioned responsesthat is, learned
reactions. In hypochondriasis these responses are Until the late 1980s, psychological and psychiatric
generally related to anxiety and its concomitant treatments for hypochondria were generally con-
physiological sensations (e.g., muscle tension, pal- sidered hardly feasible. Some authors went as far
pitations). as stating that there was no specific treatment and
that patients would not profit from any treatment
whatsoever. In the 1990s, research into the nature
Onset and Maintenance and treatment of hypochondriasis increased. In
To date, a comprehensive and empirically tested particular, the cognitive behavioral conceptualiza-
model of the onset and course of hypochondriasis is tion of the disorder has stimulated the development
lacking, although the cognitive behavioral hypoth- of new treatments. In particular, cognitions and
esis is generally adopted as an important heuristic. behaviors are therapeutic targets, and even atten-
In this conceptualization of hypochondriasis, the tional processes seem promising candidates in this
disorder is assumed to originate from threaten- respect. This has resulted in an increasing number
ing situations (e.g., witnessing the death of a loved of treatment studies in which the clinical effective-
one) that form maladaptive health-related core ness of cognitive behavior therapy has been estab-
assumptions (i.e., My body is vulnerable). These lished. Psychopharmacological treatment has been
assumptions are triggered under circumstances in little studied, although some authors note positive
which ambiguous bodily sensations (e.g., palpita- results.
tions) are experienced or in the event of critical Theo K. Bouman
incidents (such as being confronted with somebody
elses symptoms or even death). Next, the assump- See also Behavioral Therapy; Reinforcement Learning,
tions may be consolidated by further health-related Psychological Perspectives
396 Hypochondria
Further Readings
Marcus, D. K., Gurley, J. R., Marchi, M. M., & Bauer, C.
Abramowitz, J. S., & Braddock, A. E. (2008). (2007). Cognitive and perceptual variables in
Psychological treatment of health anxiety and hypochondriasis and health anxiety: A systematic
hypochondriasis. Ashland, OH: Hogrefe. review. Clinical Psychology Review, 27, 127139.
Asmundson, G. J., Taylor, S., & Cox, B. J. (Eds.). (2001). Williams, P. G. (2004). The psychopathology of self-
Health anxiety: Clinical and research perspectives on assessed health: A cognitive approach to health anxiety
hypochondriasis and related conditions. New York, NY: and hypochondriasis. Cognitive Therapy and Research,
Wiley. 28, 629644.
I
into it (note that Berkeley, in keeping with the empir-
IDEALISM icist tradition of his time, uses the word idea to mean
something like a mental thing which is the immedi-
Idealists believe that reality is fundamentally mental ate object of sensory perception).
in some sense, or that the physical world is some- Part of our commonsense understanding of
how dependent on, or constituted by, the operation physical objects is that they remain in existence even
of minds. Idealism is the polar opposite of material- when no one is around to look at them. Berkeley
ism, which can be understood to be the view that had two strategies for accommodating this ordi-
ultimate reality is wholly material and that mentality nary belief. The first strategy is that the apple exists
is dependent on material processes. by virtue of the fact that if someone were to look
This entry discusses three forms of idealism: the in its direction, she or he would perceive the visual
idealism of the 18th-century philosopher George ideas that make it up (and if she were to touch it, she
Berkeley, the phenomenalism of the 20th century, would perceive the idea of solidity that makes it up,
and panpsychism. and if he were to bite into it, he would perceive the
idea of juiciness which makes it up, etc.). The second
strategy is that the apple exists by virtue of the fact
Berkeley
that, even in the absence of human perceivers, God
The 18th-century philosopher George Berkeley is is permanently perceiving the apple: seeing its red-
probably the most famous idealist in the history of ness, feeling its hardness, tasting its juiciness.
Western philosophy. Berkeley believed in the exis- It is crucial in understanding Berkeleys view
tence of only two kinds of thing: minds and ideas. to see him in relation to John Locke, the British
Ideas are dependent on minds for their existence: For empiricist who came before Berkeley and whose life
an idea to exist is for it to be perceived by some mind. overlapped with Berkeleys. Locke claimed that the
Although Berkeley denied the existence of material immediate objects of perception are sensory ideas
objects, understood as mind-independent entities, he (call this claim A), although he also believed that
claimed to accept the commonsense view that there we indirectly perceive mind-independent material
are ordinary objects, such as tables, chairs, rocks, objects. Locke argued that some qualities of objects,
and planets. However, for Berkeley, such objects, such as color and taste, are dependent for their exis-
which he was happy to call physical objects, are tence on the mind, on the grounds that our ideas
entirely constituted of ideas. A red, juicy apple is of these qualities vary according to the perspective
composed of the red idea we perceive when we look of the perceiver (call this argument B). However, he
at it, the idea of solidity we perceive when we touch also claimed that other properties, such as solidity
it, and the idea of juiciness we perceive when we bite and extension, are mind independent.
397
398 Idealism
Berkeley took claim A and argument B to what Berkeleys arguments for idealism rely on the exis-
many believe to be their logical conclusion. If the tence of God. This is to get things precisely the
only things we immediately perceive are ideas, it is wrong way round. Berkeley argues for idealism
difficult to see how we could ever have evidence for independently of his belief in God and then uses
the existence of mind-independent objects. If the idealism as a premise of an interesting argument for
fact that ideas of color and taste vary depending on the existence of God. Whenever you open your eyes,
the perspective of the perceiver gives us grounds to you find pressed upon you ideas that you yourself
think that color and taste are mind dependent, then do not causethat is, the ideas of physical objects in
we also have grounds for thinking that solidity and the world around you. But what causes these ideas?
extension are mind dependent, as the ideas of these Given idealism, it cannot be that they are caused
qualities also vary depending on the perspective by material objects, for there are no such things.
of the perceiver (the idea of a objects shape varies Berkeley believes in only two kinds of things: ideas
depending on the angle from which we look at it). and minds. Ideas, for Berkeley, are essentially pas-
Of course, one way around this motivation for sive and can do nothing but be perceived by minds.
idealism is simply to deny the assumptions that It follows that the thing that causes the ideas in our
Berkeley shared with Locke (indeed, many philoso- minds of physical objects must be itself a mind.
phers reinterpret Berkeleys arguments as reductio Given the complexity and sophistication of the
ad absurdum style arguments against these Lockean physical world, this mind must be a very powerful,
assumptions). However, Berkeley also has arguments intelligent mind. Given the beauty of nature, and its
for idealism that are independent of those assump- helpfulness to humanity, it is natural to suppose that
tions. Berkeley argues that a mind-independent this mind is beneficent. We quickly find the cause of
world is inconceivable and therefore not possible (in our ideas having many of the traditional qualities
the same way that square circles are inconceivable of the personal God of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim
and therefore not possible). Try to imagine some- tradition.
thing existing without the mind, a tree that no one
is looking at, for example. But surely you yourself
Phenomenalism
are perceiving this tree in your imagination, and
hence the tree is not in fact an object that is not per- The 20th-century position, phenomenalism, a view
ceived. Try as you might, an object that is not being advocated by A. J. Ayer, among others, is very similar
perceived cannot be conceived of. to Berkeleys idealism. The phenomenalists believed
Few philosophers accept this argument, but it is that material objects are constituted by sense data,
difficult to see where it goes wrong. One suggestion and by sense data they meant something very similar
is that Berkeley is confusing the distinction between to what Berkeley meant by ideas. They also held,
properties the imagined tree has or lacks, and prop- and again the similarity with Berkeleys view is clear,
erties I am imagining the tree to have or lack (which that the red, juicy apple exists in the absence of a
may be contrary to the properties the imagined tree human mind on account of the fact that, if someone
in fact has or lacks). It may be the case that the looked in its direction, he or she would have a red
tree has the property of being perceived (due to the sense datum, and if someone bit into it, he or she
fact that I am imagining it), but it does not follow would perceive a juicy sense datum.
that I cannot imagine the tree lacking that prop- However, whereas Berkeley grounded these
erty. Barack Obama has the property of being the conditional truths in the will of God, the phenom-
president of the United States, but his having of that enalists took them to be brute facts about reality,
property is consistent with my imagining him lack- not capable of being explained in more fundamen-
ing that propertyfor example, if I imagine that he tal terms. This aspect of phenomenalism was later
is a schoolteacher. In the same way, just because any strongly criticized by C. B. Martin, on the grounds
object I imagine is thereby being perceived (by me that it entails that there are truths without truth-
in my imagination), it does not follow that I cannot makersthat is, truths about the world that arent
imagine it not being perceived. made true by anything in the world. For Berkeley,
A common error that undergraduate students the true sentence, If I bite into the apple, it will
make when studying Berkeley is to think that taste juicy is made true by the will of God, but for
Idealism 399
the phenomenalist this sentence is just plain true, compose them have mental properties. Second, the
even though there is nothing in the world that makes panpsychist need not hold that the mental proper-
it true. (This strategy of criticizing various meta- ties of fundamental physical particles are intentional
physical positions for failing to provide truthmakers properties; she need not hold that a fundamental
has subsequently become very popular in analytic particle has thoughts. She is more likely to claim
philosophy. For example, some people attack pre- that an electron has some very simple kind of raw
sentists, i.e., philosophers who dont believe in the experience, a kind of experience massively simpler
reality of the past or future, on the grounds that they than the complex and sophisticated experience that
are unable to provide truthmakers for [what most organisms enjoy.
presentists would agree are] true sentences about the Despite these qualifications, panpsychism is
past, e.g., Dinosaurs used to roam the Earth.) still seen by many as a somewhat eccentric posi-
tion. However, it has enjoyed a renaissance of late,
perhaps most influentially in the work of Galen
Panpsychism
Strawson, attracting followers with its promise of
Berkeley and the phenomenalists take the physi- offering a way of giving a theoretically satisfying
cal world to be fundamentally mental in the sense explanation of the existence of the consciousness of
that for a physical object like a table, a planet, or an organisms. On a conventional materialist view of
electron to exist is for it to be perceived, or for it to things, fundamental particles are in no sense con-
be perceivable. The philosophical position known scious, and yet, in certain very specific arrangements,
as panpsychism offers a different way of taking the they compose composite objectsorganisms or the
world to be fundamentally mental in character. The brains of organismswhich do have consciousness.
panpsychist agrees with the materialist that physi- Many philosophers worry that this alleged emer-
cal objects have an existence entirely independent of gence of experience from the wholly non-experien-
their being perceived. In what sense then, is physical tial, seems like nothing short of a miracle and gives
reality fundamentally mental for the panpsychist? us a rather disunified and theoretically dissatisfying
The panpsychist believes that the intrinsic nature picture of nature. Panpsychism offers us a unified
of fundamental physical objects is, at least in part, view of the natural world that avoids this whiff of
mental. Whereas a materialist (at least of a standard the miraculous. For the panpsychist, just as the tiny
kindsome panpsychists take their view to be itself mass of fundamental particles in the organism con-
a form of materialism) holds that the intrinsic nature stitute the greater mass of the organism, so the very
of an electron is constituted entirely by nonmental crude forms of consciousness instantiated by these
properties (e.g., spin, mass, and charge), the panpsy- same particles constitute the consciousness of that
chist holds that the intrinsic nature of the electron is organism (or of its brain).
partly constituted by mental properties. In this sense Idealism continues to be a minority view. There
the fundamental nature of reality is, at least in part, seems to be a basic repugnance in our intellectual
mental. culture to taking mentality to be among the funda-
It is easy to caricature the panpsychist position, mental furniture of the universe. This repugnance is
for example, by seeing it as holding that tables feel perhaps most vividly expressed by Samuel Johnson
jealous or that beer cans suffer from existential in his symbolic rejection of Berkeley: I refute in
angst. However, it is important to bear in mind two thus! he said, kicking a stone (it is not clear how
important qualifications the panpsychist is likely this constituted a rejection of Berkeley, given that
to emphasize. First, the panpsychist need not hold Berkeley believed in stones). But there are also strong
that macroscopic inanimate objects such as tables arguments for idealism and theoretical advantages
and chairs are bearers of mental properties. They to adopting the view. It is for these reasons that
are more likely to suppose that only fundamental idealism has always remained a serious, if minority,
physical particles and certain metaphysically sig- metaphysical picture of the world.
nificant composite objects, such as organisms or
Philip Goff
their brains, directly instantiate mental properties.
Tables and beer cans are intrinsically mental only See also Consciousness and Embodiment; Eliminative
in the sense that the fundamental particles that Materialism; Physicalism; Reductive Physicalism
400 Implicit Memory
level of retention as the normal control subjects did test, but some of the categories correspond to words
on the implicit test, despite dramatically deficient on the study list and others do not. Subjects are
conscious recollection. more likely to produce studied examples than coun-
terbalanced, non-studied examples. In general, the
increased accuracy, ease, or speed of processing for
Dissociations Between Implicit
studied versus non-studied materials is referred to
and Explicit Memory
as priming, and it serves as the measure of implicit
The foregoing experiment presents the standard memory. Although priming experiments are the pri-
approach to studying implicit memory. The typical mary measure of implicit memory, this topic has also
experiment consists of a study phase followed at been studied with measures of sequence learning
some delay by a memory test. In the study phase, and classical conditioning.
subjects are presented with a carefully controlled The principles that govern implicit and explicit
experience, such as a list of words or pictures pre- memory differ in several ways, as demonstrated by
sented on a computer screen. The memory test dissociations between implicit and explicit tests. One
assesses how much of the studied material is retained. of the most striking dissociations is exemplified by
In standard explicit tests, subjects are directed to the studies showing that anterograde amnesics per-
think back about the studied material. Examples form poorly on explicit memory tests but normally
include free recall, in which subjects report all that on implicit tests. This indicates that organic amnesia
they can remember about the studied material in impairs conscious recollection of the past but not
the absence of any overt cues, and recognition, in unintentional, unconscious manifestations of mem-
which subjects try to differentiate studied stimuli ory. Similar dissociations exist in which populations
from new material. Implicit tests of memory, in con- impaired in explicit memory exhibit normal levels of
trast, do not direct subjects to think back. Rather, implicit memory. For example, patients with schizo-
these tests are presented as separate exercises, unre- phrenia or depression often demonstrate decreased
lated to previous components of the experiment. explicit memory coupled with normal performance
Implicit tests are often presented as perceptual tasks, on implicit measures of memory. Likewise, healthy
general knowledge tests, or problem-solving tasks. older adults usually have reduced explicit memory
However, the tasks are carefully designed to exhibit ability compared to healthy young adults, but the
influences of the recently experienced study materi- two age groups often perform equivalently on
als. For example, the word-stem and word-fragment implicit tests of memory.
completion tests are typically presented as language Experimental variables also produce dissocia-
fluency tests, in which parts of words are presented tions between implicit and explicit memory, provid-
and subjects complete them with the first word ing additional evidence for the separability of the
that comes to mind (e.g., ban____ or b _ n _ n _ two forms of memory and insight into their func-
for banana). Subjects are unaware that some of the tional differences. For example, manipulations of
stems and fragments correspond to studied words attention during encoding can produce different
and others correspond to new words that were not effects on implicit and explicit memory. Experiments
presented during the study phase. The proportion examining attention and memory typically present
of completions is typically greater for the studied study materials to some subjects under full attention
words than for the new words. This difference can conditions, while other subjects encode study mate-
occur even in the absence of intention to retrieve the rials while simultaneously carrying out a secondary
studied materials and in the absence of awareness task, such as monitoring a sequence of tones and
that the implicit task relates to the earlier portion categorizing each as high or low. The secondary task
of the experiment. Other implicit tests use concep- is designed to distract subjects, reducing their atten-
tual as opposed to fragmentary perceptual cues. tion to the study stimuli. And, of course, it works:
For example, on the category-exemplar generation Dividing attention during encoding reduces perfor-
task, participants are presented with the names of mance on recall and recognition tests compared to
taxonomic categories (e.g., FRUIT) and are asked the full attention condition. However, if memory
to generate examples from each. This task is pre- is tested with implicit tests, such as word-fragment
sented as a general knowledge or semantic fluency completion or lexical decision, dividing attention
402 Implicit Memory
produces little effect; the two groups produce equiv- different results than implicit tests that use percep-
alent priming. Thus, dividing attention at encoding tual cues, such as the word-fragment completion.
can dissociate performance on explicit and implicit
tests. A similar dissociation is produced by varying
Multiple Memory Systems
the amount of semantic processing during the study
and Neuroimaging
episode, which has a marked effect on explicit mem-
ory tests (the levels-of-processing effect) but typically Neuropsychological and neuroscientific data indicate
has little effect on such implicit memory tests as that human memory is not a single ability but rather
word-stem completion and perceptual identification. several distinct systems. One familiar distinction is
Manipulations of perceptual attributes of stimuli that between short-term (or working) memory and
often affect priming but not explicit memory. For long-term memory. However, research on implicit
example, word-fragment completion and word- memory indicates that long-term memory is likewise
stem completion produce more priming for study not a single system. Consider the dissociations found
words that had been presented visually as opposed with amnesic patients. Because anterograde amnesia
to aurally. In contrast, study modality typically pro- typically involves damage to the hippocampus and
duces little effect on explicit tests like free recall and medial temporal lobes, it appears that these parts of
recognition. It should be noted that the critical issue the brain are critical in the formation of memories
is the match in modality between study and test. that are later experienced as conscious recollection.
Although most implicit tests are presented visually, Early theories of multiple memory systems theories
priming tasks can be implemented in the auditory proposed dichotomies to account for explicit and
modality as well. For example, auditory word stems implicit memory (e.g., declarative vs. procedural,
or fragments can be presented in the auditory ver- episodic vs. semantic). However, it is now clear that
sion of the word-stem and word-fragment tasks. there are several dissociable forms of implicit mem-
These auditory tasks show a similar sensitivity to ory. Current theories propose four long-term mem-
study modality, although in this case, the aurally ory systems: episodic memory, semantic memory, the
presented study words exhibit more priming than perceptual representation system, and procedural
visually presented words. memory. Episodic memory stores information about
Some experimental variables primarily influ- episodes in our personal past, enabling recollection.
ence explicit but not implicit memory (e.g., divided Semantic memory refers to our general knowledge
attention, semantic elaboration), whereas others pri- about the world, including factual, conceptual, and
marily influence implicit but not explicit (e.g., study linguistic information. The perceptual representation
modality). Still other variables produce opposite system is a perceptual memory system that processes
results on implicit and explicit tests. For example, information about the form and structure of words
study items presented as pictures produce better and objects. Finally, procedural memory represents
recall and recognition (i.e., better explicit memory) knowledge of cognitive and motor skills. Within this
than study items presented as words; this is known framework, the episodic system is thought to give
as the picture superiority effect. On implicit tests rise to explicit memory, whereas the other systems
such as word-stem and word-fragment completion, produce the unconscious, non-recollective effects of
the opposite is found: Words produce more priming memory that constitute implicit memory.
than pictures. Similarly, the well-known generation Neuroimaging research, using positron emission
effect can be reversed on implicit tests. Specifically, tomography and functional magnetic resonance
generating a word from a conceptual clue (e.g., imaging, provides convergent evidence for the exis-
hotc___) usually produces better explicit memory tence of multiple memory systems. Neuroimaging
than reading the same word (e.g., hotcold). On techniques allow researchers to examine the areas
word-stem and word-fragment completion, the of the brain that are involved in implicit and explicit
opposite result obtains: Reading produces greater memory. This research has found several differences
priming than generating. Finally, dissociations can in brain activity during explicit and implicit retrieval
also be found between different types of implicit tasks. Among the hallmarks of explicit memory
tests. For example, conceptual implicit tests (like the retrieval is increased neural activity in prefrontal
category-exemplar production test) often produce cortex (especially in the right hemisphere) and in the
Inattentional Blindness 403
medial temporal lobe and hippocampus. The activ- (Ed.), The cognitive neurosciences (Vol. 3, pp. 691708).
ity in the frontal lobe appears to reflect a mental Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
set in which the individual is oriented toward the
past and intentionally tries to retrieve information.
Activity in medial-temporal areas reflects the recol- INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS
lective experience itself, when the memory is success-
fully retrieved. Priming on implicit tests is associated Contrary to the popular intuition that seeing is
with decreased activity in various brain areas. This is simply a matter of using ones eyes, people often
believed to reflect a reduction in processing demands fail to notice salient objects and events despite look-
when a stimulus is processed a second time, which ing right at them. Inattentional blindness refers to
in turn produces increased speed and accuracy on instances when this occurs because a persons atten-
the priming task. The brain regions involved depend tion was preoccupied or otherwise engaged with
on whether the implicit test is perceptual or con- competing information rather than because of a
ceptual. For perceptual tests such as word-stem or visual obstruction. Indeed, eye-tracking experiments
word-fragment completion, the decreased process- have demonstrated that this phenomenon is robust
ing is found in visual cortex (in posterior occipital even when the unnoticed items are directly fixated
lobe). In contrast, when items are re-processed on on, and it occurs even when the stimulus in question
conceptual implicit tests, decreased activity is found is completely apparent to anyone whose attention is
in inferior frontal lobe and mid-temporal lobe. In not already preoccupied. This entry provides a brief
general, these results imply that the same neural overview of the nature of inattentional blindness, its
substrates responsible for the initial (perceptual or relationship to related phenomena, and factors that
conceptual) processing are re-engaged at the time of contribute to the likelihood of it occurring.
test and exhibit the effects of the initial processing
by their subsequent reduced activity.
The Nature of Inattentional Blindness
Neil W. Mulligan
Inattentional blindness belongs to a family of phe-
See also Amnesia; Consciousness and the Unconscious;
nomena that illustrate the central role of attention
Divided Attention and Memory; Memory, Neural Basis in visual awareness. Notably, the characteristics
that differentiate inattentional blindness from these
Further Readings related phenomena are the same characteristics that
make it especially surprising and striking. These
Bowers, J. S., & Marsolek, C. J. (Eds.). (2003). Rethinking characteristics include the degree to which inatten-
implicit memory. New York, NY: Oxford University tional blindness can be sustained over long peri-
Press. ods of time and the degree to which it stems from
Mulligan, N. W. (1998). The role of attention during perceiver-controlled allocation of attention instead
encoding on implicit and explicit memory. Journal of
of from fundamental limitations of the attention
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
system.
Cognition, 24, 2747.
In one of the best known demonstrations of inat-
Roediger, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1993). Implicit
tentional blindness, participants watched a video of
memory in normal human subjects. In F. Boller &
J. Grafman (Eds.), Handbook of neuropsychology
two teams of people, one team wearing black and
(Vol. 8, pp. 63131). Amsterdam, Netherlands:
one team wearing white, interweaving and passing
Elsevier. basketballs among themselves. Participants were
Rovee-Collier, C., Hayne, H., & Colombo, M. (2001). instructed to count the number of passes made by
The development of implicit and explicit memory. one of the two teams; partway through the video,
Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins. a person in a gorilla costume walked through the
Schacter, D. L. (1987). Implicit memory: History and game, stopped in the middle, pounded her chest
current status. Journal of Experimental Psychology: at the camera, and walked away, having remained
Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13, 501518. clearly visible for a full 5 seconds. This unusual
Squire, L. R., Clark, R. E., & Bayley, P. J. (2004). Medial and striking event was clearly seen by anyone not
temporal lobe function and memory. In M. Gazzaniga engaged in the pass-counting task, but fewer than
404 Inattentional Blindness
half of the participants who performed the counting trial, and participants task was to indicate on each
task were aware that it had occurred at all; peoples trial whether the horizontal or vertical extent of the
attention had been so preoccupied with the primary cross was longer. For the first several trials, noth-
counting task that they simply did not attend to the ing but the cross appeared, but on a critical trial, an
gorilla and therefore failed to notice it. The fact that additional item appeared in one of the crosss quad-
the gorilla had been visible for at least 5 seconds rants. Participants were then probed as to whether
and was seen by people not engaged in the counting they had noticed anything besides the cross on that
task underscores the fact that this effect did not stem trial. The results were surprising: Across a number
from fundamental limitations of attention. Indeed, of experiments, about 25% of participants failed to
the gorilla video and similar work on sustained notice the unexpected itemthat is, they were inat-
inattentional blindness have shown that such effects tentionally blind to iteven when it contained fea-
are particularly striking because they can emerge tures such as a unique color or motion signal, both
even when stimuli are clearly visible for extended of which are properties that visual search experi-
periods of time. ments had previously suggested could be perceived
without attention. Interestingly, additional work has
Perception Without Attention: Inattentional suggested that some aspects of perception, such as
Blindness Versus Visual Search the grouping of background elements in a display
in such a way as to affect perceptual judgments,
Although the line of research that inspired the appear to remain intact even when people cannot
gorilla video stretches back at least to the 1970s, report such groupings.
when Ulric Neisser and his colleagues demonstrated In the context of a field dominated by tasks
similar failures of visual awareness, the term inat- involving active search for targets and/or the use
tentional blindness was coined in the 1990s by of implicit (i.e., non-self-report) measures such
Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, who endeavored to as response time, work on inattentional blindness
discover what aspects of a visual scene are per- introduced as least two novel and important fac-
ceived without attention. To provide some back- tors. First, rather than using implicit measures to
ground: The notion that some types of features can make inferences about attention and perception,
be perceived without attention had been supported inattentional blindness experiments probe directly
by earlier research employing what is known as a whether or not a stimulus has been consciously
visual search task, in which participants search perceived. Second, in inattentional blindness experi-
for a predefined target ensconced amid varying set ments, the critical stimulus is unexpected and there-
sizes of non-targets. Under normal circumstances, fore not actively sought. Notably, the first of these
the time it takes to find the target increases as the aspectsthe necessarily retrospective nature of the
number of non-targets in the display increases; this probehas inspired debates about whether inat-
result suggests participants needed to attentionally tentional blindness actually reflects a form of amne-
scrutinize each display item to determine whether sia, in which people see the unexpected object but
it was the target. However, the time it took to find immediately forget it.
certain types of simple features, such as a unique
color or orientation, appeared hardly to increase
Factors Influencing Inattentional Blindness
as the number of non-targets increased, suggest-
ing that such features did not require attention to Of critical importance to demonstrations of inatten-
reach awareness. However, Mack and Rock pointed tional blindness to date is the unexpected nature of
out that visual search experiments cannot elimi- the critical stimulus. Once people know to expect
nate a possible role of attention, as the very act of it, it is difficult to elicit the effect, as the stimulus
searching for a target inherently involves attention. will no longer be fully unattended. Because of this,
To better assess perception without attention, they inattentional blindness experiments tend to provide
developed a task in which participants were retro- one data point per participant; asking participants
spectively probed about their awareness of a stim- whether or not they had seen something the first
ulus that they did not expect. In this task, a cross time around clues them in to its probable presence
typically appeared for 200 milliseconds on each on subsequent trials.
Inattentional Blindness 405
to failures to notice changes to things despite our Most, S. B., Scholl, B. J., Clifford, E. R., & Simons, D. J.
already having registered their appearance. (2005). What you see is what you set: Sustained
Less frequently confused with inattentional blind- inattentional blindness and the capture of awareness.
ness, but more closely related to it in some respects, Psychological Review, 112, 217242.
is the attentional blink. The attentional blink occurs Neisser, U. (1979). The control of information pickup in
when people monitor a rapid stream of stimuli (e.g., selective looking. In A. D. Pick (Ed.), Perception and
with stimuli presented for a 10th of a second or less) its development: A tribute to Eleanor J. Gibson
in order to report two targets. For example, par- (pp. 201219). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our
ticipants might be required to report the two digits
midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic
appearing within a stream of letters. When the two
events. Perception, 28, 10591074.
targets appear close together in the stream (e.g., sep-
Wolfe, J. M. (1999). Inattentional amnesia. In V. Coltheart
arated by only a couple of intervening items), people
(Ed.), Fleeting memories: Cognition of brief visual
often can report the first target but not the second stimuli (pp. 7194). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
one; however, when the two targets appear far apart
in the stream, participants generally can report
both. The similarity to inattentional blindness lies
in the demonstration that failures to notice a stimu- INDEXICAL THOUGHT
lus occur in the absence of attention (in this case,
when attention is preoccupied with the first target). This entry will describe some of the main philosoph-
However, in contrast to inattentional blindness, the ical and psychological puzzles that arise concerning
phenomenon stems from limits in the temporal reso- the kinds of thoughts that are expressed using indexi-
lution of attention and therefore occurs even when cal terms such as I, here, and now. These will include
people know to expect both targets. some puzzles concerning the relation between per-
Inattentional blindness also has strong connec- spectival and objective modes of thought, the signifi-
tions with the literature on attentional capture, in cance of indexical thoughts for the thinkers actions,
which implicit measures such as response times and the possibility of the same indexical thought being
eye movements have been used to suggest what entertained by different thinkers or by the same
types of features grab attention without a persons thinker at different times, and the nature of thoughts
volition. Although the weight of evidence suggests about oneself.
that attention is necessary for conscious perception, An indexical is a linguistic expression whose
there appears to be a dissociation: Stimuli that have reference varies in a rule-governed way with the
been shown to attract attention via implicit measures context of utterance. Standard examples include
have been shown not to similarly grab awareness here, now, and I, which normally refer to the place,
per se. Indeed, there are examples in the literature time, and speaker of the utterance, respectively.
where implicitly measured shifts of attention have Indexical thoughts are thoughts expressible using
been observed despite participants not being aware indexicals. Indexicals, as the word is used here, are
of the attention-capturing stimulus. Such findings to be distinguished from demonstratives such as
suggest that although attention may be necessary for that, whose reference also varies with context but
conscious perception, the allocation of attention can not in the same rule-governed manner (note, how-
also occur without leading to conscious perception. ever, that some writers use indexical or demonstra-
tive for all context-sensitive terms). There is much
Steven B. Most
debate about communication using indexicals (e.g.,
concerning messages saying I am not here now)
See also Attention and Consciousness; Attentional
but because indexical thoughts need not actually be
Blink Effect; Change Blindness; Divided Attention
and Memory; Perceptual Consciousness and
expressed, or might be expressed only in internal
Attention; Visual Search monologue, we can largely set these problems of
communication aside.
Indexical thoughts raise many puzzles. Some
Further Readings
concern the fact that to represent the world indexi-
Mack, A., & Rock, I. (1998). Inattentional blindness. cally is to represent it from ones own perspective
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. or point of view. This is often described in terms
Indexical Thought 407
of egocentricity. To think of a place as nearby and bear is about to attack me. You see what is happen-
to the left, for example, is to think of it as an ego- ing and say, A bear is about to attack you. In one
centric location in an egocentric frame of reference sense, you and I believe the same thing. Yet there are
determined relative to the thinking subject. Indexical systematic differences in our behavior; I roll up in a
thoughts are subjective in that they represent the ball and keep still while you run to get help. Because
world from the subjects point of view. Perception the individuation of beliefs should capture their psy-
is similarly perspectival. Yet we can describe many chological and behavioral role, this suggests that in
states of affairs without using indexicals, and sci- fact you and I have different beliefs, associated with
entific descriptions of the world should normally the different indexicals. However, there are still prob-
avoid indexicals. Much of our conception of real- lems. Suppose I believe that Napoleon gave a speech
ity thus seems to require that we possess map-like here. I walk away, but keep track of my movements
or allocentric representations of the world, that is, through perception. I now believe Napoleon gave a
representations from no particular point of view. speech there, where there refers to the place previ-
One major question, then, concerns how our ego- ously referred to as here. According to the argument
centric and allocentric representations relate to each given earlier, this is a new, different belief. But havent
other and, indeed, how we come to have a concep- I retained a belief, and retained it in a more psycho-
tion of an objective, mind-independent reality at all. logically significant way than in the sense in which
One qualification should be mentioned: Now is you and I shared the same belief about the bear?
an indexical because its reference varies according to This is the problem of cognitive dynamics, raised by
the time of utterance. But according to some theories David Kaplan. A related problem affects commu-
in metaphysics (A-theories), past, present, and future nication. It is sometimes held that communicating
are real, objective properties of times, whereas involves sharing ones thoughts with ones audience.
according to other theories (B-theories), they are But when I say I (or here), you replace it with you
relations analogous to left, up, or near. Hence, if (or there). Does this show that you can never believe
the A-theory is correct, temporal indexical thought what I believe about myself (or about here)?
represents the world in an objective, non-egocentric It is sometimes thought that a complete account
way, whereas if the B-theory is correct, temporal of first-person thought would constitute a complete
indexical thought is egocentric in the same way as account of the self. Much work has focused on
spatial indexical thought. various unusual epistemological features of first-
Indexical thoughts have a special significance for person thought. Among these is the phenomenon of
action. In John Perrys famous example, when one immunity to error through misidentification: There
notices a trail of sugar along the supermarket floor are certain ways of ascribing a property to myself
leaking from someones shopping trolley one thinks such that, even if I could be mistaken about whether
someone is making a mess. But when one realizes I instantiated the property, this could not be because
that the sugar is in fact leaking from ones own trol- I was mistaken about who instantiated the property.
ley one thinks I am making a mess, and one acts Although this phenomenon is arguably shared by
in a different way. Similarly, believing that the meet- some other indexical and demonstrative judgments,
ing begins at 3 p.m. does not have the same signifi- a better account of it may nonetheless help illumi-
cance for ones actions as believing that the meeting nate the nature of first-person thought.
begins in two minutes, or now, or half an hour ago.
Simon Prosser
Merely knowing that one should head north is of
no practical use in itself; one needs to know which See also Concepts and Language; Descriptive Thought;
way north is in egocentric terms, for example, to the Object-Dependent Thought; Self-Consciousness;
right. Thus, as Perry observed, indexicals are essen- Self-Knowledge
tial: One cannot adequately describe an indexical
belief-state using only non-indexical vocabulary, and
perhaps one cannot act at all unless one represents Further Readings
the world indexically. Evans, G. (1982). The varieties of reference (J. McDowell,
Indexical thoughts also raise questions about Ed.). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
the individuation of thoughts. In another of Perrys Kaplan, D. (1989). Demonstratives: An essay on the
examples, suppose that I believe, correctly, that a semantics, logic, metaphysics, and epistemology of
408 Inferences in Language Comprehension
demonstratives and other indexicals. In J. Almog, Understanders also encode the precise, verbatim
J. Perry, & H. Wettstein (Eds.), Themes from Kaplan form of messages but those representations fade
(pp. 481564). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. much faster than proposition networks and situa-
Perry, J. (2000). The problem of the essential indexical and tion models unless they are of special interest or rel-
other essays (Exp. ed.). Stanford, CA: Center for the evance to the understander. Language inferences
Study of Language and Information. (Original work are viewed as predominantly encoded in situation
published 1993) models although possibly in proposition networks
as well.
be bridged to that sentence connect with its implica- a recently stimulated or inspected location compared
tions and serve to sustain them. Lacking such bridg- to a stimulus presented at a previous unstimulated or
ing connections, many elaborative inferences may uninspected location. The IOR effect is often stud-
become deactivated and abandoned. The exception ied using a cue-target paradigm (see Figure 1), made
to this is when other discourse constraints, such as popular by Michael I. Posner and colleagues. In the
the aforementioned roles, properties, and generaliza- cue-target paradigm, participants are asked to fixate
tions, consolidate tentative elaborative inferences. a central cross, flanked by a square on each side.
The first stimulus, referred to as the cue, is a change
Factors Influencing Language Inferences in luminance of one of the two squares. A short
Many factors collaboratively guide peoples lan- time later, a second stimulus, referred to as the tar-
guage inferences. Messages differ in the importance get, is presented inside one of the two squares. Both
and interestingness of their implications and the dis- the cue and the target are equally likely to appear
tance between inferentially related ideas. People vary at both locations. Participants are not required to
in their cognitive resources, basic language skills, and respond to the cue, which is not informative about
previous knowledge about a message. People have either target location or identity. Participants can be
comprehension goals such as learning, memorizing, asked to perform different tasks, such as detecting
or being entertained. Text genres such as the narra- the target (pressing a key wherever the target is pre-
tive, exposition, and description each bear unique sented), localizing its position (reporting the location
linguistic devices and structures. These variables of the target), or discriminating some of its features
have been shown to regulate language inference in (such as its color or shape). Both speed of response
complex, interactive ways. and accuracy are measured as dependent variables.
IOR usually appears at long cue-target intervals.
Murray Singer At shorter intervals (~100500 ms), a brief period
of facilitation is observed, during which time people
See also Conversation and Dialogue; Discourse are faster to respond to a target preceded by a cue at
Processing, Models of; Working Memory in
the same location. The canonical interpretation of
Language Processing
this pattern of results is that attention is briefly cap-
tured by the cue and that, once attention has left the
Further Readings cued location, it is slower to return, hence the name
Graesser, A. C., Singer, M., & Trabasso, T. (1994). inhibition of return. This entry will focus on describ-
Constructing inferences during narrative text ing some essential characteristics of the IOR effect,
comprehension. Psychological Review, 101, 371395. its possible purposes, and the mechanisms underly-
Guraud, S., & OBrien, E. J. (2005). Components of ing its functioning. Finally, the entry will explore the
comprehension [Special issue]. Discourse Processes, consequences of IOR in visual processing as well as
39(23). its neural substrates.
Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Kintsch, W., & Bates, E. (1977). Recognition memory for Characteristics of the IOR Effect
statements from a classroom lecture. Journal of Several characteristics of the IOR effect have been
Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and recognized by using variants of the standard cue-
Memory, 3, 150159. target paradigm. When the task involves either tar-
Schmalhofer, F., McDaniel, M. A., & Keefe, D. E. (2002).
get detection or target localization, the IOR effect is
A unified model for predictive and bridging inferences.
observable at cue-target time intervals of around 300
Discourse Processes, 33, 105132.
milliseconds. When the task involves target identifi-
cation, IOR appears at longer cue-target intervals of
500 milliseconds or longer. The IOR effect is rela-
INHIBITION OF RETURN tively long lasting, and only begins to diminish when
the cue-target interval is approximately 3 seconds or
Inhibition of return (IOR) is an effect whereby peo- longer. It has been established that IOR can be envi-
ple are slower to respond to a stimulus presented at ronmentally coded, such that the IOR is observed
Inhibition of Return 411
that is, principles that are manifested in all human parameter setting did not have the character of
languages. These principles established the bound- learning. Instead, parameters were assumed to be
ary conditions for grammar formation. Children set reflexively. Reflexive responses by a species to
were not expected to deviate from these principles particular inputs are characteristic of genetically
in the course of language development. In addition, determined acquisition in any domain. Similarly, the
universal grammar spells out particular ways in expectation was that parameter values were trig-
which human languages can vary. These points of gered or fixed by experience, as in one-trial learning.
variation are called parameters. This accounted, in part, for the rapidity of childrens
Once parameters were entered into the theory of acquisition of language, as compared with other
universal grammar, many cross-linguistic differences cognitive skills such as the ability to learn to count,
that had previously been assumed to be learned or to draw, or to play a musical instrument.
were reconceived as innately specified properties of Reducing the role of experience by invoking
human languages. So parameter setting is largely a parameters raised new questions, including whether
matter of genetic specification, along with a mini- children should be expected to adopt an initial,
mal, but crucial, contribution from the environment. default parameter value. For some parameters, the
Because both the principles and parameters of uni- answer was affirmative. The initial value for these
versal grammar are innately specified, the principles parameters was determined by a learning mecha-
and parameters theory is a nativist approach to nism, the subset principle, originally proposed by
language acquisition, to be contrasted with nur- Robert Berwick. The subset principle ordered
ture approaches, which view language acquisition parameter values according to the number of lin-
as largely the product of childrens experience. The guistic structures (and corresponding meanings) that
principles and parameters theory enabled research- could be assigned to a linguistic expression. The
ers in child language to formulate and evaluate far- subset principle became operative when the class of
reaching predictions about the course of language languages that adopted one setting of a parameter, P
acquisition, including predictions that were not con- (call these P1 languages), generated fewer structures
sistent with experience-based accounts. This entry for a given type of expression than the class of lan-
ends with a sample of the kinds of insights into child guages that adopted the alternative setting of P (call
language acquisition that have been achieved within these P2 languages). In such cases, the subset prin-
the principles and parameters theory. ciple compels children learning P1 languages and
The introduction of parameters was designed to children learning P2 languages to hypothesize ini-
make language learning easier. This advanced the tially that the local language is a P1 language rather
theory of universal grammar along its stated goal than a P2 language. Children learning P2 languages
of explaining childrens rapid mastery of human are therefore expected to speak a fragment of a
language. Parameters were seen to reduce the role foreign language for a while.
of experience in childrens acquisition of human lan- To recap, experience is needed to set parameters.
guages. Parameter setting was seen to initiate radi- However, to the extent that language variation is
cal changes in child language. Instead of piecemeal explained by innately specified parameters, the role
acquisition of specific constructions, as advocated of experience is minimized, as compared to its role in
by experience-based accounts of language develop- experience-based models of language development.
ment, acquisition was seen to involve the mastery By reducing the imprint of experience on language
of clusters of linguistic phenomena, all in one fell learning, parameters were another vehicle (in addi-
swoop. The metaphor that was often coupled with tion to core linguistic principles) for guaranteeing
descriptions of parameter setting was that of a childrens convergence on correct grammars of
switch, as in a circuit box. The learner set the switch the local language, that is, grammars that are suf-
one way or the other in response to triggering ficiently similar to those of other speakers, so as to
experience. If the switch was set one way, then the permit effortless and seamless communication.
childs grammar assumed one format; if the switch It had been assumed until quite recently that the
was set the other way, the childs grammar assumed language apparatus used in setting parameters was
a different format. specific to language. This assumption has been called
Although experience was a prerequisite to set- into question, however, in the theoretical descendant
ting parameters, it is important to appreciate that of the principles and parameters framework, the
Innateness and Parameter Setting 415
minimalist program. The possibility that parameter resides in the head of NegP. Why, then, do children
setting might involve cognitive principles outside produce negative statements with not until they are
the language faculty is being taken seriously within 3 years old, rather than adult-like statements with
the minimalist program. For example, empirical cant and dont? The answer is that the internal mor-
findings about childrens abilities to mine data, as phology of negative auxiliary verbs is not transpar-
well as considerations of computational efficiency, ent to children younger than 3 years. This delays
have been instrumental in leading researchers to childrens convergence on the adult grammar and
reexamine the nature of parameters. explains why there is a transitional period during
which they analyze cant and dont as adverbs. These
Parameters in Child Language words form unanalyzed chunks for children, which
function just like the adverb not.
This section describes two parameters. The first The negative auxiliary verb doesnt resists this
parameter illustrates how changing the setting of a analysis. Doesnt has third person agreement inter-
parameter can have wide repercussions in childrens nal to the word (I do, you do, he does). This fact
grammars. The second parameter invokes the sub- encourages children to decompose the negative
set principle. Both parameters reveal differences auxiliary verb doesnt into three heads: do + s + nt.
between child and adult language, phenomena that The appearance of doesnt may, therefore, be criti-
resist explanation on experience-based accounts of cal evidence for children to add a negation phrase
language development and comport better with the NegP to their grammars. Adding NegP, in turn,
nativist approach. causes children to switch to the alternative value of
the negation parameter, according to which negation
The Negation Parameter
is a head rather than an adverb.
Young childrens negative statements bear little During the initial period, when negation is
resemblance to their adult counterparts. Childrens an adverb, child and adult language differ in sev-
negative statements often contain not (e.g., I not eral ways. One difference was mentioned earlier:
hurt him), whereas the corresponding statements Childrens early negative utterances contain not
by adults (I didnt hurt him) contain auxiliary verbs where adults use negative auxiliaries and the clitic
(e.g., do) with an appended clitic form of negation form of negation nt. A second difference involves
nt. English-speaking adults use not for sentential the tense/agreement marker. Where adults would
negation only about 10% of the time, whereas say It doesnt fit, children younger than 3 years old
some English-speaking children do not begin using permit It not fits. Here, children are associating the
the clitic form of negation nt until after age 3. The tense/agreement marker with the main verb.
negation parameter was postulated to explain this A third difference is that children avoid negative
mismatch between caretaker input and childrens questions like What dont you like? In an elicita-
output. The present version of the negation param- tion production study, the most frequent structure
eter is based on work by Hedde Zeijlstra and by produced by the 4-year-old children contained
Rosalind Thornton and Graciela Tesan. auxiliary doubling, for example, Do you dont like
Across languages, negation can either be an cheese? and What do you dont like? In these ques-
adverb or the head of the negation phrase, labeled tions, the auxiliary verb do precedes the subject
NegP (a noun is the head of a noun phrase, NP; a noun phrase you, and the negative auxiliary dont
verb is the head of a verb phrase, VP; and so on). follows it. These non-adult negative questions are
The initial value of the negation parameter analyzes expected if negation is analyzed as an adverb, and
negation as an adverb. Children do not project a if dont is also an adverb, and not morphologically
phrasal category such as NegP unless they encounter decomposed.
evidence that this category is required in the local A fourth difference concerns childrens use of
language. If the negation phrase NegP is initiated negative auxiliary verbs in tag questions. In this
by relevant input, children posit that negation is the construction, a statement is followed by a tag
head of that phrase and not an adverb after all. that turns it into a question. For example, You like
There is abundant evidence that standard English cheese, dont you? bears the tag dont you, which is
requires a negation phrase, because the clitic form of a reduced yes/no question, with the auxiliary pre-
negation nt in negative auxiliaries (e.g., cant, dont) ceding the subject NP. Because young children avoid
416 Innateness and Parameter Setting
subject-auxiliary inversion, it is not surprising that why negative concord is a prototypical feature of
childrens early productions lack tag questions. creole languages.
1. Ted didnt order sushi or pasta. Mandarin-speaking adults generally accepted sen-
tences like (1) in circumstances corresponding to
In English, negation takes scope over the disjunction the not both reading, Mandarin-speaking chil-
word (or) in negative statements like (1). This is one dren rejected them in these circumstances the vast
value of the disjunction parameter. majority of the time. For children, the Mandarin
In contrast to English, adult speakers of Mandarin word for disjunction (huozhe) received a both not
do not generate a conjunctive entailment when the interpretation, just as or does in English. For adults,
Mandarin word for disjunction (huozhe) appears by contrast, disjunction received a not both
in simple negative sentences. Mandarin adopts the interpretation.
alternative value of the disjunction parameter, as The observed differences in interpretation by
compared to English. The translation of the English children and adults are difficult to explain on an
sentence (1) into Mandarin is (2). experience-based account of language develop-
ment. Clearly, Mandarin-speaking children were
2. (Wo cai) Ted meiyou dian shousi huozhe not basing their interpretation on the parental input.
yidalimianshi. Children effectively ignore some of the primary lin-
(I guess) Ted not order sushi or pasta. guistic data, at least for a while, as they follow the
natural seams of human languages. At any given
Its sushi or pasta that Ted did not order.
time, children are speaking a possible human lan-
In Mandarin, disjunction (huozhe) takes scope over guage, but not necessarily the language that is being
negation (meiyou) in negative statements like (2). spoken around them. Such findings are evidence for
Mandarin-speaking adults accept this sentence if Ted the innateness of parameters, as anticipated by the
ordered pasta but not sushi, and they accept it if Ted theory of universal grammar.
ordered sushi but not pasta. Lastly, adults accept the Stephen Crain and
same sentence if Ted ordered neither pasta nor sushi. Rosalind Thornton
Recall that this last circumstance corresponds to the
unique reading of the English sentence (1). So the See also Language Development; Planning in Language
English sentence (1) is true in just one circumstance, Production; Production of Language
~P & ~S, whereas its Mandarin counterpart (2) is
true in this circumstance, but it is also true in other Further Readings
circumstances as well, where ~P or ~S. So, the cir-
cumstances in which the English sentence (1) is true, Baker, M. (2001). The atoms of language. New York, NY:
~P & ~S, comprises a subset of the circumstances in Basic Books.
which the Mandarin sentence (2) is true. Therefore, Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: Its nature,
the subset principle should be operative when chil- origin, and use. New York, NY: Praeger.
Chomsky, N. (2000). New horizons in the study of
dren are setting the disjunction parameter.
language and mind. New York, NY: Cambridge
The subset principle dictates that, whenever
University Press.
parameter values are in a subset/superset relation,
Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (1998). Investigations in universal
children must initially select the subset value, to avoid
grammar: A guide to experiments on the acquisition of
the proliferation of interpretations beyond those of syntax and semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
the target language. Thus, the subset principle antici- Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (2006). Acquisition of syntax
pates that childrens initial (default) setting will be and semantics. In M. Traxler & M. Gernsbacher (Eds.),
the subset (both not) reading. If so, Mandarin- Handbook of psycholinguistics (2nd ed.,
speaking children should initially interpret (2) in the pp. 10731110). London, UK: Academic Press.
same way as English-speaking children and adults Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (2012). Syntax acquisition.
interpret (1), despite the absence of evidence for WIREs Cognitive Science, 3(2), 185203.
this interpretation in the adult input. Researchers in Guasti, M. T. (2002). Language acquisition: The growth
child language have investigated this prediction, and of grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
the findings were exactly as anticipated. Whereas Yang, C. (2006). The infinite gift. New York, NY: Scribner.
418 Inner Speech
discourses. Its development in early childhood has empirical exploration. Finally, the universality of
been linked to a domain-general shift toward ver- inner speech remains an assumption that must be
bal mediation of cognition and behavior. Vygotskys tested empirically and conceptually, which will in
ideas on the functional significance of inner speech turn partly depend on further critical examination of
increasingly figure in modern research into the the assumption of homogeneity. If there are several
executive functions, the heterogeneous set of cogni- distinct varieties of inner speech, then many of our
tive capacities responsible for the planning, inhibi- conclusions about its occurrence and psychological
tion, and control of behavior. The dialogic nature significance may need to be revisited.
of inner speech has been proposed to be important
Charles Fernyhough
for capacities such as social understanding and cre-
ativity. Inner speech is also richly implicated in con- See also Conversation and Dialogue; Language
sciousness and self-understanding. Awareness of Development; Self-Consciousness
inner speech may provide important information for
metacognitive understanding of ones own mental
Further Readings
processes, and the internal generation of verbally
expressed higher order thoughts may play a part in Fernyhough, C., & Jones, S. R. (in press). Thinking aloud
conscious awareness. To the extent that it provides a about mental voices. In F. Macpherson & D. Platchias
running commentary on ones actions, inner speech (Eds.), Hallucination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
is potentially important in self-understanding and Morin, A. (2005). Possible links between self-awareness
the articulation of views about the self. and inner speech. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 12,
Interest in inner speech has further been stimu- 115134.
lated by its implication in disorders of conscious- Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In R. W.
ness. Auditory verbal hallucinations (associated Rieber & A. S. Carton (Eds.), The collected works
with schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders) of L. S. Vygotsky (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Plenum.
are thought to stem from a misidentification of (Original work published 1934)
ones own self-generated inner speech as having an
external source, supported by findings of impaired
source-monitoring in voice-hearers and commonali- INTELLIGENCE, NEURAL BASIS
ties in neural activation between auditory verbal hal-
lucinations and inner speech. Intelligence, however defined, is in the brain. This
entry explains why intelligence has a neural basis
and how researchers are progressing toward the
Future Directions potential ability to enhance intelligence by manip-
A number of open research questions will poten- ulating biology. For research purposes, intelligence
tially shape future research into inner speech. is reliably defined by tests of mental abilities that
Conceptual challenges include providing greater have a common general factor, usually designated g.
specificity about important concepts such as inter- Genetics play a predominate role in explaining indi-
nalization and charting areas of overlap and dif- vidual differences in both general intelligence and
ference with other key processes such as subvocal brain structure. Because genes work through biol-
rehearsal in working memory. Methodological chal- ogy, there must be an important biological basis to
lenges include improving the experimental elicita- intelligence, and this is the starting point for neuro-
tion of inner speech and further refining experience science investigations. Once salient brain properties
sampling techniques. Research on private speech are identified, such as regional gray matter volume
in children as an empirically observable precursor or white matter integrity, further research can iden-
of inner speech will benefit from improved meth- tify other biological and nonbiological factors that
odologies for coding and classifying private utter- can influence these properties at any time during the
ances and empirical advances in the developmental life span. An understanding of the neurobiological
cognitive neuroscience of the executive functions. factors related to intelligence will likely have impli-
The motivational and emotional aspects of inner cations for optimizing brain development, learning,
speech, largely neglected to date, remain ripe for and cognitive performance for children and adults.
420 Intelligence, Neural Basis
Treatments for the low intellectual ability that however, remain unresolved. Several neuroimag-
defines mental retardation might be possible in some ing studies, for example, indicate that the networks
cases. Concern about Alzheimers disease has stimu- related to intelligence, and the way they develop
lated researchers to focus on the potential for drugs through childhood, differ for males and females,
to increase learning and memory, two central aspects even when matched on intelligence. This suggests
of intelligence. This raises a question as to whether at least two different brain architectures can lead to
any such successful drug, aimed at neurotransmit- the same cognitive performance. There also may be
ter systems and synaptic activity, could be used in separate brain networks for specific mental abilities
persons without brain disease to increase general like musical talent, artistic rendering, or mathemati-
intelligence or even specific cognitive abilities related cal calculation that have limited overlap with net-
to but not the same as g (e.g., mathematical reason- works for general intelligence, as suggested by rare
ing or musical ability). With these powerful motiva- cases of autistic savants. Another important open
tions, neuroscience studies of intelligence are driven question is whether differences in intelligence among
by increasingly sophisticated technology. people may be related to differences in how indi-
vidual neurons function. For example, some people
may have more efficient mitochondria (the part of
Neuroimaging Studies
the cell that produces energy) per neuron than other
Both clinical lesion studies in humans and experi- people. Characteristics of synapses and neurotrans-
mental lesion studies in animals indicate that intelli- mitter systems differ among individuals as well. It
gence is represented throughout the brain in specific would be odd if such brain differences had no effect
networks rather than in a single specific part of the on cognitive abilities or intelligence.
brain like the frontal lobes. Neuroimaging studies in
humans over the past 20 years have begun to iden-
The New Nature Versus Nurture Challenge
tify these networks in some detail. Several functional
imaging studies using techniques like positron emis- The role of genes in many of these brain parameters
sion tomography, functional magnetic resonance is especially important. For example, both IQ scores
imaging, and the electroencephalogram, show that and the amount of gray and white matter appear to
high scores on tests of general intelligence are related have genes in common. The idea that intelligence
to decreased brain activity in some circumstances. may be under strong genetic control usually is inter-
This suggests that the efficiency of information flow preted to mean that intelligence is relatively fixed, as
throughout specific networks may be a key vari- it is apparently not much influenced by environmen-
able. Structural magnetic resonance imaging studies tal factors found within families. However, there
indicate that higher general intelligence scores are already is evidence that genetic manipulation of
related to increased gray and white matter in spe- specific receptors can lead to enhanced learning and
cific brain areas and to regional cortical thickness, as memory in mice. Moreover, the Human Genome
well as to whole brain size. A comprehensive review Project has resulted in rethinking simplistic genetic
of neuroimaging studies proposed that a parietal- determinism because each gene can be expressed in
frontal network underlies individual differences in multiple ways. There are biological and environmen-
general intelligence, and recent evidence supports tal factors, called epigenetic factors, which influence
this view. These studies raise the possibility of replac- gene expression through mechanisms not yet under-
ing traditional psychometric testing with neuro- stood. Individual differences in intelligence may
metrics, meaning that intelligence can be defined be based on such interactions that likely influence
and assessed by the size or shape of brain structures, structural and functional brain characteristics. These
or even by measuring the speed of information flow influences may differ according to age and sex, and
throughout salient networks with advanced tech- they may help account for rising IQ scores observed
niques like magnetoencephalography. over the past several decades. It may be possible to
Research results in the emerging field of neuro- manipulate the genetic influence on intelligence by
intelligence already provide strong validation manipulating epigenetic factors once they are identi-
for psychometric tests of intelligence by showing fied and the neuroscience is better understood. As
scores are related to brain properties. Many issues, a consequence of this complex challenge, it may be
Intelligence and Working Memory 421
possible to increase intelligence and other cognitive which was proposed by Charles Spearman in 1904.
abilities in ways not now imagined. In a groundbreaking review and set of empirical
studies, Spearman determined that all manner of
Richard J. Haier
assessments of intellectual competence (e.g., grades
See also Flynn Effect: Rising Intelligence Scores;
in various school courses, performance on basic per-
Heritability; Intelligence and Working Memory ceptual processes tasks) are positively correlateda
concept that has become known as positive mani-
fold. That is, if an individual performs well on one
Further Readings
measure of intellectual competence, that individual
Deary, I. J., Penke, L., & Johnson, W. (2010). The is more likely to perform better than average on any
neuroscience of human intelligence differences. other measure of intellectual competence. Some of
Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(3), 201211. these correlations are relatively small, but among
Haier, R. J. (2009). Neuro-intelligence, neuro-metrics and course grades, the correlations are more substantial.
the next phase of brain imaging studies. Intelligence, The implication of this pattern of correlations is that
37(2), 121123. they define an underlying psychological factor that
Jung, R., & Haier, R. (2007). The parieto-frontal represents a general ability. The factor is present to
integration theory (P-FIT) of intelligence: Converging a much greater degree in some measures (such as
neuroimaging evidence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, mathematics or language grades) than it is in other
30(2), 135154. measures (such as the ability to discriminate among
Schmithorst, V. J. (2009). Developmental sex differences in sounds that have very small differences in pitch).
the relation of neuroanatomical connectivity to
The factor was identified by Spearman as general
intelligence. Intelligence, 37(2), 164173.
intelligence (g). From this basic finding, Spearman
Tang, Y. P., Shimizu, E., Dube, G. R., Rampon, C.,
argued that if one wants to estimate an individuals
Kerchner, G. A., Zhuo, M., . . . Tsien, J. Z. (1999).
intelligence, it doesnt particularly matter what spe-
Genetic enhancement of learning and memory in mice.
Nature, 401(6748), 6369.
cific measures one chooses to administer or assess,
as long as the measures have substantial satura-
tions or loadings on the general factor. Adding up
INTELLIGENCE AND WORKING the scores on a series of tests may provide a reason-
MEMORY able estimate of the individuals standing on the gen-
eral intelligence factor. Spearman also argued that
an individuals general intelligence is fixedthat
For much of the past century, many psychologists is, it does not change as one develops through child-
have sought to find a sort of Rosetta Stone that will hood and adulthood; it is essentially fixed at birth.
allow for mapping the construct of intelligence on Later developments in the tradition of Spearmans
the one hand to more fundamental underlying psy- general intelligence theory involved a series of
chological processes on the other hand. Although the investigations where researchers attempted to find
construct of intelligence was developed early in the particular tests that were highly saturated with
history of modern psychology, working memory is general intelligence, in the hope of finding just
a recent conceptualization from basic experimental one test that could accurately provide an assess-
psychology. Attempts to link individual differences ment of an individuals intelligence. After several
in intelligence to individual differences in working attempts, Spearman and his colleagues settled on a
memory capacity have been controversial, but in the test of abstract inductive reasoning, called Ravens
end, working memory appears to be just one, albeit Progressive Matrices test, in the 1930s. Since the
an influential, component of a broader structure of 1930s, there have been many studies of individual
intellectual abilities. differences in performance on the Raven test, and
in the 1980s forward, it has been a central focus of
Intelligence
experimental psychologists who seek basic infor-
Two distinct traditions for the construct of intelli- mation processing tests that have high correlations
gence developed over the course of the past century. with performance on the Raven test. The underlying
The first is the concept of general intelligence (or g), theorizing of these investigators is that if a task that
422 Intelligence and Working Memory
is more basic than the Raven test (such as simple or Working Memory
choice reaction time, or basic memory tests) but also
The concept of working memory was introduced
correlates highly with performance on the Raven
by Alan Baddeley in the 1970s. The concept was
test, then it may represent the fundamental underly-
rooted in prior efforts to classify and understand,
ing processes that lead to individual differences in
from an experimental psychology perspective, the
intellectual ability. It is, however, important to note
basic building blocks for cognitive functioning.
that the Raven test is mainly an assessment instru-
Earlier theories and research in the 1950s and 1960s
ment for research purposesit has relatively modest
suggested that people have separate storage systems
correlations with real-world performance, such as
for short-term memory (which lasts for seconds if
academic achievement or occupational success.
the information is not consciously attended to) and
The second tradition for intelligence theory is
long-term memory (which is a more permanent stor-
based on an underlying interest in practical applica-
age system). These storage systems accounted for a
tion, especially in the prediction of academic success.
wide range of experimental phenomena, but failed to
Shortly after the introduction of Spearmans concept
account for how people manipulate information in
of general intelligence, Alfred Binet and Thodore
conscious attention and for other aspects of the cog-
Simon introduced a set of scales for the assessment
nitive information processing system. Baddeley and
of intelligence, in the context of predicting whether
his colleagues proposed instead that the information
students would succeed or fail in elementary school
processing system is made up of a central executive
settings. The approach adopted by Binet was fun-
and two subsidiary systems. The central executive is
damentally different from that of Spearman. First,
involved in planning and manipulating information
Binet conceptualized intelligence as something that
in conscious attention, while the phonological loop
was not constant; that is, it developed during child-
(the first subsystem) operates on speech-based infor-
hood and adolescence. In addition, intelligence
mation, and the visuospatial sketchpad (the second
could not be indexed by a single measure; rather, it
subsystem) operates on visual images.
was made up of many different components, such as
From this theoretical perspective, several tasks
memory, judgment, reasoning, vocabulary, and so
have been developed that allow assessment of dif-
on. Although one could obtain a single estimate of
ferent aspects of the central executive and subsys-
a childs intelligence, accurate assessment required
tems. The underlying theme of researchers who
measurement of many different aspects of intellec-
assess individual differences in these processes is
tual functioning. The accuracy of the intelligence
that some individuals have greater capabilities to
assessment for Binet and his colleagues was deter-
manipulate and store information and other indi-
mined by how well the scores on his scales corre-
viduals have lesser capabilities for these activities.
lated with academic success or failure.
Individuals with high levels of working memory
The Binet approach for assessing intelligence
capacity can keep track of more items and oper-
ultimately became the standard for future applied
ate on them (e.g., compare, order, transform, and
assessments. Modern intelligence tests, such as those
so on) than individuals with low levels of working
of David Wechsler and the Stanford-Binet, have
memory capacity. A most important characteristic
many of the same underlying components as Binets
of working memory tasks is that they tend to use
original scales published in 1905. However, because
simple stimuli (common words, one- or two-digit
the approach adopted by Binet and his followers
numbers, and simple addition or subtraction), rather
specifies that intelligence is both broad and con-
than unusual vocabulary words, cultural concepts,
text-dependent (in the sense that culturally bound
or complex math.
knowledge and skills are important components of
cognitive functioning), this approach is not generally
Linkages Between Intelligence
amenable to a search for a single or a few underlying
and Working Memory
processes that lead to individual differences in intel-
lectual functioning. As a result, there are relatively In the 1980s and 1990s, a few investigators suggested
few investigations that have attempted to link this that substantial positive correlations could be found
kind of intelligence measure to basic experimental between measures of working memory capacity on
processes. the one hand, and measures of intelligence on the
Intelligence and Working Memory 423
other hand. From a theoretical perspective, a cor- one hand, and measures of intellectual abilities on
relation close to 1.0 between such measures would the other hand, some researchers conducted a meta-
indicate that these are closely related constructs and, analysis. A meta-analysis entails collecting all of the
in turn, might suggest that the limiting process for studies that have been conducted on the topic, cat-
high intelligence is the ability to store and manipulate egorizing each different working memory test and
items with working memory. From a practical per- each different intellectual ability test, and then aver-
spective, if the correlations between these measures aging the different results to get a robust estimate
are close to 1.0, then, for most intents and purposes, of the overall relationships between the measures.
one could administer a test of working memory and This technique, developed in the 1980s, is a useful
obtain an accurate assessment of intellectual abil- way of summarizing multiple studies of the same
ity. Some investigators boldly proposed that work- general topic, and it minimizes a number of biases
ing memory and intelligence were isomorphic, that and errors that can be found in individual studies,
is, that individual differences in working memory especially when the studies have small samples or
capacity were the same as individual differences in few measures to assess the underlying constructs.
intelligence. Both such claims and the basis for the In the final meta-analysis, the results suggest that
claims were controversial, for two main reasons. many measures of working memory are indeed cor-
The first controversial aspect of these claims was related with measures of intelligence, but at a much
that they were predicated most centrally on corre- more modest level than was claimed by those who
lations between measures of working memory and hoped that working memory represented the essence
intellectual ability measures of the kind that were of intellectual functioning. The estimated correlation
developed to assess Spearmans g; that is, measures between the two constructs was about .50, meaning
of abstract reasoning such as the Raven test that that working memory accounts for about as much
were mainly devoid of cultural or verbal content. variance in broad measures of intelligence as other,
These tests capture only one aspect of general intel- more traditional, ability measures, such as vocabu-
ligence, that is, the part of intellectual functioning lary, numerical reasoning, spatial visualization, and
that is associated with nonverbal content. In addi- so on. Individual differences in working memory
tion, these tests were not highly correlated with aca- are undoubtedly related to individual differences in
demic success, as are the Binet-inspired tests, and as intelligence, but it appears clear that working mem-
a result, the association between working memory ory is not the single limiting factor for intellectual
capacity and aspects of intelligence that have clear functioning.
real-world implications was not known.
The second controversial aspect of these claims Phillip L. Ackerman
was a function of how working memory capacity
See also Flynn Effect: Rising Intelligence Scores;
was measured. In many studies, researchers used a
Intelligence, Neural Basis; Working Memory
technique called extreme-groups study. That is,
instead of testing a group of individuals with a wide
range of talent (such as would be obtained if one ran- Further Readings
domly sampled from the population at large), these
Ackerman, P. L., Beier, M. E., & Boyle, M. O. (2005).
researchers would test a large number of individuals
Working memory and intelligence: The same or
and eliminate all but those with extremely high and
different constructs? Psychological Bulletin, 131,
extremely low scores on the working memory test. 3060.
Then, they would look to see if these extreme groups Baddeley, A. (1986). Working memory. New York, NY:
also had differences in mean performance levels on Oxford University Press.
intellectual ability measures. The problem with this Binet, A., & Simon, T. (1961). New methods for the
kind of research design is that it overestimates the diagnosis of the intellectual level of subnormals. In
differences between individuals, sort of like look- J. J. Jenkins & D. G. Paterson (Eds.) & E. S. Kite
ing at basketball performance of extremely tall and (Trans.), Studies of individual differences: The search
extremely short groups of people. for intelligence (pp. 9096). New York, NY: Appleton-
To provide a better sense of the actual relation- Century-Crofts. (Reprinted from Binet, A., & Simon, T.
ship between measures of working memory on the [1905]. LAnne Psychologique, 11, 191244).
424 Intension and Extension
Daneman, M., & Carpenter, P. A. (1980). Individual that the predicate applies to in this possible world,
differences in working memory and reading. Journal of and reserve the set of all actual and possible things
Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19(4), 450466. the predicate applies to for the role of an intension.
Engle, R. W. (2002). Working memory capacity as (See the suggestion by David Lewis in 1970 about
executive attention. Current Directions in Psychological extensions.)
Science, 11(1), 1923. As well as disputes about what sort of things
Kyllonen, P. C., & Christal, R. E. (1990). Reasoning ability should be considered to be the extensions of predi-
is (little more than) working-memory capacity?! cates, names, and sentences, there have also been
Intelligence, 14(4), 389433.
theories that extend the notion of extension to other
Spearman, C. (1904). General intelligence, objectively
parts of language. Quantifier expressions (all cats,
determined and measured. American Journal of
most sailors, etc.) are assigned extensions in some
Psychology, 15, 201293.
kinds of generalized quantifier theory. Descriptions
(the first King of England, a cat in my garden)
are sometimes assigned extensions, either by treating
INTENSION AND EXTENSION them as a kind of quantifier expression or by treating
their extensions as the things they apply to. Extensions
Intension and extension are terms of philosophical could be attributed to other pieces of language as well.
art in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and
the philosophy of mind. Unfortunately, these wide-
spread terms of art are used somewhat differently by Intensions
different theorists. Perhaps the best way to proceed Intensions, on the other hand, are often treated as
is to describe orthodox uses of the terms intension features of meaning that determine the extensions
and extension and then to note why some writers of words. The intension of a predicate might be a
use them differently. concept or something that describes the things that
fall under the predicate. Or it might be a property,
such that things fall in the extension of the predi-
Extensions
cate if they possess that property. Or it might be a
Here is a basic package of views about what exten- function from possible worlds to extensionsgiven
sions are. The extension of a predicate is the set the relevant possible world as an input, it delivers
of objects that it applies to. The extension of is a the extension of the expression as an output. On
rabbit is the set of rabbits, for example, and the this conception of the intension of predicates, these
extension of runs is the set of running things. intensions would in effect code information about
The extension of a name is the thing it is the name which things would have which features, given dif-
of. The extension of George W. Bush is a certain ferent alternatives to this world.
ex-president, for example. The extension of a sen- A similar range of options exist for names. The
tence is a truth-value: normally there are thought to intension of a name might be some concept or
be two truth-values, True and False. Sometimes it description that picks out the thing it is the name of.
is thought that an extension is the thing, or things, Or it might be a property such that only one thing
out there in the world that are picked out by (the thing named) has that property. Or it might be
pieces of language. a set of properties that together uniquely character-
In the years since Gottlob Frege first presented ize the object named. (This approach comes from
this package of views about extensions, some theo- the work of Richard Montague.) Or it might be a
rists have offered slightly different accounts of the function from possible worlds to objects. Finally, the
extensions of these expressions. Some people are intension of a sentence might be a full thought, or
suspicious of sets, or of giving sets a role in the a description of the circumstances under which it is
meanings of ordinary pieces of language. They might true. Or it might be a proposition that, together with
interpret the extension of a predicate as the things, how things are, determines a truth-value. Or it might
collectively, that the word applies to (the rabbits are be a function from possible worlds to truth-values
the extension of rabbit). Other people think that given a world and a sentence, the function yields the
the extension of a predicate is only the set of things extension (i.e., the truth-value) of the sentence.
Intension and Extension 425
There is significant variation in what theorists conjunction is true in the intersection of the two sets
take intensions to be. The most prominent theory of worlds where each of the conjuncts is true.
of intensions, however, treats intensions as being One aim of many theories of meaning is to pro-
ultimately defined using possible worlds and set vide a compositional semantics for linguistic expres-
theory. Possible worlds are alternative ways things sions. Specify the meanings of the expressions, and
could have gone. One reason they are invoked is to specify the way they are put together, and the theory
show not just what words do apply to but how they should predict the meaning of the larger expres-
would have applied if things had gone differently. sion produced. The goal of semantic theories like
Montague was perhaps the chief pioneer of the tra- Montagues is to assign intensions to every part of
dition of taking intensions to be built up from pos- language and then formulate general principles that
sible worlds and the contents of those worlds, and allow us to determine the intensions of complex
this treatment of intensions is now common among expressions from the intensions of their constitu-
philosophers of language but especially among ents. Some theories of meaning try to get by without
semanticists in linguistics. One way to do this is to postulating intensions, and instead provide rules for
treat intensions as functions from possible worlds to determining the extensions of sentences by specifying
extensions: in effect, to treat the intension as a rule the extensions of some of the sentences constituents.
for assigning pieces of language various extensions Such theories are much less likely to assign exten-
given different specifications of how the world turns sions to every piece of language used in the sentence,
out. So the intension for is a rabbit takes a world however, because there seem to be insurmountable
w as input and delivers a set of possible objects as problems for determining extensions for expressions
an outputthe set of objects that are rabbits in w. such as necessarily.
The intension of a sentence is then a function from
worlds to truth-values. We could equivalently rep-
Extensional and Intensional Contexts
resent such an intension as the set of worlds where
the sentence is true, since the set of worlds where A traditional place extensions and intensions have
the sentence is true is the one that is mapped to the played a role in philosophy of language is in specify-
truth-value True by a function from worlds to truth- ing the difference between an extensional context
values. There are a number of proposals for assign- and an intensional context. An extensional con-
ing intensions to names. One of the simplest would text is a position in a sentence where coextensive
be a function from worlds to possible objects in that expressions can be substituted without changing
world (i.e., the object named in that world). An even the truth-value of the overall sentence. For exam-
simpler intension of a name would be just the object ple, Jon occurs in an extensional context in Jon
itselfwe could maintain that the name names hugs Mary. Any other expression with the same
that very object, no matter what possible world we extension as Jon could be substituted there. For
consider. example, if one of Jons other names was Jonathan
Contemporary semantic theories assign inten- Dodgson, then the sentence Jonathan Dodgson
sions to many other categories than proper names, hugs Mary would have to have the same truth-
predicates, and sentences. For example, in the tradi- value as our original sentence Jon hugs Mary. If
tion of defining intensions as set-theoretic construc- definite descriptions such as the nicest postman
tions from possible worlds and individuals, one way in Grimsby have extensions (a controversial mat-
to specify the intension of the word and is as a func- ter), and that expression happened to be coextensive
tion from two sets of worlds to one set of worlds, with Jon, then we could substitute it and be sure
in particular, the function that takes two sets of of getting a statement with the same truth-value.
worlds and delivers their intersection. To see how Some places in sentences, however, are inten-
this works, notice that we can treat the proposition sional. Not just the extension of the expression in
expressed by a sentence as the set of worlds that are that place matters to the truth-value of the claim,
as the sentence says things are. When we have two but the intension does as well. Take our previous
sentences and connect them with and, the resulting example again, and suppose Jon and the nicest
sentence is true when, and only when, both of the postman in Grimsby have the same extension (they
initial two sentences are true. In other words, the both pick out Jonathan Dodgson). Mary believes
426 Intension and Extension
Jon is a postman may come apart in truth-value not normally tired at or about anything at the end
from Mary believes the nicest postman in Grimsby of a long day, even when it is more mental tiredness
is a postman. Mary may not have talked to Jon than physical tiredness.
about his work, but she is still capable of working Talk about intentionality is often intensional
out that the nicest postman in Grimsby must at least (with an s). Belief reports are often intensional, as
be a postman. This shows that Mary believes ___ is are many other reports of mental states. Other men-
a postman can be an intensional context. Predicates tal states are directed but seem to require descrip-
can also appear in intensional contexts. Suppose, as tion in ways that create non-extensional contexts.
seems plausible, that all and only giant pandas are For example, the sheriff might hunt for Robin Hood
vegetarian bears (i.e., is a giant panda and is a but not hunt for Robin of Locksley (he may even
vegetarian bear have the same extension). A zoo- have enlisted Robin of Locksleys assistance to help
keeper might say about the zoos brown bear, If him hunt for the dangerous outlaw). Or at least this
we train Growley to eat only tofu, Growley would seems true for one use of hunts for. The expres-
be a vegetarian bear. It would not thereby be true sion hunt for seems to create a non-extensional
that If we train Growley to eat only tofu, Growley context and picks out an intentional state of the
would be a giant panda. If . . . then . . . construc- sheriff, or at least a partially intentional state of the
tions, therefore, can be intensional contexts. sheriff, as hunting might involve an activity as well
as a mental state.
The home of the concepts of extension and inten-
Intension, Hyperintension,
sion is the theory of language. However, they are
and Intentionality
also important in the philosophy of mind: Mental
Places in sentences are called hyperintensional when representations may well also have extensions and
substituting expressions with the same possible- intensions, and theorizing about these seems indis-
worlds intensions can produce a difference in truth- pensable to theories of mental content. How the
value. Belief contexts are like this: In the previous notions of extension and intension apply to mental
example, Jon and Jonathan Dodgson have representation depends, of course, on what mental
the same intension according to many theories, representations are like. If mental representation is
but Mary might not believe that Jon is Jonathan via a language of thought, the distinction drawn for
Dodgson, if she knows about Jonathan Dodgson as languages can just be applied as is. If mental rep-
the author of her favorite novels but Jon as the local resentation works in other ways, the account may
postman. On the other hand, she does believe that have to be different. Still, theories of mental content
Jonathan Dodgson is Jonathan Dodgson, so we can- will probably need to take account of intensional
not substitute the two names in our belief reports phenomena as well as extensional ones: The repre-
without affecting truth-value. Hyperintensional sentational character of a complete thought is not
contexts may signal that we need something more exhausted by its truth-value, nor can the mental rep-
complex than possible-worlds intensions for a resentations of objects be exhaustively characterized
theory of meaning. by specifying which object is represented. It matters
It is important to distinguish intensionality (with how objects are represented, and those differences in
an s) from intentionality (with a t), especially since representation are analogous to the way that pieces
they are often used about similar subject matters. of language that refer to objects can have the same
Intentionality (with a t) is perhaps best glossed as extension but differ in intension.
aboutness, or as the ability of mental states in
Daniel Nolan
particular to represent other things. Belief states are
intentional, for example, because they have con- See also Concepts and Language; Descriptions;
tents: a belief that John is hungry is about John and Representational Theory of Mind
is also perhaps about being hungry. Franz Brentano
famously claimed that all mental states were inten-
Further Readings
tional, although this is not obviously true. Perhaps
being tired, for example, is at least in part a mental Frege, G. (1952). On sense and reference. In M. Black &
state, but is not obviously about anything. We are P. Geach (Eds.), Translations from the philosophical
Intentionality of Bodily Sensation 427
writings of Gottlob Frege (pp. 5678). Oxford, UK: sensations. For example, some argue that the phe-
Blackwell. (Original work published 1892) nomenological difference between an itch on your
Lewis, D. (1970). General semantics. Synthese, 22, nose and an itch on your back is best accommo-
1867. dated by holding that such bodily sensations involve
Montague, R. (1973). The proper treatment of experiences that are intentionally directed toward
quantification in ordinary English. In J. Hintikka, J. different locations. If a bodily sensation, such as a
Moravcsik, & P. Suppes (Eds.), Approaches to natural tickle, is identified with something that is felt to have
language: Proceedings of the 1970 Stanford Workshop a location on some part of ones body, then argu-
on Grammar and Semantics (pp. 221242). Dordrecht,
ably the bodily sensation is not itself an intentional
Netherlands: Reidel.
mental state or event. Rather, the experience of it
Montague, R. (1974). Formal philosophy (R. Thomason,
is. To mark this distinction, two distinct sensation
Ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
terms are sometimes introduced: one that refers to
the sensation as intentional experience (henceforth,
SE) and one that refers to the object it is directed on
INTENTIONALITY OF BODILY (henceforth, SO).
SENSATION
Accounts of the Intentionality
A mental state or event is said to have intentionality of Bodily Sensation
when it is about, is directed toward, or represents, For those aiming to provide an account of the inten-
something. Some philosophers claim that bodily tionality of the experience of located bodily sensa-
sensations, such as itches, tickles, tingles, and pains, tion, three central concerns are the following: (a) to
lack intentionality. Among those who defend the provide an account that accommodates the distinc-
claim that bodily sensations do possess intentional- tive manner in which a bodily sensation feels to be
ity, there is disagreement over what they are directed located; (b) to provide an account of what the sub-
toward, and there is disagreement over the account ject is aware of at the relevant location, for example,
that should be given of the manner in which they are whether it is simply some part of her body, or some-
directed toward their objects. This entry will briefly thing obtaining or occurring at that part of the body;
explore these issues. and (c) to provide an account that can accommo-
date the affective dimension of certain bodily sensa-
Puzzles About Bodily Sensations tions, for example, the negative affective component
Reports of certain bodily sensations seem to involve of pain.
the use of transitive verbs whose object is some sen-
The Feeling of Bodily Sensation as Located
sible quality of an external object or event, such as
temperature or pressurefor example, I can feel It is often suggested that when one feels a bodily
the warmth of the cup. Other reports appear to sensation as located, the relevant location is primar-
involve the use of intransitive verbsfor example, ily given as the location of some part of ones body.
My foot is itching. Disagreements over whether For example, in the case of phantom limb sensa-
bodily sensations have intentionality are usually tions, experienced by some amputees, it does not feel
concerned with the latter, intransitive bodily sen- to the subject as though there is a pain at some place
sations. Some have argued that although sensations in midair. Rather, it feels to the subject as though
like itches, tickles, and pains, may be caused by her body is located at that place, even though the
events in ones body, such mental occurrences are relevant body part no longer exists. In light of this,
not directed toward anything. It is suggested that some claim that ones awareness of a sensation as
although we can distinguish between a perceptual located is itself a form of bodily awarenessa form
(e.g., visual) experience and what that experience is of awareness of ones body, or some part of it. Under
an experience of, this sort of distinction is inappli- this approach, providing an account of the inten-
cable in the case of bodily sensation. tionality of located bodily sensation is connected
A common objection to this position is that with the task of explaining the sense in which one is
it fails to accommodate the felt location of bodily aware of ones body from the inside.
428 Intentionality of Emotion
What the Subject Is Aware of at the Location can come to signify for the subject the threat of dam-
According to some accounts, when one feels a age to her body. Others argue that the negative affec-
sensation as located in some part of ones body (e.g., tive component of a sensation like pain is an aspect
a stabbing pain in ones knee), one has an experi- of the representational content of ones experience.
ence that is not only directed toward some body part For example, in feeling severe pain in some part of
but is also directed on a subjective, mind-dependent ones body, a bodily condition, such as tissue dam-
entity. For example, the suggestion is that although age, is represented by the subjects experience as bad
your knee seems to you to be the kind of thing that or as unpleasant, and the suggestion is that subjects
can exist independently of your awareness of it, the have the normal cognitive and emotional reactions
stabbing pain (SO) that you feel to be there does not. to pain that they do because their experience repre-
Connected with this is the suggestion that, although sents the bodily condition in this way.
other subjects may come to know that you are feeling Matthew Soteriou
a stabbing sensation in your knee, there is something
odd in the idea that they might come to know this See also Causal Theories of Intentionality; Intentionality
through feeling it. So although your knee is a publicly of Emotion; Mind-Body Problem; Representational
observable object, the pain you feel to be there is not. Theory of Mind
Some claim the relevant entities are mind-dependent
objects (sense data); others claim that they are sub- Further Readings
jective properties of body parts; and yet others claim
that, when we feel such sensations, we project mind- Armstrong, D. M. (1962). Bodily sensations. London, UK:
dependent qualities onto parts of the body. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
According to an alternative, representationalist Aydede, M. (Ed.). (2006). Pain: New essays on its nature and
approach, although the intentional experience (SE) the methodology of its study. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bermudez, J. L., Marcel, A., & Eilan, N. (Eds.). (1995).
of a bodily sensation is a subjective mental occur-
The body and the self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
rence, what it represents as obtaining at the body
part is not. Ones experience of a bodily sensation
has an intentional content that represents some
mind-independent, physical condition of the body. INTENTIONALITY OF EMOTION
Some who take this approach suggest that our ordi-
nary talk about bodily sensations tends to focus on
the subjective intentional experience, rather than the Intentionality refers to the ability of mental states
mind-independent condition it represents, because to be about, be directed at, or represent objects,
the affective quality associated with the experience properties, and states of affairs in the world. Just
(e.g., the negative affective quality associated with as it is disputed whether all mental states are inten-
pain) is so salient. tional, so it is not settled whether all emotions have
intentionality, but it is generally accepted that most
emotions do and that this is one central way of dis-
Affective Dimensions
tinguishing them from similar but non-intentional
When a subject feels severe pain in some part of states such as moods. I am angry at someone, in love
her body, she might be described as being in pain. with my wife, afraid of the shark, worried by the
Some suggest that this psychological condition has shouting, happy about winning the lottery, surprised
emotional and motivational components that cannot because of the kind act. Moods such as depression,
be accommodated by simply appealing to the fact in contrast, do not seem to be directed at anything
that the subject is having a conscious experience that at all, or at least at no particular or a less specific
represents some bodily condition. Although there object. Providing an account of the intentionality of
may be a sensory-discriminatory aspect to pain expe- emotion is seen as one of the key elements in under-
riencefor example, concerning the location, inten- standing the nature of emotion, and many of the dif-
sity, and quality of the painwe also need to appeal ferences between competing philosophical theories
to distinct emotional-cognitive components of pain of emotion can thus be seen to hinge on different
experience in order to explain how the experience ways of explicating emotional intentionality.
Intentionality of Emotion 429
The nature of intentionality is, however, com- Yet further complexities become apparent when
plex, obscure, and subject to a great deal of philo- it is noted that the intentional objects of emotions
sophical debate, so it is unsurprising that, given the may not just be perceived as present, but may be
many and varied dimensions of emotional phenom- absent or even merely imagined. Whereas some
ena and the raging debates about defining emotion, emotions, such as anger at p or love for p, might
the subject of the intentionality of emotion cannot seem to require belief in the existence of p (or where
avoid inheriting and multiplying this difficulty and p is a proposition, the truth of p), others, such as
complexity. As such, the reader should be aware fear or hope, do not. Hope, for example, may take
that many of the issues discussed in this entry are a propositional but nonexistent object, as in I hope
hotly contested. that the green dragon will not eat the hobbit.
This entry is structured as follows: The first part Imagining or construing some object as disgusting
provides an overview of some of the main issues may move one to feel disgust as if the object were
concerning the intentionality of emotion, including genuinely perceived to be disgusting, even when it is
the nature and range of the intentional objects of not believed to possess disgusting properties.
emotions. The second part examines the view of Both philosophers and psychologists main-
emotional intentionality inherent in cognitive and tain that there is thus a close connection between
feeling theories of emotion and notes some of the emotions and evaluative judgments or appraisals.
problems facing such views. The third and final part Debates about the right conception of emotion
examines some perceptual theories of emotion, the center here around whether the relevant appraisals
various views of intentionality arising from such cause the emotion or are constitutive parts of the
theories, and some of the problems and challenges emotion. So, one might say that the perception of
confronting these, such as explaining the role of the the lion, and the realization that it poses a threat to
body and feelings in such intentionality. me, causes my fear, where the actual emotional state
is conceived as something independent of this over-
all evaluative appraisal; or one might say that this
Intentional Objects of Emotion
appraisal just is, in part, the emotional state of fear
One central obstacle to capturing the intentional- itself. What answer one gives to this will depend, in
ity of emotion in any unified way is that the inten- part, on whether one thinks of emotions as cognitive
tional objects of emotions form an immense and or noncognitive states.
varied range, including actions, events, values, states Emotions are not just directed at particular
of affairs, particular objects, properties, proposi- objects, actions, and states of affairs, but at more
tions, and bodily states. If I am afraid of the lion, specific features and properties of these that explain
my fear is directed at a particular object, the lion, the specific emotional responses. My fear of the lion,
and perhaps also at the situation confronting me. for instance, is explained by my perceiving his big
We might also capture this by saying that I am afraid teeth and menacing gait as frightening and hence my
that the lion will eat me, thereby giving the emo- construing the situation as dangerous. It is the dan-
tion a propositional object (in italics). Whereas some ger or dangerousness that explains why I feel fear
emotions, such as anger, may be directed at either rather than surprise or boredom. In this way, philos-
propositional objects or particulars, others, such as ophers sometimes distinguish between material (or
love, may require specific objects as their focus, and particular) intentional objectsthe lion and its big
yet others, such as regret, may require propositional teethand formal (or proper) intentional objects
objects. Moreover, certain social emotions such as for example, the danger. The latter depend on the
pride, jealousy, and shame, often involve a number former and generally comprise evaluative properties,
of different intentional objects, partly in virtue of or they essentially involve evaluations. It is not the
their self-reflexivity. If I am ashamed of performing lion as such that is the object of my emotional state,
a certain action, this may involve negatively evalu- but the lion construed as dangerous.
ating both the action performedfor example, as In fact, the purported distinction between material
shameful, or more specifically as morally or socially and formal objects is open to some debate, but it is
bad or unacceptableas well as myself, as perhaps supposed to capture the central role that the latter play
unworthy or in some respect dis-valuable. in defining and individuating the emotions directed at
430 Intentionality of Emotion
them. So fear, for example, may be defined partly as frequently called feeling theories, prominent for
a response to the dangerous or threatening, and this much of the first half of the 20th century, to the cog-
is in part what distinguishes it from other emotions, nitive theories that replaced them and which have,
such as anger. Some philosophers and psychologists in turn, held sway until relatively recently. Supported
have thus attempted to develop taxonomies of emo- by work in empirical psychology, feeling theories
tions based on their formal objects and the paradigm hold that what is essential to the nature of emotion
scenarios or core relational themes that contain are certain bodily changes, and they either identify
them. Sadness is a reaction to loss, anger a reaction the emotion with such changes, with the feeling or
to the offensive, fear a response to danger, and so on. perception of such changes, or with a wider pro-
Formal objects are also generally held to play a cess involving both the changes and perception of
central role in explaining and justifying emotional such changes. The intentionality of emotion on these
responses. My fear of the lion is explained or made views is at best restricted to the bodily changes of
intelligible by the danger the animal poses, and only which we are, through some sort of feeling, aware.
if an object possesses a certain value, such as danger- Such theories appear to provide an inadequate pic-
ousness, is fear an appropriate, warranted, or correct ture of emotional intentionality, failing to individuate
response. Formal objects thus provide not merely the vast range of emotions via a relatively limited
criteria of intelligibility, but criteria of correctness range of bodily feeling and changes, and essentially
and rationality for emotions insofar as they give rea- neglecting the intentional relationship of emotions
sons for the subject to feel specific emotions rather to the world. I am afraid of the charging lion, not of
than others. It is worth noting that if the formal my bodily state. Concomitantly, these theories face
objects of emotions are taken to be value properties, difficulties in explaining the rationality of emotions.
then ones metaphysical view of the status of such Cognitive theories, in contrast, have sought to
properties may have ramifications for ones views model the intentionality of emotions on paradig-
about the rationality of emotions and the nature of matic intentional states, such as beliefs and desires. A
their intentionality. typical cognitive model holds that an emotion such
Over and above these detailed issues and disputes, as fear can be understood as involving the belief that
it is widely accepted that the intentionality of emo- something is dangerous and the desire to avoid this
tion comprises both an inward focus, on our own danger; anger consists in the belief that I have been
bodily changes and phenomenological state, and an wronged and a desire to retaliate, and so on. Or, on
outward focus, onto the range of objects in the world a more reductive account, fear just is the judgment
at which our emotions are directed. On the one that something is dangerous, and anger just is the
hand, therefore, the intentionality of emotions can judgment that I have been offended. In either case,
be understood in terms of subjects representing the the belief that an object is dangerous is thus a neces-
objects of their emotions, and this helps to distinguish sary condition for being afraid and, perhaps coupled
the objects and causes of emotional responses, as with desire (to avoid the danger), forms a jointly
these can come apart. For example, I may react with sufficient condition for fear. Thus, emotions involve
anger to some trivial, nonoffensive remark you make, beliefs about their material and formal objects, and
where the real cause of my anger is a deep-seated the rationality of emotional responses can be under-
mood of depression from which I am suffering, and stood in terms of the truth and falsity of such beliefs.
yet this is clearly not represented by me as the object Many philosophers, however, have objected to
of my emotion. On the other hand, however, there this model both as a way of accurately capturing the
appear to be certain nonrepresentational intentional nature of emotions and as a way of explaining their
properties of emotions, such as somatic changes and intentionality. Although they do not deny that emo-
bodily feelings, often explicated in terms of certain tions frequently involve certain beliefs and desires,
biological, evolutionary functions. A challenge for these philosophers argue that emotions do not seem
emotion theories is to reconcile or combine these two reducible to combinations of these states or to be
different aspects of emotional intentionality. fully captured by reference to them. Beliefs do not
seem to be necessary for emotions, for these may
exhibit cognitive impenetrabilityI remain afraid of
Cognitive Theories and Intentionality
the dog even though I do not believe the dog is dan-
Many of the features of the intentionality of emotion gerous. Neither do they seem to be sufficientI may
listed earlier explain, in part, the shift from what are believe the lion is dangerous without feeling fear,
Intentionality of Emotion 431
I may believe the death of a loved one is a great loss argues that emotions have a distinctive intentionality
without feeling sadness. Doubt has also been cast on involving what he calls feeling toward; roughly,
the close link between emotions and desires appar- a kind of thinking of x with feeling that is directed
ently posited by cognitive theories. Feeling pride or intentionally at objects in the world as being a cer-
admiration, for example, do not seem necessarily to tain way or having particular features. Feeling
involve any particular desire. toward, unlike belief, may be subject to the will
In light of such considerations, there has been a and has a distinctive phenomenology. Feeling afraid
steady but noticeable convergence of views to the of the lion involves having feelings of fear toward
effect that the belief-desire model of emotions is the lion, where this sort of intentional state cannot
far too impoverished a way of understanding our be analyzed in terms of unemotional attitudes.
emotional engagement with the world. In particu- Although it recognizes the distinctive, complex,
lar, it seems obvious that emotions typically have a and rich nature of emotional intentionality, it might
phenomenological flavor that beliefs (and perhaps be argued that this notion of feeling toward
even desires) lack, and that some emotions have nonetheless remains a little too obscure to helpfully
distinctive bodily changes associated with them. explain such intentionality. But further perceptual
That is, it feels like something to be in an emotional theories of emotion promise to flesh out the relation-
state, as opposed to a belief-state that doesnt feel ship between bodily feelings and intentionality in a
like anything and hence does not have any distinc- way that does justice to the phenomena.
tive phenomenology. Arguably, this phenomenology Jesse Prinz, drawing heavily on contemporary
of feeling and the associated bodily changes are not psychological theories of emotion, has developed
just contingent parts of emotions accompanying the perhaps the most comprehensive attempt to recon-
underlying beliefs and desires; rather, they constitute cile the inward and outward aspects of emotional
essential parts of the emotional response. It has thus intentionality. Emotions, Prinz holds, are embodied
been maintained by some that the intentionality appraisals. They are individuated by those situa-
of emotions cannot be reduced to the intentional- tions that reliably elicit them in virtue of possessing
ity of other states such as beliefs and desires, but it what he calls core relational themes; namely, rela-
remains unclear what role, if any, feeling should tional properties holding between us and our envi-
be thought to play in characterizing emotional ronment that bear on our well-being, for example,
intentionality. dangers, losses, offenses, achievements. A danger-
ous situation, for example, will reliably elicit fear.
Further, Prinz argues, mental states get their inten-
Perception, Feeling, and Intentionality
tional content in virtue of having the function of
Partly in an attempt to explain some of these phe- being reliably caused by something. If emotions are
nomena, many recent theories have stressed impor- perceptions of bodily states, therefore, and those
tant analogies between emotions and perceptions bodily states are reliably caused by the instantiation
and a number of perceptual theories have been of core relational themes, then our perceptions of
put forward. The label is a relatively loose one, the body may also represent those themes. When
encompassing as it does a host of quite different confronted with a dangerous situation, the appraisal
looking models of emotions and their intentional- of danger elicits those bodily changes that partly
ity. The appeal of such theories is that they seek to constitute fear. The perception of such changes then
capture the way in which emotions, like perceptions, represents the core relational theme of danger
have a certain phenomenology: that they often have because it is reliably elicited by dangerousness. Thus,
an image-like quality; that their triggering is, to a Prinz claims, perceptions of bodily feelings have for-
large extent, automatic or involuntary; and that, on mal objectsfor example, dangerand conditions
the whole, they are belief independent. of correctness, and the intentionality of emotions
Peter Goldie, for instance, argues that the bodily directed at inward bodily states is correlated with
feelings present in many emotionsthose that have their intentional relation to the world outside.
a distinctive physiologyhave intentionality in the There are some, however, who doubt that such
sense that these feelings are directed toward ones a close link can be forged between emotion and
body as being a certain way, and as such they pro- perception. Whereas the content of our perceptions
vide prima facie reasons for believing that one is appears to be straightforwardly causally connected
experiencing a particular emotion. In addition, he to what is the case in our environment, emotional
432 Intergroup Conflict
intentionality essentially involves and depends on Prinz, J. (2004). Gut reactions. New York, NY: Oxford
an extremely rich set of background values, needs, University Press.
aspirations, beliefs, desires, expectations, and self- Roberts, R. (2003). Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
conceptions. Emotions do not so straightforwardly University Press.
track the way our environment is. Scherer, K. R. (2005). What are emotions? And how can they
Rather different perceptual models, such as be measured? Social Science Information, 44, 695729.
those put forward by Ronald de Sousa and Robert Solomon, R. (1976). The passions. New York, NY:
Roberts, seek to explain these differencesand Doubleday.
Solomon, R. (Ed.). (2004). Thinking about feeling.
thereby provide a more accurate picture of
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
the intentional feelings present in emotional
Tappolet, C. (1999). Emotions et valeurs [Emotions and
intentionalityby holding that emotions are not
values]. Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France.
best thought of as a straightforward type of percep-
Teroni, F. (2007). Emotions and formal objects. Dialectica,
tion but rather as construals or ways of seeing or 61, 395415.
attending to the world. The function of emotions on
such views is partly to make certain features of situ-
ations, actions, and objects salient, to foreground
them in our appraisals and to direct our attention to INTERGROUP CONFLICT
them in preparation for judgment and action. The
intentionality of emotion then involves a complex Intergroup conflict emerges from three elements of
interaction between imagination, belief, perception, human psychology: group perception, group identi-
and feeling, as well as various motivating states and fication, and group threat. All three are required for
values of the agent. For example, to construe a situ- substantial conflict and especially for conflict that
ation as dangerous, I need to perceive it as bearing a includes violence: interstate war, genocide, ethnic
particular, threatening relation to my various values, cleansing, pogroms, riots, and terrorism.
desires, and interests, and my feeling of fear will in
turn help me to focus on those features of the situa- Group Perception
tion that are most relevant to its danger. Intergroup conflict presupposes perception of at
Cain Samuel Todd least two groups. This is easy when two teams meet
on a sports field, with each team member marked by
See also Emotion, Psychophysiology of; Emotion, Structural the team colors. Often, however, group perception
Approaches; Emotions and Consciousness; Intentionality is not so obvious. How do Irish Republicans know
of Bodily Sensation; Rationality of Emotion who is a Loyalist in Northern Ireland? How did
Hutu know who was Tutsi in the 1994 genocide in
Further Readings Rwanda? How did real Cambodians know who
were the Cambodians with Vietnamese minds to
Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes error: Emotion, reason, and
be exterminated in the killing fields of 19751979?
the human brain. New York, NY: G. P. Putnams Sons.
Intermarriage, conversion, and migration pro-
Davidson, R., Scherer, K., Goldsmith, H. H. (Eds.). (2003).
duce many individuals who cannot easily be coded
Handbook of affective sciences. Oxford, UK: Oxford
in an either-or fashion. Is the son born to Muslim
University Press.
De Sousa, R. (1987). The rationality of emotion.
Algerian parents in France seen as French or
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Algerian? This is not a matter of what passport he
Deigh, J. (1994). Cognitivism in the theory of emotions. holds. How do most French people see him? How
Ethics, 104, 824854. do Algerians see him? How do other French citi-
Deonna, J. (2006). Emotion, perception and perspective. zens of Algerian origin see him? Not only are group
Dialectica, 60, 2946. boundaries fuzzy, but they can change over time. In
Goldie, P. (2000). The emotions. Oxford, UK: Clarendon the 1800s, Irish immigrants to the United States did
Press. not count as White; today their descendents are
Nussbaum, M. (2001). Upheavals of thought: The undeniably White.
intelligence of emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge The puzzle is why we see these fuzzy boundar-
University Press. ies as sharp and well defined. When someone talks
Intergroup Conflict 433
of time, in a sequence of action and reaction that the out-group hurts in-group members. While
sharpens boundaries, raises group identities, and contributions to intergroup conflict in many com-
increases threat perception on both sides. petitive situations are intentional, the challenging
task of models is to explain unintended and sub-
Clark McCauley
optimal situations that should be avoided from the
See also Collective Action; Disgust; Intergroup Conflict,
collective point of view. Among several theoreti-
Models of; Political Psychology; Resentment cal models that have been proposed previously to
understand and explain the causes, emergence, and
dynamics of intergroup conflict, this entry focuses
Further Readings
on key models and theories in sociology, social
Berreby, D. (2005). Us and them: Understanding your psychology, and economics.
tribal mind. New York, NY: Little, Brown.
Chirot, C., & McCauley, C. (2006). Why not kill them all? Classical Models in Sociology
The logic and prevention of mass political murder.
Karl Marx viewed historical development in terms
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Maoz, I., & McCauley, C. (2008, February). Threat,
of ongoing class conflict. Class conflict has its origins
dehumanization, and support for aggressive retaliatory in differences in economic resources, and, in par-
policies in asymmetric conflict. Journal of Conflict ticular, in property ownership. Economic resources
Resolution, 52(1), 93116. establish power and the exploitation of labor. The
Stephan, W. C., Ybarra, O., & Morrison, K. R. (2009). recognition of common interests leads to class con-
Intergroup threat theory. In T. D. Nelson (Ed.), sciousness that is a requirement of successful col-
Handbook of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination lective action and of revolution that breaks down
(pp. 4360). New York, NY: Psychology Press. existing class power.
In a different perspective, the seminal work of
Georg Simmel emphasized the functional roles
INTERGROUP CONFLICT, of intergroup conflict in group consciousness, in
cohesion, in integration, and in solidarity within
MODELS OF the group. Simmel argued that individuals have a
limited choice in conflict situations, as the force to
Intergroup conflict typically originates in the comply with a uniform group action is very strong,
rival interests of groups with distinct member- but he also underlined the importance of relational
ships. Beyond prejudice, and dislike that is exhib- structures in conflict.
ited in attitudes, its most harmful manifestations Drawing on Simmels work, realistic conflict the-
include social exclusion, violent clashes, street ory was oriented toward the functions of intergroup
battles, ethnic conflict, and civil war that involve conflict. As Lewis Coser argued, the primary func-
actions oriented against the out-group from in- tions of conflict are to establish and maintain group
group members. Relevant models all recognize identities and boundaries, and to support internal
that although groups might have their leadership solidarity. The starting point of realistic conflict is
or hierarchical organization, they are not unitary intergroup competition. Groups compete with each
actors but rather are collections of individuals other for certain scarce resources; it is the scarcity of
who, under social influence and control, have their these resources that makes intergroup conflict real-
free will and cognitive capacity to act in favor of istic. Groups try to obtain these resources because
their groups interest or form attitudes that stig- it is in their interest. In general, hostility toward the
matize out-group members. Rival interests that are competing group is just a means for obtaining the
at the root of intergroup conflict include compe- scarce resources for the in-group.
tition between groups for power, social control, Hubert M. Blalock handled actual intergroup
territory, economic and social incentives, or social competition for scarce resources at the macro level
identity. Rivalry is symmetrical in the sense that separately from individual actions. In his model,
a competitive action by in-group members hurts individuals are mobilized if they perceive intergroup
the out-group, but also a competitive action by competition or an out-group threat. This perception
Intergroup Conflict, Models of 435
does not necessarily have to coincide with actual The minimal group paradigm stimulated the for-
competition. mation of social identity theory. The basic premise
Models of Lewis F. Richardson were based on of social identity theory is that individuals strive
statistical proportions of individuals with different to achieve or maintain a satisfactory image about
war-moods (attitudes toward going to war) in the themselves and that an important aspect of self-
rival nations. He explained changes in the propor- definition is group identification. Once people per-
tions by an underlying mechanism that is analogous ceive group boundaries, cognitive processes trigger
to epidemics. Friendly and hostile attitudes spread an in-group/out-group categorization. Accentuation
irreversibly as a disease or fashion and result in of group boundaries results in polarization of the
transitions from one mood to another. When appro- worthy in-group image and the unworthy out-
priate transition rules and starting parameters are group picture that together provide positive social
assumed, the typical phases of war can be deduced. identity. Individuals strive for and invest emotional
For certain values of the parameters, a balanced energy to obtain social identity. This might ground
state of armament levels is derived. The other two their behavioral decision to participate in in-group/
typical scenarios are escalation of a runaway arms out-group hostility. Mostly, social identity is not
race and complete disarmament. taken into account purposefully, but it can indirectly
explain why group members are mobilized into
Theories and Models in Social Psychology conflict.
The positive association between positive atti- As a follow-up to social identity theory, on one
tudes toward in-group members and negative side, self-categorization theory emphasizes inter-
attitudes toward out-group members is empha- group behavior in terms of underlying cognitive rep-
sized by the theoretical concept of ethnocentrism. resentations. Radical views express that individuals
William Graham Sumner claimed that this associa- are transformed into groups via the process of self-
tion is universal and every group has a syndrome of categorization, meaning that this cognitive mecha-
ethnocentrism. nism is sufficient for thinking in group terms. On the
Muzafer Sherif, in his theory of conflict, focused other side, critics of self-categorization theory main-
on the emergence of negative out-group attitudes tain that social identity is obtained conditionally,
and intergroup hostility. In line with realistic con- only if the group is seen as an acting social unit, and
flict theory, he emphasized that competition between these critics give more attention to the instrumental
groups has a fundamental impact on the evolution character of intergroup relations in which one group
of group structures, on negative out-group attitudes, competes with another to achieve valued goals.
and on the emergence of hostile behavior. Sherif
Rational Choice, Economics,
also attempted to determine possible resolutions
and Game Theory
of conflict. He argued that occasional contact does
not improve intergroup relations, but cooperative Ethnic competition theory emphasizes economic
interdependencies and the establishment of superor- incentives in intergroup relations. Ethnic groups are
dinate, common goals do. considered as effective coalitions that are formed to
For the emergence of in-group favoritism and extract material benefits from others or to defend
out-group hostility, it is not required that groups possessions. This is also the source of ethnic com-
be organized or have an established set of norms. petition and violence. The stronger the ethnic com-
This is highlighted by the minimal group paradigm. petition, the more severe the attitudes toward the
Groups that are created on a cognitive basis and competitor group are. Because employment possibil-
therefore are referred to as minimal are able to ities are scarce and are the targets of ethnic competi-
develop in-group favoritism even in the absence of tion, competition is intensified by desegregation of
social interaction. Examples from minimal group the labor market. Ethnic groups (and other groups)
experiments are the groups created based on a pref- have fixed group boundaries, meaning that entry
erence for the paintings of Klee or Kandinsky, or and exit are blocked. Ethnic networks therefore
based on the overestimation or underestimation of enjoy several advantages, like trust, cohesion, and
dots in a figure. easier establishment of collective action.
436 Introspection
Individual decisions in the intergroup context are relations are represented by a two-level game. At the
interdependent, because contributions to harmful intergroup level, groups as aggregates face an inter-
intergroup competition have an effect on intergroup dependent situation. Group action is determined as a
relations and consequently on the well-being of out- consequence of individual actions within the group.
group members. This interdependence is captured At the group level, for groups with n people, strate-
by game-theoretic models of conflict. The simplest gic interdependence can be represented as an n-per-
game-theoretic model is the two-person prisoners son game. The most relevant examples for models of
dilemma. In the prisoners dilemma, players have intergroup conflict in the team games approach are
two options: cooperate or defect. Defection brings the intergroup prisoners dilemma game, in which no
higher benefits irrespective of the action of the other participation is a dominant strategy equilibrium that
party, but if both sides defect, payoffs are lower than is suboptimal in comparison to the outcome in which
if both sides cooperate. Endless civil war, unsettled everyone participates; the intergroup public goods
disputes, and mutually harmful clashes are examples game, in which intergroup competition is based on
where both sides are punished and no benefits are the number of contributors and public good benefits
realized. If groups were unitary entities and they are distributed in the group with more contributors;
could choose between cooperation and defection the intergroup chicken game; and the intergroup
(e.g., the mobilization of group members to fight), assurance game. Model extensions include structur-
mobilization would be their dominant strategy. This ally embedded team games that incorporate dyadic
means that regardless of the action of the out-group, forms of social control in the team games model and
the in-group would gain more with mobilization. that highlight the effect of social networks and seg-
Following the dominant strategy by both sides regation on intergroup conflict.
would result in a suboptimal outcome.
Kroly Takcs
A substantial element of intergroup relations is
the free rider problem within the groups. Whether See also Collective Action; Decision Theory,
looking at civil war, violence between football sup- Philosophical Perspectives; Intergroup Conflict;
porters, or fights between urban gangs, participa- Political Psychology
tion in conflict involves high costs and risk for the
participants. If they do not participate and instead
Further Readings
let others do the job, individuals can still enjoy
the benefits of intergroup competition (e.g., pub- Bornstein, G. (2003). Intergroup conflict: Individual,
lic happiness, pride, or social identity) that can be group, and collective interests. Personality and Social
considered as group public goods. As individuals Psychology Review, 7, 129145.
are able to free ride on the effort of others, in-group Levine, J. M., & Hogg, M. A. (Eds.). (2009). Encyclopedia
interdependence can be considered as a collective of group processes and intergroup relations. Thousand
action problem. Recent models that take account of Oaks, CA: Sage.
the free rider problem also recognize that individuals Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1986). The social identity theory
have contradictory interests considering intergroup of intergroup behavior. In S. Worchel & W. G. Austin
and within-group relations. Conflict between the (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations.
Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall.
groups often originates from an establishment of
Takcs, K. (2003). Modeling intergroup conflict as strategic
in-group collective action. Successful mobilization
interactions. Review of Sociology/Szociolgiai Szemle, 9,
is difficult to achieve; violent competitions are there-
113137.
fore less frequent than peaceful coexistence.
Which group is able to realize the benefits of
intergroup competition depends on an intergroup
comparison of the strength and efficiency of mobi- INTROSPECTION
lization of group members. The appropriate model
should represent the duality of within-group and You can learn about your own mind in the same
intergroup interdependencies. A framework that way you learn about others mindsby observing
allows for combined modeling is offered by the team behavior, by reading psychology books, by looking
games approach. In team games, competitive group at readouts of brain activity. But its also generally
Introspection 437
thought that you can also learn about your mind in of introspecting); and the effort condition, which
a way no one else can, by introspection. But what requires that introspection not be constant, effort-
exactly is introspection? No simple characterization less, automatic, or subpersonal, but rather requires
is widely accepted. Introspection is a key concept some sort of special reflection by the individual that
in psychology and philosophy of mind, both as a is different from the ordinary un-self-reflective flow
process worth studying in its own right and as a of thought and action in daily life. Scholars differ in
method (of disputable validity) for learning about the weight they put on these conditions, and because
the mind. This entry will discuss the general features of this, an account of self-knowledge that violates
of introspection, several broad classes of approach one of these latter three conditions may be seen by
to introspection, and the accuracy of introspective some researchers but not others as an account of
judgments. introspection.
Accounts of Introspection
Assertions of First- and Third-Person Parity
General Features of Introspection
It is sometimes asserted that our only methods for
For a process to qualify as an introspective knowing our own minds, or some aspect of our own
process as the term is ordinarily used by philoso- minds, are the methods by which we know others
phers and most psychologists, it must be a process minds. If so, then there is no distinctive introspec-
that yields judgments, knowledge, belief, or the like tive process or no such process that offers access to
(for simplicity, this entry will just refer to judgments) the sorts of mental states in question. No promi-
about ones own current or very recently past mental nent psychologist or philosopher has embraced the
states or processes (for simplicity, this entry will just position in its starkest and most universal form,
refer to states). Furthermore, it must be a process although Daryl Bems self-perception theory comes
(unlike, say, inference or perception) that can only close. According to self-perception theory, we learn
yield judgments about ones own currently ongoing about our own minds almost exclusively by observ-
or recently past mental states and not other peoples ing our behavior, with little input from internal cues.
mental states or mental states other than those (at For example, we infer what our attitudes are by
most) a few moments past. noticing what we endorse and reject and how much
However, there are arguably non-introspective money it requires to entice us to do something, just
cognitive processes that can only yield judgments as we learn about the attitudes of other people.
about ones own currently ongoing or recently past Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson have argued
mental states. For example, inferring that one likes that we have no introspective access to the processes
hats from the fact that one feels a hat pressing on underlying our decisions and attitudes (although
ones forehead would not generally be regarded we do have uniquely first-person access to mental
as an introspective process; nor is the process of content such as current sensations and evalua-
conforming to a made-up or confabulated self- tions) and that we arrive at judgments about such
description simply to render that self-description things as our motives and reasons on pretty much
true; nor is any automatic, subpersonal interaction the same basis as, and with no more accuracy than,
of different physiological or functional regions of we arrive at judgments about other peoples motives
the mind. Thus, there are three further conditions and reasons. However, Bems view is out of favor
that are sometimes treated as necessary for a process and Nisbett and Wilsons remains contentious.
to qualify as introspective: the directness condition, Personality traits (such as extraversion) and non-
which requires that introspection yield judgments conscious subpersonal processes (such as early visual
(knowledge, belief, or the like) by relatively direct processing) are good candidates for mental states to
means (and not, e.g., by inference from how things which people have no special introspective access.
stand outside the mind); the detection condition, If we know better than do others whether we are
which requires that introspection involve some extraverted or not, it is because we have seen more
sort of detection of, or attunement to, a preexist- of our own behavior and perhaps because we can
ing mental state or event (and not, e.g., a mental introspect such things as incipient emotional reac-
state that is brought into existence in the course tions to imagined events, from which introspections
438 Introspection
we can reach non-introspective inferential judgments delineated categories for bodily sensation). However,
about personality. Goldman argues that specific contents of attitudes
like belief are too manifold for preexisting classifi-
Self-Monitoring Accounts of Introspection cational categories to exist for all of them. Rather,
Introspection is often characterized as a type of he suggests, we represent the specific contents of
mental monitoring, perhaps by a functionally dis- such mental states by redeploying the content of
tinct cognitive system or group of systems. Two the represented mental state into the representation
important recent accounts are the account of Shaun of that statesimply copying the representational
Nichols and Stephen Stich, on the one hand, and the content of the lower order state into the higher order
account of Alvin Goldman on the other. state. (In this last respect, Goldmans account resem-
The Nichols and Stich account of self-knowledge bles the Nichols and Stich account.)
appeals to two distinct mechanisms. The first is a
Introspection Without Self-Monitoring?
monitoring mechanism that simply converts inter-
nally stored representations with the content P A number of philosophers have developed
(e.g., the representation with the content It will accounts of introspection that jettison the intuitive
rain on Thursday) into internally stored represen- idea that introspection is a type of self-monitoring.
tational beliefs with the content I A that P, where Sydney Shoemaker, for example, has developed an
A here refers to the attitude one takes toward that account of introspection on which it is just partly
contentfor example, belief or desire (I may believe constitutive of believing something that you are dis-
that it will rain on Thursday or, alternatively, I may posed to judge that you believe itno special act of
desire that it will). The second mechanism is the self-monitoring required. Other philosophers have
(non-introspective) theory of mind mechanism that endorsed what they call the transparency of self-
we typically use in attributing mental states to other knowledgethe idea that, when asked about ones
people but which can also be turned on ourselves. own mental states (e.g., Do you think there will
For example, if I can discern from your behavior be a Third World War?) one tends to reflect not
that you enjoy sherry, I can also use the theory of on ones own mind but on the world outside ones
mind mechanism to discern that fact from my own mind (e.g., on whether political conditions and
behavior. Nichols and Stich support the idea that human nature are such that a Third World War
there are two distinct mechanisms here by appeal- is likely and consequently saying yes or no
ing to a double dissociationthat is, to cases in in answer to the question about what one thinks).
which it appears that one mechanism but not the Whereas some transparency theorists deny that the
other breaks down. They argue that in certain types process of looking outward or thinking about the
of schizophrenia, the monitoring mechanism breaks external world to answer questions about ones
down while the theory of mind mechanism remains mental states is, strictly speaking, an introspec-
intact and that in autism the theory of mind mecha- tive process, others such as Fred Dretske have
nism breaks down while the monitoring mechanism characterized such accounts as introspectivethus
remains intact. manifesting dissent about whether the detection
Goldman criticizes the Nichols and Stich account and directness conditions previously described are
for failing to describe how the monitoring mecha- genuinely necessary conditions on an introspec-
nism detects the attitude type of the detected rep- tive process.
resentation (i.e., whether the attitude toward that
representation is one of belief, desire, etc.) and for
The Accuracy of Introspective Judgments
leaving unclear how people can discern the strength
or intensity of their attitudes. His positive account Although there is some dissent on the issue, a major-
starts from the idea that we can direct an attentional ity of philosophers have long held that knowl-
process toward discerning the general types of our edge of ones own mental statesor at least some
mental states (e.g., belief, happiness, bodily sensa- important subclass of them, such as ones currently
tion) and some of the properties of those mental ongoing conscious statesis highly trustworthy,
states (e.g., intensity for belief, a variety of finely perhaps even (as Ren Descartes suggested in the
Introspection 439
17th century) infallible or indubitable. Psychologists, Finally, in the interdisciplinary field of con-
in contrast, have a history of skepticism about the sciousness studies, considerable attention has
accuracy of introspective reports, dating back to the recently been devoted to the accuracy or inaccu-
early introspective psychologists of the late 19th and racy of introspective reports about the stream of
early 20th centuries, such as Wilhelm Wundt and conscious experience, including imagery, sensory
E. B. Titchener, who repeatedly cautioned about the experience, and emotional experiencewithout, so
difficulty of introspective observation and developed far, any clear resolution.
training techniques intended to improve the accu-
Eric Schwitzgebel
racy of introspective reports.
Contemporary psychologists criticizing the accu- See also Access Consciousness; Inner Speech;
racy of introspection have often cited the work of Self-Consciousness; Self-Knowledge; Unconscious
Nisbett and Wilson mentioned earlier, which seems Emotions, Psychological Perspectives
to suggest that peoples access to their own motives
and reasons is neither especially better nor different Further Readings
in kind from the access other people have. Whether
this shows that introspection is inaccurate, or instead Bem, D. J. (1967). Self-perception: An alternative
simply that we do not or cannot strictly speaking interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena.
introspect our motives and reasons, is unclear; in Psychological Review, 74, 183200.
Dretske, F. (1995). Naturalizing the mind. Cambridge, MA:
any case, if the Nisbett and Wilson view is roughly
MIT Press.
correct, whatever process it is that people engage in
Ericsson, K. A., & Simon, H. A. (1993). Protocol analysis
when they report on their motives and reasons is not
(Rev. ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
an especially accurate one.
Goldman, A. I. (2006). Simulating minds. Oxford, UK:
Often cited as suggesting the accuracy of a cer- Oxford University Press.
tain sort of introspective reportalthough again Jack, A. I., & Roepstorff, A. (Eds.). (20032004). Trusting
the question arises of whether what is involved is the subject? (Vols. 12). Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic.
introspection strictly speakingis the work of Nichols, S., & Stich, S. P. (2003). Mindreading. Oxford,
K. Anders Ericsson and Herbert Simon on think- UK: Oxford University Press.
aloud protocols and retrospective verbalizations Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than
of thought processes. Ericsson and Simon review we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes.
evidence suggesting that people often engage in Psychological Review, 84, 231259.
the cognitive processes they say they do, when Schwitzgebel, E. (2008). The unreliability of naive
asked to give simultaneous or immediately retro- introspection. Philosophical Review, 117, 245273.
spective description of those processes, and thus Shoemaker, S. (1994). Self-knowledge and inner sense.
that verbal reports about such processes may be Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 54,
valuable data. 249314.
ENCYCLOPEDIA of the
MIND
Editorial Board
Editor-in-Chief
Harold Pashler
University of California, San Diego
Associate Editor
Emily Goldknopf
University of California, Los Angeles
Editorial Board
Tim Crane
University of Cambridge
Fernanda Ferreira
University of Edinburgh
Marcel Kinsbourne
New School for Social Research
Richard Zemel
University of Toronto
Editorial Assistant
Ruth Hsiao
University of Illinois College of Medicine
ENCYCLOPEDIA of the
MIND
Volume
TWO
Editor-in-Chief
Harold Pashler
University of California, San Diego
Copyright 2013 by SAGE Publications, Inc.
FOR INFORMATION: All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
SAGE Publications, Inc. photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
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Printed in the United States of America.
E-mail: [email protected]
Volume 2
Entries
J 441 R 627
K 447 S 663
L 455 T 731
M 477 U 749
N 553 V 757
O 569 W 775
P 577
Index 797
List of Entries
vii
viii List of Entries
xi
xii Readers Guide
441
442 Jealousy
more jealousy when their mothers interacted with a fertilization occurs internally within women, men
similar-aged peer than when she interacted with an could never know for certain whether an offspring
infant. Jealousy in younger infants was not affected was biologically their own. Therefore, men should
by the rivals age. Thus, it appears that over the be particularly concerned about a mates sexual infi-
course of development, an individuals appraisals of delity because it could lead to the man expending
the nature and meaning of the interactions between valuable resources (food) on offspring that were not
the rival and the loved one become increasingly genetically his own, which would be costly to his
important in the elicitation of jealousy. inclusive fitness. Ancestral woman faced a different
Social-cognitive theorists have focused on two threat; she needed to ensure that her mate did not
general factors that cause a loved ones involvement give his resources to other women and their children,
with another to be particularly upsetting: (a) when which could decrease the likelihood of the womans
it reduces benefits obtained from the primary rela- own children surviving. Thus, present-day women
tionship, and (b) when it threatens some aspect of a should be particularly jealous over emotional infi-
persons self-concept or self-esteem. People ponder delity. Inherent in this is the assumption that a mans
the meaning and ramifications of their loved ones emotional involvement is a proxy for his spending
relationship to the rivalWill my partner stop resources on another.
giving me time and attention? and What does This hypothesis drew apparent support from
this mean about me? Am I unattractive or unlov- early work that found when forced to predict
able? Conclusions that people draw from such whether a partners sexual or emotional infidelity
questions affect the intensity and nature of their would be more upsetting, more women than men
jealousy. picked emotional infidelity. However, several lines of
new research with other measures and with partici-
Individual Differences pants who have actually experienced a loved ones
Attachment Styles betrayal have not found consistent gender differ-
ences in reactions to sexual and emotional infidelity.
According to attachment theory, peoples experi- For example, one study found that men and women,
ences, beginning in infancy, lead them to form men- regardless of sexual orientation, focused more on the
tal models of relationships that include beliefs about emotional aspects of their partners actual betrayal
others and the self. People who have a secure attach- relative to the sexual aspects.
ment style readily trust others and are comfortable This begs the question of why men and women
with intimacy. Research suggests that differences in have similar jealousy reactions. One possibility is
attachment style may play an important role in jeal- there may have been no need for sexually dimorphic
ous reactions. For example, one study found that jealousy mechanismsa more general jealousy pro-
securely attached individuals reported that a past cess may have addressed the inclusive fitness risks
jealousy experience brought them closer to their faced by either gender. Flirting behaviors (increased
partnersan effect not experienced by individuals eye contact, smiling) usually occur well before
with insecure attachment styles. having sex or falling in love. Because the same
behaviors can signal the beginnings of emotional
Gender interest, sexual interest, or both, attention to these
There is controversy over whether men and common early warning signs could enable both men
women are jealous over different things. The jeal- and women to prevent their partners from engag-
ousy as a specific module view hypothesizes that ing in either form of infidelity, without the need for
women should feel more jealous over emotional sexual dimorphic mechanisms.
betrayal and men over sexual betrayal because the
two genders face different reproductive threats. Christine R. Harris and
(The basic tenet of modern evolutionary theory is Ryan S. Darby
that we inherited our psychological and/or physi-
cal traits from the ancestral people who reproduced See also Emotion Regulation; Envy; Rationality of
the most, i.e., had higher inclusive fitness.) Because Emotion; Relationships, Development of
Joint or Collective Intention 443
does each participant owe the others such respect? notably Wilfrid Sellars and, later, John Searle, have
What if the intention is to do something bad? proposed that, on the contrary, our intending to do
Alternatively, what if one party comes to participate something is a matter of each of us being in a special
in the shared intention only because he or she is psychological state, expressible by the words We
coerced into doing so by the other party? intend . . . . The author may give the psychological
state a special label, such as we-intending.
Schools of Thought on Joint Intention One problem with this proposal is that it is rela-
tively obscure. It says little more than that those to
As to the relationship of a joint intention to specific whom a joint intention can correctly be ascribed are
psychological states of the participants, there are in a special psychological state, a state appropriate
several schools of thought. This entry distinguishes specifically to those who participate in a joint inten-
between what might be called correlated personal tion. Presumably this state involves some under-
intentions, subjective we-intentions, and joint standing of who we are, whether by description
commitment accounts, and makes note of the or by enumeration. Other than that, it is not clear
advantages and disadvantages of each. what it amounts to. At the end of the day, the move
from the question What is a joint intention? to
Personal Intentions Accounts
What is a we-intention? does not take us very far.
A popular perspective on the matter centrally The negative point made by those who advocate
invokes appropriately correlated personal intentions an account in terms of we-intentions as opposed to
of the participants. Such intentions are expressible personal intentions, however, appears to be sound.
with I intend and other similar expressions. One There are significant problems with personal inten-
advantage of personal intentions accounts is that the tions accounts of joint intentions.
idea of a personal intention is already familiar from
action theory. Problems With Personal Intentions Accounts
The personal intentions invoked in correlated per- One problem with personal intentions accounts
sonal intentions accounts have a variety of contents. is that a joint intention to paint the house together
Thus, Michael Bratman invokes personal intentions soon, for instance, does not appear necessarily to
that we do such-and-such. More fully, Bratmans involve personal intentions of the type to which
earliest account of a joint intention to J posits a set of personal intentions theorists appeal. One reason for
interlocking personal intentions and runs roughly saying this is as follows.
as follows: I intend that we J; you intend that we J; It seems that those who have agreed to paint a
I intend that we J by virtue of both my intention that house together can immediately and truly say, We
we J and your intention that we J; and you intend intend to paint the house together, simply by vir-
likewise. Finally, it is common knowledge between tue of this agreement. And it is at least not obvi-
the participants that they have these personal inten- ous that those who have agreed to paint a house
tions. That means, roughly, that each knows of these together tomorrow must each personally intend that
intentions of each, and each knows this. In later they paint the house together tomorrow, or person-
work, Bratman added various further clauses. ally intend to do his or her part in their painting the
One might also propose that a joint intention house together, or something of that sort. Indeed, it is
involves not personal intentions that we J, but rather not obvious that each must have any particular per-
personal intentions on the part of each to act as best sonal intentions with respect to what we intend.
he or she can to achieve their J-ing, given the actions One or more of them may have such intentions, of
of the other party. This is roughly in the spirit of course, but the fact that they made the agreement in
work on the topic by Raimo Tuomela and Kaarlo question does not seem to entail that they have such
Miller, among others. intentions. If no such personal intentions must be
present when there is a joint intention, then clearly
Subjective We-Intentions Accounts
no personal intentions account will work.
Rather than invoking a personal intention express- Another problem with a personal intentions
ible with the words I intend, some philosophers, account is that those who participate in a given joint
Joint or Collective Intention 445
intention tend to think and act as if, by virtue of ones broad sense. It can take place without face-to-face
participation in a joint intention, one owes the other interaction.
participants actions that respect the shared intention. In a special kind of case, the parties are jointly
This is indicated by the kinds of rebukes and demands committed to accept decisions of a given person or
on one another in which participants engage. So one body as to what they are jointly committed to intend
might say to another, in a rebuking tone, Why did as a body. The initial joint commitment establishes
you buy tickets for an evening flight? Our plan was the person or body in question as having the author-
to go in the morning. Accounts of joint intention in ity to establish joint intentions for the parties.
terms of personal intentions have difficulty explain- What of joint intentions to do something bad and
ing such reactions, which appear to be based on the joint intentions such that one party or more of the
very existence of the joint intention or plan. parties have been coerced into participating in the
A further problem is the fact that participants in a joint intention? Gilbert argues that given such fac-
joint intention understand themselves and the other tors, the parties may well be able to argue that it is
parties not to be free to unilaterally alter or cancel not appropriate to act in accordance with the shared
the joint intention, absent special background under- intention, all things considered. Nonetheless, they
standings. Thus, a participant might appropriately can still be said to owe each other such action, in a
respond to a rebuke such as the one mentioned in particular sense of owe.
the previous paragraph with Oh, I forgot but not People owe one another actions in accordance
Oh, I changed our plan! To the latter response, with any joint commitment insofar as by jointly
the first party might object But you cant change committing one another they have together imposed
our plan, not just like that! Because one can alter a constraint on each other, with respect to what
ones personal intention, just like that, this aspect they may appropriately do. To that extent they
of joint intentions may be impossible for a personal may together be said to have put their dibs on
intentions account to capture. the action of each. So each may rebuke any other
with respect to action that is not appropriate to the
Joint Commitment Accounts shared intention, in the name of them all.
An account of joint intention that provides an Gilbert labels any set of jointly committed per-
alternative to both personal intentions and subjec- sons a plural subject. In using this label, she does
tive we-intentions accounts has been proposed by not mean to imply that there is a group conscious-
Margaret Gilbert. It appeals to more than the sub- ness, or subjective state, distinct from the conscious-
jective states of the participants, as the we-intentions ness of each individual person. Hence, her account
accounts do, and does not require personal inten- respects an important constraint that other theorists
tions in favor of the joint intention, as the personal of joint intention have insisted on.
intentions accounts do. Gilbert has argued that Her account also allows that those with a joint
when people have a joint intention, they owe each intention will appropriately form, where necessary,
other conforming actions and are open to rebukes personal intentions that will support the joint inten-
for nonconformity and demands for conformity. tion, as when someone forms the personal intention
Using the example of painting the house together, to drive to the store for paint, in light of a joint inten-
Gilberts account runs roughly as follows: Two tion to paint the house with another person, whom,
or more people have a joint intention to paint the he or she knows, will be buying other necessary items.
house together if and only if they are jointly com- Yet such personal intentions need not be present in
mitted to intend as a body that the house be painted every case where there is a joint commitment of the
by virtue of the coordinated activity of the two of kind in question here. This respects the point made
them. It is understood that, in order that such a earlier as to the apparent nonnecessity of such per-
joint commitment be established, each has com- sonal intentions to the existence of a joint intention.
municated to the other his or her readiness jointly Margaret Gilbert
to commit them all to emulate as far as possible
a single creature that intends that the house be so See also Action and Bodily Movement; Collective
painted. Communication is understood here in a Action; Philosophy of Action
446 Joint or Collective Intention
447
448 Know-How, Philosophical Perspectives
bodily movement, considering propositions, is itself prior stock of physical-factual knowledge concern-
an operation, an action of sorts. Now if the act of ing color vision was incomplete, and it follows,
proposition-consideration itself were unintelligent, claims Jackson, that physicalism is false. There are
it would be hard to see how it could confer intel- some nonphysical features of the world to be learned
ligence on the bodily movement that it preceded. So about.
clearly, the act of considering the relevant proposi- One of the first and most enduring replies to this
tion prior to originating an intelligent bodily action provocative argument draws on Ryles distinction.
had itself better be intelligent. But what is it to be David Lewis, following Lawrence Nemirow, asserts
an intelligent act according to Ryles Cartesian intel- that what Mary learns when she sees red is not any
lectualist legend? It is to be preceded by a mental new fact, but a set of new abilitiesin other words,
operation of considering a relevant proposition. In she gains no knowledge-that, only knowledge-how.
which case the mental planning procedure that origi- Specifically, Lewis proposes that Mary acquires the
nated the bodily action in this case itself needs to be abilities to recognize, remember, and imagine the
preceded by a mental act of planning, an act which, experience of redness through her meeting with
in turn, must be intelligent and thus preceded by a the rose. However, because Mary learns no new
further contemplative act, and so on. The dilemma fact, as there is no new proposition that Mary now
that arises for the Cartesian, then, is this: Either an knows, Lewis claims, physicalism is not threatened
intelligent action can never get started, for it must by Marys increase in knowledge. She learns how to
always be preceded by a further mental act of plan- do some new things, but there is no newand so
ning, or some actions are intelligent without being nonphysicalfact that she discovers.
preceded by mental operations, operations Ryle con- Lewiss argument has brought renewed attention
siders appallingly occult on Descartes conception on Ryles distinction, mostly in the service of dis-
of mind and its processes. This reasoning led Ryle cussions concerning mind, but also independently.
to posit a distinct, nonintellectual, practical genre of Some remain dubious about the distinction. An arti-
knowledge, that is, knowledge-how, knowledge, in cle by Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson makes
some sense, of the body. a good case for the assimilation of knowledge-how
to knowledge-that. But Stanley and Williamsons
Know-How Versus Know-That thesis, that knowing how to ride a bicycle (for exam-
in Modern Philosophy ple) is really knowing, of some manner of riding a
The know-how/know-that distinction as proposed bicycle, that this is a way to ride a bicycle, is itself
by Ryle is of philosophical interest in its own right, widely rejected. Thus, the controversy rumbles on.
as well as for the part it plays in the Rylean critique Sam Coleman is also sympathetic to the view that
of Descartes. Nowadays the distinction is more know-how, or ability knowledge, might reduce to
familiar to philosophers because of its employment knowledge of fact. He notes that abilities, such as the
in another controversy concerning the philosophy of ability to ride a bicycle, depend on knowing what
mind. Frank Jackson tries to disprove physicalism certain sensations feel likein the case of cycling,
the doctrine that all that exists is physical matter the would-be rider must, crucially, become well
and its combinationswith an argument that cen- acquainted with the sensation of balancing on her
ters on an omniscient color scientist, Mary. Mary bicycle in order to gain the ability. But if knowing
knows all the scientific facts relating to human color what sensations feel like is factual knowledgeas
vision, despite never having seen color. Living her Jackson suggeststhen know-how/ability knowl-
life hitherto in a monochrome laboratory, Mary edge will be partly constituted by knowledge-that.
has extensively studied red-seeing subjects in the If this is so, then Ryles distinction may collapse,
outside world, thus accumulating her stock of sci- and with it Lewiss popular objection to Jacksons
entific knowledge. One day, Mary is shown a red knowledge argument.
rose. Jackson invites us to agree that Mary learns Sam Coleman
something important in this encounter: the fact of
what an experience of redness is like, qualitatively, See also Knowledge by Acquaintance; Mind-Body
for the person undergoing it. In which case Marys Problem; Physicalism; Reductive Physicalism
Knowledge Acquisition in Development 449
beyond basic sensory capacities and domain-general this view, developing brain capacities and increas-
learning mechanisms. Thus, knowledge is viewed ing knowledge of the world (expertise) contribute
as built up primarily from experience. In contrast, to general developments in capacity, reasoning strat-
nativists suggest that infants are endowed with egies, and performance. Structural theories posit
innate knowledge and abilities that unfold over time. that development involves acquiring the ability to
In contrast to both of these views, a constructivist reflect on early representations, with knowledge
approach (epitomized by Jean Piaget) proposes that proceeding from largely procedural and unconscious
children actively construct their knowledge. On this to more explicit and deliberate. Theory theories
view, children enter the world with basic capacities to suggest that children are born with innate, albeit
organize information in the world into mental struc- rudimentary, knowledge about the world that con-
tures and then elaborate on these structures as new strains how they process and interpret information
information is encountered. In this way, children are they encounter, but that important reorganizations
like scientists, forming theory-like representations of of knowledge take place with development. For
the world and interpreting new information in light example, preschoolers distinguish between material
of existing theories. and immaterial entities (e.g., objects vs. thoughts)
Piaget suggested that knowledge development and understand some principles about material sub-
involves qualitative change, with children proceed- stance (e.g., that matter occupies physical space),
ing through four developmental stages marked by but, between ages 4 and 12, their concept of mat-
distinct modes of thinking: sensorimotor (birth ter undergoes considerable reorganization as they
to roughly age 2 years), pre-operational (roughly incorporate more complex principles (e.g., that all
26 years of age), concrete operational (roughly 712 matter has weight, regardless of its size or density).
years of age), and formal operational (roughly 12
years on). However, it is now widely acknowledged
Content and Structure of Early Knowledge
that a strict stage view of knowledge development
is incorrect, as it underestimates childrens early Childrens nave theories about the world differ
capacities and overestimates the rationality of ado- from scientific theories but are similar in the fol-
lescents and adults. Early knowledge is much richer lowing respects: They presume a domain-specific
than previously thought. Young children understand ontology (e.g., objects are units in nave phys-
certain concepts before they can demonstrate them ics; animals are units in nave biology); they are
(also known as a competence-performance gap). For constructed from evidence; they generate predic-
example, infants younger than 9 months of age fail to tions and causal explanations; they posit unobserv-
search for an object that is covered with a cloth, seem- able theoretical entities (e.g., gravity) to account for
ing to indicate an implicit belief that out of sight is observable phenomena (e.g., objects falling); they are
out of mind. However, careful experiments that track coherent; and they are defeasible in the face of coun-
infants gaze and reaching behaviors indicate aware- terevidence. Three foundational domains in which
ness of hidden objects as young as 3 to 4 months children construct causal theories include physics,
of age. Contemporary researchers have developed psychology, and biology. In each of these domains,
numerous other implicit and subtle measures (e.g., rate there are impressive early capacities as well as con-
at which infants suck a pacifier as a measure of inter- siderable changes across development.
est in a stimulus, sequential order of manual object Fundamental elements of a nave theory of physics
exploration as a measure of categorization, neuroim- are evident early in infancy. Infants represent objects
aging techniques as measures of the role of attention as solid, bounded entities whose behavior accords
and control in cognitive tasks), which reveal that basic with certain physical regularities. They expect objects
cognitive capacities are in place early in development. to continue to exist when out of sight, and they expect
There are several contemporary views of cogni- them to move lawfully (e.g., not through obstruc-
tive development that differ from Piagets view but tions). With age, children acquire richer understand-
build on his insights. For example, information- ings of physical and mechanical principles. For
processing theories emphasize that development example, they are not born with an understanding
involves domain-general changes, such as increased that objects obey the laws of gravity, but begin to
processing speed or working memory capacity. On develop expectations about gravity by about 2 years
Knowledge Acquisition in Development 451
of age. Further changes in physical understanding and relatively little attention was paid to the contex-
take place even into adulthood, as adults struggle tual nature of the input. For example, Piaget provided
to overcome an intuitive physics in which they have the example of a child discovering basic principles
pre-Newtonian beliefs about the physics of everyday of mathematics by rearranging and re-counting a
objects (e.g., incorrectly predicting that a ball rolling set of pebbles. However, learning is not entirely a
out of a curved tube will continue on a curvilinear, solitary act; instead, it is embedded in social and cul-
rather than a linear, trajectory). tural understandings. Much of childrens knowledge
A nave theory of psychology, also known as a is derived not from their direct interactions with the
theory of mind, also has precursors in infancy. environment but rather from the testimony of knowl-
By 5 months, infants interpret behaviors of animate edgeable others. Studies of theory of mind tell us
entities as goal directed and distinguish between that learning often requires attending to others as a
intentional and accidental actions. By preschool age, crucial source of information. Social transmission is
children distinguish between mental and physical also a mechanism for transmitting scientific concepts
entities (e.g., thoughts vs. actual objects), link per- (germs, shape of the earth), natural categories (toma-
ception with knowledge, and see people as having toes are fruit), social concepts (ethnicity, personality
beliefs and desires that are linked to their actions. traits), and supernatural concepts (God, witchcraft).
Richer understandings of the links among beliefs, The typically developing child interprets and evaluates
desires, and actions emerge across development. For the surrounding social input, and disruptions to these
example, not until age 6 do children appreciate that capacities can be devastating (as with autism). Cultural
differences in preexisting expectations differentially factors also play a key role. In a long tradition influ-
influence how people interpret ambiguous events. enced by Lev Vygotsky, cultural psychologists have
Knowledge of the biological world entails clas- concluded that cultural contexts significantly influence
sifying living things and reasoning about biological childrens learning. Finally, comparative studies with
processes, such as growth and reproduction. There humans and nonhuman species suggest that certain
is debate about whether childrens biological knowl- forms of social learningimitative learning, instructed
edge constitutes a theory; however, at the very least, learning, and collaborative learningmay be unique
by preschool age, children exhibit certain key under- to humans (or if not unique, then at least particularly
standings. For example, they distinguish between well developed). Humans are the preeminent species
biological and inanimate entities and appreciate that that create culture and cultural artifacts. Thus, human
biological processes only occur with the former. Less knowledge development is uniquely influenced by
is known about biological knowledge in younger social and cultural factors.
children; however, infants expect animate objects
to exhibit self-initiated movement and inanimate Conclusions
objects to require external force, which is a likely
precursor to a nave biological theory. The study of knowledge development in childhood
As children construct knowledge systems, they provides a particularly fruitful approach to under-
also reveal systematic biases in how they interpret standing human intelligence. Much of what makes
and incorporate new information. These include an our species distinctive is our capacity to acquire infor-
essentialist bias (assuming that categories have an mation (from observing the world and learning from
underlying reality), a teleological bias (assuming that others), to organize that information into explanatory
all entities and events have a purpose), and causal and predictive theories, and to reorganize knowledge
determinism (assuming that all entities and events in the face of new and unexpected evidence. These
have a cause), among others. These biases are par- capacities are rooted in fundamental processes that
ticularly evident in early childhood, but they may are evident early in infancy and continue to grow and
also persist into adulthood. flourish with maturity and experience.
Elizabeth A. Ware and Susan A. Gelman
Context and Culture
See also Concepts, Development of; Folk Psychology;
Until recently, the focus in cognitive development was Language Development; Representations,
primarily on characterizing childrens knowledge, Development of; Social Cognition
452 Knowledge by Acquaintance
and knowledge of truths, which is best understood Since Russell, there has been widespread agree-
in terms of the distinction between our conceptual ment on the importance of a distinction between
ability to think about things and our epistemic abil- thinking of an object by description and thinking
ity to know truths about those things. According to of an object in a more direct way that exploits a
Russell (1912), acquaintance plays a foundational descriptively unmediated relation to the object.
role in explaining each of these abilities: All our Indeed, the term acquaintance is sometimes used as
knowledge, both knowledge of things and knowl- a mere placeholder for whatever relation it is that
edge of truths, rests on acquaintance as its founda- enables one to think nondescriptive thoughts about
tion (p. 48). an object. From this perspective, however, it is a
First, acquaintance plays a foundational role in substantive question whether Russell was entitled to
Russells theory of knowledge. He argues that all assume that the role of acquaintance could be played
of our knowledge of truths depends ultimately on only by states of conscious awareness.
acquaintance, which is foundational in the sense For example, Gareth Evans introduces a cat-
that it does not itself depend on any knowledge of egory of information-based thought, which exploits
truths. Acquaintance with an object enables us to information that is causally derived from an object.
know descriptive truths about the object, but this According to Evans, the role of Russells notion of
descriptive knowledge depends on acquaintance, acquaintance is played by the information link with
rather than vice versa. an object that is provided in perception, memory, and
Second, acquaintance plays a foundational role testimony. However, it is a focus of contemporary
in Russells theory of conceptual thought. He argues debate whether the information provided by percep-
that we can think about an object only if we know tion, memory, and testimony must be conscious to
which object we are thinking about. Either we know play the role of Russells notion of acquaintance.
the object by acquaintance or we know it by descrip- In sum, Russells work on acquaintance raises
tion, in which case we must be acquainted with the important questions about the role of consciousness in
properties in terms of which it is described. This is the grounding our conceptual and epistemic abilities. These
rationale for Russells (1912) principle of acquain- questions are central to much current work in episte-
tance, which states: Every proposition which we mology and the philosophy of language and mind.
can understand must be composed wholly of con-
Declan Smithies
stituents with which we are acquainted (p. 58).
See also Descriptive Thought; Know-How, Philosophical
Contemporary Work on Acquaintance Perspectives; Object-Dependent Thought
455
456 Language Development
their pacifier sucking once they are bored with a cat without the /c/ sound. Phonological awareness
stimulus (e.g., the sound pa). If the infants suck- is an important precursor for learning to read.
ing then increases on presentation of a new phoneme
(e.g., da), it is an indication that the infant detects
Lexicon
the difference in sounds. Interestingly, after about
9 months of age, infants have a harder time distin- Words are difficult to learn because they are
guishing between phonemes in languages other than arbitrary symbols with no inherent relation to their
their own. Thus, language experience influences referents. The ability to map a word to its referent
language perception, as it is easier for infants to per- (e.g., to know that when they hear dog, it is refer-
ceive differences in phonemes they hear regularly. ring to the four-legged animal) is crucial to lexical
The first sounds infants produce are vegeta- development. How children do this is a topic of
tive sounds such as crying and burping. Around 6 much debate. Nativists would argue that children
to 8 weeks, infants begin cooing or producing are born with knowledge of how words work.
long drawn-out vowel-like sounds of content- Other psychologists explain the mapping problem
ment. Between 4 and 7 months, babies engage in using a variety of constraints. For example, the
vocal play and increase their repertoire of sounds. whole object constraint suggests that children first
Vowels are produced first because they are easiest assume words to refer to a whole object, rather than
to produce physiologically, followed by consonants its parts. Social-cognitive psychologists assert that
formed in the back of the mouth (/g/), and then by children solve the mapping problem by focusing on
consonants formed in the front of the mouth (/m/). the intentions of others and the meanings they are
Between 6 and 9 months, children start babbling, trying to convey. Finally, researchers with more of a
first by producing reduplication of true syllables domain general perspective would argue that other
from their language, also known as canonical bab- cognitive processes, such as attention and memory,
bling (e.g., /nana/), and later by working in a larger can help explain word learning. Thus, the process of
range of phonemes. During this period, children also word learning is less clear-cut than the facts of word
produce jargon where they string together sounds learning at different ages.
with the melody and intonation of their language. As with other aspects of language, comprehen-
Indeed, studies have found that parents exaggerate sion precedes production in lexical development.
their intonation when talking to infants as com- Children tend to recognize their own name by
pared with talking to adults. As is found with per- 5 months, and by 10 months they can comprehend
ception of sounds, after 6 months of age, the sounds between 10 and 150 words as well as simple phrases,
infants produce start to resemble the sounds of the yet they do not often produce their first words until
language(s) they are exposed to rather than other they are 10 to 15 months old. Children reach a
languages. productive vocabulary of 50 words between 15 and
Childrens first words often have a simple syl- 20 months. In children learning English as well as
lable structure. During the second year of life, when many other languages, on average approximately
children are limited in their repertoire of phonemes, half of the first 50 words produced are nouns (e.g.,
they find creative ways to transform sounds to make ball, mama), yet there is variation across children.
them easier to produce. For example, they use what However, in some languages such as Mandarin,
is called reduplication of syllables to transform bottle there is less of a noun bias in childrens early lexi-
to /baba/ or delete syllables in words, such as trans- cons. Differences across languages may be due to the
forming banana to /nana/. They often mispronounce structure of the languages themselves in how nouns
words during this period as well. By age 3 years, and verbs are used, and to cultural differences in
speech is more intelligible, and by age 7, children parenting practices such as labeling objects.
sound adultlike in their phonology. Children show By age 2, children can produce between 50 and
some signs of phonological awarenessthat is, 550 words. Some of these large individual differences
awareness of their phonological abilitiesas early in vocabulary development can be explained by pho-
as age 2, when they play with sounds and appreciate nological memory as well as environmental factors.
rhyme. As children get older, this awareness grows For example, studies consistently find a positive rela-
and they can correctly answer questions such as say tion between the variety of vocabulary words parents
458 Language Development
use with children and childrens vocabulary size. As grammatical development based on the MLU of chil-
toddlers, children often produce unconventional dren he was observing longitudinally. He transcribed
word-meaning mappings. Overextensions refer to all their utterances, counted how many morphemes
using a word more broadly than is appropriate such were in each utterance, and then averaged the total
as using dog to refer to all four-legged animals, utterance length per child at each age. On average,
whereas underextensions refer to using a word children between 16 and 31 months are shown to
more narrowly, such as using dog to refer only to have MLUs between 1.0 and 2.0. MLUs increase to
German shepherds but not to collies. between 2.0 and 3.0 for children between 21 and
As childrens vocabulary size increases during 41 months, and MLUs of 4.0 or more are reached
early childhood, so does the depth of their vocabu- by children around 3 years old or older.
lary in that they gain greater understanding about Syntax is the component of grammar that governs
specific words and their meanings and appropriate the ordering of words in sentences. Studies show that
uses. Vocabulary acquisition is by no means com- as early as 16 to 18 months, children can compre-
plete at age 5. In fact, school-age children have been hend meaning carried in word order. As children
shown to increase their vocabularies by approxi- begin to produce language, they go through phases of
mately 3,000 words per year. syntactic development, which becomes increasingly
complex with age. In the two-word phase of produc-
Grammar tive grammatical development, children tend to use
Grammatical development includes an under- the same words in different combinations to express
standing of morphology and syntax. Morphology possessives such as my chair and my book
consists of the rules for combining morphemes to and descriptives such as pretty doll and pretty
create words. Morphemes are the smallest unit dress. Three-word speech combinations tend to
of meaning in language. Free morphemes are be telegraphic at first in that they omit morphemes
words that stand alone (e.g., dog) whereas bound (e.g., put it table); at around 2 to 3 years, children
morphemes cannot stand alone (e.g., plural s). fill in these obligatory morphemes. At around 3.5
Morphemes can be combined by (a) compounding, years, when children reach an MLU of 3.0 to 4.0,
or combining two or more free morphemes (e.g., they also start to produce passives as well as complex
houseboat); (b) derivation, or combining a bound sentences. However, some more complex aspects of
and free morpheme to change the meaning (e.g., syntax such as anaphora, or the understanding of
teacher); or (c) inflection, or combining a bound and how pronouns refer to their referents in a sentence,
free morpheme without changing the meaning or are not mastered until middle childhood.
grammatical category of the word (e.g., dogs).
Bilingual Language Acquisition
Evidence that children acquire morphological
rules comes from observing childrens productive Recent estimates suggest that almost 50% of the
errors (e.g., falled) as well as from experimental worlds population is bilingual, and by 2030, 40%
studies. A famous early study in 1958 by Jean Berko of American school-aged children will be English-
used nonsense words to test childrens morphologi- language learners. The study of bilingualism is
cal development. An experimenter first presented important given these social circumstances, as well
children with a picture and labeled it with a non- as to learn about how bilingualism develops and
sense word such as wug. The experimenter then pre- varies across children. Bilingualism develops either
sented children with another picture and said, Now sequentially, when one language is introduced after
there is another one, there are two of them, there are the acquisition of the first language, or simultane-
two __? If children could correctly answer wugs, ously, when both languages are learned in tandem.
this was evidence that they had learned the morpho- Although monolinguals and bilinguals learn lan-
logical rules because they had never heard the word guage in some similar ways, bilingualism has been
wugs before in their language. The preschoolers in shown to slightly alter the course of development of
her study (the youngest subjects) performed well certain linguistic and cognitive processes. Children
on these tasks. Another measure of childrens early in both monolingual and bilingual environments
productive morphological development is a count begin canonical babbling at approximately the same
of the mean length of utterance (MLU) measured time. Bilinguals, however, have smaller vocabular-
in morphemes. Roger Brown developed stages of ies in each language than their monolingual peers;
Language Development 459
lexical knowledge appears to be distributed across abilities. In contrast, children with another language
the two languages. Bilinguals, however, are found to disorder, specific language impairment (SLI), do not
show greater metalinguistic awareness, phonologi- display cognitive deficits. SLI usually results in lan-
cal awareness, grammatical awareness, and cogni- guage production 1 year behind and comprehension
tive control. Proficiency in second language learning 6 months behind typically developing children. SLI
depends on several factors. First, individuals who seems to be hereditary, as 20% of children with SLI
are exposed to a second language earlier in child- have relatives with language difficulties.
hood are better able to speak without an accent and Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD)
ultimately master certain grammatical structures, provide an example of the social nature of language
because they have more opportunities to speak. development. Lower functioning children with ASD
However, receptive vocabulary, translation, and show delayed linguistic development, and some of
story comprehension seem to be skills that are better these children never acquire language. Higher func-
honed when second language acquisition occurs at tioning children with ASD, however, display similar
an older age. syntactic abilities to typically developing children
but struggle with communicative competence.
Atypical Language Development Toddlers with ASD show little interest in others, do
Studying children with atypical trajectories of lin- not initiate joint attention, and rarely produce point-
guistic development is important for understanding ing gestures. Later, pragmatic development is also
how various abilities contribute to language acqui- impaired in children across the autism spectrum.
sition as well as to help develop new interventions In sum, in the first 5 years of life, children make
for language disorders. Typical language develop- great gains in oral language skills. These abilities are
ment relies on exposure to linguistic models in the found to contribute to the acquisition of reading and
environment. Deaf children born to hearing parents writing during school. Further, language develop-
are not exposed to these models and must use alter- ment is by no means complete when children enter
native ways to acquire language and communicate school; rather, it is a lifelong process, as even adults
with others. Approximately 1 in 1,000 children are continue to build their vocabularies and gain greater
born with severe hearing loss, yet if they are exposed understanding of language over time.
to sign language from birth, deaf children demon- Meredith L. Rowe and Kathryn A. Leech
strate a typical linguistic progression using sign.
These children typically babble manually rather See also Bilingual Language Processing; Bilingualism,
than vocally, and they produce their first sign before Cognitive Benefits of; Dyslexia, Developmental;
or at the same time as typically developing children Gesture and Language Processing; Heritage Language
produce their first words. and Second Language Learning; Innateness and
Studying language disorders can also help Parameter Setting; Language Development,
Overregulation in; Word Learning
researchers better understand typical language
development, specifically with regard to the extent
to which language and other cognitive processes Further Readings
are interrelated. For example, children with Down
Berko Gleason, J., & Berstein Ratner, N. (2009). The
syndrome show general cognitive defects and are
development of language (7th ed.). Boston, MA:
also late to babble and begin talking; they produce
Pearson.
toddler-like phonological patterns into adulthood. Bloom, P. (2000). How children learn the meanings of
Thus, cases of Down syndrome provide some evi- words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
dence that linguistic and cognitive processes operate Hoff, E. (2009). Language development (4th ed.). Belmont,
in tandem, as both are delayed in these children. On CA: Wadsworth.
the other hand, some children who have impaired Hoff, E., & Shatz, M. (Eds.). (2007). Handbook of
cognitive development do not have impaired lan- language development. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
guage development. This provides evidence that Lust, B., & Foley, C. (Eds.). (2004). First language
cognitive and linguistic functioning may be separate acquisition: The essential readings. Malden, MA:
processes. Individuals with Williams syndrome, Blackwell.
for example, have IQs that are similar to those Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct. New York, NY:
with Down syndrome but have stronger language Morrow.
460 Language Development, Overregulation in
Poeppel, D., & Hickok, G. (2004). Towards a new (an asterisk indicates ungrammatical forms). This
functional anatomy of language. Cognition, 92, 112. developmental pattern is commonly referred to as
Tomasello, M. (1995). Language is not an instinct [Review a U-shaped learning curve. The irregular past tense
of the book The language instinct, by S. Pinker]. forms are said to undergo this U-shaped learning
Cognitive Development, 10, 131156. curve because, during early acquisition of the irregu-
lar past tense, children produce inflected irregulars
correctly. They then go through a phase where they
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT, overgeneralize the regular formation in which -ed is
simply added to the verb stem. This overregulation
OVERREGULATION IN of the regular formation to irregular verbs results
in irregulars being produced incorrectly. In the final
The study of language development has revealed phase of the learning curve, childrens performance
many interesting findings and has contributed to the on irregulars increases as they learn to associate the
field of language acquisition and, more generally, correct irregular past tense form with its stem.
to linguistics and psychology. Of particular impor-
tance is the emergence of certain intriguing patterns Explaining Overregulation
that are characteristic of early language develop-
ment. This entry will discuss one particular feature It is worth examining why this phenomenon
of language development, namely, overregulation. occurs. Recall that the past tense can be inflected
Overregulation in language development occurs regularly or irregularly. In English, many irregu-
when children apply linguistic generalizations in lar verbs are highly frequent (i.e., they occur quite
contexts where that would not be deemed appropri- often). This could explain why the irregular forms
ate for adult speakers. are produced accurately at first. However, although
individual tokens of irregular verbs are high in fre-
Linguistic Background: The quency, there are many more regular verbs then
Case of the Past Tense irregular verbs in English. This difference in type fre-
quency (such as more regular verb types than irregu-
For instance, in English, verbs can be classified into lar verb types) may play a role in the overregulation.
two main types: regular and irregular. Regular verbs Therefore, because children come across many more
are so-called as their past tense forms are created regular verbs than irregular verbs, they overapply
by the addition of the suffix -ed to the stem (e.g., the regular rule.
walkwalked). On the other hand, the irregular On the other hand, it has also been argued that
verbs cannot be summarized under one rule as overregulation occurs because children make use
can be done for the regular verbs. As such, the rela- of a grammatical rule (i.e., add -ed to a verb stem),
tionship between the stem and the past tense form is which acts as the default rule. Hence, in cases where
more arbitrary (e.g., gowent). no irregular form can be retrieved, the default rule is
applied. In German, the regular participle (-t) has a
Properties of Overregulation smaller type frequency than the irregular participle
U-Shaped Curve (-n) but exhibits overregulation in the same way as
the English regular past tense. From this point of
At some point during language development view, overregulations are argued to show evidence
(around the age of 2 years), children begin acquir- for symbolic or rule-based representations.
ing past tense formations. Although they produce
both regulars and irregulars more or less accurately
in the early stage of past tense acquisition, as they Overregulation in Other
begin to acquire more verbs, they start producing Linguistic Phenomena
errors, especially with regard to irregular formation. Although the primary example used here is the past
It is at this point during language development when tense, evidence of overregulation can also be found in
children incorrectly inflect irregular verbs in a regu- the development of plural formation. In this case, the
lar manner. For example, they may produce *goed regular plural marker in English, -s, is overapplied
instead of went, or *thinked instead of thought incorrectly to nouns that would normally undergo an
Language Production, Agreement in 461
irregular plural inflection (e.g., mouse*mouses). In Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M.,
addition, children are also known to produce incor- Rosen, T. J., & Xu, F. (1992). Overregularization in
rect comparative and superlative forms of adjectives. language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for
In English, the comparative form of an adjective is Research in Child Development, 57(4, Serial No. 228).
created by adding the suffix -er to the adjective (e.g.,
highhigher), and the superlative form is created by
the addition of the suffix -est (e.g., highhighest). LANGUAGE PRODUCTION,
A common error in comparative formations occurs
with the adjective good where children incorrectly
AGREEMENT IN
produce *gooder as the comparative form. Likewise,
*goodest may be produced as the superlative form. Agreement refers to the correspondence of some
Finally, irregular inflections themselves may be used formal feature (person, gender, number) between
as stems allowing for concatenation with a regular an agreement controller (e.g., the subject noun) and
affix (e.g., for the past tense, come*camed; for plu- syntactically related words in the sentence (e.g.,
rals, mouse*mices; and for superlatives, good the verb). Being syntactic in essence, this phenom-
*bestest). enon provides a privileged window on the processes
involved in grammatical encoding. This entry sum-
Theoretical Implications marizes two major lines of research on agreement
that have been pursued in psycholinguistics. The
Overregulations in language development have been first line explores the influence of semantic and pho-
argued to provide evidence for nativist views of lan- nological factors in agreement to shed light on the
guage acquisition (generally, views that language- issue of modularity in language production. The sec-
specific innate processes play a large role in language ond line addresses agreement deficits in the produc-
acquisition). This view is predicated on the finding tion of specific populations.
that overgeneralizations are attested implying that
children do not simply acquire language based on Semantic and Phonological Factors
input alone, as adults do not normally produce these in Agreement Production
errors and therefore there are no such errors in the
input. Non-nativists, on the other hand, would argue In the early 1990s, Kathryn Bock initiated what
that there are models of language acquisition which became a whole research program on agreement
use error-free input that can simulate the U-shaped production. She showed that so-called attraction
curve representative of past tense acquisition. errors by which an element with agreement features
Although overregulation may not occur very interferes in the realization of agreement (e.g., cabi-
frequently in language development, it nevertheless nets in *The key to the cabinets are on the table;
provides valuable insight into the mechanisms and * = ungrammatical sentence) can be reproduced
processes that children make use of during language and boosted in the laboratory by asking partici-
acquisition. pants to complete sentences under time constraints.
Experimental research showed that interference is
Renita Silva primarily guided by the syntactic features of the
attracting element, independently of the represen-
See also Language Development; Language Production, tation of these features at the conceptual level (e.g.,
Agreement in; Syntactic Production, Agreement in; plurality) and at the morphophonological level (i.e.,
Word Learning
in the form of the word, like the final s on English
nouns). Nevertheless, agreement turns out to be
Further Readings under the partial guidance of conceptual and mor-
Clahsen, H., Hadler, M., & Weyerts, H. (2004). Speeded phophonological features of the agreement control-
production of inflected words in children and adults. ler. For example, the grammar of English allows
Journal of Child Language, 31, 683712. plural verbs to occur with grammatically singular
Kuczaj, S. A., II. (1977). The acquisition of regular and but conceptually plural collective head nouns (e.g.,
irregular past tense forms. Journal of Verbal Learning the faculty are threatening to protest). Along these
and Verbal Behavior, 16, 589600. lines, experimental research on attraction errors
462 Language Production, Agreement in
across languages showed that erroneous plural Franck and colleagues proposed that both concep-
verbs are more frequent with collective subject head tual and morphophonological influences arise at a
nouns (e.g., the fleet) than with nouns referring to stage of lexical selection during which the control-
individual entities (e.g., the ship), or with distribu- lers features are being selected within the functional
tive subjects (e.g., the label on the bottles, in which lexicon (i.e., the lexicon for grammatical morphemes
one has to assume a multiplicity of labels) than with like nominal or verbal inflections), whereas these
nondistributive subjects (e.g., the baby on the blan- features are copied at a stage operating on the basis
kets). Research on antecedent-pronoun agreement of syntactic principles, following characteristics of
showed that pronouns (reflexive and tag) are also modular systems.
prone to conceptual agreement and this to a larger
extent than verbs. Studies of subject-predicative
Agreement in Specific Populations
adjective gender agreement in Romance languages
also revealed sensitivity to the conceptual features Children produce agreement markers on nouns (such
of the agreement controller. For example, gender as the final s in English) before they produce verbal
attraction is reduced when the subject nouns gender or adjectival agreement morphology. Initial produc-
has a conceptual feature, as is the case for biological tions (of nouns as well as agreeing particles like verbs
gender (e.g., the girl) as compared to when it has or adjectives) are characterized by a tendency of the
strictly grammatical gender, not represented concep- child to produce unmarked forms (singular, mas-
tually (e.g., the table, which is grammatically femi- culine). Nevertheless, from early on, children also
nine in these languages). Research showed that the produce occasional plural and feminine forms and
manifestation of agreement features in the morpho- this consistently in the context of plural or feminine
logical form of the controller also modulates attrac- agreement controllers. This systematicity attests that
tion. For example, attraction in number and gender even though young children tend to simplify their
is significantly reduced when the subject expresses productions, they do so in virtue of grammatical con-
number or gender morphologically (e.g., in Italian, straints in agreement and not by chance. Across lan-
nouns ending in o are typically masculine) as com- guages, children with specific language impairment
pared to when it fails to express it (nouns ending in usually show difficulties with inflectional morphol-
e may be masculine or feminine). Similarly, the pres- ogy, with an overuse of default agreement forms.
ence of case markers (i.e., markers that indicate the Difficulties with agreement production are also
grammatical function of a noun, e.g., as a subject or commonly reported in children with developmental
object) was also found to reduce error rates as com- dyslexia. Nevertheless, evidence is accumulating in
pared to ambiguous case marking. More generally, favor of the hypothesis that the observed impairment
morphophonological influences were found to vary with agreement in these populations does not result
cross-linguistically as a function of the validity of the from a deficit in the syntactic machinery per se, but
morphophonological marker in the language. rather of impoverished processing and memory sys-
Different interpretations of conceptual and tems involved operating at the interface with syntax
morphophonological effects on agreement have in language production. (For example, these popula-
been proposed. Gabriella Vigliocco and colleagues tions show optional production of agreement mark-
interpreted them within an interactive framework ers, production in consistent contexts, and preserved
in which grammatical encoding is maximally influ- sensitivity to agreement in comprehension.)
enced by nongrammatical information. In the mark- Similar profiles of agreement deficits are found
ing and morphing model developed by Bock and in agrammatic speech in individuals with Brocas
colleagues, nongrammatical influences are restricted aphasia, commonly described as involving a general
to two specific stages of agreement production: breakdown in the production of grammatical mor-
Conceptual influences arise at the marking stage of phemes. However, recent studies based on a finer
sentence production when features from the mes- grained approach to syntactic production in these
sage level are transmitted to the syntax, whereas patients have shown that, across languages, agree-
morphophonological influences arise subsequently ment morphemes are often either intact or better
at the level of morphing when features are transmit- preserved than other inflectional morphemes like
ted to structurally controlled elements (like verbs) tense. The tree pruning hypothesis accounts for the
and morphophonologically specified. Finally, Julie patterns of impairments in people with agrammatism
Language Production, Incremental Processing in 463
by assuming that higher projections of the syntactic Models of language production agree that speak-
tree are pruned, following the hierarchical order of ers need not generate all levels of representation for
functional categories. Under this account, agreement an entire utterance before beginning to speak. They
production by individuals with Brocas aphasia is propose that fluent speech output is accomplished
conceived of as a grammar-based phenomenon but by incremental processing, so that the articulation of
driven by processing or working memory limitations. early parts of an utterance occurs in parallel with the
planning of upcoming segments. However, exactly
Julie Franck
how processing at different levels is coordinated
See also Aphasia; Planning in Language Production;
remains a matter of dispute. In particular, there is
Production of Language; Syntactic Production, disagreement about how much of an utterance must
Agreement in be generated at a particular level of representation
before processing at the next level can begin.
This entry will introduce different proposals
Further Readings
about the degree of incrementality operating dur-
Bock, J. K., Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., Meyer, A. S., ing speech production. It will discuss the relevant
& Schriefers, H. (2001). Some attractions of verb findings for processes involved in the generation of
agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 43, 83128. grammatical and phonological structure.
Franck, J., Vigliocco, G., Antn-Mndez, I., Collina, S., &
Frauenfelder, U. H. (2008). The interplay of syntax and
form in language production: A cross-linguistic study of Generating Grammatical Structure
form effects on agreement. Language and Cognitive There is conflicting evidence about how much of an
Processes, 23(3), 329374. utterance must be grammatically encoded prior to
Friedmann, N. (2006). Speech production in Brocas articulation. Some theories claim that the verb of a
agrammatic aphasia: Syntactic tree pruning. In Y.
sentence must be retrieved before the generation of
Grodzinsky & K. Amunts (Eds.), Brocas region (pp.
syntactic structure can commence. Verbs control the
6382). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
structure of clauses and there is evidence that the
Jakubowicz, C. (2011). Measuring derivational complexity:
clause operates as a planning unit during speech pro-
New evidence from typically-developing and SLI
duction. Planning pauses in speech have been shown
learners of L1-French. Lingua, 21(3), 399351.
Vigliocco, G., & Harsuiker, R. J. (2002). The interplay of
to occur more frequently between clauses than clause
meaning, sound, and syntax in sentence production. internally. Speech error data have been used to claim
Psychological Bulletin, 128, 442472. that the words for a whole clause are retrieved prior
to speech onset. Word exchange errors such as put
the drawer in the cloth suggest that the exchang-
LANGUAGE PRODUCTION, ing words drawer and cloth are retrieved in parallel.
However, it is also proposed that these effects could
INCREMENTAL PROCESSING IN occur during conceptual, rather than grammatical,
processing.
Language production involves the generation of sev- Experimental evidence exists for tightly incre-
eral successive levels of representation. These repre- mental planning. In recent years, eye-tracking stud-
sentations map between the thought to be expressed ies have recorded the gaze patterns of speakers while
and the motor commands that articulate it. Current they describe pictured scenes. These experiments
models of language production are in broad agree- demonstrate that speakers almost always fixate on
ment about the nature of these representations. pictured objects in their order of mention and rarely
Speaking begins with the construction of a concep- look ahead at objects to be named later (although
tual representation of the meaning to be expressed. some peripheral processing of immediately adjacent
This representation triggers grammatical encoding objects can occur). The time spent looking at an
processes, which select the appropriate words from object is a function of the ease with which it can
the mental lexicon and generate a syntactic structure be identified, as well as of the ease with which the
to fix their linear order. Phonological encoding pro- phonological form of its name can be retrieved.
cesses then generate the abstract sound structure of These findings suggest that we plan speech word-by-
the utterance prior to articulation. word with planning progressing only slightly ahead
464 Layered Control Architectures
of articulation. However, these experiments usually that unit comprises more than one lexical item (e.g.,
involved the production of one sentence structure to I-like-to).
one fixed pattern of pictures. It is possible, therefore, However, the syllable latency effect has proved
that the observed visual and linguistic processing difficult to replicate. Moreover, it has been dem-
patterns are strategic rather than typical. onstrated using the picture-word interference task
Evidence from reaction time experiments in that priming may be limited to the initial syllable of
which speakers produce more varied utterances is disyllabic words in some two-word utterances. For
consistent with the first phrase as a planning unit. example, naming a picture of a colored object (e.g.,
Sentence onset latencies (i.e., the time it takes to purple ball) is speeded by hearing the first syllable
begin sentences) have been shown to increase as the of the adjective (i.e., pur) but not the second syllable
complexity of the sentence initial phrase increases. In (i.e., ple). It is possible, therefore, that although the
contrast, priming the retrieval of the verb in subject- phonological word may be the preferred unit of
verb sentences does not speed sentence production. phonological encoding, it may not constitute the
For example, exposure to a verb (e.g., brushing) minimal unit of phonological encoding.
does not speed the production onset of a sentence As with grammatical encoding, it is possible that
with a semantically related verb (e.g., the woman the degree of incrementality employed by speak-
is combing her hair). This finding suggests that the ers may vary across different speaking contexts.
verb need not be accessed before speech onset. Similarly, there remains the issue of cross-linguistic
It is possible that there is some flexibility in the differences in the scope across which dependen-
degree of incrementality that speakers can adopt. cies operate during the generation of phonological
However, there are also minimum planning units structure.
that must be employed due to grammatical depen-
Linda R. Wheeldon
dencies. In many languages, grammatical agreement
must occur between the elements of a sentence See also Language Production, Agreement in; Production
and the lower limit of advance planning will dif- of Language; Prosody in Production
fer depending on the scope of the dependencies in
a given language. For example, in many languages,
Further Readings
the form of a determiner (e.g., the) is dependent on
the gender of the noun it refers to (e.g., das rote Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From intention to
auto, the red car). articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Meyer, A. S., Sleiderink, A. M., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1998).
Generating Phonological Structure Viewing and naming objects: Eye movements during
noun phrase production. Cognition, 66, B25B33.
Generating the sound form of an utterance does not
Schriefers, H., Teruel, E., & Meinshausen, R. M. (1998).
simply involve the retrieval of the stored phonologi-
Producing simple sentences: Results from picture-word
cal representation for each word, because the exact interference experiments. Journal of Memory and
sound structure of a word is dependent on the con- Language, 39, 609632.
text in which it is produced. Willem Levelt argued Wheeldon, L. R., & Lahiri, A. (1997). Prosodic units in
that prior to articulation, we construct a complete speech production. Journal of Memory and Language,
phonological worda prosodic unit with one 37, 356381.
stressed syllable that can comprise several words. For
example, the five words in the utterance, I gave it to
her, can form one phonological word, I-ga-vi-ter.
A number of experiments provide support for
LAYERED CONTROL
this hypothesis. The time to begin to produce a word ARCHITECTURES
has been shown to increase with its number of syl-
lables, suggesting that all syllables of a word are A layered control architecture is one in which there
encoded prior to articulation. Moreover, sentence are multiple levels of control at which the sensing
onset latency has been shown to be a function of the apparatus is interfaced with the motor system. It
length of the initial phonological word, even when is distinguished from hierarchical control by the
Layered Control Architectures 465
constraint that the architecture should exhibit dis- (walking, grooming, eating, etc.) is spared. With
sociations, such that the lower levels still operate, all but the hindbrain and spinal cord removed, the
and exhibit some sort of behavioral competence, animal cannot coordinate the movements required
in the absence (through damage or removal) of for these actions; however, most of the component
the higher layers but not vice versa. A substantial movements that make up the actions are still pos-
body of the neuroscience literature can be inter- sible. The notion of a layered architecture is now
preted as demonstrating layered control systems in being mapped out in more detail in the context of
the vertebrate brain; layering is also an important specific types of behavior. For instance, as illustrated
theme in the design of artificial control systems, in Figure 1, the vertebrate defense systemthe con-
for instance, for autonomous robots. trol system that protects the body from physical
harmcan be viewed as being instantiated in mul-
Layered Control in the Vertebrate Brain tiple layers from the spinal cord (reflexes), through
In many ways, the notion of layering is a com- the hindbrain (potentiated reflexes), midbrain (coor-
mon, often unspoken, assumption in neuroscience; dinated responses to species-specific stimuli), fore-
however, the implications of the layered nature of brain (coordinated responses to conditioned stimuli),
the brain are not always acknowledged in a field and cortex (modification of responses according to
often dominated by the study of the mammalian context). In this system, the higher layers generally
cortex. The idea of the brain as a layered architec- operate by modulating (suppressing, potentiating, or
ture can be traced to the views of John Hughlings modifying) responses generated by the lower layers.
Jackson, a 19th-century neurologist inspired by the
Layered Control in Robots
Darwinian revolution. According to Jackson, the
various anatomical levels of the brain implement Although many control architectures for artificial
multiple functional levels of sensorimotor compe- agents include elements of layered control, the sub-
tence with higher centers supporting the same sort sumption architecture, proposed by Rodney Brooks,
of sensorimotor coordinations as those below, but illustrates the idea in perhaps its purest form. The
in a more complex fashion. This view contrasted principle of the subsumption architecture is that con-
with that of many of Jacksons contemporaries for trol systems are built incrementally, one layer at a
whom the highest levels of the brain, particularly time, with each new layer fully tested and debugged
the frontal lobes, were considered to be the seats of before another is added (emulating, perhaps, the
understanding and consciousness. Jackson strongly process of natural evolution). New layers operate
asserted that, although the frontal lobes may play primarily by injecting their signals into lower layers
a role in these more refined functions, the brain is a thereby subsuming the lower level functionality.
product of evolution and, therefore, all of its levels A key idea is that the system as whole does not con-
must be involved, in some way, with the coordina- struct integrated representations of the world; rather,
tion of sensing with action. Jackson also popularized sensory signals are processed differently at each level
the idea of dissociation; he argued that a breakdown to implement relatively direct and behavior-specific
at a higher layer should cause a reversion to the next mappings between sense data and the motor signals
highest layer of control. Discoveries of such disso- required to control the robots actuators. Robots
ciations between the vertical layers of the vertebrate built according to the principles of the subsumption
nervous system were among the first findings of neu- architecture can operate in cluttered real-world set-
roscience. For instance, removing the cortex from a tings, despite having relatively simple control sys-
cat or a rat eliminates many major sensory, motor, tems, and show rapid responsiveness together with
and cognitive centers but leaves intact the ability to robustness to breakdown or damage (if higher levels
generate basic motivated behavior. That is, the ani- become inoperable, the lower level system should
mal still shivers when cold, escapes or fights when still function). Arguably, however, the principles of
attacked, searches for food and drink, stops eating subsumption have failed to scale to allow the control
when sated, and so on. When most of the forebrain of robots with many actuators and multiple goals,
is removed, integrated behaviors can no longer be that is, where the system is faced with particularly
generated, but the capacity for elementary actions difficult problems of action selection.
466 Layered Control Architectures
Hippocampus
Context & Septum A
M
Y
Sensory Conditioned
Complex G
Cortex D Emotional
Neutral Stimuli
A Responses
L
Neutral A
Thalamus
Stimuli
Sudden Distal
Hindbrain Startle Responses
Stimuli
Motor,
Sensory Autonomic,
Input & Endocrine
Output
Figure 1 Layered organization of neural mechanisms for defense in the vertebrate brain
Source: Prescott, T. J., Redgrave, P., and Gurney, K. (1999). Layered control architectures in robots and vertebrates. Adaptive
Behavior, 7, 99127.
Note: The nature of the sensory input, the principal brain structures involved, and the nature of the defense reaction are
indicated for each level. The output of all layers appears to be relayed to a relatively restricted set of motor, autonomic, and
hormonal effector systems.
Other Dimensions of Brain Organization across the different levels. A better understanding
of this full hybrid control architecture remains an
The nervous system is an intricately complex struc-
important goal for the sciences of mind.
ture. Thus, although the vertebrate brain shows
clear evidence of layered control, there will likely Tony J. Prescott
be other important governing principles in its orga-
nization. Indeed, a system that works by the prin- See also Common Coding; Decision Making, Neural
ciples of layered control alone may be too rigid to Underpinnings; Natural Action Selection, Modeling
exhibit the intelligent, flexible behavior that ver-
tebrate animals are clearly capable of (and cur- Further Readings
rently far exceeds that achievable by robots). One Brooks, R. A. (1991). New approaches to robotics. Science,
proposal is of a centralized, or centrencephalic, 253, 12271232.
organizing principle whereby a group of central, Gallistel, C. R. (1980). The organization of action: A new
subcortical brain structures serves to coordinate synthesis. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
and integrate the activity of both higher level and Prescott, T. J., Redgrave, P., & Gurney, K. (1999). Layered
lower level neural systems. Although the notion control architectures in robots and vertebrates. Adaptive
of centrencephalic organization appears to oppose Behavior, 7, 99127.
that of layered control, it is possible that the brain, Thompson, R. (1993). Centrencephalic theory, the general
although fundamentally layered, uses central inte- learning system, and subcortical dementia. Annals of the
grative systems to manage and coordinate activity New York Academy of Sciences, 702, 197223.
Learning Styles 467
Theories of learning styles suggest that learning Visual/auditory/ Learning is more effective if the
varies across individuals, based on how the person kinesthetic material is perceived in the
perceives material (e.g., visually vs. auditorily) or preferred modality
how the person thinks about it (e.g., trying to solve Converging/ A preference for deductive
a problem sequentially vs. trying to think about it diverging thinking or for broad,
globally). This entry describes what learning styles associational thinking
theories predict about human learning and discusses Serialist/holist A tendency to work through
the lack of evidence supporting these predictions. problems incrementally versus
globally
Definition of Learning Styles
Verbalize/ A tendency to use words or to
The key prediction of learning styles theories is that visualize use mental pictures when
learning and thinking ought to be faster and more thinking and reasoning
effective if a person thinks about the material in a Field dependent/ A tendency to see and think
way that matches his or her style than if there is a field independent about related objects as a
mismatch. This preference is predicted to be stable whole, versus separating an
and thus observable across time and with different object from its surrounding
learning tasks. context
A few particulars of this definition require elabo-
ration. First, learning styles are specific. The claim
is not that everyone learns differently but that
there is a limited number of styles. Second, learn- time, dozens of theories have been proposed, many
ing styles reflect performance, not just preference. A of which are rather complex. Some that may be
sequential learner not only likes doing tasks sequen- described simply are shown in Table 1.
tially rather than globally, he or she also performs Styles are most often assessed through self-report
tasks better that way. Third, learning styles occur questionnaires, which typically ask about the types
on a continuum. It is usually assumed that a few of activities the respondent enjoys (I like cross-
people will show extreme preferences but that most word puzzles and anagrams), behaviors (I often
will be somewhere in the middle. Fourth, learning find myself humming a tune or tapping in time to
styles are distinct from abilities. It is always better to music), or beliefs about styles of thought (I pre-
have more ability than less, but styles are meant to fer a concrete, step-by-step solution to problems,
be value neutral. There is nothing inherently better rather than trying to come up with a shortcut).
about being a visual learner or an auditory learner. Assessment may also include completion of some
Different researchers have proposed different tasks and an interview.
bases for learning styles. Some have suggested that Researchers have used two important criteria to
a style is a relatively fixed part of ones cognitive evaluate learning styles theories: reliability and pre-
makeup, built into the mind. Others have suggested dictive validity. Reliability means that the assessment
that learning styles actually reflect more broadly of a persons style should be consistent. One should
based personality types; the theoretical distinctions be able to administer two or more tests of style and
are meant to capture not only learning but also how always get the same classification. Predictive validity
one interacts with other people, for example. Still means that the people with different styles should
other theorists have suggested that learning styles show meaningful differences in how they think and
are somewhat open to change, based on experience learn when confronted with real-world tasks. By
and on the moment-to-moment demands of the these two criteria, learning styles theories are not
environment. well supported.
Legal Formalism and Legal Realism opinions are often written in formalist language,
describing the decision as unequivocally constrained
Legal formalism was a form of deductive legal
by the law.
reasoning promulgated by Christopher Columbus
Langdell, who became dean of the Harvard Law
School in 1870 and who transformed legal educa- Differences Between Legal Reasoning
tion from apprenticeship to professional education. and Scientific Reasoning
According to formalism, the law is hierarchically Scientists are more concerned with discovering valid
organized with a few highly abstract principles at generalizations than with specific cases. Legal rea-
the top, from which a larger number of mid-level soning is more like early psychiatry, in that individ-
rules are derived, and finally a very large number of ual cases are central. Excellence in legal reasoning
specific legal rules and case precedents, rather like involves finding factors that distinguish among
the taxonomic system of Linnaeus (phyla, genera, apparently similar cases and general rules that unite
species). Like the explorer who discovers a new spe- apparently disparate cases.
cies, the judge confronted with a new case could find When scientists are trying to decide among
its exact place in the ordered structure by comparing multiple competing hypotheses, they can design
it with the low-level exemplars. Langdell promoted and carry out empirical research to generate new
law as a logical, deductive science. information. Judges do not have this power. Judges
Formalism was sharply criticized by Oliver must work with the information given to them, and
Wendell Holmes Jr. and later critics such as Roscoe that information consists of what other people have
Pound, Karl Llewellyn, and Benjamin Cardozo, who said (attorneys, witnesses) or written (attorneys,
argued that application of legal rules does not yield judges, legal scholars) and their own background
definite answers in any but the easiest cases. Judges knowledge.
do not discover the defining distinction between one Scientists can also postpone making any deci-
case and another by logical analysis; the boundaries sion at all. They can look at the evidence available
are often fuzzy and overlapping, and what judges do and decide that it is inconclusive. Trial court judges
is create the defining distinction. The fundamental have to make a decision on the basis of the evidence
principles and legal rules are important and pro- before them, even if it is ambiguous. Usually they
vide guidance, but in many cases, are insufficient to have to decide for one party or the other. Appellate
determine the outcome. court judges have to make a decision based on the
In the 20th century, these criticisms were further briefs and oral arguments. Their decisions have prec-
developed in the legal realism movement. Its adher- edential force, defining the law for years to come,
ents were an eclectic group of political activists, whether the case was close or clear. A 5-to-4 decision
admirers of the rapidly growing social sciences, and from the Supreme Court is as final as a unanimous
legal scholars who believed that the purpose of the decision. In science, no decision is reached when
law was as important as the letter of the law. The scientists are closely divided on an issue. Judicial
unifying theme was a rejection of formalism and decisions are always supposed to be final; scientific
a belief that legal doctrine played a limited role in decisions never are.
actual legal decision making. They focused on the Scientists think of variables like sanity or parental
political, social, cultural, and psychological forces fitness or maturity as matters of degree, but legal
that influence legal decisions and on how legal deci- decision makers are forced to draw bright lines and
sion makers actually reason, rather than how they make categorical decisions: A 17-year-old is a child;
justify their decisions. Legal realism has largely been an 18-year-old is an adult.
absorbed into legal education, and consideration Ideas of free will and free choice are fundamental
of the social context, purposes, and policy implica- to legal thinking, and this creates a tension between
tions of the law is common. Few people still believe law and the social sciences, which are, to varying
in strict Langdellian formalism, although many degrees, deterministic. The judges task is to assign
law courses are a blend of formalism and the con- responsibility, which implies the assumption that
siderations raised by the legal realists, and judicial people are personally accountable for their actions.
470 Lie Detection
Some conditions can reduce responsibility, but free palmar sweating, respiration, and blood pressure
will is the starting point. while individuals are asked different types of ques-
Finally, just as methodological rigor is central to tions. The first broadly used polygraph techniques
science, adherence to the rules of law is central to became known as relevant-irrelevant tests (RIT).
legal decision making. Every decision that has prec- The RIT includes a relevant or did you do it ques-
edential value must be justified by explicit discussion tion (e.g., in the case of a womans rape, Did you
of the applicable law. Whether or not the rules actu- place your finger in Glendas vagina?). The physi-
ally determine the outcome, the judge must always ological reaction to relevant questions is compared
provide a legal reason for the decision. to the response to truthfully answered irrelevant
questions dealing with simple facts (e.g., Is your
Phoebe C. Ellsworth
name John?). Guilt is inferred if the relevant ques-
See also Analogical Mapping and Reasoning; Case-Based
tion elicits the stronger response. The problem with
Reasoning, Computational Perspectives; Deductive the RIT is that the accusatory relevant question
Reasoning; Scientific Reasoning can be emotionally arousing even when answered
truthfully, thus ensuring that it will elicit a strong
physiological reaction, often much stronger than
Further Readings
the response to the innocuous irrelevant question.
Burton, S. J. (1995). An introduction to law and legal Recognized for this bias against the innocent, the
reasoning (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Little, Brown. RIT has been largely replaced by the control or com-
Ellsworth, P. C. (2005). Legal reasoning. In K. J. Holyoak parison question test (CQT).
& R. G. Morrison (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of
thinking and reasoning (pp. 685704). New York, NY: Control (Comparison) Question Technique
Cambridge University Press.
Horwitz, M. (1992). The transformation of American law, The CQT, first introduced in the 1940s, is typically
18701960: The crisis of legal orthodoxy. New York, used in forensic applications. Like the RIT, the CQT
NY: Oxford University Press. includes relevant questions. However, the reactions
to the relevant questions are compared to those from
control questions that are thematically related to
the content to the relevant question. Control ques-
LIE DETECTION tions, which are answered no, are believed to tap
a probable lie based on the expectation that peo-
Most educated people understand that the link ple typically engage in misbehaviors that are covered
between body and mind makes plausible the physi- by the question. An example of a control question
ological detection of deception. However, in the appropriate for an interrogation concerning a sex
absence of a physiological response unique to lying, crime would be Have you ever committed a sex act
developing a valid lie detector has been both chal- you were ashamed of? CQT theory assumes that
lenging and controversial. Modern lie detection innocent individuals will be disturbed more by their
relies on polygraph testscollections of interroga- denial to the control than to the relevant question
tion techniques assisted by physiological recording because only the control question is likely to elicit
that are intended to detect criminal offenders, screen a lie. By contrast, guilty individuals are expected to
out dishonest job applicants, and identify personnel respond more to the relevant question because, for
who pose security risks. Despite the widespread use them, this question elicits a more important lie.
of polygraphy in the United States, mostly by gov- Regrettably, for the innocent, the significance of
ernment agencies, the scientific community remains the accusation contained in the relevant and control
skeptical that polygraphy could have the high accu- questions is not equivalent. Only the relevant ques-
racy claimed by polygraph practitioners. tion deals with the criminal allegation, and only the
response to this question can lead to consequences
Relevant-Irrelevant Technique such as prosecution or public embarrassment. Just
Modern polygraph testing is computerized and as is the case for the RIT, the CQT is biased against
involves obtaining digital representations of auto- the innocent because only the relevant question deals
nomic nervous system activity associated with with a consequential allegation. Hence, the accuracy
Lie Detection 471
of failed CQTs is suspect. But can passed tests be panel held public hearings, had access to classified
trusted? Unfortunately, research has shown that liars government documents and data on polygraph test-
can augment their physiological reactions to the con- ing, and systematically evaluated the world litera-
trol questions by lightly biting their tongue or doing ture on test validity. They concluded that the weak
stressful mental exercises, thereby beating a CQT. theory underlying polygraph tests renders implausi-
Neither failed nor passed CQTs can be trusted. ble high accuracy claims, the generally poor quality
of research on polygraph testing leads to overesti-
Screening Techniques mates of accuracy, the precise accuracy of polygraph
tests is indeterminate, and there is no evidence that
The most common applications of polygraphy occur polygraph tests provide information about truthful-
with screening of law enforcement job applicants ness that cannot be achieved by other methods.
and of government employees with security clear- An important question becomes why polygraph
ances. Applicant screening tests deal with the of tests are used if they have such a weak scientific
integrity of prospective employees by, for instance, foundation. Polygraph tests are typically adminis-
asking if they told the truth in response to hundreds tered under circumstances where having the truth
of questions on their job application dealing with is important but difficult to obtain. Examiners are
their trustworthiness on previous jobs, use of drugs skilled interrogators adept at using the test occasion
and alcohol, meeting financial obligations, and so to leverage information from the examinee. Under
forth. Employees who already have jobs can be que- the circumstances, important admissions and even
ried regarding their adherence to protocols designed confessions to otherwise unsolvable crimes are
to protect classified information entrusted to them. obtained. That anecdotal evidence indicates that
Screening test formats vary across settings, but many such discovery frequently occurs speaks to the utility,
of the tests resemble an RIT with many relevant not the accuracy, of polygraph tests. Indeed, the fast-
questions. Any relevant questions eliciting stronger est growing application of polygraph testing involves
responses than others are likely to become a basis their use with convicted sex offenders whose treat-
for interrogation by the polygraph operator. If the ment progress and compliance with rules governing
examinee cannot explain the reactions to the satis- their release are difficult to monitor. Challenged to
faction of the examiner, the test is failed. Although be truthful during their polygraph tests, sex offend-
accurate statistics regarding the rate at which these ers often divulge information about deviant sexual
tests are failed is lacking, anecdotal evidence indi- behavior and fantasies that monitoring programs
cates that preemployment tests are somewhat fre- use to help manage their rehabilitation.
quently failed whereas postemployment tests are
rarely failed. This pattern is generally believed to Probing Memory: The Guilty (Concealed)
reflect the examiners understanding that the cost Knowledge Test
of erroneously failing a qualified but untrained pro-
spective employee is considerably less than that asso- Although conventional lie detection methods have,
ciated with failing a highly trained and thoroughly at best, a weak scientific foundation, there are mem-
vetted current employee. ory-based detection methods that have a strong
scientific rationale. The best known of these, intro-
duced by David Lykken in 1959, is called the guilty
Evaluation of the Scientific Foundation
knowledge test (GKT; sometimes referred to as the
for Lie Detection Techniques
concealed information test). It is well established
Proponents of polygraph tests typically claim near that a physiological response accompanies brain rec-
infallibility for their techniques, especially for the ognition of personally important information. The
CQT. Scientists at arms length from the polygraph GKT is based on the principle that the perpetrator
profession have repeatedly evaluated the evidence of a crime can be detected if bodily responses are
in support of these claims and have concluded con- recorded while being presented with crime-relevant
sistently that they are unfounded. The most recent memorial information that only the guilty and the
and thoroughgoing evaluation of polygraph testing police possess. For instance, in a case of rape, GKT
was carried out by a panel of more than a dozen questions such as the following might be asked
scientists for the National Academy of Sciences. The while recording a suspects physiological activity:
472 Lie Detection
If you sexually assaulted Glenda, then you would questioning formats that are similar to those already
know what weapon was used to force her compli- in use and thus are vulnerable to the well-known
ance. Was it (a) a box cutter, (b) a baseball bat, (c) criticisms already leveled at existing lie detection
a hammer, (d) an ice pick? . . . In what room in her techniques.
house did the crime take place? Was it (a) the pan-
try, (b) the attic, (c) the bathroom, (d) the garage? Conclusion
Knowing that he grabbed an ice pick off the tool
bench and assaulted her in the garage, the rapist In conclusion, notwithstanding more than a half
would be expected to give the strongest response to century of experience with conventional lie detec-
these relevant items. An innocent suspect, not know- tion techniques, there are no generally accepted
ing the correct answers, would respond randomly to methods for detecting lying or identifying liars.
the multiple choice options. If enough questions are Despite long-standing criticism that polygraphic
asked, there is little likelihood of an innocent person interrogation is without scientific foundation, poly-
failing a GKT by chance. Likewise, if a recognition graph testing in the United States remains common-
response is evident to almost all the correct alterna- place, and government agencies administer tens of
tives, the likelihood of guilt is high. As one might thousands of these tests every year. This common
expect, given the sensible rationale underlying the usage points to the utility of the polygraph, the belief
GKT, research has shown its potential to be highly that polygraphic interrogation provides an effective
accurate, with errors identifying the innocent as vehicle for obtaining information from criminals
guilty especially unlikely. and untrustworthy personnel that likely would be
However, there are several reasons why the GKT undiscoverable otherwise. As the National Academy
is seldom used in real-world applications. Basic of Sciences report noted, unlike other fields of scien-
research is needed to determine what criminals tific inquiry, polygraph research has not progressed
remember from their crimes. Without such knowl- over time, thus failing to strengthen its scientific
edge, it is difficult to know how much confidence underpinnings in any significant manner. Hence, it is
to place in a passed GKT because it is possible that unlikely that polygraph testing will be substantially
the items do not deal with crime facts the perpetra- improved or gain acceptance in the scientific com-
tor remembers. In addition, GKT item development munity as valid. Memory-based methods, such as
requires considerable investigative work to iden- the GKT, that have sound scientific underpinnings,
tify material likely to be readily recognized by the may profit from further refinement and appraisal.
perpetrator that is not likely to be known to other William G. Iacono
suspects in the case. Because the CQT, the main
polygraph technique used by law enforcement, does See also Deception, Linguistic Cues to; Emotion,
not have these limitations, is believed by polygraph Psychophysiology of; Eyewitness Memory
proponents to be very accurate, and has proven util-
ity, the police see little advantage to substituting the Further Readings
GKT for the CQT.
Ben-Shakhar, G., & Elaad, E. (2003). The validity of
Looking to the Future psychophysiological detection of information with the
guilty knowledge test: A meta-analytic review. Journal
Historically, lie detection has employed autonomic of Applied Psychology, 88(1), 131151.
nervous system measures from peripheral body sites. Honts, C. R., Raskin, D. C., & Kircher, J. C. (2006). The
Advances in neuroscience methodology now make case for polygraph tests. In D. L. Faigman, D. H. Kaye,
relatively straightforward the recording of activity M. J. Saks, J. Sanders, & E. K. Cheng (Eds.), Modern
in the brain using techniques such as the dense array scientific evidence: The law and science of expert
electroencephalogram and functional magnetic reso- testimony: Vol. 4. Forensics (pp. 787831). Eagan, MN:
nance imaging. These methods offer promise for the Thomson West.
future, but how well they improve on autonomic Iacono, W. G. (2008). Effective policing: Understanding
measures has not been established. More important, how polygraph tests work and are used. Criminal
research with these measures depends on the use of Justice and Behavior, 35, 12951308.
Love 473
Iacono, W. G., & Lykken, D. T. (2006). The case against Susan Hendrick and Clyde Hendrick used these
polygraph tests. In D. L. Faigman, D. H. Kaye, M. J. love styles as the basis for their research program
Saks, J. Sanders, & E. K. Cheng (Eds.), Modern and suggested that those six love styles can be
scientific evidence: The law and science of expert depicted in a six-dimensional matrix in which every
testimony: Vol. 4. Forensics (pp. 831895). Eagan, MN: person gets assigned a certain point on all of the six
Thomson West. love styles to describe the amount of each love
National Research Council. (2003). The polygraph and lie style. These styles are largely independent of each
detection. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. other. People can be especially high on one style or
moderately high on several of them. Also, it is pos-
sible to experience different love styles with different
LOVE partners. The love styles, therefore, are dependent
not only on the individual but also on the partner,
Love has the potential to make people both very as well as on demographic factors like age, life stage,
happy and very unhappy. Yet, there seems to be and so forth.
no easy and unambiguous answer to questions as
to what love is and how people fall in love. This The Duplex Theory of Love
entry will address some major areas of psychological The duplex theory of love, developed by Robert
research on love. First, taxonomies of love will be J. Sternberg, has two parts. One part specifies the
introduced. Then, the biological foundations of love structure of love, the other part, how this structure
will be explored. Finally, applications of the findings comes to be. The two parts are called the triangular
will be considered. subtheory and the subtheory of love as a story.
the experiencing of the passion component in the differentially satisfying as a function of the extent to
absence of the other components of love. Empty love which they match our more salient stories.
emanates from the decision that one loves another
and is committed to that love in the absence of Prototype Theory
both the intimacy and passion components of love. Eleanor Rosch suggested that there are many
Romantic love derives from a combination of the concepts in everyday life that can be best described
intimacy and passion components. Companionate by means of prototypes. Prototypes are members of
love derives from a combination of the intimacy and a category that represent the essence and typical fea-
decision/commitment components of love. Fatuous tures of the category members in a particularly good
love results from the combination of the passion and way. Other members of a category may differ in that
decision/commitment components in the absence some of their features are more or less prototypical
of the intimacy component. Consummate love, or of the category than others.
complete love, results from the full combination Beverley Fehr used the prototype approach to
of all three components. Most loves are impure examine peoples conceptions of love. She found that
examples of these various kinds: They partake of people regarded characteristics of companionate
all three vertices of the triangle, but in different love, such as caring and respect, as more prototypi-
amounts. cal of love than characteristics of passionate love,
which would include features such as passion and
The Subtheory of Love as a Story. The kind of love
sexual desire. Similar to the prototypical features of
triangles discussed in the previous section emanate
love, people regarded friendship as more prototypi-
from stories. The interaction of our personal attri-
cal of love than passionate love. Studies show that
butes with the environmentthe latter of which we,
couples who had a rather prototypical view of love
in part, createleads to the development of stories
also felt more love for their partner.
about love that we then seek to fulfill, to the extent
possible, in our lives. Various potential partners fit
these stories to greater or lesser degrees, and we are Biological Theories
more likely to succeed in close relationships with Biological theories focus on biological and physi-
people whose stories more closely match our own. ological processes as well as knowledge of evolution
Although the stories we create are our own, they to explain psychological phenomena.
draw on our experience of living in the world. There
is a potentially infinite number of stories, and the Love as a Decision Bias
stories may contain some overlap.
Examples of stories are Douglas Kenrick and his colleagues view love as
a system of decision biases that evolved over time.
1. Addiction. Strong anxious attachment; clinging Human beings, similar to members of other species,
behavior; anxiety at thought of losing partner. have to make many decisions over the course of
2. Art. Love of partner for physical attractiveness; their day. In the domain of love, potential questions
importance to person of partners always are: Who is the best person to mate with, how do
looking good. I attract potential mates, and how do I retain them
over a longer period of time? People often do not
3. Business. Relationships as business propositions;
make decisions on an objective basis but rather have
money is power; partners in close relationships
an (often unconscious) inclination toward one or the
as business partners.
other action alternative. Kenrick suggests that their
decisions are biased because there are some inborn
The most common conception is of love as a decision biases that have evolved over the course of
travel story, or a journey that two people take human history and development. The decision biases
together, trying to stay on the same path. take the form of if-then rules where if refers to
We may have multiple stories represented hier- a certain condition in the environment and then
archically, so that the stories are likely to vary in constitutes a response that is designed to adapt to
salience for us. In other words, we will prefer some the environment. For example, when men are look-
stories over others, so that we may find partners ing for potential partners, they tend to pay relatively
Love 475
more attention than women to physical features like romantic lovethe caregiving system and the sexual
beauty and young age, which indicate fertility. system. The caregiving system is triggered by oth-
Different social situations necessitate different ers expressions of needs and attachment. Its goal
decision biases, which interact in dynamic ways with is to help others in need and to reduce their misery.
each other. These decision biases are the basis of all The sexual system is activated by the presence of a
human behavior, so that although there may be cul- potential attractive and fertile partner. Its goal is to
tural variations due to ecological differences, human engage in sexual intercourse and, ultimately, to pass
behavior cannot be seen as a completely blank on ones genes to the next generation.
slate because the decision biases provide a certain
framework. Applications
Love as a Means to Commitment A feature of research on love is that it has applica-
tions to peoples everyday lives. For example, people
David Buss suggests that love is primarily a can assess their own love triangles or love stories or
device to achieve commitmenta means that helps attachment styles. Assessing such patterns can help
bind people together through better or worse. He people better understand how they love and also
starts his explanation with changes that occurred what they are looking for in a partner. Partners can
when humans started diverging from their primate also assess the extent to which they are looking for
ancestors: Womens ovulation was concealed, so the same things in a relationship.
that men could not recognize when would be the Individuals and partners can also use theories of
best time to have intercourse with, and impregnate, love to enhance their relationships. For example,
them. This is one of the reasons men and women people who have an anxious-ambivalent style of lov-
started to be engaged in long-term bonding. Buss ing may have difficulties in their relationships and
has suggested that love evolved as a means to help may wish to work on this styleeither on their own
people stay committed to each other even in difficult or, preferably, in the context of psychotherapyif
circumstances, for example, when they get sick or it is causing them problems in their life. People first
meet some other, more attractive potential mate. need to understand what their issues are in relation-
Research has shown, for example, that when ships. Theories of love can help them find out what
people feel love for their partner, they can better sup- these issues are. Then they can decide whether they
press thoughts of alternative attractive mates. want to resolve them, and how.
Love From an Attachment Point of View
Summary
Phillip Shaver and his colleagues applied the con-
ceptual framework of attachment theory to adults. Theories of love address questions such as what
They suggest that for every behavior that is exhib- love is, how it develops, how it can be assessed, and
ited in attachment relationships of young children how it can be enhanced. We have considered sev-
to their caregivers, there is also a parallel behavior eral approaches, including taxonomic, prototypic,
in adult relationships. Shaver and colleagues suggest and biological ones. These theories differ in both
that three attachment styles exist in adults, just as in the assumptions and assertions they make; however,
children. they have in common that they attempt to provide
A secure attachment style leads to people being plausible and empirically supported accounts of the
comfortable being close to their close others, with- nature of love.
out any great fear of being abandoned or others Because the theories deal with somewhat differ-
getting too close to them. An anxious-ambivalent ent aspects of the phenomenon of love, they are not
attachment style leads people to cling to their loved necessarily mutually exclusive. There may be ele-
ones and to be afraid of losing them. An avoidant ments of many theories that, in combination, help us
attachment style leads people to avoid closeness to understand the mysterious nature of love.
others and to become anxious once those others Robert J. Sternberg and Karin Sternberg
seek proximity.
In addition to the attachment system, there are See also Attraction; Jealousy; Relationships,
two other behavioral systems that may play a role in Development of
476 Love
Further Readings
of relationship initiation (pp. 337351). New York, NY:
Buss, D. M. (2007). The evolution of human mating Psychology Press.
strategies: Consequences for conflict and cooperation. In Kenrick, D. T., Sadalla, E. K., & Keefe, R. C. (1998).
S. W. Gangestad & J. A. Simpson (Eds.), The evolution Evolutionary cognitive psychology: The missing heart of
of mind: Fundamental questions and controversies (pp. modern cognitive science. In C. Crawford & D. L.
375382). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Krebs (Eds.), Handbook of evolutionary psychology
Fehr, B. (1988). Prototype analysis of the concepts of love (pp. 485514). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
and commitment. Journal of Personality and Social Shaver, P. R., & Mikulincer, M. (2006). A behavioral
Psychology, 55, 557579. systems approach to romantic love relationships:
Fisher, H. (2004). Why we love: The nature and chemistry Attachment, caregiving, and sex. In R. J. Sternberg &
of romantic love. New York, NY: Henry Holt. K. Weis (Eds.), The new psychology of love (pp.
Hatfield, E., & Rapson, R. L. (1996). Love and sex: 3564). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Cross-cultural perspectives. Needham Heights, MA: Sternberg, R. J. (1998). Cupids arrow. New York, NY:
Allyn & Bacon. Cambridge University Press.
Hendrick, S. S., & Hendrick, C. (2008). Satisfaction, love, Sternberg, R. J., & Weis, K. (Eds.). (2006). The new
and respect in the initiation of romantic relationships. In psychology of love. New Haven, CT: Yale University
S. Sprecher, A. Wenzel, & J. Harvey (Eds.), Handbook Press.
M
on the type of input utterances, machine speech rec-
MACHINE SPEECH RECOGNITION ognition can be classified as isolated word recogni-
tion or continuous speech recognition. Based on the
Speech represents the most natural means of human generality of the models, machine speech recognition
communication. Machine speech recognition, often can be classified as speaker dependent or speaker
called automatic speech recognition, is the automatic independent. Based on the size of the vocabulary,
process performed by machine or computer to trans- machine speech recognition can be classified as
form a speech utterance into a text consisting of a small vocabulary (up to 100 words), medium vocab-
string of words. The term machine aims at making ulary (up to 1,000 words), or large vocabulary (up
the distinction between machine speech recognition to hundreds of thousands of words). Applications
and human speech recognition (human speech per- of machine speech recognition include voice dialing
ception). Machine speech recognition is also differ- (e.g., digit recognition), command and control, form
ent from machine speaker recognition, which is the filling (e.g., data entry), web search by voice, and
automatic process performed by machine to identify dictation (e.g., speech-to-text word processing).
a speaker or to verify the identity of a speaker based
on his or her voice. After a brief overview of the gen-
Dynamic Time Warping
eral steps involved in machine speech recognition,
this entry introduces two of the most prominent One of the most successful early techniques for
machine speech recognition techniques. machine speech recognition is called dynamic time
There are different techniques for machine speech warping (DTW) and is based on a combination
recognition, but generally speaking, they consist of a of template matching and dynamic programming.
common series of steps. First, the acoustic waves of Dynamic programming is a mathematical optimiza-
pressure corresponding to the speech utterances are tion process of finding the best (optimal) decisions
transformed into electric signals by a microphone. in a recursive manner. A string of acoustic feature
These electric signals are then transformed into a vectors corresponding to the input test utterance is
string of feature vectors, usually called acoustic fea- matched consecutively against each stored reference
ture vectors. The feature vectors are representations template of feature vectors corresponding to training
of the spectrum and energy of the speech signal over utterances. The test string of vectors and the stored
short periods. Then, the extracted string of acoustic string of vectors corresponding to each reference
feature vectors is matched against previously stored template form a search grid on which DTW finds an
models of sentences, words, syllables, or phonemes. optimum path. The test feature vectors are warped
The text string of words that best matches the incom- nonlinearly in time (compressed or expanded) with
ing string of acoustic feature vectors is presented at the feature vectors of the stored templates. A match-
the output of the machine speech recognition. Based ing score or distance is then computed between the
477
478 McCollough Effect
a minute, look away and you will see a green spot during adaptation. Thus, similar to the overwhelm-
on your retina before it fades away quickly. You ing majority of aftereffects, the McCollough effect is
just adapted to the (red) light and, as a result, saw a negative aftereffect.
a (green) color that is opposite or complementary The McCollough effect is a dramatic departure
to the original. In general, persistent exposure to from other negative aftereffects, however. In con-
a stimulus causes the neural circuitry responsive trast to simple aftereffects that do not require a test
to the stimulus to adapt. The adaptation results in stimulus for the misperception to be evident, the
afterimages or aftereffects, namely, percepts that McCollough effect is a contingent aftereffect that
are dissimilar from the actual stimulus. Aftereffects is created by relatively brief experimentally induced
are generally negative insofar as the feature value correlations between stimuli that are usually uncor-
perceived following the adaptation is opposite that related in the real world. The aftereffect is different
of the adapter (the stimulus that causes the adapta- depending on whether the test stimulus is horizontal
tion), as in the preceding example. or vertical in the previous example. Also, in con-
Celeste McColloughs discovery of an aftereffect trast to simple aftereffects that last a few seconds,
that was contingent on a feature of the adapting the McCollough effect is stable for weeks, or even
pattern radically altered the study of adaptation. months.
The aftereffect, known as the McCollough effect, There are at least two other fascinating aspects of
has since been extensively replicated in other labo- the McCollough effect. The observer does not have
ratories. It arises from the alternating presentation to maintain fixation on a point on the adapter; in
of stripes (gratings) of perpendicular (orthogonal) fact, the observer can let the eyes wander over the
orientations of complementary colors for a mod- pattern, and the resulting aftereffect will be largely
est time period (510 minutes). Figure 1 illustrates unaffected. Second, the effect does not transfer
the adapting stimuli, which consist of red, horizon- interocularly: If adaptation is limited to one eye,
tal and green, vertical gratings. Subsequent to the no discernible negative aftereffect is observed in
adaptation, achromatic (i.e., black and white) hori- the non-adapted eye. Given that the McCollough
zontal gratings appear greenish and achromatic ver- effect is contingent on adapter orientation, that ori-
tical gratings pinkish, opposite to the colors shown entation selectivity does not emerge before primary
visual cortex (or V1), and that orientation-tuned
cells in V1 typically have binocular responses, one
would expect the McCollough effect to transfer to
the non-adapted eye. That it does not is surprising,
and suggests a subcortical locus, where information
from the two eyes is segregated.
Stemming from the McCollough effect, research
has expanded into investigations into mechanisms
or theories to explain the McCollough effect, explo-
rations of aftereffects on other visual dimensions,
and discoveries of positive contingent aftereffects.
offer a biologically plausible model. In this regard, red and achromatic horizontal gratings for equal
McCollough originally proposed that cells that were durations leads to an aftereffect of at least 24 hours
sensitive to both color and orientation, which lie in duration in which test achromatic horizontal grat-
visual cortex, adapted. A more recent and influen- ings appear reddish, that is, the color that is paired
tial neural network model by Stephen Grossberg with the adapter orientation. The effect, termed the
and colleagues accounts for the spectrum of empiri- anti-McCollough effect, transfers 100% to the non-
cal findings related to the McCollough effect and is adapted eye, suggesting a neural locus on a higher
based on known mechanisms in biological vision. level than that of the classical McCollough effect.
One interpretation of the finding is that the neurons
Contingent Aftereffects in a lower order area adapted to the stimulus, and
neurons in a higher order area downstream adapted
In addition to inspiring models and theories of to the signal from the lower order area, giving rise to
learning and visual function, the discovery of the a negative aftereffect of the classical negative afteref-
McCollough effect spawned a veritable cottage fect. The findings are in accord with the idea that sig-
industry of contingent aftereffects. A number of nals from higher order areas have greater access to
aftereffects that are contingent on color have been visual awareness than those from lower order areas.
found by pairing color with visual dimensions such Finally, studies have used contingent aftereffects to
as movement and spatial frequency. Complementary distinguish fast, preconscious from slow, conscious
to the McCollough effect, which is a color afteref- color processing by demonstrating that McCollough
fect contingent on orientation, a tilt aftereffect that aftereffects can be induced at frame rates at which
is contingent on color has been found. Contingent conscious perception fails.
aftereffects with visual dimensions other than color The discovery of the McCollough effect in 1965
have also been obtained. For example, afteref- revolutionized the area of sensory adaptation, but its
fects that are contingent on the direction of stim- inner workings still remain somewhat of a mystery.
ulus motion have been reported in a number of Nevertheless, contingent aftereffects, in general, can
studies. Motion aftereffects that are contingent on be promising tools for understanding how the brain
stimulus luminance, size, direction of gaze, binocu- perceives.
lar disparity, the orientation of a stationary grating
superimposed on a moving textured surface, and Bhavin R. Sheth
even the color or pattern of a stationary area sur-
rounding the moving stimulus have been reported. See also Face Perception; Reinforcement Learning,
Negative aftereffects that are contingent jointly on Psychological Perspectives; Stereopsis
two different dimensions of a stimulus have also
been reported. Finally, a long-lasting contingent Further Readings
aftereffect has been observed in the auditory system. Coltheart, M. (1973). Letter: Colour-specificity and
monocularity in the visual cortex. Vision Research,
Positive and Double Negative Aftereffects 13(12), 25952598.
Not all contingent aftereffects are negative. There MacKay, D. M., & MacKay, V. (1973). Orientation-
have been reports of a positive aftereffect; that is, sensitive after-effects or dichoptically presented colour
the test color perceived following the adaptation and form. Nature, 242(5398), 477479.
is the same as the color of the oriented adapter. In McCollough, C. (1965). Color adaptation of edge detectors
in the human visual system. Science, 149, 11151116.
another study, observers simultaneously viewed alter-
Sheth, B. R., & Shimojo, S. (2008). Adapting to an
nating orthogonally oriented achromatic gratings in
aftereffect. Journal of Vision, 8(3), 110.
one eye and alternating red and green homogeneous
textureless fields in the other eye. When the eye that
adapted to the color fields viewed achromatic test
gratings later, observers reported a classical negative MEMORY, INTERFERENCE WITH
aftereffect, but when the eye that adapted to the ori-
ented gratings viewed the same gratings, observers There are two types of memory interference: pro-
reported a positive color aftereffect. More recently, active interference and retroactive interference.
a double negative aftereffect has been reported. Proactive interference occurs during memory
Binocular or monocular exposure to alternating retrieval when a later memory trace is hindered by
Memory, Interference With 481
a highly similar earlier memory trace. Retroactive when the learning phase was followed by routine
interference can occur during both memory retrieval daily activities as opposed to a period of sleep.
and memory consolidation (strengthening). It occurs In an attempt to explain how (nonspecific) cog-
during retrieval when an earlier memory trace is nitive activity might impede the consolidation of an
hindered by a highly similar, later memory trace. earlier memory trace, the psychologist John Wixted
Retroactive interference with consolidation occurs argues that any cognitive activity engages the consoli-
when the consolidation of a recently acquired mem- dation system to allow for the retention of this activity
ory trace is hindered by further cognitive activity, and its associated material. Moreover, he hypoth-
drugs, brain lesions, or seizures. Memory interfer- esizes that consolidation resources are not unlimited.
ence theory differs from another theory of forget- Therefore, according to Wixted, post-learning cogni-
ting, decay theory, in that it attributes forgetting to tive activity impedes the consolidation of an earlier
interference rather than to the sole passage of time. memory trace because it actively deprives the earlier
memory trace of limited consolidation resources.
Retroactive Interference However, the magnitude of this interference effect
Retroactive Interference With is not constant over time. Indeed, the most important
Memory Consolidation and influential finding to have emerged from Mller
and Pilzeckers as well as Ernest Burton Skaggss
Retroactive Interference by early memory research is that of a temporally graded
Further Cognitive Activity effect of further activity on early memory traces:
The notion that forgetting might occur due to Retroactive interference is largest when further
memory interference was first put forward in 1900 activity occurs immediately following the learning of
by the German psychologist Georg Mller and early material, and it decreases with increasing delay
medical student Alfons Pilzecker. They noted dur- in the onset of further activity. This temporal gradi-
ing their early experimental work on healthy par- ent of retroactive interference indicates that memory
ticipants that recently learned material often seemed traces are initially highly fragile and vulnerable to
to pop into consciousness in an unwilled manner, interference but that they consolidate and become
especially when their participants were not engaged less susceptible to interference over time.
in any mentally effortful activity following new
Increased Retroactive Interference by Further
learning. Mller and Pilzecker hypothesized that Cognitive Activity in Patients With Amnesia
this perseveration of recently learned material
reflected a transiently continued activity of learn- Recent neuropsychological work on amne-
ing-related physiological processes that served the sic patients by Nelson Cowan, Sergio Della Sala,
consolidation, that is, the strengthening of new Michaela Dewar, and their colleagues has shown sub-
memory traces. stantially augmented effects of post-learning activ-
They posited that the consolidation of a recently ity on recent memory traces in some patients with
acquired memory trace could be hindered by sub- anterograde amnesia, indicating that these patients
sequent cognitive activity; they called this effect are especially vulnerable to retroactive interference.
retroactive interference. Their work showed In line with the consolidation theory, the research
that, indeed, more nonsense syllables were forgot- has revealed a steep temporal gradient of retroactive
ten by their participants when the learning of such interference in at least some amnesic patients. This
nonsense syllables was followed by the learning of gradient demonstrates that, even in amnesic patients,
further nonsense syllables (filled delay) than when memory traces can consolidate over time, provided
it was followed by a period of rest (unfilled delay). that this time is devoid of further activity.
This retroactive interference effect was also appar-
Retroactive Interference by Brain Lesions
ent when the interpolated material was not similar
to the earlier material, that is, when the learning of It is not only further cognitive activity that dif-
nonsense syllables was followed by a picture descrip- ferentially interferes with older and newer memory
tion task; this result indicated that this interference traces. Around the same time as Mller and Pilzecker
effect was nonspecific. Further evidence for such were investigating consolidation and retroactive
nonspecific effects comes from John Jenkins and interference in healthy participants, the French psy-
Karl Dallenbach, whose much-cited study demon- chologist Thodule-Armand Ribot noted that cer-
strated that more nonsense syllables were forgotten tain types of pathological damage to the brain had
482 Memory, Interference With
a more detrimental effect on recent pre-morbid than nonsense syllables to interpolated antonyms and
remote pre-morbid memories, implying that earlier finally to interpolated synonyms.
memories are less vulnerable to pathological brain Retrieval-based retroactive interference theory
damage than are later memories. This effect, which continues to dominate psychological memory interfer-
has been widely reported and is known now as ence research, and most current psychology textbook
temporally graded retrograde amnesia, is in line definitions of retroactive interference refer solely to
with Mller and Pilzeckers consolidation theory, in retrieval, not consolidation.
that it is strongly suggestive of a gradual strengthen- The general consensus is that the attempted
ing of memories over time. retrieval of a particular memory trace also activates
those memory traces that are highly similar to the
Retroactive Interference by Drugs to-be-retrieved memory trace, or which are associ-
Pharmacological animal work has shown that ated with the same retrieval cue. Such activation of
memory consolidation can also be hindered by cer- multiple memory traces is said to lead to competition
tain drugs such as protein synthesis inhibitors, which for retrieval and, thus, to interference. According
are toxins or antibiotics. This work usually involves to this theory, retroactive interference arises if the
the learning of a response such as shock avoidance, attempted retrieval of an early memory trace also
followed by the injection of a protein synthesis activates a later acquired and currently stronger
inhibitor, and subsequent memory testing. As with memory trace. For example, when asked to verify
retroactive interference by further cognitive activ- ones previous phone number it is likely that ones
ity, protein synthesis inhibitors have a temporally new phone number will be activated and indeed ini-
graded interference effect on new memory traces. tially retrieved.
They are most detrimental to a new memory trace In the laboratory, such retrieval retroactive inter-
when injection occurs immediately following learn- ference can be reliably produced via paired associ-
ing, and they become less effective with augmenting ate learning paradigms (AB-AC paradigms). These
delay between learning and injection. paradigms consist of the learning of a list of word
pairs, each comprising a cue word and an associated
Retroactive Interference With Memory Retrieval word, for example, dog-train. List 1 learning is then
followed by the learning of a second list of word
Interpolated cognitive activity not only interferes
pairs, which consist of the same cue words and new
with memory consolidation of an earlier memory
associated words, for example, dog-sun. This inter-
trace; it can also interfere with the retrieval of an ear-
polated list tends to interfere during the subsequent
lier memory trace, provided that the memory trace
cued recall of List 1 (i.e., dog-?). It has still not been
resulting from the interpolated cognitive activity is
established conclusively whether the interpolated
highly similar to the earlier memory trace. Similarity
memory trace is (transiently) stronger than the older
can take various forms: Two or more memory traces
trace or whether it might actually weaken the old
can be similar in type, that is, visually, phonologically,
trace within memory storage, for example, as a
or semantically, or they can be similar because of a
result of the active inhibition of the old trace during
mutual association with a retrieval cue. For example,
learning of the new trace.
a computer login screen might cue ones private as
well as ones work computer password.
Proactive Interference
One of the classic early experimental psychol-
ogy paradigms to demonstrate a similarity effect of One of the first explicit references to proactive inter-
retroactive interference was that by the psycholo- ference comes from the 19th-century German psy-
gists John McGeoch and William MacDonald. They chologist Hugo Mnsterberg, who always carried
showed that the magnitude of forgetting of new his pocket watch in a particular pocket. He noticed
verbal material was closely related to the degree of that after changing pockets he continued to auto-
similarity between the early and interpolated later matically reach to the old pocket watch location.
material. Forgetting of a list of adjectives was low- Such instances of proactive interference are believed
est following relatively dissimilar interpolated mate- to occur because a cue (in this particular example
rial (the reading of jokes, referred to as rest by the intention to check the time) is associated with
the authors), and it increased progressively from both an old, established memory trace and a new
interpolated three-figure numbers to interpolated memory trace. Given the greater strength of the
Memory, Neural Basis 483
old memory trace, the cue results in the retrieval of patients general impairment in the inhibition of
the old memory trace. Similar situations can arise irrelevant, in this case competing, stimuli.
when one changes ones computer password or ones
Michaela Dewar and Sergio Della Sala
address, or when a woman marries and takes on her
husbands surname. See also Amnesia; Memory, Neural Basis; Memory
Recall, Dynamics
Early Experimental Work on
Proactive Interference
Further Readings
In the 1950s, the psychologist Benton
Underwood went as far as to propose that most Cowan, N., Beschin, N., & Della Sala, S. (2004). Verbal
recall in amnesic patients under conditions of
forgetting could be accounted for by such proactive
diminished retroactive interference. Brain, 27, 825834.
interference as opposed to by retroactive interfer-
Dewar, M. T., Cowan, N., & Della Sala, S. (2007).
ence. He argued that the then-prominent retrieval
Forgetting due to retroactive interference: A fusion of
retroactive interference theory could not explain
Mller and Pilzeckers (1900) early insights into
why some participants showed extensive forget- forgetting and recent research on anterograde amnesia.
ting of nonsense syllables over a period of 24 hours Cortex, 43, 616634.
when this period was not filled with any similar Dewar, M., Fernandez Garcia, Y., Cowan, N., & Della
material (i.e., when it was spent engaged in every- Sala, S. (2009). Delaying interference enhances memory
day activities at home). Having examined various consolidation in amnesic patients. Neuropsychology, 23,
studies, he noted that the amount of forgetting over 627634.
24 hours was in fact closely related to the number McGeoch, J. A., & McDonald, W. T. (1931). Meaningful
of study lists learned prior to the learning of the relation and retroactive inhibition. American Journal of
to-be-recalled list. Psychology, 43, 579588.
Importantly, however, this relationship was only Mller, G. E., & Pilzecker, A. (1900). Experimentelle
present in studies in which the learning of prior lists Beitrge zur Lehre vom Gedchtnis [Experimental
was massed. The amount of forgetting was unrelated contributions to the theory of memory]. Zeitschrift fr
to the number of prior lists when these were spread Psychologie. Ergnzungsband, 1, 1300.
over a longer time frame, as tends to be the case Wixted, J. T. (2004). The psychology and neuroscience of
outside the laboratory. Proactive interference theory forgetting. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 235269.
also appeared to be unable to explain the benefit of
interpolated sleep that was demonstrated by Jenkins
and Dallenbach. Underwoods claims that proactive MEMORY, NEURAL BASIS
interference was a major source of forgetting could
thus not be sustained for very long. The ability to learn new information, and subse-
quently remember it, is critical to all animals. Whether
Increased Proactive Interference in Patients
it is apparent in response changes to repeated stimuli
With Executive Impairment
by an invertebrate, or by the collection of events in
Even though no longer in the top list of forgetting ones personal past that shapes the complex behav-
causes, proactive interference does of course pro- ior of a human, memory allows an organism to
duce some forgetting as evinced in the Mnsterberg effectively adapt to the environment. The study of
example presented earlier. It is especially often memory processes has been arguably the most excit-
observed in the laboratory in patients with damage ing and productive area of behavioral neuroscience
to the executive system who have difficulties in the in the past 50 years. Because learning is ubiquitous
inhibition of irrelevant stimuli and distracters. In the across animals, it has been possible to study its bio-
aforementioned AB-AC paradigm, for example, dys- logical mechanisms in animal models in a way not
executive patients often continue to recall AB asso- possible for most other human cognitive capacities.
ciations during the AC learning trials. These patients This work has allowed researchers to understand
are also often reported to show increased levels of neural mechanisms of memory at multiple levels of
retroactive interference with retrieval. It is hypoth- analysis, including molecular interactions, plasticity
esized that such increased levels of experimentally in circuits, and the roles of different anatomical sys-
induced retrieval interference are the result of the tems. In this entry, the critical contributions at each
484 Memory, Neural Basis
of these levels of analysis will be discussed. Findings new information, such as the names of new people
from human amnesic patients are described in terms he met. What was surprising at the time was that this
of how these studies led to the idea that there are dif- profound memory impairment occurred with a back-
ferent brain systems that support different kinds of ground of normal intellectual functioning. H. M. was
memory. In subsequent sections, studies at the circuit able to perceive, reason, and use language relatively
level are described which focus on how associations normally. Thus, it appeared that memory could be
are formed in the brain. Finally, the entry outlines selectively affected by a lesion, demonstrating that a
work examining the molecular mechanisms of long- distinct neural system supports memory processing.
term plasticity using brain slices. Although memory impairment had been reported
before as the result of brain injury or neurological dis-
ease, such as Alzheimers disease, these cases typically
Memory and Neural Systems
involved more widespread cognitive impairment. The
Most modern discussions of memory and the brain careful study of patient Henry Molaison, and of other
begin with the case of Henry Molaison, who was amnesic patients that followed, promoted the view
known as patient H. M. to most psychologists and that memory can be localized in the human brain.
neuroscientists until his death in 2008. Molaison The brain structures that are often damaged in
had suffered from serious epileptic seizures starting amnesia include the hippocampus and cortical
in childhood, and he underwent bilateral surgical regions in the medial temporal lobe that surround
removal of the medial temporal lobe in 1953 in order this structure. This medial temporal lobe system is
to remove the epileptic foci. While this surgery was organized in a hierarchical fashion. The hippocam-
effective in that the frequency of seizures decreased pus receives and sends projections to the entorhinal
substantially, it resulted in a severe impairment in cortex, which is interconnected with the parahippo-
memory. Molaison was virtually unable to retain any campal and perirhinal cortices (Figure 1).
Hippocampus
Perirhinal cortex
Entorhinal Cortex
Hippocampus
Parahippocampal
cortex
Figure 1 Magnetic resonance images of the human brain, showing regions that are damaged in medial temporal lobe amnesia
Note: The panels show frontal sections, with the top of the figure representing the top of the head, and the image
being in the plane of the face. The top panel is more anterior (closer to the face) than the bottom panel. The
hippocampus is shown in black on the right side in both images. The entorhinal cortex is shown in dark gray and the
perirhinal cortex is shown in white in the anterior image. These structures do not extend to the posterior section.
The parahippocampal cortex appears in more posterior sections and is shown in white in the lower panel. These
brain structures can be seen as on the left side as they appear in the magnetic resonance image.
Memory, Neural Basis 485
These regions are, in turn, interconnected with Some support for the idea that remotely learned
a wide range of high-level association cortical information is stored in temporal cortex comes
areas, including frontal, temporal, and parietal from the study of patients with semantic demen-
regions. With this architecture, the hippocampus is tia. Semantic dementia is a progressive neurologi-
positioned to receive highly processed input from cal disease that involves degeneration of temporal
all over the brain. This is consistent with the idea lobe cortex. These patients lose knowledge of the
that memory representations are complex and mul- world, and appear to have lost older memories, but
timodal. Amnesia can also result from damage to new memories can still be formed, at least as long as
structures in the diencephalon that are connected to medial temporal lobe regions are not affected by the
the hippocampus via the fornix. disease.
While much focus has been on the hippocampus, Whereas remote memories are preserved even
it is clear that the surrounding cortices make addi- after extensive medial temporal lobe damage, more
tional contributions above and beyond their role as recently learned information can be vulnerable.
conduits for information. While damage restricted Damage to the medial temporal lobe can result in
to the hippocampus results in a significant memory amnesia for information learned before the injury, a
impairment, a far more significant and profound phenomenon known as retrograde amnesia. In some
impairment results when these cortical regions are cases, the extent of retrograde amnesia can be fairly
damaged as well, as in the case of Henry Molaison. brief (a few days), but in other cases, it may extend
These results suggest that these regions play a role in for many years. A primary factor in the duration of
memory processing, particularly in the primate brain retrograde amnesia is the extent of damage to the
in which these cortical areas are well developed and medial temporal lobe memory system. Those patients
provide the major input into the hippocampus. with complete damage to the hippocampus may have
A currently unresolved question is whether the hip- difficulty remembering information for several weeks
pocampus and these cortical areas play similar or or months before their lesion, whereas patients with
slightly different roles in memory. extensive damage to medial temporal lobe cortices as
A second major insight gained from the study of well as hippocampus may have retrograde amnesia
amnesic patients is the fact that the eventual stor- extending throughout most of their adult lives.
age site of memories is not in the medial temporal The existence of retrograde amnesia indicates
lobe. Patients with medial temporal lobe damage are that, for some time after initial encoding, the medial
impaired at learning new information, but memo- temporal lobe is necessary for memories to be
ries from the remote past are intact. Thus, Henry retrieved. This finding suggests that a kind of con-
Molaisons knowledge of facts about the world solidation takes place, with memory traces chang-
and vocabulary from before his surgery remained ing gradually across time. These changes would lead
intact, although he was unable to acquire much in to a gradual independence of these memory traces
the way of new facts, and words that were invented from the medial temporal lobe. One possibility is
after his surgery did not enter his vocabulary for that memory traces are set up in the cortical areas,
the most part. These findings indicate that remote but that for an extended time, the medial temporal
memories are stored in regions that are intact in lobe is needed to access them. As noted earlier, it is
amnesic patients. A likely site is the cerebral cortex. also possible that the medial temporal lobe is always
Cortical regions outside the medial temporal lobe, needed for retrieving detailed contextual memories.
particularly the lateral and inferior temporal lobe,
are likely candidates. These regions receive output
The Declarative/Nondeclarative Distinction
from medial temporal lobe cortices, and enduring
memory traces may be set up here. By another view, In addition to the importance of the medial tempo-
the medial temporal lobe structures remain impor- ral lobe in memory functioning, another major les-
tant for retrieving memories about events, even those son learned from the study of Henry Molaison is that
that were learned remotely. By this view, individual there are multiple forms of memory that depend on
elements of memories may be stored in cortex, but different brain regions. Amnesic patients show impair-
medial temporal lobe structures are needed to bind ments in memory for events and facts, known as
together these traces to reexperience all elements of declarative memory. Declarative memories share the
an episode. property that one can declare them; that is, they are
486 Memory, Neural Basis
verbalizable. Despite impaired declarative memory, (faster and more accurately) if they had been pre-
amnesic patients are able to show learning in differ- sented with it previously. It appears as if the initial
ent domains. Skill learning has been one of the most presentation leaves some sort of trace that allows
widely studied forms of intact learning in amnesic more efficient processing when it is presented again.
patients. These patients are able to learn to perform This facilitation does not depend on remembering
new motor skills at the same rate as neurologically that the primed stimulus had been presented. In fact,
intact subjects. One of the visuomotor skill tasks com- amnesic patients who are unable to remember that
monly used in the laboratory to assess performance of stimuli had been presented at all nevertheless exhibit
amnesic patients is the rotor-pursuit task. In this task, normal priming. This finding demonstrates that the
subjects attempt to keep a stylus in contact with a neural changes that support priming are indepen-
rotating disk. At first, it is difficult to keep the stylus in dent of the medial temporal lobe memory system.
contact, but it becomes easier with practice. Although Priming and motor skill learning share the prop-
an amnesic patient may have difficulty in remember- erty that neither requires conscious awareness of
ing the testing episode from one day to the next, he or what has been learned. However, in other ways, these
she would show absolutely normal performance as two kinds of learning are different. Skills are gener-
measured by the decrease in errors over trials. ally learned gradually and incrementally. Priming,
Another visuomotor task in which amnesic on the other hand, occurs rapidly, even after a single
patients show normal performance is the serial exposure to a stimulus. These two forms of memory
reaction time task. In this task, an asterisk prompt also depend on different brain systems. Motor skill
appears in one of four locations, and subjects press learning depends on the striatum and its interaction
a key corresponding to the position as soon as it with the cerebral cortex, primarily the frontal lobes.
appears. The asterisks appear according to a complex Patients with neurological diseases that affect the stri-
sequence that is not readily apparent to the subjects. atum, including Huntingtons disease and Parkinsons
Nevertheless, subjects react more quickly to each disease, show impaired ability to learn new motor
prompt with practice. It also appears that they have skills in addition to their difficulties in motor perfor-
learned the sequence, because if the asterisks begin to mance. Neuroimaging findings also show activation
appear randomly, performance slows down. Amnesic in the striatum that is related to motor skill learning.
patients show normal learning of this sequence Priming appears to involve changes in the sensory
despite their poor memory for the testing episode. cortex that processes the primed stimuli. Most of
The motor skills tested in the laboratory are similar the work in this area has been done in the visual
to the more complex skills learned in daily life in that modality. The second viewing of a stimulus is gener-
what is learned is often difficult to verbalize. While ally accompanied by less activity in the extrastriate
most of us learn to ride a bicycle with practice, we visual cortex than the first viewing as measured by
generally have a great deal of difficulty telling some- neuroimaging techniques such as functional mag-
one how to do it. Another example is learning to drive netic resonance imaging. This finding is consistent
a car with a manual transmission. One must learn with the idea that the initial exposure makes it easier
by doing, and not through verbal instructions. This to process subsequent exposures, and thus less blood
characteristic of skill learning sets it apart from the flow is needed to the neural region representing the
kind of learning that is impaired in amnesic patients item. This efficiency may be realized by the repre-
that is dependent on medial temporal lobe structures. sentation becoming more tuned to the task at hand.
The distinction between our declarative memory for For example, if one is identifying objects, the second
facts and events, which we can verbally describe and time around, those elements of the representation
which we are aware of learning, and non-verbalizable that are key for identification will be more acti-
knowledge that we acquire in a motor skill learning vated, and those elements that are not critical will be
task is fundamental to differentiating between the activated less, thus resulting in behavioral priming
roles of different brain systems in memory. (faster identification) and neural priming (less blood
Another memory domain in which performance flow to the region).
of amnesic patients is intact is perceptual priming. The most compelling evidence for separate mem-
When people see a stimulus, such as a word or ory systems comes from double dissociations in mem-
picture, they can process it a little more effectively ory performance observed in neuropsychological
Memory, Neural Basis 487
patients. Whereas amnesic patients exhibit normal of a tone, the rabbits conditioned eyeblink response
skill learning and impaired declarative learning, the will peak at 500 milliseconds after the tone onset.
opposite pattern is observed in patients with basal The main input to the cerebellum is from sen-
ganglia dysfunction, such as those suffering from sory nuclei in the brain stem. Through a series of
Parkinsons disease, who are able to remember train- lesion studies, the pathways that are necessary
ing episodes but who exhibit impaired skill learn- and sufficient for this learning have been mapped
ing. A double dissociation has also been reported out. The lateral pontine nucleus sends information
between declarative memory and perceptual prim- about auditory conditional stimuli to the cerebel-
ing. A few patients with lesions in extrastriate visual lum. Information about the unconditional stimulus
areas have been described who show deficits in per- is conveyed via the climbing fibers from the infe-
ceptual priming despite normal declarative memory rior olivary nucleus. Lesioning or inactivating this
for the same items. These double dissociations are nucleus in a well-trained rabbit does not abolish
important in that they demonstrate that skill learn- the conditional response. Rather, the conditional
ing and priming are not simply easier than declara- response is gradually extinguished over trials. This
tive learning, as one could argue based solely on the outcome arises because the input of the uncondi-
intact results from amnesic patients, but rather rely tional response is removed from the learning circuit.
on independent brain systems. It is as if the air puff is no longer being presented.
Input from the conditional and unconditional
stimuli converge on cerebellar Purkinje cells. These
Neural Circuits in Associative Memory
are remarkable neurons with extensive arbors.
In the quest to describe how the brain contributes to Based on the anatomy of the cerebellum, David
memory processes, a particularly fruitful approach Marr developed a model in 1969 in which conver-
has been to study relatively simple forms of learning gent inputs could become associated by impinging
in animal models. For example, in Pavlovian condi- on the Purkinje cells with close temporal proximity.
tioning paradigms, what is learned is an association When both climbing fibers and the conditional stim-
between a conditional and an unconditional stimulus ulus inputs are activated, long-term changes occur
(CS and US). A tractable approach is to identify the in the synapses. Although the conditional stimulus
neural circuits that process the CS and US and sites inputs are initially weak, they are strengthened
of their convergence. These convergence areas would through pairing with the much stronger climbing
be likely candidates for sites of plasticity and thus fiber inputs. After training, presentation of the con-
could be targeted for physiological investigations. ditional stimulus alone becomes adequate to affect
This approach has been applied to discover the the Purkinje cells. In these neurons, the strength-
neural substrates of Pavlovian conditioning of the ened synapses are actually inhibitory, so these cells
eyeblink response in the rabbit. Rabbits have a have reduced output in response to the conditional
nictitating membrane, or third eyelid, that moves stimulus compared to the level before learning. This
in response to an unconditional stimulus, such as a reduced output ultimately modulates motor regions
puff of air to the cornea. If this unconditional stimu- of the brain, resulting in a conditional response. The
lus is consistently paired with a neutral conditional immediate output of the Purkinje cells is the deep
stimulus, such as a tone, a conditional response will nuclei of the cerebellum. Input from the conditional
gradually develop in response to the tone alone. and unconditional stimuli also converge in this
Early work showed that animals retained the con- region, so the deep nuclei may work together with
ditional response even after the removal of the the Purkinje cells in the cerebellar cortex to produce
forebrain. These results strongly implicate the cer- optimally timed learned responses.
ebellum, which receives sensory input from the brain By studying this simple form of learning, it has
stem and plays an important role in precisely timed been possible to identify the essential site of the
behaviors. The conditioned eyeblink response is memory, or the engram. A similar approach has
timed optimally so that the nictitating membrane is been taken to study the circuit supporting the con-
maximally closed when the unconditional response ditioning of an emotional response. One procedure
onset is expected. That is, if a rabbit is trained with that has been studied in detail is conditional fear in
the airpuff occurring 500 milliseconds after the onset the rat. As rats are prey animals, they have evolved
488 Memory, Neural Basis
robust neural mechanisms that support defensive the slice remains viable. LTP has been often touted as
behaviors. For example, rats will freeze, or become a neural model of memorya strong or salient input
motionless except for breathing, when presented gives rise to a long-lasting change in a structure that is
with a stimulus, such as a tone, that had been paired known to be critical for memory processing. Although
with a painful unconditional stimulus, such as a LTP is readily measured in the hippocampus, it is by
foot shock. This conditional emotional response is no means confined to there, as long-term plasticity
thought to reflect an acquired fear of a previously (either potentiation or depression of activity) has been
neutral stimulus. Information about the conditional measured in cortex, striatum, and cerebellum.
and unconditional stimuli converge in the amyg- The tetanus results in LTP because the rapid
dala, which has been shown to be important for the frequency of pulses means that neurotransmitter
acquisition and expression of fear. Unlike in the case continues to be released even when the postsynaptic
of eyeblink conditioning, in which a discrete motor neuron is already depolarized. This situation also
response is learned, learned fear activates a number occurs when a weak input is paired with a strong
of different responsesfreezing, as well as effects on input that depolarizes the cell. A weak input is as
heart rate, respiration, and digestion. The amygdala effective as a tetanus in causing LTP if the post-
orchestrates this system through its outputs to brain synaptic cell is simultaneously depolarized. These
stem structures. Like the cerebellum, the amygdala conditions would occur naturally when a weak and
is not necessary for declarative learning, but rather strong stimulus occur togetherwhereas the weak
these two structures are key elements of two differ- stimulus alone cannot cause the neuron to fire, when
ent nondeclarative memory circuits. it is paired with a strong stimulus it gains strength
to the point in which it can subsequently cause the
neuron to fire on its own. This idea, that temporal
Molecular Mechanisms of Learning
proximity of firing of a weak and a strong input
The hippocampus, cerebellum, and amygdala are leads to a change in synaptic strength of the weak
critical structures supporting different types of learn- input, was promoted by Donald Hebb in 1949 as a
ing as shown primarily through lesion studies. Each means for associative learning in the nervous system.
of these structures has been the subject of intense LTP has been a popular model system to study
scrutiny in terms of the changes that are occurring possible cellular and molecular bases for learning.
at the level of the synapse to support learning. Many The N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor that
of these studies are done using in vitro techniques in is abundant in the hippocampus appears to be criti-
which a slice of brain is removed and kept alive in cal for the activity-dependent plasticity that leads to
an oxygenated bath. This preparation allows access LTP. This receptor is activated by the neurotrans-
to individual neurons and their inputs. mitter glutamate, which is the primary excitatory
The most popular in vitro preparation in the past neurotransmitter in the brain. When the neuron is at
several years has been the hippocampal slice. Using rest, this receptor is blocked by a positively charged
this preparation, one can record neural activity in the magnesium ion, which prevents glutamate from acti-
different hippocampal regions, including the dentate vating the receptor. However, when the postsynaptic
gyrus. While responses can be recorded from single cell is depolarized, and thus becomes more positively
neurons, researchers often measure the population charged, the magnesium ion moves away, and gluta-
spikethe result of a population of action potentials mate released from a cell conveying a weak input can
in response to stimulation of the input to this region. now bind to this receptor. Activation of the NMDA
By stimulating the perforant path in the slice, a clear receptor results in a cascade of events in the cell
population spike can be recorded in the dentate that do not occur after activation of other types of
gyrus. An exciting development in cellular neurosci- glutamate receptors. The results of NMDA-receptor
ence was the finding of long-term potentiation (LTP) activation include the synthesis of new proteins that
in the dentate gyrus. After an intense stimulation of change the structure of the synapse, making it more
the perforant path (called a tetanus), a small stimulus efficient, and the release of nitric oxide that travels
now elicits a much larger population spike than the back to the presynaptic neuron and facilitates the
same stimulus did before the tetanus. This potentia- subsequent release of neurotransmitter. Both of
tion of neural activity can last many hours, as long as these mechanisms may underlie learning in the intact
Memory and Knowledge 489
mammalian brain. Interfering with the NMDA Malenka, R. C., & Bear, M. F. (2004). LTP and LTD:
receptor with drugs such as MK-801 severely dis- An embarrassment of riches. Neuron, 44, 521.
rupts memory formation, suggesting that there is a McCormick, D. A., Steinmetz, J. E., & Thompson, R. F.
link between this receptor and memory function. (1985). Lesions of the inferior olivary complex cause
extinction of the classically conditioned eyeblink
response. Brain Research, 359, 120130.
Future Directions
Schacter, D. L. (1985). Priming of old and new knowledge
Progress in understanding the neural basis of mem- in amnesic patients and normal subjects. Annals of the
ory has proceeded in parallel at several levels of New York Academy of Sciences, 444, 4153.
analysis: the level of the anatomical structures, of Squire, L. R. (1992). Memory and the hippocampus:
neural circuits within those structures, of changes in A synthesis from findings with rats, monkeys, and
neurons, and of the molecules involved. Although humans. Psychological Review, 99, 195231.
progress at each of these levels has been immense Squire, L. R., Clark, R. E., & Knowlton, B. J. (2001).
over the past few decades, there is much work to be Retrograde amnesia. Hippocampus, 11, 5055.
done in bridging between the levels. For example, Squire, L. R., & Zola-Morgan, S. (1991). The medial
it is unclear whether the same principles that apply temporal lobe memory system. Science, 253,
to neural changes for simple conditioned responses 13801386.
also apply to declarative learning. Whereas the site Thompson, R. F., & Steinmetz, J. E. (2009). The role of the
cerebellum in classical conditioning of discrete
of plasticity for simple conditioned responses is usu-
behavioral responses. Neuroscience, 162, 732755.
ally localized, it appears that the storage of declara-
Wiggs, C. L., & Martin, A. (1998). Properties and
tive memories is more distributed in the cortex. Also,
mechanisms of perceptual priming. Current Opinion in
while the mechanisms underlying long-term poten-
Neurobiology, 8, 227233.
tiation have been studied extensively in the labo-
ratory, these may not be identical to changes that
occur under physiological circumstances. Questions
such as these are likely to feature prominently in MEMORY AND KNOWLEDGE
behavioral neuroscience in the next decade.
One important strand of psychological research on
Barbara Knowlton memory has been concerned with uncovering ways
in which human memory can be unreliable, mislead-
See also Amnesia; Implicit Memory; Reinforcement
Learning, Psychological Perspectives
ing, or even involve complete fabrication. In appar-
ent contrast to this line of research, philosophical
discussions of memory typically seek to give it a
Further Readings central, indispensable role in knowledge. This entry
Aggleton, J. P., & Brown, M. W. (1999). Episodic memory, will review some of the accounts philosophers have
amnesia, and the hippocampal-anterior thalamic axis. given of the epistemology of memory, before briefly
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 425444. returning to the question as to the potential rele-
Barrionuevo, G., & Brown, T. H. (1983). Associative long- vance of empirical research in psychology for such
term potentiation in hippocampal slices. Proceedings of accounts.
the National Academy of Sciences, 80, 73477351.
Bliss, T. V., & Collingridge, G. L. (1993). A synaptic model What Role(s) Does Memory
of memory: Long-term potentiation in the hippocampus. Play in Knowledge?
Nature, 361, 3139.
Corkin, S. (2002). Whats new with the amnesic patient To bring out one way in which memory may be
H. M.? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3, 153160. thought to be central to knowledge, consider the fol-
Fanselow, M. S., & Poulos, A. M. (2005). The neuroscience lowing argument attacking the so-called myth of the
of mammalian associative learning. Annual Review of given. Its target is a position in epistemology known
Psychology, 56, 207234. as classical foundationalism, according to which
Knowlton, B. J., Mangels, J. A., & Squire, L. R. (1996). empirical knowledge must ultimately rest on a set of
A neostriatal habit learning system in humans. Science, basic beliefs whose epistemic status does not, in
273, 13991402. turn, depend on that of other beliefs. Traditionally,
490 Memory and Knowledge
foundationalists favorite candidates for such basic consequence, at least some of them have difficul-
beliefs have been beliefs about our own sensations. ties accounting for the distinctive epistemological
Suppose you have a certain visual experience on significance of memory. For instance, there is an
the basis of which you form the belief There is a influential tradition in epistemology that is centered
ripe tomato in front of me. Arguably, the epistemic on the notion of justification, often associated with
status of that belief turns on whether you are right the thought that justification is a necessary condi-
to believe that things actually are as they visually tion for knowledge (as opposed to, say, mere true
appear to you. Yet, the foundationalist would claim belief). Following this tradition, it is sometimes
that there is another belief you can form in this situ- assumed that questions about the epistemological
ation, whose epistemic status does not seem to turn significance of memory are best approached by ask-
on that of other beliefs, namely, the belief that you ing in virtue of what beliefs retrieved from mem-
are, at any rate, having a red sensation. ory (henceforth: memory beliefs) might count as
Implicit in this line of thought is the idea that the beliefs the subject is justified in holding. On closer
mere having of a sensation, by itself, can put you inspection, however, it is not obvious that this lat-
into a position to have a belief about itand this is ter question best captures the role memory plays in
what has been criticized as the myth of the given. knowledge.
Your having the belief a red sensation is occur- Consider one possible answer to the question as
ring or even just this type of sensation is occur- to what justifies memory beliefs: that remembering
ring seems to require that you can think of your that p is itself a source of justification for the belief
current sensation as being of one type rather than that p. In effect, the strategy behind this answer is
some other, which, in turn, seems to require drawing to downplay the epistemological significance of the
on memory. If you cant remember (and thus have generative/preservative distinction: Memory may
beliefs about) any other sensations you could have be preservative with respect to contentthat is, it
instead, your putative beliefs about your current preserves beliefs acquired by some other means
sensation will be devoid of contentthere will be but it is generative with respect to justification.
nothing in them that can distinguish that sensation This latter idea is typically spelled out in terms of
from any other sensation. Thus, it looks as though the thought that there is a specific phenomenol-
not even beliefs about our own sensations can serve ogy attached to retrieving beliefs from memory (as
as basic beliefs in the foundationalists sense. opposed to, say, just guessing). There is an experi-
It is often said that, without memory, we would ence of recall, which can serve as a justification for
know very little, because any knowledge we might believing that p.
have through sensory experience would only last as One problem for this view is that it is by no
long as the experience itself. The preceding example means clear how exactly invoking the idea of
suggests that this statement might not go far enough a distinctive phenomenology of retrieval might
in acknowledging the epistemic centrality of memory. help flesh out the idea that remembering is itself
Rather, if the kind of attack against the myth of the a source of justification. It is perhaps tempting to
given sketched is along the right lines, memory plays think that such experiences can play a similar role
a key role in our very ability to gain knowledge from in the justification of memory beliefs as, say, visual
experience. At the same time, however, there is of experiences play in the justification of visually
course also a sense in which memory, in turn, depends based beliefs. Yet, intuitively, the epistemic role of
on a capacity for experience (or other capacities for perceptual experiences has something to do with
acquiring knowledge). Memory is not itself a faculty the fact that there is a sense in which those experi-
for coming to know something; it is dependent on ences directly present us with the very things our
there being other such faculties. As it is sometimes beliefs are about. In particular, it is the specific per-
put, memory is not a source of knowledge, or, if it is, ceptual experience I have which makes it rational
it is a preservative, rather than a generative, source. for me to form the specific beliefs I do. By contrast,
the putative epistemic role of memory beliefs, on
the view we have been considering, would have
Memory and Justification
to be rather different. Insofar as there is a distinc-
Many epistemological theories focus primar- tive experience of recall, it seems to be the same
ily on generative sources of knowledge, and, as a experience that accompanies different instances of
Memory and Knowledge 491
memory retrieval, no matter what beliefs are being of memory needs to be seen within its wider role of
retrieved. making it possible for us to acquire extended bodies
An alternative answer to the question of what jus- of knowledge.
tifies memory beliefs turns on the idea that memory
is preservative not just with respect to the content
False Memories and the Epistemology
of beliefs but also with respect to their justification.
of Episodic Memory
As normally understood, the suggestion here is not
that, to be justified in believing that p (where the The previously discussed considerations are all con-
belief that p is a memory belief), I need to be able to cerned (at least primarily) with factual or semantic
remember the circumstances under which that belief memory, that is, the ability to retain knowledge of
was acquired and thus be in a position to rehearse facts, concepts, or meanings that we learned about
my original justification for acquiring the belief. in the past, but not necessarily knowledge about the
This would make all but a fraction of our beliefs past itself. Yet, perhaps the first thing to come to
epistemically problematic. Rather, as it is normally mind when the issue of the relation between mem-
understood, the view at issue here is that beliefs held ory and knowledge is raised is the idea that mem-
in memory in fact retain the justification with which ory plays a role specifically in our knowledge about
they were originally acquired, even if the subject her- the past. Philosophical discussion of this idea has
self is no longer able to remember how she acquired centered primarily on the epistemology of event or
the belief. episodic memory, that is, the type of memory for
This view faces the problem that it is not obvi- particular past events that we might express, for
ous what exactly the idea of a beliefs retaining its example, by saying I remember seeing/doing x.
justification comes to. This idea seems to presuppose In particular, theorists have tried to reconcile two
that justification is something akin to a property of intuitions about this type of memory: that it plays a
beliefs, that is, states (of believing that p, or q, etc.) fundamental role in our knowledge of the past, and
that a subject is in over time. Yet, when the notion that it involves the having of memory images.
of justification is explicated in the epistemological The idea of a memory image is meant to capture
literature, it is typically by means of examples in a sense in which recollecting specific events from
which a subject acquires a belief for the first time, ones past life involves something akin to reexperi-
or holds on to a belief in the presence of countervail- encing them. Yet, it has been argued that the having
ing evidence. That is, the notion of justification is of a memory imagethat is, a present occurrence
attached to aspects of the subjects cognitive activity, cannot constitute our most fundamental way of
something the subject does at a time. knowing about the past. The thought has been
As already indicated, perhaps the most basic that if we did not have a more fundamental way
worry about both of the views outlined previously of knowing about the past, not involving imagery,
is whether it is right to assume that the epistemic we would never come to connect present memory
significance of memory is best framed in terms of images with the past. This argument, though, seems
the notion of justification. As against this assump- to assume that the only role imagery might play in
tion, some authors have held that it is actually more knowledge about the past is by serving as evidence
intuitive to think of the role that memory plays in on the basis of which we make judgments about
knowledge in terms of the idea that memory frees the past. It can be avoided if we can make sense of
the subject from the need to seek justification for an alternative way of viewing the epistemic role of
certain of her beliefs. Any sort of sustained rational memory images. Specifically, it has been suggested
inquiry seems to presuppose that we can normally that, in the case of episodic memory, the subjects
rely on beliefs we acquired earlier without con- ability to call up a memory image is itself the specific
stantly having to establish their epistemic creden- form her knowledge of the past takes.
tials anew. Thus, it might be thought that there is It is in this context, in particular, that empirical
a sense in which memory has a more fundamental work on the reliability of memory might be thought
epistemic role to play than can be explained by to raise challenges for the epistemology of memory.
invoking the idea of memory generating or preserv- Space prohibits a proper review of the large vari-
ing justification for individual beliefs held in mem- ety of empirical studies in this area. However, very
ory. Rather, on this view, the epistemic significance broadly, a general theme that emerges from much of
492 Memory Recall, Dynamics
this research is that subjects memories about past the laboratory, this basic question concerning human
events are susceptible to interference from informa- memory is addressed by asking people to study a
tion received some time after the relevant events sequence of individually presented items (typically
took place. At the extreme, entirely false apparent words) and then to try to recall all of the items they
memories can be planted in subjects by giving can remember in any order. This task, first introduced
them misleading information. This clearly raises by E. A. Kirkpatrick in 1894, is termed free recall.
a general challenge for epistemologists to provide By analyzing the order in which participants freely
grounds for thinking that, by and large, we can recall list items, one can gain considerable insight
nevertheless regard memory as reliable. More spe- into the nature of the recall process. The analysis of
cifically, though, the intuition that episodic memory recall dynamics in free recall reveals several strik-
has a distinctive epistemological role to play seems ing regularities. This entry first reviews five major
to trade on the idea that there is an essential differ- phenomena that govern the way people search their
ence between simply remembering facts about a past memories: the effects of recency, primacy, contigu-
event and recollecting the event itself, that is, having ity, forward asymmetry, and semantic proximity.
some more direct access to the past through having Subsequent sections discuss how these phenomena
witnessed it. It is this idea, which is arguably a key occur both in the patterns of correct recalls and
ingredient of our commonsense understanding of recall errors, as well as in the latencies measured
memory, that might be seen to be under threat once between successively recalled items. This entry closes
it is clear just how much what we seem to remem- with a brief discussion of the theoretical implications
ber having experienced can actually be the result of of these phenomena.
post-event construction.
Christoph Hoerl Recency
A
0.5
observes a strong recency effect and participants are
1st Recall nearly as likely to initiate recall with the final list
3rd Recall
item as in immediate free recall. This long-term
0.4 5th Recall
7th Recall recency has been taken to support the view that
Recall Probability
0.2 Primacy
In addition to the recency effect, one also observes
0.1
a primacy effect in free recall, whereby the first
few list items are remembered better than items
0 from the middle of the list. This is seen both in the
1 3 5 L-5 L
Serial Position overall probability of recalling list items and in an
increased tendency to initiate recall with the first
B
1 list item (Figure 1). The primacy effect is largely
attenuated when participants are discouraged from
0.8 rehearsing list items throughout list presentation.
This is because early list items tend to be rehearsed
Recall Probability
0 Contiguity
1 3 5 L-5 L
Serial Position
Because in free recall the order of recall reflects the
order in which items come to mind, recall transi-
Figure 1 Serial position effects. (A) The probability of
recalling a list item from each list position in output tions reveal the organization of memory for the list
positions 1, 3, 5, and 7. (B) The probability of recalling list items. Consider, for example, that a participant has
items in any output position (the serial position curve) for just recalled an item from serial position i and that
data from the same immediate free recall studies. the next recall is from serial position j. To examine
the effects of the temporal organization of the list on
Note: L represents the last serial position of a list (thus,
free recall transitions, one can measure the relation
L-5 is the fifth to last serial position). The x-axis is not
continuous because the studies analyzed differ in the
between recall probability and the lag between i and
number of items presented per list, though all were between j, defined as j i. This measure is called the condi-
15 and 30 items. tional-response probability as a function of lag, or
lag-CRP.
Given that the participant has just recalled the
and long-standing associative knowledge concerning item from serial position i, the lag-CRP indicates the
the items themselves. If, however, recency depends probability that the next item recalled comes from
exclusively on the operation of STS, then one would serial position i + lag given the possibility of making
not expect to find recency in continual distracter a transition to that serial position. Lag-CRP analyses
free recalla task where participants perform a dis- have shown that the contiguity effect, a tendency for
tracting task (e.g., mental arithmetic) after every list participants to recall items from nearby in the list to
item, including the last one. According to the STS the just-recalled item, and the asymmetry effect, a
account of recency, the final distracter should greatly tendency for participants to recall items in the for-
attenuate the recency effect, as in delayed free recall. ward direction, are extremely robust properties of
However, in continual-distracter free recall, one free recall.
494 Memory Recall, Dynamics
Figure 2A illustrates these phenomena. Positive The contiguity effect in free recall is also related
values of lag = (j i) correspond to forward recalls; to participants overall ability to recall list items.
negative values of lag correspond to backward recalls. For example, older adults, who recall significantly
Large absolute values of lag correspond to words fewer correct items than do younger adults, exhibit
spaced widely in the list; small absolute values corre- significantly reduced contiguity effects. Moreover,
spond to words spaced closely together in the list. The the magnitude of each participants contiguity effect
contiguity effect seen in these data also appears in the is positively correlated with that participants recall
form of shorter interresponse times (IRTs) between performance.
recall of items from neighboring list positions. This
can be seen in the conditional-response latency (lag- Associative Asymmetry
CRL) function shown in Figure 2B.
An interesting feature of the contiguity effect, as
seen in Figure 2, is the strong forward asymmetry,
with recall transitions being nearly twice as likely
A in the forward than in the backward direction. This
0.3 tendency to make forward transitions is also seen
Conditional-Response Probability
increase steadily throughout the recall period, grow- picture makes it easier to subsequently recognize a
ing as an exponential function of the number of picture studied in a nearby list position. On the basis
items recalled. This increase in IRTs is highly pre- of these results, the contiguity effect may be seen as
dictive of recall terminationfollowing an IRT of reflecting a kind of mental time travel undertaken
greater than 10 seconds, people rarely recall fur- during memory search and retrieval. In recalling an
ther items. The dynamics of recall also appear to item, the participant travels back to the time of
be significantly affected by recall errors. Following its presentation, making it more likely that subse-
intrusions or repetitions of already recalled items, quent recalls will come from neighboring list posi-
people have a significantly increased tendency to tions. According to this view, contiguity arises due
either commit further errors or terminate recall, a to a contextual retrieval process in which recalling
pattern that is true at all stages of the recall process. an item reinstates its associated temporal contexts,
Although the exponential increase in IRTs during which, in turn, serve as a cue for neighboring items.
the recall period has been argued to support a model
of recall in which items are randomly sampled with Summary
replacement from a set of available responses, this By analyzing the dynamics of memory retrieval in
account is falsified by the strong dependencies in free recall, one can see how the search of episodic
sequences of responses, including the temporal and memories is a highly cue-dependent process. Five
semantic clustering effects, as reviewed earlier. major principles govern the way people recall lists
of studied items. First, people tend to initiate recall
Retrieved Context Theory with recently studied items. Subsequent responses
continue to show a bias toward recent items, but
Whereas the contiguity effect can be easily accom-
this recency effect rapidly dissipates over the course
modated within the view that neighboring items
of retrieval (Figure 1). Second, recall of a given item
become associated when they co-occupy a short-
tends to be followed by recall of an item from a
term buffer (or working memory system) several
neighboring (contiguous) list positiona phenome-
studies are hard to reconcile with this classic infor-
non known as the contiguity effect (Figure 2). Third,
mation processing account. For example, Marc
the contiguity effect exhibits a strong forward asym-
Howard and Michael Kahana found that separating
metry effect, with forward transitions being approx-
items by an unrelated distractor task (mental arith-
imately twice as common as backward transitions
metic) did not disrupt the relative tendency to make
(Figure 2). Fourth, recall of a given item tends to
transitions to neighboring items. This finding was
be followed by recall of a semantically related item
further extended in 2008 by Marc Howard and col-
(Figure 3). These principles not only govern correct
leagues who asked participants to free recall items
responses; they also govern the errors people make
from 48 previously studied word lists. Under these
during recall. A fifth principle is the tendency to
conditions, participants exhibited a significant con-
make transitions to early list items, as seen in the pri-
tiguity effect even when making recall transitions
macy effect. Because primacy is not always observed
among items that occurred on different lists. For
and largely reflects peoples use of rehearsal strat-
instance, following recall of an item from list 5, par-
egies, this principle may be considered secondary
ticipants were more likely to recall an item from lists
to the first four major phenomena described ear-
4 or 6 than from lists 3 or 7, and so forth. In 2008,
lier. By studying the order of recall responses, and
Orin Davis and colleagues also found that in recall-
not just whether or not items are recalled, one can
ing lists of paired associates, recall errors exhibited
observe the striking effects of temporal contiguity
a strong contiguity effect, extending across several
and semantic similarity on the accuracy and timing
intervening pairs. Because interpair rehearsal would
of both correct recalls and recall errors. The study
be a major source of interference in this task, it is
of recall dynamics thus allows us to characterize the
unlikely that the contiguity effect can be entirely
basic associative processes operating in recall and to
explained on the basis of rehearsal strategies. Even
test theories of these associative mechanisms.
in item recognition of lists of pictures, participants
exhibit contiguity effects in which recognizing a Michael Kahana and Jonathan Miller
Mental Action 497
formed the intention to F, one might choose to to Peacocke, the distinctive way in which a sub-
express that intention, but the mental acts of judg- ject comes to know of his own actions is by taking
ing that p and deciding to F cannot themselves be such an apparent action-awareness at face value. He
intended. argues that this distinctive action-awareness exists
One response to this line of thought is to claim for mental actions, as well as for bodily actions.
that when one is engaged in directed thinking, such Other accounts of how one knows what one
as trying to figure out an arithmetical problem, is doing when performing an action appeal to the
although one does not intend to think a thought idea that our intentions can embody a form of self-
with the content that p, intention may still have a knowledgepractical knowledge of our intended
significant role to play in ones mental activity, for actions. According to this view, intended action is
ones intention may be to think a thought that stands behavior that realizes the agents knowledge of it.
in a certain relation to other thoughts or contents. The suggestion is that this can accommodate the
Although one does not decide to judge that p, and intuition that one does not normally need to find out
one does not decide to decide to F, one may be able by observation or inference what one is doing when
to decide to determine (or attempt to determine) performing an intentional action, for performing the
whether p, and one may be able to decide to decide action was ones own idea to begin with. On this
(or attempt to decide) whether to F. The conclusion view, ones knowledge of what one is thinking may
that some draw from this is that although mental sometimes be explained, in part, by the distinctive
acts like judging and deciding are not themselves epistemic role of ones intentions in thinking.
mental actions, mental action may sometimes play
an important role in explaining their occurrence.
Mental Action and Wakeful Consciousness
An alternative response is to reject the assump-
tion that a mental event can only be a mental action Brian OShaughnessy appeals to the idea that there
if the content of the mental event is intended. For is a distinctive form of self-knowledge that accom-
example, according to Christopher Peacocke, for a panies ones mental actions in arguing for the claim
mental event to be a mental action, it must consist that mental action has a crucial role to play in an
of an event that either is, or constitutively involves, a account of the state of wakeful consciousness in the
trying, and Peacocke has argued that tryings should self-conscious. He argues that the progression of the
be distinguished from prior intentions. Peacocke stream of conscious thought and imagination is, in
argues that conscious events of deciding and judg- the awake self-conscious subject, distinctive. The
ing can be caused by such events of trying, and so respect in which it is distinctive is connected with the
can be mental actions. He has suggested that such variety of self-knowledge that accompanies it, and
mental actions have the phenomenology of doing the relevant form of self-knowledge is linked with the
something, rather than involving the phenomenol- idea that the mental will is operative. According
ogy of being presented with something as being the to OShaughnessy, the awake self-conscious subject
case, as in perception, or as something occurring to (as opposed to one who is dreaming) is able to make
one, as in unintended imagination. sense of what is happening in a certain domain of
his mental life insofar as he is able to make sense of
what he is up to, and the variety of self-knowledge
Mental Action and Self-Knowledge
involved is importantly linked with the idea that the
For Peacocke, knowing what one is consciously perspective he has on this aspect of his mental life is
thinking will often involve knowing what mental that of its agent.
actions one is performing. Peacockes account of
Matthew Soteriou
how we standardly know our own actions appeals
to the occurrence of events of action-awareness that See also Action and Bodily Movement; Philosophy of
are not beliefs and that have a first-personal, pres- Action; Self-Knowledge
ent tensed content of the form I am doing such-
and-such nowfor example, I am judging that p
Further Readings
now. This action-awareness is standardly brought
about by an event of trying that causes the action OBrien, L., & Soteriou, M. (2009). Mental actions.
that the action-awareness represents. According Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Mental Causation 499
OShaughnessy, B. (2000). Consciousness and the world to Descartes that she found it unintelligible how his
(chaps. 5, 6, 14). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. theory could allow minds to cause the motion of
Peacocke, C. (2008). Truly understood (chap. 7). Oxford, bodies. She held that bodies could only be moved by
UK: Oxford University Press. things in spatial contact with them, which ruled out
Soteriou, M. (2005). Mental action and the epistemology of minds as causes of bodily movements because they
mind. Nous, 39(1), 83105. lacked the required spatial attributes. Although he
Straswon, G. (2003). Mental ballistics or the never resolved the dispute with Princess Elizabeth,
involuntariness of spontaneity. Proceedings of the Descartes later developed a theory that identified the
Aristotelian Society, 103(3), 227256.
pineal gland as the locus of mind-body interaction.
By moving the pineal gland, he claimed, the mind
affects the motion of our animal spirits (an air-like
MENTAL CAUSATION kind of matter), which communicate the impulse to
our muscles via the nerves.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz criticized Descartes
Mental causation is the causation of physical effects
position for being at odds with physics. He held
by mental causes. The paradigm case of men-
that the law of conservation of momentum was vio-
tal causation is the causation of someones bodily
lated if minds affected the motion of bodies in the
movement by a mental state or event of hers. The
way envisaged by Descartes. Leibnizs own position
belief that mental causation exists is deeply rooted
denied mind-body interaction altogether. According
in common sense. It seems uncontroversial to say,
to his view, different substances never interact, but
for instance, that a sudden pain caused Jones to
God created them so that their histories unfold inde-
wince, or that Smiths thirst caused him to have a
pendently in perfect, preestablished harmony.
drink. Nevertheless, explaining how the mind can
have physical effects has proven a challenge for phi- The Argument From the Causal
losophers of mind. For physical effects already have Completeness of the Physical
physical causes, which threatens the claim that they
also have mental causes. The problem is most press- In the 21st century, virtually no one endorses
ing for positions according to which the mind is not Leibnizs doctrine of preestablished harmony or
itself physical. However, recent decades have also Princess Elizabeths conception of the motion of
seen a debate over whether the view that the mind bodies. Still, most contemporary philosophers share
is physical can adequately explain mental causation. the spirit of their objections to Descartes, which
demands that mental causation fit into our picture
History of the physical world. One element of this picture is
the principle of the causal completeness of the physi-
The existence of mental causation was generally cal, which says that every physical effect has a physi-
considered uncontroversial by ancient philosophers. cal cause (this principle is also called causal closure
For instance, both Plato and Aristotle, although dif- of the physical):
fering in their views about the nature of the mind,
held that agents mental states need to be invoked Completeness: Every physical event that has a cause
in order to give causal explanations of some of their has a physical cause.
bodily movements. Completeness is the starting point for an influential
The modern debate about mental causation can argument about mental causation. It seems that if an
be traced back to Ren Descartes and the contro- event has a physical cause, this cause is sufficient to
versy about his theory of the mind. Descartes held bring the event about, which rules out that any non-
that minds and bodies are two radically different physical causes are involved. This idea is expressed
kinds of substance: Minds are substances that are by the following principle:
thinking and not spatially extended, whereas bodies
Non-redundancy: If an event has a physical cause, it
are substances that are spatially extended and not
does not have any nonphysical causes.
thinking. (By a substance in general, Descartes under-
stood something that exists and whose existence We may add to our assumptions the commonsensi-
does not depend on anything else.) In correspon- cal view that some mental events, such as Joness
dence, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia complained pain or Smiths thirst, have physical effects:
500 Mental Causation
Mental causes: Some mental events have physical events are physical events. This claim can be spelled
effects. out in different ways.
From completeness, non-redundancy, and mental
causes, it follows that some mental events, namely Type Identity
those that have physical effects, are physical causes According to the type identity theory, every type
and thus are themselves physical events. Because it is of mental event is identical to a type of physical
implausible that there should be a difference in kind event. For instance, a proponent of the type identity
between those mental events that have physical theory might hold that pain is identical to a certain
effects and those that do not, the conclusion general- type of neural event. The type identity theory has
izes to the claim that all mental events are physical been criticized for reasons independent of mental
events. causation. It seems that mental events are multiply
realizable. For instance, for some animals, pain may
Objections to the Argument coincide with a physical event that is of a different
If one denies the conclusion of the argument from type from the neural event occurring in humans
completeness, non-redundancy, and mental causes, when they are in pain; there might even be possible
one has to reject at least one of its premises. If one beings that can be in pain while their physiology
rejects mental causes, one has to hold that no men- differs radically from that of any animals we know.
tal events have physical effects; this view is called Multiple realizability contradicts the type identity
epiphenomenalism. Accepting epiphenomenalism theory. For if pain is identical to a certain type of
comes at a price, as it requires abandoning the intui- neural event, pain and this neural event are one and
tively plausible claim that some of our mental events the same type of event, so that, necessarily, if a pain
cause bodily movements. This has far-reaching con- event occurs, so does an event of the neural type.
sequences: Given that performing intentional actions
requires that intentions and desires cause bodily Token Identity
movements, it follows from epiphenomenalism that Instead of accepting the type identity theory, one
we never perform intentional actions. may opt for the weaker theory that identifies each
Whereas completeness seems to have a good token mental event, that is, each particular occur-
standing, some philosophers have taken issue with rence of a mental event, with a given token physical
the assumption of non-redundancy. Defenders of event. This so-called token identity theory allows for
non-redundancy typically reply that giving up non- multiple realizability, since the different tokens of
redundancy means accepting that some physical pain events, say, may be identical to token physical
events are overdetermined by physical and non- events of different types.
physical events; it is implausible, they hold, that The most influential token identity theory has
overdetermination is so widespread a phenomenon been Donald Davidsons theory of anomalous
as accounting for all cases of mental causation monism. While identifying token mental events with
would require. Whether such widespread overde- token physical events (hence monism), Davidson
termination would be objectionable is a matter of denies that there are strict laws relating the mental
controversy. The issue is complicated by the fact that and the physical (hence anomalous). He holds that
overdetermination can be read in two ways. It can causation requires strict laws, and that token men-
either simply mean that an effect has two causes, or tal events can be causes or effects because they fall
it can refer to a case with a specific causal structure under physical descriptions and hence are subject to
analogous to the case of a firing squad, where two the strict laws of physics. It has been objected against
shots are individually sufficient to bring about the anomalous monism that, while it allows token men-
victims death. tal events to be causes, it does not explain how token
mental events can be causally efficacious by virtue
Physicalism of their mental properties. It has been argued that
If one accepts the generalized conclusion of the argu- because it is only mental events physical properties
ment from completeness, non-redundancy, and men- that matter for their causal relations, according to
tal causes, one has to accept the claim that all mental anomalous monism, their mental properties, such
Mental Causation 501
as the property of being a pain event, are rendered to which some mental states and events have contents
causally irrelevant. that depend not merely on what is going on in the
subjects head but also on the subjects environment.
Supervenience For instance, a content externalist might hold that the
Currently the most common view according to content of Smiths belief that he is holding a glass of
which mental events are physical events is superve- water is partly due to the fact that Smith has been
nience physicalism. In a standard formulation, this in causal contact with water in his environment. It
view says that whenever a mental event of a certain seems desirable to be able to say that contentful men-
type occurs, this is by virtue of the occurrence of tal states and events can have physical effects and
some type of physical event that necessitates the that their contents play a role in their causal efficacy.
occurrence of the mental event. Like the token iden- However, on the face of it, it seems that the causes
tity theory, supervenience physicalism is compatible of an agents bodily movements are internal to the
with the multiple realizability of mental events. For agent and independent of the environmental fac-
it is consistent with supervenience physicalism that tors relevant for the content of the agents thoughts.
different occurrences of a certain type of mental How content externalism might be reconciled with
event are due to occurrences of different types of the causal relevance of mental content is a matter of
physical events, provided that an event of the mental ongoing controversy among philosophers of mind.
type could not have failed to occur given the occur- Thomas Kroedel
rence of an event of any of these physical types.
With respect to mental causation, supervenience See also Anomalous Monism; Anti-Individualism About
physicalism faces the so-called exclusion problem. Cognition; Emergence; Mind-Body Problem;
Suppose that a certain mental event occurs. Given Physicalism; Reductive Physicalism
supervenience physicalism, this occurrence is due to,
and necessitated by, the occurrence of some physical Further Readings
event. It seems that any putative physical effects of
the mental event will already be caused by the physi- Crane, T. (1995). The mental causation debate.
cal event. This, however, calls the causal efficacy of Supplement to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian
the mental event into question. The rationale behind Society, 69, 211236.
the final step of this argument resembles the non- Davidson, D. (1980). Mental events. In Essays on actions
redundancy principle: If a physical effect already and events (pp. 207225). Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press. (Reprinted from Experience and
has a physical cause, other events simultaneous with
theory, pp. 79101, by L. Foster & J. W. Swanson, Eds.,
this cause seem to be rendered causally irrelevant.
1970, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press)
Some philosophers accept that the exclusion prob-
Descartes, R. (1988). The passions of the soul. In
lem makes mental events causally irrelevant if super-
J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, & D. Murdoch (Eds.),
venience physicalism is true. Others contend that, Descartes: Selected philosophical writings
unlike in the case of physical versus nonphysical (pp. 218238). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
events, supervenient mental events do not compete University Press.
with their underlying physical events for causal effi- Heil, J., & Mele, A. (Eds.). (1993). Mental causation.
cacy. The latter philosophers are often motivated by Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
a desire to prevent generalized epiphenomenalism. Kim, J. (2009). Mental causation. In B. P. McLaughlin,
For if the exclusion problem is genuine, it general- A. Beckermann, & S. Walter (Eds.), The Oxford
izes beyond mental events and threatens the causal handbook of philosophy of mind (pp. 2952).
efficacy of other entities that plausibly supervene Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
on the physical, such as the events and properties Kroedel, T. (2008). Mental causation as multiple causation.
described in chemistry and biology. Philosophical Studies, 139, 125143.
Leibniz, G. W. (1989). Monadology. In R. Ariew &
D. Garber (Eds.), G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical essays
Content Externalism
(pp. 213225). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
A further problem of mental causation arises for the Yablo, S. (1997). Wide causation. Philosophical
widely held position of content externalism, according Perspectives, 11, 251281.
502 Mental Effort
poorly supported by the immediate environment. devoted to one task cannot be devoted to another.
Tasks that are controlled and effort demanding Yet another possibility is interference: Trying to
when they are initially learned, such as searching for carry out many tasks at once can cause cross-talk in
a target in a field of distracters, can come to demand processing and responding. Effort may be the brains
less effort after extensive practice. way of limiting the potential for such interference.
Research on judgment and decision making
similarly recognizes a distinction between two broad Effort and the Selection of Decision Strategies
categories of decision processes that closely parallels Tradeoffs between effort and accuracy have been
the distinction between automatic and controlled discussed extensively in the field of decision mak-
processing: System 1 processes are relatively fast ing. When someone making a decision faces many
and automatic, whereas system 2 processes are sources of information and possible responses, there
slower, more deliberative, and associated with a are many ways they could integrate the information
greater sense of effort. and arrive at a decision. Simpler strategies might
save effort, while reducing the likelihood of making
Effort Costs and Effort Allocation the best possible choice.
When physical exertion is involved, people gener- There is evidence that decision makers often rely
ally choose the least demanding paths to their goals. on simplifying heuristics, such as considering only a
There is evidence that a similar principle applies to subset of the relevant information or the available
mental effort. For a given activity, people tend to alternatives. Several researchers, including John
weigh the cost of effort against its expected payoff. Payne and colleagues, have proposed that people
Effort seems to be recruited on an as-needed choose strategies adaptively, rationally evaluating
basis. In psychophysiology experiments, arousal the expected accuracy and effort of each possible
tends to increase as people prepare for moderately strategy. A simplifying decision strategy (e.g., focus-
difficult tasks (where effort will likely help), but not ing on only a single source of information) might be
when they prepare for tasks that are trivially easy chosen if it minimizes the costs of effort with only a
or impossibly difficult (where effort is unlikely to modest loss of accuracy.
change performance substantially). These types of
Personality
findings suggest that effort allocation involves stra-
tegic decisions. Individuals differ in their inclination to engage in
Models of attention and executive control often mentally effortful activities or to process informa-
posit an internal mechanism for monitoring ongoing tion deeply; for example, people vary on a scale of
levels of cognitive demand. This monitoring mecha- need for cognition. Individuals also vary in measures
nism regulates the engagement of effort, attention, of cognitive ability, such as general fluid intelligence
and control; engagement of these functions is high and working memory span. Both motivation and
when needed, and low otherwise. Effortful cognitive ability are likely to influence the costs and benefits
control is treated in such models as if it carries a attributed to mental effort.
cost, not being engaged unless it is expected to bring
gains. Metacognition: Interpreting Effort
How people interpret and evaluate their own men-
The Nature of Effort Costs
tal states is known as metacognition. One form of
One possible explanation for effort costs is metacognition is the use of the experience of men-
metabolic consumption. If mental effort consumes tal effort as a basis for predictions and factual infer-
energy, minimizing effort might help conserve nutri- ences. This has been studied experimentally by
tive resources. However, this is a matter of debate; manipulating disfluency, the subjective sensation
effortful cognitive processing seems to bring about that information requires effort to perceive, remem-
relatively small changes, if any, in the brains total ber, or process. Subtle manipulations of disfluency
glucose consumption. Alternatively, effort might be (such as degrading text legibility) can influence a
viewed as involving an opportunity cost. If there is a variety of judgments. Disfluency can cause people to
limited capacity for cognitive control, then capacity judge that products are less valuable, cities are less
504 Mental Effort
populous, pictures are less likeable, and that apho- norepinephrine. Both of these neurotransmitters are
risms are less likely to be true. released by brain stem nuclei with diffuse cortical
In a notable example, Norbert Schwarz and col- projections, exerting broad influence on cortical
leagues asked participants to evaluate their own level dynamics. Dopaminergic modulation influences the
of assertiveness. Before making this judgment, some executive attention network; dopamine levels relate
participants were asked to recall 12 examples of to incentives, response vigor, physical effort exer-
their own assertive behavior; other participants were tion, and control-related cognitive processes such as
asked for 6 examples. Members of the 12-example working memory. Norepinephrine levels influence
group then described themselves as less assertive, focused attention and are related to indices of physi-
despite having recalled a greater amount of sup- ological arousal such as pupil diameter.
portive information. These participants presumably A neuropsychological case study provides strik-
inferred, from the sense of mental effort involved ing evidence linking the cognitive control network
with generating 12 examples, that such examples to physiological and subjective aspects of mental
were scarce. effort. The patient, reported by Lionel Naccache and
Experiences of mental effort can also inform colleagues, had a large medial frontal cortical lesion
judgments of learning. Information might be judged that included anterior cingulate cortex. She could
as poorly learned if it takes effort to interpret and successfully perform demanding cognitive tasks, but
recall; as a result, a person might devote additional these tasks evoked neither their usual physiological
study time to the material. Conversely, if informa- response nor any subjective sense of effort. This sug-
tion feels easy to interpret, a person might conclude gests that the subjective and physiological charac-
(perhaps inaccurately) that it does not need to be teristics of effort can be dissociated from response
studied further. generation processes.
Joseph T. McGuire,
Mental Effort and the Central
Jonathan D. Cohen, and
Nervous System
Matthew M. Botvinick
As noted earlier, mental effort is often measured
using physiological indices of autonomic nervous See also Attention, Resource Models; Automaticity;
system activity. Mental effort is also associated with Metacognition and Education; Two System Models of
specific patterns of brain activity. Reasoning; Working Memory
In neuroimaging experiments, tasks that require
controlled processing consistently activate a net- Further Readings
work of brain regions, including lateral prefrontal,
anterior cingulate, and parietal cortices. This collec- Botvinick, M. M. (2007). Conflict monitoring and decision
making: Reconciling two perspectives on anterior
tion of regions has been referred to variously as the
cingulate function. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral
cognitive control, executive attention, or task-pos-
Neuroscience, 7, 356366.
itive network. The network responds to numerous
Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., Feinstein, J. A., Blair, W., &
manipulations of difficulty, including working mem-
Jarvis, G. (1996). Dispositional differences in cognitive
ory demands, task novelty, and response override. motivation: The life and times of individuals varying in
A separate network of brain regions, including need for cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 119,
ventromedial prefrontal and posterior cingulate 197253.
cortices, often shows activity reductions during Camerer, C. F., & Hogarth, R. M. (1999). The effects of
tasks that demand effort. This system is sometimes financial incentives in experiments: A review and
called the default mode or task-negative network. capital-labor-production framework. Journal of Risk
An active hypothesis is that these regions support and Uncertainty, 19, 742.
episodic or self-reflective thoughts, and that such Kahneman, D. (1973). Attention and effort. Englewood
thoughts decline in frequency when individuals com- Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
mit mental effort to a task. Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and
Mental effort is also associated with spe- choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American
cific neuromodulators, including dopamine and Psychologist, 58, 697720.
Meta-Analysis 505
Miller, E. K., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An integrative theory or, more important, with respect to summarized
of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of effect sizes, that is, the magnitudes of the effects
Neuroscience, 24, 167202. examined. Even the best reviews of research by the
Muraven, M., & Baumeister, R. F. (2000). Self-regulation most sophisticated scholars have been primarily
and depletion of limited resources: Does self-control qualitative narratives and have rarely told us much
resemble a muscle? Psychological Bulletin, 126, more about each study in a set of studies than the
247259. direction of the relationship between the variables
Naccache, L., Dehaene, S., Cohen, L., Habert, M. O., investigated, and often not even that, and whether
Guichart-Gomez, E., Galanaud, D., & Willer, J.C.
or not a given significance level was attained.
(2005). Effortless control: Executive attention and
This state of affairs is beginning to change,
conscious feeling of mental effort are dissociable.
however. More and more reviews of the literature
Neuropsychologia, 43, 13181328.
are moving from the traditional literary approach
Payne, J. W., Bettman, J. R., & Johnson, E. J. (1993). The
adaptive decision maker. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
to quantitative approaches to research synthesis
University Press.
described in an increasing number of textbooks
Schwarz, N. (2004). Metacognitive experiences in of meta-analysis. The goals of these quantitative
consumer judgment and decision making. Journal of approaches of meta-analysis are to help us discover
Consumer Psychology, 14, 332348. what we have learned from the results of the studies
conducted and to help us discover what we have not
yet learned.
META-ANALYSIS In what follows, this entry defines the concept
of research results, briefly examines the history
of meta-analysis, defines the concept of successful
Meta-analysis is the quantitative cumulation of sci-
replication, and concludes by comparing a more
entific evidence. There has long been pessimism in
traditional view of replication success with a newer,
the younger social, behavioral, educational, and
probably more useful view.
biomedical sciences in that our progress has been
slower and less orderly than we would like, at least
Defining Research Results
when compared to the progress of older, more pro-
grammatic sciences, such as physics and chemistry. Before we can consider various issues and procedures
In other words, the more recent work in physics and in the quantitative cumulation of research results,
chemistry seems to build directly on the older work we must become quite explicit about the meaning
of those sciences, whereas the more recent work of of the concept results of a study. It is easiest to
the social, behavioral, educational, and biomedi- begin with what we do not mean. We do not mean
cal sciences seems often to be starting from scratch. the prose conclusion drawn by the investigator and
Those who have looked closely at the issue of cumu- reported in the abstract, the results, or the discussion
lation in the physical sciences have pointed out that section of the research report. We also do not mean
these disciplines have ample problems of their own. the results of an omnibus F test with df > 1 in the
Nonetheless, in the matter of cumulating evidence, numerator or an omnibus test with df > 1, that is,
the social, behavioral, educational, and biomedical tests of statistical significance that leave unspecified
sciences have much to be modest about. exactly what differences were found.
Limited success in the process of cumulation does What we do mean is the answer to the question:
not seem to be due to lack of replication or to the What is the relationship between any variable X and
failure to recognize the need for replication. Indeed, any variable Y? The variables X and Y are chosen
there are many areas of the social, behavioral, edu- with only the constraint that their relationship be
cational, and biomedical sciences for which the of interest to us. The answer to this question should
results of many studies, all addressing essentially normally come in two parts: (a) the estimate of the
the same question, are available. Our summaries of magnitude of the relationship (the effect size), and
the results of these sets of studies, however, have not (b) an indication of the accuracy or reliability of the
been nearly as informative as they might have been, estimated effect size (e.g., as indexed by a confidence
either with respect to summarized significance levels interval placed around the effect size estimate). An
506 Meta-Analysis
alternative, or better, an addendum, to the second are in the form of quantitative reviews, that is,
part of the answer is one not intrinsically more meta-analyses. Despite its increasing frequency in
useful, but one more consistent with the existing the literature, however, meta-analysis is not without
practices of researchers: the significance level of the controversy and criticism (see Further Readings).
difference between the obtained effect size and the To gain a deeper understanding of meta-analytic
effect size expected under the null hypothesis (usu- procedures, it will be useful to consider the concept
ally an effect size of zero). of replication. Meta-analysis, after all, involves sum-
Because a complete reporting of the results of a marizing or synthesizing studies that are broadly
study requires the report of both the effect size and thought of as replications. It is important to note
level of statistical significance, it is useful to make that studies typically included in meta-analyses are
explicit the relationship between these quantities. not replications in a narrow sense. Rather, they
The general relationship is given by the following: examine the same underlying relationships even if
their independent and dependent variables are oper-
Significance Test = Effect Size Study Size ationally defined in different ways. For example, in
a meta-analysis of the effects of psychotherapy, the
In other words, the larger the study is, in terms
independent variables might be behavior therapy
of the number of sampling units being studied, the
versus placebo, or psychodynamic behavior therapy
more significant the results will be. This is true
versus placebo, or cognitive behavior therapy versus
unless the size of the effect is truly zero, in which
placebo. The dependent variables might be patients
case a larger study will not produce a result that is
scores on a standardized paper and pencil measure
any more significant than a smaller study. Effect
of psychological health, or the ratings by observers
sizes of exactly zero, however, are rarely encountered.
of the effectiveness of patients interpersonal interac-
tions, or the patients report of the degree to which
Meta-Analysis: A Historical Note
they are experiencing an improvement in their enjoy-
We are inclined to think of meta-analysis as a recent ment of life.
development, but it is older than the famous t test,
which dates back a hundred years. We can simulta- Defining Successful Replication
neously describe the early history of meta-analysis, There is a long tradition in psychology of urging rep-
while providing a classic illustration of the meta- lication of each others research. Although we have
analytic enterprise. In 1904, Karl Pearson collected been very good at calling for such replications, we
correlation coefficients (called rs); there were six have not been very good at deciding when a replica-
of them, with values of .58, .58, .60, .63, .66, and tion has been successful. The issue we now address
.77. The weighted (by sample size) mean of these is this: When shall a study be deemed successfully
six correlation coefficients was .64, the unweighted replicated? Ordinarily, this is taken to mean that in
mean was .63, and the median was .61. Pearson a new study at time 2, a null hypothesis that has
was collecting correlation coefficients because he been rejected at time 1 (i.e., was found significant)
wanted to know the degree to which inoculation is rejected again, and with the same direction of out-
against smallpox saved lives. His own rough and come. When one study is significant and the other is
ready summary of his meta-analysis of six studies not, we have a failure to replicate, but such fail-
was that there was a .6 correlation between inocula- ures may be quite misleading. Let us consider an
tion and survivala truly huge effect. In practical example.
terms, a correlation of that magnitude describes a
situation in which inoculation increases the survival Pseudo-Failures to Replicate
rate from 20% to 80%.
The Saga of Smith and Jones
When Karl Pearson quantitatively summarized
six studies of the effects of smallpox inocula- Smith has published the results of an experiment
tion, a meta-analysis was an unusual thing to do. in which a certain treatment procedure was pre-
Recently, however, there has been an explosion of dicted to improve performance. She reported results
meta-analytic research syntheses such that a rapidly significant at p < .05 in the predicted direction. Jones
increasing proportion of all reviews of the literature published a rebuttal to Smith, claiming a failure to
Meta-Analysis 507
replicate. Both had an effect size r of .24. But Smith researchers reliance on a dichotomous decision pro-
had 80 participants and Jones had only 20. In this cedure has been well documented. In this dichoto-
type of situation, it is often the case that, although mous procedure, differences between p levels are all
the p value associated with Smiths results is smaller regarded as trivial except the difference between a
than Joness (i.e., more significant), the studies were p .05 and a p > .05, or some other critical level
in quite good agreement as to their estimated sizes of of significance at which we have decided to reject
effect as defined by r, the correlation (technically, the the null hypothesis. This dichotomous approach
point biserial correlation), between group member- to significance testing has been increasingly criti-
ship (coded 0 or 1) and performance score (a more cized, for example, by the American Psychological
continuous score). Thus, studies labeled as failure Associations Task Force on Statistical Inference.
to replicate may turn out to provide quite strong The newer, more useful view of replication suc-
evidence for the replicability of the claimed effect. cess has two primary characteristics: (a) a focus on
effect size as the more important summary statistic
On the Odds Against Replicating of a study, with a relatively more minor interest in
Significant Results the statistical significance level, and (b) an evaluation
A related error often found in the behavioral, of whether replication has been successful made in a
educational, biological, and social sciences is the continuous, not dichotomous, fashion. For example,
implicit assumption that if an effect is real, we two studies are not said to be successful or unsuc-
should expect it to be found significant again on cessful replicates of each other, but rather the degree
replication. Nothing could be further from the truth. of failure to replicate is indexed by the magnitude of
Suppose there is, in nature, a real effect of treat- difference between the effect sizes (e.g., rs) obtained
ment with a true magnitude of r = .24, equivalent in the two studies.
to a difference in success rates of 62% versus
38%. Further suppose an investigator studies this Robert Rosenthal
effect with an N of 64 participants or so, giving the
researcher a level of statistical power of .50, a very Further Readings
common level of power for behavioral researchers of
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the
the past 45 years. Even though an r of .24 can reflect
behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
a very important effect, there is only one chance
Cooper, H., & Hedges, L. V. (Eds.). (1994). Handbook of
in four (p = .25) that both the original investigator
research synthesis. New York, NY: Russell Sage.
and a replicator will get results significant at the .05 Cooper, H., Hedges, L. V., & Valentine, J. C. (Eds.).
level; that is, the probability (power) for the first (2009). The handbook of research synthesis and
study (p = .50) is multiplied by the probability for meta-analysis (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Russell Sage.
the second study (p = .50) to yield .50 .50 = .25. Glass, G. V, McGaw, B., & Smith, M. L. (1981). Meta-
If there were two replications of the original study, analysis in social research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
there would be only one chance in eight (p = .125) Hunt, M. (1997). How science takes stock. New York, NY:
that all three studies would be significant (i.e., p = .5 Russell Sage.
.5 .5 = .125), even though we know the effect in Light, R. J., & Pillemer, D. B. (1984). Summing up: The
nature is very real and very important. science of reviewing research. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Contrasting Views of Replication Rosenthal, R. (1991). Meta-analytic procedures for social
research (Rev. ed.). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
The traditional, less useful view of replication suc- Rosenthal, R., & DiMatteo, M. R. (2002). Meta-analysis.
cess has two primary characteristics: (a) It focuses on In H. Pashler (Ed.), Stevens handbook of experimental
significance level as the relevant summary statistic of psychology: Vol. 4. Methodology in experimental
a study, and (b) it makes its evaluation of whether psychology (J. Wixted [Vol. Ed.]), (3rd ed.,
replication has been successful in a dichotomous pp. 391428). New York, NY: Wiley.
fashion. For example, replications are successful Rosenthal, R., & Rosnow, R. L. (2008). Essentials of
if both or neither p < .05, and they are unsuccess- behavioral research (3rd ed.). New York, NY:
ful if one p < .05 and the other p > .05. Behavioral McGraw-Hill.
508 Metacognition and Education
Wilkinson, L., & the Task Force on Statistical Inference. whether she recalled the correct name and how
(1999). Statistical methods in psychology journals: quickly she recalled itto infer how well she had
Guidelines and explanations. American Psychologist, learned the planets name. Control refers to regulat-
54, 594604. ing any aspect of cognition, such as beginning a new
activity, doing the same one in a different manner, or
even deciding to continue the current activity. Often,
METACOGNITION AND EDUCATION monitoring is used in metacognitive control, such as
in the earlier example where Kendall used the out-
Lying in bed, Kendall is doing science homework. come of her self-tests (monitoring) to decide which
Kendall usually enjoys science and believes she can planet names to continue studying (control).
succeed on most of her classwork. She is particu-
larly motivated to learn the planets, because her The Role of Metacognition in Learning
fifth-grade teacher has just discussed the solar sys-
Metacognition can contribute to student successes
tem. Kendall repeats every planet name while look-
and failures. Students who do not accurately moni-
ing at its picture, and then she decides to cover up
tor their progress may not spend enough time on
each name to test herself. She remembers most of
activities that they believe they are doing well on but
them but forgets Saturn and Venus, so she decides to
in fact have not been learned well. For instance, if a
spend more time memorizing their names.
student believes that he is able to solve algebra equa-
In this scenario, Kendall is relying on cognitive
tions for a particular variable, he may stop practic-
and metacognitive processes to complete her home-
ing this particular kind of problem even if he still
work. Cognition refers to mental activities and
requires further practice to master it. Some students
mental representations, such as Kendalls underlying
may not monitor their progress, which could limit
memories for the planet names. Metacognition refers
the effectiveness of problem solving. Alan Schoenfeld
to peoples thoughts (or cognitions) about their cog-
had novice and expert mathematicians solve a vari-
nitions, such as Kendalls understanding that testing
ety of difficult math problems. The major difference
herself may help her identify planets that have not
between the two was that the experts continually
been stored in memory. Accordingly, her under-
monitored their progress; if they monitored that one
standing of cognition (metacognition) may lead her
approach was not working, they tried another one.
to use effective strategies and, in turn, improve her
The novices failed to monitor altogether, and hence
memory (cognition). This entry discusses the role of
they spent too much time exploring a singleand
metacognition in education.
usually invalidsolution to a problem.
Given that students must monitor (and do so
Components of Metacognition
accurately) to efficiently control their study, a com-
Metacognition is not a unitary construct; it has three mon focus of research on metacognition has been
general components: knowledge about cognition, to establish how accurately students can monitor
monitoring of cognition, and control of cognition. their ongoing progress. Unfortunately, across many
Metacognitive knowledge includes any knowledge domains, students have demonstrated limited skill at
or beliefswhether they are valid or invalidabout accurately monitoring their progress. They are rela-
how our minds operate. An expert on cognition tively poor at judging how well they have learned
would have detailed metacognitive knowledge about to associate pairs of words (e.g., chevalhorse);
how the mind operates, whereas many students may they are relatively poor at evaluating how well they
have rudimentary knowledge about how the mind comprehend text materials and often fail to detect
operates. For instance, many students do not know inconsistencies in texts that they are reading; they
how to study most effectively or how to optimally are relatively poor at evaluating how close they are
solve problems. Monitoring refers to assessing the to finding the correct solution for insight problems;
current state of any cognitive process, such as when and they often have difficulties monitoring the rela-
Kendall attempted to monitor her progress by test- tive effectiveness of a variety of learning strategies.
ing her memory for each planet. In doing so, she was Even though students monitoring is often unimpres-
able to use the outcome of the testfor example, sive, they still use monitoring to make decisions on
Metaphor 509
how to study. Put differently, students may use inac- are expected to persist longer and use better strate-
curate monitoring to control study, which can lead to gies to study and hence should have higher academic
poor student outcomes. In fact, almost every teacher achievement. As expected, academic self-efficacy of
has had students perform poorly on an exam, yet college students is related to cumulative grade point
afterward, the students complain that they were sure average, even after controlling for other relevant
they knew all the material. In these situations, they factors such as academic skills and commitment to
likely did not accurately evaluate their learning and college.
prematurely stopped studying. Relative to research on cognition, research
Fortunately, techniques are being discovered to on metacognition is in its infancy. Even so, over
help students accurately monitor their progress in 2 decades of metacognitive research involving edu-
many domains. Kendall evaluated her learning by cation has demonstrated the vital role of accurate
first studying each planet and its name and then ask- metacognition to student performance across many
ing herself, Can I recall the name from memory? disciplines, including memorizing key concepts in
Students who use this technique right after they the classroom, problem solving, writing, reading,
study each to-be-learned item show poor accuracy and mathematics.
at evaluating which items they have learned well,
Keith W. Thiede and John Dunlosky
because the memory for each item would be easily
accessed from short-term memory. By contrast, stu- See also Implicit Memory; Mental Effort
dents who first study items and then wait to assess
their learning show very high levels of accuracy,
because by delaying their monitoring they can assess Further Readings
whether each item has been stored in long-term Dunlosky, J., & Metcalfe, J. (2009). Metacognition.
memory. Thus, simply having students delay their Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
monitoring after study can greatly enhance its accu- Hacker, D. J., Dunlosky, J., & Graesser, A. C. (2009).
racy. Although delayed monitoring can help students Handbook of metacognition in education. New York,
monitor their learning of simple materials (e.g., asso- NY: Psychology Press.
ciating a picture of Saturn with its name), delayed Schunk, D. H., & Zimmerman, B. J. (2008). Motivation
monitoring per se does not always improve accu- and self-regulated learning: Theory, research, and
racy. For instance, students evaluation of how well applications. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
they comprehend text materials does not improve if
these evaluations are delayed after reading the texts.
Instead, other techniquessuch as summarizing
each textmay be necessary for achieving accurate
METAPHOR
evaluations of comprehension.
Metaphorsfigurative uses of language in which a
word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing
The Role of Self-Efficacy in Learning is used to designate anotheroccur across languages
Beyond monitoring-and-control processes, students and across uses of language, from ordinary conver-
beliefs about their own abilities appear to have an sation to literary and scientific writings. In spite of
influential role in their classroom performance. In the prevalence of metaphors, it has proved surpris-
our opening scenario, Kendall believed she could ingly difficult to characterize precisely how they
successfully learn science materials, and this high self- work. Consider a few examples: Juliet is the sun,
efficacy will motivate her to persist while learning My surgeon is a butcher, Vanity is the quicksand
even difficult science concepts. More generally, aca- of reason. Each of these metaphors brings together
demic self-efficacy refers to a students belief about otherwise unrelated entities to achieve informative
how well he or she can perform in the classroom. To and perhaps insightful effects in a remarkably com-
measure efficacy, students rate themselves on state- pact way. Comprehending them requires the hearer
ments such as I know how to study to perform (or reader) to draw on the literal meanings of the
well on tests. As compared to students with low words used, but broader knowledge about the enti-
efficacy, students with higher academic self-efficacy ties literally denoted by the words in questionthe
510 Metaphor
sun, butchers, and quicksandalso seems to be the words of the metaphor mean, rather than some-
required. This discussion will focus on two ques- thing that the speaker means (which she manages to
tions about metaphor that have received particular convey by uttering those words). Sterns metaphor-
attention from philosophers, linguists, and psychol- operator neatly sidesteps this worry, but at the cost
ogists in recent years. The first question concerns the of a substantial increase in the complexity of the
nature of metaphorical content: What, if anything, general process of semantic interpretation.
does a metaphor mean beyond the literal meanings Partly in response to worries about early semantic
of its words? The second question concerns how accounts, philosophers such as Donald Davidson
hearers construct metaphorical interpretations: Do have moved to the other extreme, denying that
they treat metaphors as implicit comparisons or as metaphors have any determinate content beyond
explicit categorizations? their literal meaning. Although agreeing that a given
metaphor may give rise to a wide range of thoughts
(or other effects) in its hearer, this non-cognitivist
Metaphorical Content
view insists that a metaphor does not express those
Although metaphors are notoriously resistant to thoughts. Instead, the metaphor simply causes its
being paraphrased, there is no doubt that they can hearer to notice a range of thoughts by nudging her
provoke extensive and vivid effects. The nature to see one thing as another (e.g., to see a certain sur-
and status of these effects has been a matter of con- geon as a butcher). The non-cognitivist view thus
siderable recent debate. Four main positions have allows for the full variety of metaphors effects, its
been defended regarding the nature of metaphori- capacity to stir emotions and stimulate vivid mental
cal content and how that content is related to the images or a sense of new insight. Further, the diffi-
literal meanings of the words (or sentence) uttered: a culty of paraphrasing metaphors is easily explained:
broadly semantic account, a non-cognitivist account, If a metaphor does not have a distinctive metaphori-
and two pragmatic accounts, one in terms of impli- cal content, then it is unsurprising that attempts
cature, the other in terms of direct content. to capture this putative content routinely fail.
According to semantic accounts of metaphor, Nonetheless, the view has been widely criticized for
particular words or phrases of the metaphorical sen- denying that there is anything to get right or wrong
tence are reinterpreted so that the sentence as a whole when interpreting a metaphor, for we routinely take
takes on a new (metaphorical) meaning. Whereas speakers who utter metaphors to be making truth-
early versions of the semantic account attributed evaluable claims and we agree and disagree about
this to an interaction or conflict between the literal both the substance and correctness of those claims.
meanings of the sentences subparts, more recent Intermediate between the semantic and non-
work by Josef Stern posits a metaphor-operator in cognitivist extremes are two pragmatic accounts of
the sentences logical form that demands metaphori- metaphor. Both accounts endorse the idea that meta-
cal instantiation. The metaphor-operator is a covert phors communicate a determinate content but reject
marker in the underlying structure of the sentence, the idea that the sentence itself has a metaphorical
attaching to the part of the sentence that is inter- meaning in addition to its literal one. Instead, meta-
preted metaphorically and directing the interpretive phorical content is something that the speaker com-
process toward the generation of a metaphorical, municates by speaking as she does: It is what she
rather than literal, interpretation. means, not what her words mean. These positions
Although semantic accounts give full credit to are distinguished by whether they take the meta-
the centrality and importance of metaphorical lan- phorical content to be communicated to the hearer
guage, it remains difficult to defend the idea that directly or indirectly, that is, to constitute something
metaphor is a matter of semantic, that is, linguis- that the speaker asserts or something that she merely
tically encoded, meaning, rather than of language implies.
use. Early semantic accounts struggled to explain the On the indirect account, deriving from the work
status of metaphorical meanings in relation to lit- of H. P. Grice and John Searle, the speaker is taken
eral meanings; insofar as metaphorical meanings are to be saying (or making as if to say) exactly what
both novel and contextually sensitive, its difficult her words literally express. Insofar as this literal
to see why they should count as an aspect of what interpretation is inadequate as a contribution to
Metaphor 511
the ongoing conversation (e.g., it is patently false denotations in order to generate an interpretation
or irrelevant), the hearer is led to consider the pos- of the speakers utterance able to support a range of
sibility that the speaker is making a more oblique implications sufficient to achieve optimal relevance.
conversational contribution. If someone says, My For example, suppose that a speaker utters the sen-
lawyer is a shark, she probably isnt intending to tence John is a soldier to say of John (someone
assert that her legal representative is a large fish; who is not literally a soldier) that he is metaphori-
instead, she should be interpreted as intending to cally a soldierperhaps that he is steadfast, loyal,
communicate indirectly, describing her lawyer as a and can be counted on in a tight spot. Whereas the
shark in order to convey that the lawyer has various encoded concept soldier picks out the set of soldiers,
qualities typically associated with sharks: perhaps the interpretive process draws on contextually rel-
that he is ruthless, vicious, or predatory. evant assumptions associated with the encoded con-
One strength of the indirect pragmatic account cept, such as being steadfast and loyal, to construct
is that it shows how metaphorical content might a related, ad hoc concept with a broader denotation
depend on literal meaning without needing to posit than that of the encoded concepta denotation that
metaphorical meanings as well. However, metaphors picks out not just actual soldiers but also other indi-
seem to function much more directly than this view viduals (such as John) who share these associated
allows: It is perfectly acceptable to answer Romeos properties of soldiers. This ad hoc concept is then
claim that Juliet is the sun by saying Indeed she is taken to capture the property the speaker is asserting
or No, she isnt, and these are responses to a claim of John.
that Romeo has asserted, not to something he has This account respects both the directness of meta-
merely implied. Further, the claim that metaphori- phorical utterances and the ubiquity and naturalness
cal utterances are processed by first computing the of their occurrence in ordinary discourse. At the
sentences literal meaning has been challenged on same time, the direct pragmatic account is consistent
empirical grounds. Work by Sam Glucksberg and with psycholinguistic work on both the automatic-
colleagues has shown that when subjects are asked ity and relative effortfulness of metaphor process-
to judge the literal falsity of sentences, they take ing. One might ask, though, whether the account
longer to reach a decision when the sentence has a reduces the difference between metaphorical and lit-
plausible metaphorical interpretation. This suggests eral cases too much: The interpretation of especially
that people have difficulty ignoring metaphorical poetic metaphors seems to involve more conscious
interpretations, and more specifically, that those reflection and explicit appeal to the metaphors ordi-
interpretations do not depend on the inappropriate- nary literal interpretation than the process of ad hoc
ness of a literal alternative. concept construction looks to allow.
The final option is to take metaphorical content
to be communicated directly by the speaker, that is,
Metaphor Comprehension
to be something that the speaker asserts by her utter-
ance, by allowing asserted content to extend well Arising in counterpoint to questions about the
beyond sentence meaning. One cognitively oriented nature of metaphorical content are questions about
example of this position is developed within the how hearers construct metaphorical interpretations.
framework of relevance theory by Robyn Carston, When a metaphor juxtaposes two entities, what sort
Dan Sperber, and Deirdre Wilson. According to of connection is the metaphor thereby presenting?
this account, there is no presumption that speakers Specifically, is the metaphor comparing the two con-
aim to use words literally, but only that their utter- cepts in question, or is the metaphors topic being
ances will be relevant enough to their hearers to be categorized as belonging to a group of which the
worth processing, and as relevant as the speakers metaphors vehicle is a typical or exemplary mem-
themselves are willing and able to make them. The ber? (A metaphors topic is its subject, while
hearer thus undertakes to construct an optimally its vehicle is that thing the topic is compared
relevant interpretation, employing a single interpre- to or described as beinge.g., Juliet and the sun,
tive mechanism in both metaphorical and literal respectively.)
cases. Encoded concepts are replaced as needed Comparison models begin with the idea that
by ad hoc concepts with broader or narrower metaphors involve feature matching, that they
512 Metaphor
highlight similarities between the metaphors topic job is a jail, literal comparisons such as Emeralds
and vehicle. However, there are a number of diffi- are like sapphires become nonsense when turned
culties with any straightforward feature-matching into the categorical Emeralds are sapphires,
account. Metaphors routinely highlight correspon- suggesting that something other than comparison
dences between features that are not literally shared underlies the metaphorical case.
by topic and vehicle. For example, the sun is a source Sam Glucksberg has taken this discrepancy to
of literal warmth to anyone who feels its rays, but show that metaphors really are what they appear
Juliet is notshe is, at most, a source of emotional to be: categorical statements, rather than implicit
warmth to Romeo. Further, good metaphors tend to comparisons. According to his category-transfer
involve new and informative ways of thinking about account, comprehending a metaphor requires using
their topics by allowing us to see how certain proper- the metaphors vehicle to construct a superordinate
ties of the vehicle might be carried over to the topic. or abstract category of which that vehicle is a proto-
Dedre Gentner and colleagues have developed a typical memberthe metaphor asserts that its topic
more nuanced comparison model based on the idea belongs to this category. In the metaphor My law-
of structure mapping. This account models the yer is a shark, the word shark refers not simply to
comprehension process in two steps: First, an align- the set of sharks but to the set of predatory creatures
ment process looks for structural correspondences more generallyit has dual reference. However,
between the two conceptual domains of the meta- because a single vehicle may be used metaphori-
phor (e.g., the domain of lawyers and the domain cally to convey more than one meaning (we would
of sharks). These correspondences may be indirect, mean something quite different were we to say that
involving relational properties that, although instan- Achilles, rather than Juliet, is the sun, for example),
tiated differently, play similar roles within the two the metaphors topic must play a filtering or con-
domains. So, although we might say that lawyers straining role in selecting the correct metaphoric
and sharks are both predatory, in one case the pre- category in a given instance.
dation relation is entirely social while in the other its Assigning the topic a merely filtering role may
rather more carnivorous! Further, the model priori- not be sufficient, though: It relegates the topic to a
tizes matching of interconnected systems of proper- passive role in the interpretive process and might
ties over piecemeal matching of individual features. entail unnecessary processing effort by requiring that
The second step involves projecting unmatched alternative metaphorical categories be computed.
properties within the aligned system of concepts Further, as with the structure-mapping account, the
from the vehicle to the topic (e.g., the property of category-transfer account lacks a clear explanation
being the center of the solar system is mapped to the of emergent properties. More generally, the two
property of being at the center of Romeos life and accounts seem best suited to explaining different
thoughts). The structure-mapping account thus aims kinds of metaphors: Structure mapping looks most
to generate structural and relational resemblances plausible for novel metaphors, whereas category
beyond direct feature matching while using projec- transfer more naturally explains more conventional-
tion to explain a metaphors informativeness. ized cases.
However, this account does not explain how so- Empirical and theoretical investigations of these
called emergent properties are derived. These are questions are increasingly proceeding hand in hand.
properties not standardly possessed by either topic Both developmental and clinical populations are
or vehicle, yet which are central to the metaphori- proving rich sources of data for evaluating the com-
cal interpretation. For example, That surgeon is a peting models of metaphor discussed here. At the
butcher communicates that the surgeon is careless, same time, new methods of collecting data, such as
but carelessness is not a property typically associ- neuroimaging, are also being brought to bear, fur-
ated with either surgeons or butchers. Further, the ther expanding the range of available evidence.
structure-mapping account does not explain a strik-
Catherine Wearing
ing discrepancy between metaphorical and literal
comparisons: Only the former can be transformed See also Analogical Mapping and Reasoning;
into meaningful class-inclusion statements. Whereas Conversation and Dialogue; Discourse Processing,
My job is like a jail can be transformed into My Models of; Inferences in Language Comprehension
Microgenesis of Consciousness 513
Anatomy The self The object continuously) for a lifetime. In microgenetic theory, the
Cortex Rational self Object
duration of persistence is a function of the iteration or
recurrence of the object, while its revival in memory is
a recurrence in the present.
Limbic system Affective self Desire
Microgeny is an adaptive becoming in which
the environment, in the form of sensation, trims
Brain stem Core self Drive or parses away what is maladaptive to the inferred
physical surround but does not provide the stuff of
Figure 1 The structure of the mental state which perception is made. Rather, the brain thinks
up the world it perceives. The perceptible world
Note: Within the brain, this unfolding proceeds along
is the furthermost rim of mind in a rapid transition
phylo- and onto-genetic lines, from older, deeper, central
structures, progressively upward and outward to the cortex.
from inner core to outer surface. The physical world
On the psychic level, the core (instinctual, unconscious) is known indirectly through its model in conscious-
self is derived to the empirical (feeling) self, which in turn ness; its nature depends on the type of organism and
leads outward to the perception of objects in the world the adequacy of sensory data, but consciousness
by the rational (calculating, analyzing) self. There is a cannot sustain the world without the constraints of
corresponding transition from drive through desire to an sensation. The degree of approximation to an objec-
object perceived as being objectively valuable (or not). tive world determines the content of the state, for
The transition from core to world is a continuum; the example, daydream, reverie, fantasy, hallucination,
entire sequence constitutes a momentary mental state delusion, confabulation, and so forth, all of which
or an act of cognition. are psychic events that actualize at different points in
object formation. Without the impact of sensation,
Thus, conscious perception is not a passive process especially at the final phase of the microgeny, think-
of recording what is actually out there, Kants die ing is dreaming; psychosis is an intermediate phase.
Dinge an sich, but rather it places the self in relation In this bottom-up sequence, sense data do not
to objects that emerge from within, located in a spe- enter the act/object development, but remain external,
ciously objective space and time grid that is created by where they sculpt or constrain what develops. Sense
the brain/mind, constrained by sensory data only in the data, even within the sculpting process, are imper-
last stages of the process to fit with reality. The uncon- ceptible: We perceive the effects of sensory parsing in
scious self operates with a limited repertoire of instinc- perception but not the assembly of sensory bits. In the
tive pre-objects and behaviors oriented to survival with transition from limbic memory to neocortical percep-
no concept of past or future, or any space other than tion, there is a cascade of whole-part or context-item
the immediate perceptive field, or any objects other shifts that leads from inner and private to outer and
than those recognized there as belonging to a limited public, from events that are memory-like to those that
set of primitive categories, or any possible actions other are perception-like, from past to present, from con-
than stereotyped reactions to objects or pre-objects that cept and image to external object, from the archaic to
conform to these categories. The limbic system (a clus- the recent in forebrain anatomy, from unity to diver-
ter of gray-matter nuclei that lie above the brain stem sity, and from the simultaneity of the unconscious to
and under the neocortex) imbues objects with the feel- temporal order in conscious recollection and in the
ings they arouse, pain or pleasure, delight or disgust, world. The sequence recurs in overlapping fashion
amusement or boredom. The neocortex appears last in every fraction of a second. The recursive nature of
phylogenesis and is more highly developed in humans this process causes the stream of consciousness to
than the higher primates (especially the frontal lobes). appear as overlapping moments in an unsteady, even
The neocortex mediates the final phase of object- and occasionally chaotic rhythm of repetition and novelty.
action-formation. The developing configurations
undergo a final adaptation to the environment through
Subject and Self, Awareness
the influence of sensory constraints. The instinc-
and Consciousness
tual activity of the core can be contained within the
microgenetic epoch, which lasts for milliseconds, but A subject is the subjective whole of the organism
feeling states can be more or less persistent (revived), excluding its external portion. The external portion
and thoughts can be maintained (recur more or less of that whole is made up of objects, perceived as
Microgenesis of Consciousness 515
existing outside the organism and belonging to the then beyond this perimeter to an external world that
physical world. Objects are psychic appearances, lit- finally detaches from the observer. The action
erally phenomena (that which appears in ancient space of young infants transforms to the indepen-
Greek), which, on reflection, point to entities that dent space of the conscious adult. We see an analo-
putatively exist independently of what we think we gous transition from the implicit and unconscious to
know of them. Awareness refers to the relation of the conscious and explicit in all areas, for example,
subject to object. The conscious self, a segment in a word that individuates from a mental lexicon,
the stream of outgoing subjectivity aware of its own a specific recollection from a memory store. The
priority and subjectivity, arises within a subject that transition from concept to object, store to item,
is aware of objects. Consciousness can be conceived lexicon to word, unconscious to conscious, is not
as consisting in the relation of a self to inner and a transfer of like to like, as if the depth were a mere
outer objects, where the relation is the unidirec- container. The transition of category to instance
tional process of becoming through which subject, or whole to part occurs over a qualitative series of
then object, actualizes. The relation of the self to largely hidden internal phases that constrain con-
inner objects is introspection or reflection; to outer sciousness to an outcome that delimits a theoreti-
objects, exteroception or perception. cally infinite number of possibilities.
The core, an early phase in the epoch, is the seed
of personality. In higher mammals and young chil- Conclusion
dren, the core shows the first tendency to individual- William James regarded consciousness as the cen-
ity, expressed in temperament or attachments. Prior tral issue in psychology and the duration of the
to its appearance, behavior seems to be regulated by present as the central issue for its understanding.
mechanism: instinctual drive, environmental signal, Time and space are specified out of the core: Space
consummation. The core or unconscious mind is as objects grow out of concepts, time as duration
dependent on drive and the immediate occasion. In is incremented by events. Subjective time develops
the evolution of mammals, individuality and aware- in a transition from the simultaneity of the core to
ness show a gradual advance from species to species, serial order in the world. Inwardly, time is counted
as the core becomes more detached from the object in duration, externally in increments. The duration
world, capable of entering into the binary I/Thou required for events to be perceived as stable objects
relation out of which all subsequent interpersonal is also the basis for the perception of events. The
relations evolve. Out of the core a conscious self is persistence of an object over a minimal duration to
shaped in relation to beliefs and values and guided be perceived for what it is entails a recurrence within
to actuality by sense data. The self is conscious of successive nows. All objects are events in which
inner and outer objects, fixed in the present by the change (recurrence) is imperceptible.
attention system and short-term memory, yet able Duration is the glue of continuity that carves
to attend to events in the past (long-term, episodic, events out of flux. Time is not a uniform flow but
and semantic memory) and to plan for those in the a replacement of changing objects across intervals,
future (prospective memory, imagination). themselves changeless, thus nonexistent. The conti-
As partition continues, object and lexical con- nuity of the self, of inner and outer, and the recogni-
cepts, images and feelings, punctuate the subjective tion of sameness or difference, owes to the overlap
pole. At the objective pole, value penetrates objects in a succession of present moments. Specifically, the
with greater specificity and refinement: The simple overlap of the present (now) in the replacement of
archaic category of edible is broken down into a categorical self and its objects is the basis for the
tasty or not tasty (essentially I like it or I near-identity of recurrences. The scenario of inces-
dont like it), conditioning later aesthetic judgments sant change with a relative stability of inner and outer
of increasing subtlety, while requiring the interven- events is comprehensible in terms of categories suf-
tion of a subject, the I who does or does not like. ficiently flexible to accommodate deviance and suf-
There is a parallel articulation of inner and outer. ficiently habitual to cancel brief atypical replications.
The present encompasses events of greater duration,
enfolding a narrative of self and experience. The Maria Pachalska,
bodily space of the core expands to the perimeter Bruce Duncan MacQueen,
of the arms reach, that is, a manipulation space, and Jason Walter Brown
516 Mind-Body Problem
See also Consciousness, Comparative Perspectives; Descartes famously argued that the identity theory
Consciousness and Embodiment; Consciousness and must be false. According to Descartes, it is conceiv-
the Unconscious; Self-Consciousness; Time Perception able that minds exist without bodies, and so it is pos-
sible that minds exist without bodies, and so minds
Further Readings are not bodies. Now the relationship between what
is conceivable and what is possible is tricky and has
Brown, J. W. (1977). Mind, brain, and consciousness:
attracted much attention. It is dubious that Descartes
The neuropsychology of cognition. New York, NY:
Academic Press.
is licensed to move from conceivability to possibility.
Brown, J. W. (1988). Life of the mind. Hillsdale, NJ:
But what of the move from the notion that it is pos-
Erlbaum. sible that minds are not bodies to the conclusion that
Brown, J. W. (2005). Process and the authentic life minds are not bodies? That move might seem a non-
(N. Rescher, J. Seibl, & M. Weber, Eds.). Heusenstamm, starter. Much that is possibly the case is not actually
Germany: Ontos Verlag. the case. But what Descartes assumes, at least implic-
Brown, J. W. (2010). Neuropsychological foundations of itly, is that if minds and brains are identical, then
conscious experience. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: they must share all of their properties in common.
Chromatika. Descartes assumes that whatever is identical must
Brown, J. W., & Pachalska, M. (2003). The nature of the be indiscernible: For any two objects, x and y, if x is
symptom and its relevance for neuropsychology. Acta identical to y, then for any property x has y has, and
Neuropsychologica, 1(1), 111. vice versa. And so if minds are brains, then whatever
Dennett, D., & Kinsbourne, M. (1992). Time and the property the one has the other also has. But it is not
observer: The where and when of consciousness in the possible for brains to exist without brains. And so, if
brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15, 183247. minds are brains, then minds could not exist without
James, W. (1890). Principles of psychology. New York, brains. Thus, if it is possible for minds to exist with-
NY: Holt. out brains, then it follows that minds are not brains.
Pchalska, M. (2002). The microgenetic revolution: Descartes response to the mind-body problem is
Reflections on a recent essay by Jason Brown. Journal that minds and bodies are radically different kinds
of Neuropsychoanalysis, 4(1), 109117. of things; the latter material, the former immaterial.
Pchalska, M., & MacQueen, B. D. (2005). Microgenetic But Descartes solution, dualism, introduces two
theory. A new paradigm for contemporary
new problems. The first challenge is to make intel-
neuropsychology and neurolinguistics. Acta
ligible what an immaterial thing might be. The sec-
Neuropsychologica, 3(3), 89106.
ond problem, related to the first, is the problem of
mental causation: How do minds causally interact
with bodies? This problem for Descartes is especially
MIND-BODY PROBLEM acute: How do immaterial substances interact with
material substances?
The mind-body problem is the problem of explain- The contemporary version of the mind-body
ing how the mind and body are related. Put that problem is not cast in terms of substances and is
way, the problem seems singular even if not simple. often cast, instead, in terms of laws, states, proper-
Is the mind simply the body or some part of it? If ties, or events. In terms of properties, for instance, the
it is not, then what is it and how is it related to the mind-body problem is this: How are mental proper-
body? Most important, if the mind is not the body, ties related to physical properties? That is, how are
how do they interact? mental properties related to the properties of interest
to the natural sciences? And the problem of mental
causation, in its modern guise, concerns the causal
Descartes and Dualism
closure of the physical. It is commonly presumed
The most obvious strategy for solving the problem that the laws of physics are causally closed; there are
is to insist that minds are bodies or some proper no physical events that are not caused by other phys-
part of the body, perhaps the brain or the central ical events. Were this not the case, then there would
nervous system. This position, the identity theory, be, at the explanatory level of physics, miracles:
claims that minds and brains are identical. Ren physical events with no physical explanations. But
Mind-Body Problem 517
if the instantiations of mental properties are caus- terms in terms of behaviors or dispositions to behave.
ally efficacious with respect to the physical, if having By comparison, we might think of somethings being
some mental property is the cause of some behavior, fragile as its being disposed to shatter if struck. If it
for instance, then we are left with only three pos- shatters when struck, we might say that it shattered
sibilities. First, there are physical events that are not partly due to its fragility. But its fragility, it might be
physically caused, and so there are physical events thought, just is its being such that it would shatter.
without physical causes. Second, whatever the men- There is an explanation, logical behaviorism con-
tal causes the physical also causes, and so behavior tends, even though the explanatory circle is small.
is causally overdetermined. Third, mental properties Logical behaviorism does not deny the mental, per
are identical to physical properties. The first option se. Ordinary psychological explanations have a
is the modern version of Descartes solution. The purchase. But, according to logical behaviorism, the
third is the modern version of materialism, what is mental is not separate from the body. Indeed, logical
commonly called physicalism. The second? Well, behaviorism denies that the mental is at all private.
about that there is much contemporary debate, to In philosophy, the popularity of both versions
which we will return. of behaviorism went hand in hand with a theory of
meaning that was popular during the early part of
the 20th century, the verificationist theory of mean-
Eliminativism
ing, according to which the meanings of theoretical
A more radical way to respond to the problem of terms were supposedly the verification conditions
mental causation, however, is simply to deny that for their correct applications. Verificationism and
the mental is causally efficacious. One way to do the behaviorist theories following in its train now
this is to claim that the mental, although it might have few adherents. With better theories of mean-
be caused by the nonmental (e.g., the feeling of pain ing and reference, and especially with better theories
might be caused by a broken bone) and although it with respect to theoretical terms, both philosophy
might cause what is mental (e.g., someones experi- and the behavioral sciences once again began appeal-
encing pain might cause that person to remember ing to hidden objects, states, and processes without
being in pain), does not cause anything nonmental embarrassment.
(and so the feeling of pain would not cause someone Not everyone agreed that these included the
to avoid the cause of that pain in the future). This mental, however. The latter part of the 20th century
position, epiphenomenalism, has few contemporary introduced new versions of eliminativism. According
adherents. The problem for the position is that, first, to defenders of this view, attributions of proposi-
it seems obvious to many that the mental is causally tional attitudes (e.g., beliefs and desires) belong to
efficacious, and second, if the mental does not cause a folk theory for explaining behavior. As a theory,
the physical (if, e.g., it does not cause behavior), it is this folk theory is subject to revision and even elimi-
hard to see why we should believe it to exist. nation as better theories are developed. If the best
Early in the 20th century, the more popular theories for explaining human behavior appeal to
response to dualisms troubles was to deny the men- neuroscience, and if our folk theories are not reduc-
tal entirely, or at least to deny it any explanatory ible to the theories of neuroscience, then, according
role. According to psychological behaviorism, what to these eliminativists, we should conclude that our
is explanatorily relevant is what is observable, and folk theories of the mind are not simply incomplete,
what is observable with respect to explaining human but false.
behavior are environmental stimuli and behavioral
outputs. Psychological behaviorism attempts to
Functionalism
solve the mind-body problem by denying the
mental entirely. Another form of behaviorism, logi- Another strategy that surfaced during the second
cal behaviorism, agrees with psychological behav- half of the 20th century, and that has attracted far
iorism that what matters is what is observable, but more attention, is functionalism. According to this
insists that the mental is causally efficacious, or at view, someone is in pain, for instance, whenever
least that appeals to the mental play an explanatory she is in a state that plays a particular functional
role. Logical behaviorists attempted to define mental role, which is to say whenever she is in that state
518 Mind-Body Problem
commonly caused by pain stimuli (e.g., pin pricks) Role functionalism is theoretically compatible
and that commonly produces pain behavior (e.g., with both dualism and physicalism about the mind.
moving ones arm quickly away from the pin). It is compatible with dualism since it allows that the
Functionalism shares with behaviorism the idea instantiation of some nonphysical property might
that the meanings of mental predicates are tied with play the appropriate functional role. It is compat-
behavior, but it breaks with behaviorism in that, ible with physicalism since, presumably, nothing
according to functionalism, mental predicates pick nonphysical actually plays that role. According to
out properties and states that not only cause behav- role functionalism, the property of being in pain
ior but also cause each other. Pains produce not only is not, strictly speaking, a physical property or
behavior but also beliefs and memories. And part any particular physical property, and so creatures
of the commonsense explanation for this appeals to physically very different than us, and perhaps even
the fact that we reflect on our memories, beliefs, and machines of the right type, might share the property
desires and that this reflection results in additional of being in pain. But assuming that pain is always
memories, beliefs, and desires. realized physically, assuming that everything that is
One version of functionalism, realizer function- in pain has some physical property the instantiation
alism, is generally thought of as a version of the of which plays the functional role of pain for that
identity theory. According to realizer functionalism, creature or machine, there is an important sense in
because mental terms pick out whatever it is that which dualism is false.
plays a particular functional role, and because it is Exactly how and whether dualism is false and
presumably the job of neuroscience to tell us what physicalism is true by the lights of role functionalism
that is, mental state terms (at least when used to has itself been an area of intense debate. According
ascribe mental states to us) pick out neurophysio- to one particularly influential view, token-token
logical states (of us). Thus understood, realizer func- physicalism, although mental types (e.g., pain)
tionalism solves the problem of mental causation are not identical to physical or neurophysiological
by insisting that mental properties just are certain types, particular instances or tokens of the mental
physical properties, and so there is no threat to the (e.g., someones particular pain at some particular
causal closure of the physical and there is no worry moment) are identical to particular instances or
about causal overdetermination. tokens of the physical. By analogy, no one thinks
Another version of functionalism, role function- that a particular shade of red, say crimson, is iden-
alism, holds that mental terms pick out properties tical to redness, because something can be red but
and states at a higher level of abstraction, perhaps not be crimson. Nonetheless, it might be held, some-
those that humans might share with machines hav- things being crimson is just its being red.
ing no neurophysiology. As commonly understood,
role functionalism holds that mental properties are
The Mind-Body Problem Today
second-order propertiesproperties had by proper-
ties. Someone is in pain, according to this view, in Role functionalism was once thought to be a kind
virtue of having some first-order property (presum- of philosophical panacea, a halfway house between
ably some physical property) the instantiation of a dualism that seems shrouded in mystery and a
which plays the appropriate functional-causal role. reductive physicalism that seems counter to com-
So, for instance, if having some neurophysiological mon sense, and it continues to be the favored view
property plays the pain role for us, if having that in the philosophy of mind. But role functionalism
neurophysiological property is typically caused by faces several objections. According to one objection,
pin pricks, for example, and typically causes pain being functionally organized in a particular way is
behavior, then we are in pain whenever that neuro- insufficient for intentionality. We can imagine, it is
physiological property is instantiated in us. But that thought, a creature or a robot with the right kind of
neurophysiological property is not identical to pain. functional organization, but without what we would
Rather, pain is the having of some property or other think of as thoughts or understanding.
(in our case that particular neurophysiological prop- It is also challenging to see how functional orga-
erty) that plays the relevant functional-causal role. nization is sufficient for consciousness, but here the
Mind-Body Problem 519
problem is seemingly a problem for any theory of One particularly interesting response to this
the mind, and especially for any physicalist theory. It problem is to think of mental property tokens not
seems possible, for instance, that someone function- as identical to physical tokens, but instead to think
ally like me, someone who typically sees blue objects of them as proper parts of physical tokens. The posi-
as blue, who typically comes to believe that such tion agrees with realizer functionalism that mental
objects are blue after seeing them, who typically properties are not second-order. And it agrees with
asserts that such objects are blue when asked, and dualism, but here a dualism about properties and
so forth, might have experiences of blue objects that not substances, that instances of mental properties
are qualitatively different than the experiences that I are not identical to instances of physical properties.
have when I see blue objects. We are functionally the It also agrees with role functionalism that the mental
same, she and I, but we are not mentally the same. is physical in virtue of being multiply realizable by
The problem, the qualia problem, is to explain how the physical. To understand the suggestion, imagine
functionalism in particular, and physicalism more an overly simplified view, a popular philosophical
generally, can explain the qualitative nature of many fiction. Imagine that pain in humans is correlated
of our mental states. with C-fibers firing and that pain in Martians is
Where the qualia problem raises the worry that correlated with A-Fibers firing. According to tradi-
functionalism cannot avoid all of the problems of tional role functionalism, if John the human is in
physicalism, another problem suggests that role pain, then his being in pain is not his having C-fibers
functionalism cannot avoid a perennial problem fire, although it is true that he wouldnt be in pain
for dualism. The problem, the problem of mental if his C-fibers were not firing. His being in pain is
causation, is that if mental properties are not identi- his being functionally organized in the appropriate
cal to physical properties, then it would seem that way and, thus, his having something or other that
their instantiations would have nothing to do. One is playing the pain role. Perhaps we might say that
version of the problem maintains that any causal his being in pain at this moment is identical to his
explanation of an event excludes all other explana- having C-fibers firing at this moment, but being in
tions. The problem, if such there is, would seem- pain is not having C-fibers fire. But then it is unclear
ingly apply to the properties appealed to by most of what causal role there is for pain to play for John
the natural sciences. Indeed, it would seem to raise since any instance of pain in John just is an instance
a problem for all of the sciences except for phys- of C-fibers firing in John.
ics since, if the argument were successful, it follows According to traditional realizer functionalism,
that the lower level causal explanations exclude if C-fibers firing is the realizer of pain for humans,
all other higher level causal explanations. But role then it just is pain for humans. And because A-fibers
functionalism seems to face special challenges in firing just is pain for Martians, it just is pain for
explaining how the mental could, by its lights, be them. But then it appears that humans and Martians,
causally efficacious. If a mental property is a sec- although it is true to say of both that they experience
ond-order property, if it is the having of some prop- pain, actually share nothing in common when they
erty or other that plays a particular functional role, are both in pain.
then it would seem to be the first-order property If we think that pain is multiply realizable, if we
that does the work by definition. And if instances agree with the Role Functionalist that humans and
of mental properties are identical to instances of Martians have something in common when in pain,
physical properties, if the role functionalist endorses then we must also think that the causal powers of
token-token identity, then those instances must play C-fibers firing and the causal powers of A-fibers
exactly the same causal role. And if they play the firing are relevantly similar. No doubt they do not
same causal role, if instantiations of mental proper- share all of their causal features, for otherwise they
ties never cause anything not caused by instantia- would not be neurophysiologically distinct, but their
tions of physical properties, then that would seem causal features must overlap with respect to those
a good reason to think either that mental proper- features relevant for pain, for otherwise we would
ties do not exist or that they just are those physical not treat them as alike psychologically. Pain, on this
properties. view, contributes the set of causal powers that is a
520 Mirror Neurons
proper subset of those powers contributed by both sector of the macaque monkeys ventral premotor
C-fibers firing and A-fibers firing, and so an instance cortex, known as area F5. Mirror neurons discharge
of pain might be thought of as a proper part of any not only when the monkey executes goal-related
instance of C-fibers (or A-fibers) firing. Whether this hand motor acts such as grasping objects, but also
strategy will prove successful is as yet a matter of when it observes other individuals (monkeys or
considerable controversy. humans) executing similar motor acts. Neurons with
similar properties were subsequently discovered in
Michael Watkins
regions of the posterior parietal cortex reciprocally
See also Anomalous Monism; Behaviorism; connected with area F5.
Consciousness and Embodiment; Eliminative Action observation causes in the observer the
Materialism; Emergence; Explanatory Gap; Mental automatic activation of the same neural mechanism
Causation; Physicalism; Reductive Physicalism triggered by action execution. For the first time, a
neural mechanism allowing for a direct matching
Further Readings between the visual perception of an action and its
execution has been identified. By means of the mir-
Chalmers, D. (1996). The conscious mind. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
ror matching mechanism, the results of the visual
Churchland, P. (1979). Scientific realism and the plasticity analysis of the observed actionwhich, in principle,
of mind. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. has no meaning for the observercan be translated
Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness explained. Boston, MA: into an account that the individual is able to under-
Little, Brown. stand. It was proposed that this mechanism could
Fodor, J. (1974). Special sciences and the disunity of science underlie a direct form of action understanding. If
as a working hypothesis. Synthese, 28, 77115. mirror neurons do in fact mediate action under-
Jackson, F. (1982). Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical standing, their activity should reflect the meaning of
Quarterly, 32, 127136. the observed action, not its visual features.
Kim, J. (2005). Physicalism, or something near enough. Two sets of experiments were carried out to verify
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. this hypothesis. The first experiments tested whether
Kripke, S. (1972). Naming and necessity. Cambridge, MA: the mental representation of an action triggers F5
Harvard University Press. mirror neurons, the second whether mirror neurons
Lewis, D. (1966). An argument for the identity theory. can respond to the sound produced by actions. The
Journal of Philosophy, 63, 1725. results of these experiments answered both ques-
Putnam, H. (1975). Mind, language, and reality. tions in the affirmative and showed that what drives
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. mirror neurons discharge is not the mere visual
Shoemaker, S. (2007). Physical realization. Oxford, UK: description of a motor act, but rather its goal.
Oxford University Press. In the most lateral part of area F5, a class of
Yablo, S. (1992). Mental causation. Philosophical Review, mirror neurons responding to the execution and
101, 245280.
observation of mouth actions has been found.
The majority of these neurons discharge when
the monkey executes and observes mouth-related,
MIRROR NEURONS object-related motor acts, such as grasping, biting,
or licking. However, a small percentage of mouth-
Our social competence largely depends on the capac- related mirror neurons discharge during the observa-
ity to understand the intentional behavior of others. tion of communicative facial actions performed by
What are the origins of this capacity? What are its the experimenter in front of the monkey (commu-
underlying neural mechanisms? This entry will pre- nicative mirror neurons). Macaque monkeys show
sent and discuss a class of neurons originally discov- an initial capacity to control and voluntarily emit
ered in the premotor cortex of macaque monkeys social signals; this is mediated by the frontal lobe. It
that can shed light on these issues: mirror neurons. is interesting that this capacity develops in a cortical
areaarea F5that in humans became Brodmanns
Mirror Neurons in Monkeys area 44, a key area for verbal communication.
In the early 1990s, a new class of premotor neurons, More recently, premotor and parietal mirror
mirror neurons, was discovered in the anterior neurons have been found to have a role in intention
Mirror Neurons 521
understanding. The discharge of mirror neurons dur- Together, these results suggest that our ability to
ing the observation of an act (e.g., grasping an object) empathize with others is mediated by mechanisms
is conditioned by the type of subsequent act (e.g., of embodied simulation, that is, by the activation
bringing the object to the mouth) that specifies the of the same neural circuits that underpin our own
overall action intention. In addition to recognizing emotional and sensory experiences. In this view,
the goal of the observed motor act, mirror neurons empathy is conceived of as the outcome of our natu-
allow the observing monkey to predict the agents ral tendency to experience interpersonal relations at
next action, and hence its overall basic motor inten- the implicit level of intercorporeity, that is, of the
tion. This neural mechanism could provide scaffold- mutual resonance of intentionally meaningful sen-
ing for more sophisticated social cognitive abilities, sory-motor behaviors. Recent studies have suggested
such as those that characterize the human species. that mirror mechanisms could be malfunctioning in
individuals affected by autistic spectrum disorders.
The discovery of mirror neurons opens exciting new
Mirror Neuron Mechanisms in Humans
perspectives in a variety of different fields in social
Solid evidence, recently also at the single neuron cognitive neuroscience, such as our understanding of
level, demonstrates the existence of a mirror neuron psychopathological states, language, and aesthetics.
matching mechanism in the human brain as well. The mainstream view in cognitive science was,
Action observation leads to the activation of premo- and may partly still be, that action, perception, and
tor and posterior parietal cortical areas, the likely cognition are to be considered as separate domains.
human homologue of the monkey areas in which The discovery of mirror neurons challenges this
mirror neurons were originally described. Distinct view by showing that such domains are intimately
cortical regions within the premotor and posterior intertwined. It also provides a new empirically based
parietal cortices are activated by the observation/ notion of intersubjectivity, which can be viewed
execution of mouth-, hand-, and foot-related actions. first and foremost as intercorporeity, the main basic
The mirror neuron mechanism for actions in source of knowledge we directly gather about others.
humans is directly involved in imitation of simple
Vittorio Gallese
movements and in the imitative learning of complex
skills. Furthermore, many interesting phenomena
See also Common Coding; Consciousness and
described by social psychologists, such as the cha-
Embodiment; Emotional Recognition,
meleon effectthe unconscious mimicry by the
Neuropsychology of; Facial Expressions, Emotional;
observer of postures, expressions, and behaviors of Motor System, Development of; Social Cognition
her or his social partnerscan find a neurophysi-
ological explanation in the mirror mechanism. The
premotor cortex, which has the mirror mechanism Further Readings
for action, is also involved in processing action-
Freedberg, D., & Gallese, V. (2007). Motion, emotion and
related words and sentences, suggesting that mirror
empathy in esthetic experience. Trends in Cognitive
neurons, along with other parts of the sensory-motor
Sciences, 11, 197203.
system, could play a role in language processing.
Gallese, V. (2006). Intentional attunement: A neurophysio-
Mirroring mechanisms also underpin our capac-
logical perspective on social cognition and its disruption
ity to empathize. When we perceive others express-
in autism. Brain Research, 1079, 1524.
ing a particular emotion such as disgust, the same Gallese, V. (2007). Before and below theory of mind:
brain areas are activated as when we experience Embodied simulation and the neural correlates of social
the same emotion. This, of course, does not imply cognition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
emotional contagion. In fact, in spite of a common Society London B: Biological Sciences, 362, 659669.
shared activation focus of activation in the anterior Gallese, V., & Lakoff, G. (2005). The brains concepts: The
insula, no matter whose disgust is at stake, different role of the sensory-motor system in reason and
cortical areas activate when disgust is subjectively language. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22, 455479.
experienced as opposed to when it is only observed Rizzolatti, G., & Sinigaglia, C. (2010). The functional role
in the facial expression of someone else. Similar mir- of the parieto-frontal mirror circuit: interpretations and
ror mechanisms have been described for the percep- misinterpretations. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11,
tion of pain and touch. 264274.
522 Mnemonic Strategies
framework can improve memory. Linking the items retrieval practice and the keyword mnemonic for foreign
to be remembered in a story provides such a mean- vocabulary learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 21,
ingful framework and can dramatically improve 499526.
recall. Higbee, K. L. (2001). Your memory: How it works and
how to improve it (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Marlowe.
Acronyms and Rhymes Morris, P. E., & Fritz, C. O. (2006). How to . . . improve
your memory. The Psychologist, 19, 608611.
Other mnemonics popular with students include Roediger, H. L., III. (1980). The effectiveness of four
acronyms, in which the first letters of words to be mnemonics in ordering recall. Journal of Experimental
remembered are arranged to spell out a meaning- Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 6, 558567.
ful word, and acrostics, in which the first letters of
the words become the first letters of words in an
easily memorized phrase. For example, the acronym
FACE has often been used to remember the notes in
MODELING CAUSAL LEARNING
the spaces of the treble clef and the acrostic Every
Good Boy Deserves Favor cues the notes on the Humans display remarkable ability to acquire causal
treble clef lines. Research has shown such mne- knowledge. Humes philosophical analysis of causa-
monics can be effective, but primarily as a way of tion set the agenda for discovering how causal rela-
remembering the order of known items rather than tions can be inferred from observable data, including
for memorizing new information. Rhymes, such as temporal order and covariations among events. Recent
the Thirty days hath September rhyme for the computational modeling work on causal learning has
lengths of the months, are another technique, and made extensive use of formalisms based on directed
rhymes and rhythm have been shown to help by lim- causal graphs (Figure 1). Within a causal graph, each
iting the possible alternatives during recall. arrow connects a node representing a cause to an
effect node, reflecting core assumptions that a cause
Applying and Combining Mnemonics precedes its effect and has some power to generate or
prevent it. The computational goal is to infer from
Mnemonics are most effective when the learner the observable data the unobservable causal struc-
combines ability and commitment; when mnemono- ture conveyed by the graph and the magnitude of the
phobia (fear of using mnemonics) is overcome, power of each cause to influence its effect.
they are effective in classroom learning. However, This entry covers some key issues that arise in
other memory improvement techniques incorpo- modeling human causal learning. Alternative models
rating retrieval practice, such as the name game of causal learning vary depending on the assump-
for learning the names of members of a group, are tions adopted in the computation, the goal of the
less demanding on the learner and can be equally computation, and the presentation format of the
effective. Retrieval practice and imagery mnemonics input data. Understanding models from these per-
can be combined to achieve even greater memory spectives can clarify their commonalities and differ-
improvement than when either is used separately. ences, guide the design of psychological experiments
Suitable selection of techniques from among mne- to test the validity of key assumptions, and assess
monic and other memory improvement techniques whether models can potentially be extended to
can dramatically ease the burden of memorizing and
the embarrassment of memory failure.
Peter Morris
Flu Stress Lung Cancer
See also Memory Recall, Dynamics; Retrieval Practice
(Testing) Effect; Visual Imagery
real-life problems, such as medical diagnosis and A strength judgment involves a quantitative assess-
scientific discovery. ment of a cause-effect relation: What is the prob-
ability with which a cause produces (or prevents) an
Alternative Causal Assumptions effect? A structure judgment is a more qualitative
When the causal graph includes multiple potential assessment of cause-effect relations: Does a candi-
causes of a single effect, two leading classes of mod- date cause, in fact, produce (or prevent) an effect?
els make different assumptions about the integra- In a causal graph, a strength estimate assesses the
tion rule used to combine causal influences. One weight associated with an arrow, whereas a struc-
class (including the classic delta-P model and the ture estimate assesses the existence of an arrow.
associative Rescorla-Wagner model) assumes a lin- Learning causal strength allows a system to antici-
ear integration rule: Each candidate cause changes pate the occurrence of an effect in a new context and
the probability of the effect by a constant amount respond adaptively. Learning causal structure allows
regardless of the presence or absence of other causes. a system to explain events and to choose appropri-
A second class is represented by the power PC the- ate actions.
ory, a theory of causal judgments postulating that A general model of causal learning needs to
learners assume that unobservable causal influences achieve both of these computational goals. Although
operate independently to produce the effect. Guided many heuristic models of strength estimation have
by this assumption, causal integration is based on been proposed, most do not generalize to structure
probabilistic versions of various logical operators, judgments. Within a Bayesian framework, a strength-
such as OR and AND-NOT, chosen to reflect the learning model assumes the learner has some prior
polarity of causal influence (i.e., whether a cause guesses about possible values of causal strength and
produces or prevents the occurrence of an effect). updates beliefs given observed data. A structure-
When the causal graph includes multiple effects learning model assumes the learner has prior guesses
of a single cause (e.g., flu causes headache and chest about strength and structure, and computes a score
pain, as shown in Figure 1), the causal Markov to quantify the support that observed data provide
assumption states that the probability of one effect for beliefs about aspects of the structure. Bayess
occurring is independent of the probability of other rule provides the computational engine to update
effects occurring, given that its own direct causes beliefs. A different variant, constraint-based models
are present. Statistical models that examine causal of structure learning, operates in a more bottom-up
relationships adopt the Markov assumption, which fashion, computing statistical dependencies in the
guides exploration of conditional independencies data and selecting those structures consistent with
that hold in a body of data, thereby constraining the these dependencies.
search space by eliminating highly unlikely cause-
effect relations. The extent to which humans employ Alternative Learning Formats
the causal Markov assumption remains controversial.
Formal modeling of causal learning has empha-
When observations are limited, human causal
sized acquisition of causal relations from complete
learning relies heavily on some type of prior knowl-
statistical data (i.e., a 2 2 contingency table tally-
edge. Prior knowledge can be specific to a domain
ing frequencies of the four possible combinations of
(based on known categories), but it can also include
presence versus absence of cause and effect). Some
abstract assumptions about properties of a system
models restrict themselves to predictions based on
of cause-effect relations (e.g., preference for causal
such idealized data presentation, side-stepping issues
networks that exhibit various types of simplicity).
related to memory and presentation order.
Use of appropriate prior knowledge can explain the
In many realistic situations, however, such sum-
rapid acquisition of causal relations often exhibited
mary data are not available to the learner. Rather,
by humans.
data about cause-effect pairings arrive sequentially
with no external record of the events. For nonverbal
Alternative Types of Causal Judgments
animals, there is no obvious way to present sum-
Causal learning potentially enables two types of marized data; humans also must often learn from
judgments: causal strength and causal structure. sequential data. Because sequential models aim to
Moral Development 525
dynamically integrate prior beliefs with new obser- say that humans are reasoning beings doesnt, by
vations in a trial-by-trial manner, such models are any means, exclude emotions. Indeed, Nussbaum
sensitive to order of data presentation. The devel- sees close links in that emotions do not stand alone
opment of sequential models of causal learning is or overwhelm thought, but are guided by ways of
currently an active research area. judging social relationships, are part of peoples
goals in life, and inform their understandings of
Hongjing Lu
other people and events. In such a framework, moral
See also Concepts, Development of; Knowledge
judgments include an integration of reasoning and
Acquisition in Development; Reinforcement Learning, emotions such as sympathy, empathy, compassion,
Psychological Perspectives and respect.
This entry focuses on approaches that have
examined the development of moral reasoning, as
Further Readings integrated with emotions. First, the entry provides a
Chater, N., & Oaksford, M. (Eds.). (2008). The historical overview describing early and influential
probabilistic mind. Oxford, UK: Oxford University theory and research on the development of moral
Press. judgments. It then describes research that modified
Gopnik, A., & Schulz, L. (Eds.). (2007). Causal learning: those early theories through findings that young
Psychology, philosophy, and computation. Oxford, UK: children construct moral judgments about welfare,
Oxford University Press. justice, and rights, which they distinguish from the
Shanks, D. R., Holyoak, K. J., & Medin, D. L. (Eds.). customs and conventions of society. Finally, the
(1996). Causal learning. San Diego, CA: Academic entry considers how moral and other types of social
Press. thought are involved in decision making.
heteronomous way of thinking. In particular, there is and agreement on procedures in application of laws
what Piaget referred to as unilateral respect for adult (stage 5) and on moral principles of welfare, justice,
authority. A central feature of heteronomous think- and rights separate from particular social systems
ing is that children do not distinguish or differenti- (stage 6).
ate moral ideas from adherence to existing rules and Piaget and Kohlberg made some lasting contri-
customs or from obedience to authority. butions to the study of moral development. They
According to Piaget, the shift to autonomous charted a view of the psychology of morality that
thinking involves differentiations of moral con- included substantive definitions of the moral
cepts pertaining to welfare and justice from exist- domain. Many philosophers, including Immanuel
ing customs, rules, and adherence to the commands Kant, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, Ronald
of authorities. For this shift to occur, it is necessary Dworkin, and Martha Nussbaum, have presented
for children to engage more in peer interactions analytic formulations of concepts of justice (see
and to focus less on adult-child interactions. Peer especially John Rawlss influential treatise, A Theory
relationships promote both a sense of equality and of Justice), welfare, and rights. Piaget and Kohlberg
abilities to understand the perspectives of others. At demonstrated that the study of the psychology of
the autonomous level, children develop their own morality could not be adequately conducted in
understandings of the purposes of rules and the the absence of sound definitions of this domain.
roles of authority in social relationships entailing They were, therefore, guided in their psychological
fairness, rights, and cooperation. Children are then research by philosophical conceptions as possibly
better able to take the perspectives of others and involving the formation of substantive moral con-
distinguish moral aims based on welfare and justice cepts (as opposed to research that only looked at
from existing rules and customs. Unilateral respect psychological variables like learning, internalization
is replaced by mutual respect by which there is con- of values, and personality traits).
cern with reciprocity in social relationships.
Autonomy does not mean that people are indi-
Morality as Distinct From Other Domains
vidualistic or concerned with the self or indepen-
dence. Rather, it refers to participation in generating The work of Piaget and Kohlberg also demonstrated
understandings of moral concepts that are applied to that children could be productively posed with prob-
decisions as to how people should treat one another. lems regarding how people should relate to each
One of the major subsequent contributions to this other. However, subsequent research shows that the
type of perspective came from Lawrence Kohlberg, levels they proposed do not accurately capture chil-
who included children, adolescents, and young drens moral judgments because the research tasks
adults in his research. He proposed modifications used were overly complex. Kohlberg, for instance,
in Piagets propositions through formulations of the presented children with situations entailing conflicts
development of moral judgments that included six with a number of features to consider. A well-known
stages grouped into three levels. At the first level situation is the story of man who must decide
(labeled premoral), children are described as making whether to steal a drug he cannot afford to save the
moral judgments first on the basis of punishment life of his wife who has cancer. The situation includes
(stage 1) and then on the basis of self-interest and several components in conflict, including the value
prudence (stage 2). At the next level (conventional of life, property rights, law, and obligations in per-
morality), moral concepts are not differentiated, sonal relationships. Other research has examined the
first, from maintaining good relations and approval judgments of children, adolescents, and adults about
of others (stage 3) and then from the rules, conven- straightforward issues bearing on physical harm,
tions, and authority of social systems (stage 4). It psychological harm, theft, and fairness. This body
is at the third level of postconventional morality, of research, conducted by Elliot Turiel, Larry Nucci,
which presumably does not emerge until late ado- Judith Smetana, Melanie Killen, Cecilia Wainryb,
lescence or adulthood, that moral understandings and Charles Helwig, first involved studies aimed at
of justice and rights are clearly differentiated from determining the criteria that children apply to moral
premoral and conventional understandings; moral and non-moral issues. In a large number of studies,
judgments are based on concepts of social contract children were presented with situations describing a
Moral Development 527
transgression identified as part of the moral domain, about harm and fairness. The development of moral
such as one child physically assaulting another. They judgments is associated with the early emergence of
evaluated the acts and answered questions ascertain- emotions like sympathy, empathy, and respect.
ing if they considered the evaluation of the acts to
be based on rules (e.g., what if there were no rule Moral and Social Decision Making
about it?), authority (e.g., what if the teacher said
it was all right?), and common practice (e.g., what The existence of different domains of social reason-
if it was generally accepted in a group or culture?). ing has implications for explanations of how people
By 3 or 4 years of age, childrens judgments about make decisions in social situations. In coming to deci-
moral issues are not contingent on rules, authority sions, people take into account different domains,
dictates, or accepted practices. Acts that harm others different considerations within the moral domain,
or involve unequal treatment are evaluated as wrong and different priorities. Two exampleshonesty
even if there are no rules or an authority deems them and rightsillustrate the process of coordinat-
acceptable. In addition, moral prescriptions are ing different considerations in coming to decisions.
judged to generalize across social contexts. These Honesty is generally considered morally right and
judgments are based on understandings of welfare, necessary to maintain trust. However, in some cir-
justice, and rights. The research shows, however, cumstances, honesty is not necessarily the morally
that young childrens concepts are primarily about correct course of action. An example discussed in
harm or welfare, whereas older children develop philosophical discourse is a situation in which lying
concepts of justice and rights along with concerns might be necessary to save a life. In this regard, it has
with welfare. The development of moral judgments been found that physicians judge deception of medi-
also involves increased capacities to relate concepts cal insurance companies acceptable when it is the
of welfare, justice, and rights to other considerations only means to obtain treatment for a patient with
in complex situations. a serious condition. They give priority to prevent-
It is well established that young children differen- ing harm over honesty. Other studies have shown
tiate morality from punishment, obedience, author- that adolescents consider it acceptable to defy and
ity, and interests of the self. Children distinguish deceive parents who direct their offspring to engage
the domain of morality from the domain of social in acts considered morally wrong. Deception of par-
conventions. Social conventions refer to existing ents is also judged acceptable when they direct activ-
regularities in social systems that coordinate social ities seen as part of adolescents legitimate personal
interactions (examples are customary practices choices. Similar results of the coordination of hon-
about matters like forms of address, modes of dress, esty and moral or personal considerations have been
eating habits). At all ages, conventions are judged obtained in research on adults judgments regarding
to be contingent on rules, authority, and common marital relationships. Similarly, coordination of dif-
practices. Moreover, children form ways of thinking ferent considerations is seen in decisions about rights
about the personal domain, which pertains to arenas like freedom of speech and religion. Although chil-
of personal jurisdiction that do not involve imping- dren and adults endorse rights, in many situations
ing on the welfare or rights of others. they subordinate rights to matters like preventing
Children develop distinct ways of thinking in the harm or promoting community interests.
moral, conventional, and personal domains. The To understand moral and social decision mak-
domains constitute different developmental path- ing, it is necessary to examine the different domains
ways, with age-related changes within each domain. of thought that people apply to social situations.
Observational studies in homes and schools also Therefore, the study of moral development requires
show that social interactions around moral events examination of social and personal domains, as well
differ from interactions around conventional events. as the moral domain.
Interactions associated with moral events typically Elliot Turiel
do not involve communications about rules or
expectations of adults (which do occur for conven- See also Concepts, Development of; Emotion and Moral
tional events), but are about feelings and the perspec- Judgment; Folk Psychology; Knowledge Acquisition in
tives of those involved, as well as communications Development; Social Cognition
528 Motivated Thinking
(associative stage) is characterized by subtle move- Studies have shown that learning through obser-
ment adjustments. The movement outcome is more vation is effective, especially if it is combined with
reliable, and the performance is more consistent from physical practice. Observational practice appears to
trial to trial. Inefficient muscular co-contractions are be particularly beneficial for the learning of complex
gradually reduced, and the movement becomes more motor skills, and combined observational and physi-
economical. In addition, at least parts of the move- cal practice can be more effective than physical prac-
ment are controlled more automatically. After exten- tice alone. It has been argued that observation gives
sive practice, the performer reaches the autonomous learners the unique opportunity to extract important
stage, which is characterized by fluent and seemingly information concerning appropriate coordination
effortless motions. Movements are accurate, with few patterns or subtle task requirements, or to evaluate
or no errors, consistent, and efficient. The skill is per- the effectiveness of strategieswhich would be dif-
formed largely automatically at this stage, and move- ficult or impossible to do while executing the move-
ment execution requires little or no attention. ment. From that perspective, observational practice
How can the learning process be facilitated and offers the learner a chance to conduct information
individuals ability to perform or maintain those skills processing that could not occur while physically
be enhanced? This is a question that interests prac- practicing.
titioners (e.g., coaches, physical therapists, athletes, Demonstrations can involve expert models or
musicians) and theorists alike. Studies have identified another learner (learning model). Observing a learn-
a number of factors that influence learning. Yet, the ing model can be as effective as observing an expert,
functioning of those factors has been viewed mainly particularly when two learners practice in a dyad
from an information processing perspective. Only (pair) and alternate between physical and obser-
recently has it become clear that the learning process vational practice. In some studies, dyad practice
is not merely the acquisition of a specific movement resulted in more effective learning than individual
pattern that is facilitated by providing learners with (physical) practiceeven though dyad participants
the right information at the right time. Learning also had only half the number of physical practice trials
encompasses affective reactions, the self-regulation of that participants in the individual, physical practice
cognitive processes, and attentional focus to meet task group received. Aside from the information gained
demands. This is particularly relevant in the natural by observing another learner, learning benefits
and almost inevitably social context of movement. of dyad practice are presumably also a result of
Thus, both the learners informational and motiva- enhanced motivation, resulting perhaps from com-
tional needs have to be optimized to enhance learning. petition with the partner, the setting of higher goals,
To help learners acquire the goal movement pattern or the loss of self-consciousness as people fulfill inter-
and reach a state of automaticity, they are typically dependent dyadic roles and find another in the same
provided with demonstrations, instructions, and feed- learning boat. It is perhaps not coincidental that
back. The following sections discuss how the effec- participants in collaborative or cooperative learning
tiveness of these learning variables can be enhanced situations often anecdotally report more enjoyment
by taking into account both their informational and than they have experienced learning alone.
motivational roles. When considering learning, it is Thus, interspersing physical practice with dem-
important to keep in mind that learning is assumed onstrations can make an important contribution to
to reflect a relatively permanent change in a persons skill learning. Considering the high costs of certain
capability to perform motor skills. Therefore, in types of training (e.g., pilot training, medical educa-
experimental studies, learning is typically assessed in tion, physical therapy), the incorporation of dem-
retention or transfer tests (the latter involve a variation onstrations, dyadic, or collaborative practice, may
of the task), performed under the same conditions for not only be cost-efficient but can also enhance the
all groups and at a given time interval following prac- effectiveness of training.
tice under different conditions of interest.
Instructions
Demonstrations
Focus of Attention
Demonstrations (e.g., live or video presentations of a
model) are often used in practical settings to provide Studies have shown that the wording of instruc-
the learner with an idea of the goal movement. tions has an important impact on performance and
Motor Learning, Practical Aspects 531
learning. Specifically, instructions directing attention more positive affective self-reactions, greater interest
to performers movements (inducing a so-called in the task, as well as more effective learning and
internal focus) are relatively ineffective. In contrast, greater automaticity in movement control.
directing attention to the effect of their move- The construction of a task as something that
ments on the environment, such as on an imple- reveals ones inherent capacity may act as a threat
ment (inducing an external focus), generally results to ones ego. Learners who view a task as a reflec-
in more effective performance and learning. For tion of an inherent ability presumably approach
instance, focusing on the swing of a golf club has the learning situation with more apprehension than
been demonstrated to lead to greater shot accuracy those who see task performance as an acquirable
than focusing on the swing of ones arms. On tasks skill. This, in turn, may hinder the learning process
involving balance, focusing on the movements of compared with a situation that is regarded by the
the support surface results in greater stability than performer simply as a learning opportunity. Similar
focusing on the movement of ones feet. The learn- to other variables (e.g., attentional focus and norma-
ing advantages of instructions promoting an exter- tive feedback), a persons ability conception appears
nal focus have been shown for a variety of motor to affect the extent to which he or she becomes
skills, levels of expertise, and populations (including self-consciouswith concomitant effects on motor
children and persons with motor impairments). performance and learning.
An external focus of attention appears to speed
up the learning process, or shorten the first stages
Feedback
of learning, facilitating movement automaticity. In
contrast, a focus on ones own movements results in Frequency of Feedback
a more conscious type of control that constrains the Views regarding the role of feedback (knowledge
motor system and disrupts automatic control pro- of results, knowledge of performance) in motor
cesses (constrained action hypothesis). Movement learning have changed considerably over the past
efficiency has also been shown to be enhanced by an century. Whereas early researchers believed that
external focus. The mere mention within the internal feedback should be given frequently and immedi-
focus instructions of the performers body may act to ately after the movement, this notion changed in
increase self-consciousness, or self-focus, which, in 1984 when Alan Salmoni, Richard Schmidt, and
turn, may lead to self-evaluation and activate implicit Charles Walter proposed the guidance hypothesis.
or explicit self-regulatory processes in attempts to According to this hypothesis, feedback guides the
manage thoughts and affective responses. learner to the correct movement pattern, while at
the same time carrying the risk thatif provided
Conceptions of Ability
frequently, immediately after, or even concurrently
Individuals beliefs about, or conceptions of, key with, the movementlearners might become depen-
abilities have been shown to affect the learning of dent on it, thereby failing to develop the capability of
motor skills. Specifically, whether people view their detecting and correcting errors themselves. In addi-
ability as something that is genetically determined tion, the learning of a stable movement representa-
(i.e., reflecting a fixed capacity or talent) versus tion has been assumed to be made more difficult
something that is amenable to change with prac- by frequent feedback, due to increased variability
tice influences their motivation and learning. Even in performance in the learners attempts to correct
though most adults have certain ability conceptions, errors. Numerous subsequent studies have provided
these can also be influenced by instructions given in support for those assumptions, for example, by
a learning situation. Some researchers have manipu- showing that reducing the feedback frequency or
lated those conceptions to assess their influence on delaying feedback can be beneficial for learning.
individuals motivation and performance of motor However, recent findings suggest that detrimental
skills. In these studies, ability concepts were induced effects of frequent or immediate feedback may occur
through instructions depicting performance on the primarily when the feedback induces an internal
task as something that reflected either an inherent focus (i.e., directs attention to the body movements).
ability or an acquirable skill. Learners who viewed If the feedback promotes an external focus (i.e.,
the task as an acquirable skill, as opposed to reflect- directs attention to the desired movement effect), a
ing an inherent capacity, showed greater self-efficacy, high frequency has been shown to be more effective
532 Motor System, Development of
than a reduced feedback frequencypresumably was found that learning was positively or negatively
because it helps learners maintain an external focus. affected depending on whether learners were led to
Even concurrent feedback can be beneficial for believe that their performance was above or below
learning if it induces an external focus. average. Specifically, the conviction that ones per-
formance was better than average was associated
Self-Controlled Feedback with more effective skill learning than the belief that
ones performance was below averageessentially
Having learners decide after which trials they
resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
want, or do not want, to receive feedback has been
Positive or negative performance feedback pre-
demonstrated to lead to more effective learning than
sumably influences the cognitive perception of
predetermined feedback schedules. The percent-
personal capability (e.g., self-efficacy expectations,
age of practice trials on which self-control learners
perceived competence) and creates positive or
requested feedback varied widely between studies.
negative affect experienced for the self. Self-efficacy
Yet, the actual feedback frequency appears less
expectations, in turn, may influence individuals goal
important than the learners ability to choose, or not
setting, effort, and attention to task performance.
to choose, feedback. Self-controlled practice condi-
Recent neuroscientific evidence links positive affect
tions have generally been assumed to lead to a more
to the dopamine processing that supports sequence
active involvement of the learner, enhancing motiva-
learning. Negative affect may also dampen, or inter-
tion and increasing the effort invested in practice.
fere with, memory processing.
Self-controlled feedback might also produce better
correspondence to learners needs for information Gabriele Wulf and Rebecca Lewthwaite
about their performance, such as after a strategy
change, or allow them to ask for feedback after pre- See also Automaticity; Skill Learning, Enhancement of
sumably successful (more motivating) trials.
Further Readings
Positive Feedback
Salmoni, A. W., Schmidt, R. A., & Walter, C. B. (1984).
Feedback after good trials has been demon- Knowledge of results and motor learning: A review and
strated to enhance learning compared to feedback critical reappraisal. Psychological Bulletin, 95,
after poor trials. In studies in which learners 355386.
were provided with feedback after blocks of trials, Schmidt, R. A., & Lee, T. D. (2005). Motor control and
groups who received feedback about their best tri- learning (4th ed.). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
als in that block (and not about the worst trials) Wulf, G. (2007). Attention and motor skill learning.
showed superior learning compared to those who Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
received feedback about their worst trials (and not
about their best trials). It is interesting that, in stud-
ies on self-controlled feedback, learners indicated
that they preferred to receive feedbackand chose MOTOR SYSTEM, DEVELOPMENT OF
feedbackmore frequently after relatively success-
ful trials. This may be another reason for the learn- Motor development involves advances in behavior
ing benefits of self-controlled feedback. across the entire bodythe eyes and head for look-
Similarly, positive or negative normative feedback ing, the trunk for maintaining a stable postural base,
can affect learning. Normative feedback involves the arms and hands for manual actions, and the
norms such as a peer groups actual or bogus aver- limbs for locomotion. Development entails increas-
age performance scores. Thus, normative feedback, ing coordination between active muscle forces and
by definition, involves social comparisona ubiq- passive gravitational and inertial forces. However,
uitous phenomenon in settings that involve the per- there is more to the study of motor development
formance and learning of readily observable motor than muscles and biomechanics. Goal-directed
skill or lack thereof. In studies in which learners movement is inextricably linked with perception,
were provided with a (fabricated) average score of cognition, and social interaction, and motor skill
other performers, in addition to their own score, it acquisition includes developmental changes in all of
Motor System, Development of 533
these domains. This entry summarizes four critical on perceptual information about the body and envi-
aspects of motor development: Movement is ubiqui- ronment. Even the simplest movements of the head
tous, prospective, creative, and malleable. and limbs require anticipation of disruptions to a
stable postural base. Perceptual feedback from just
Movement Is Ubiquitous prior movements informs the consequences of future
actions.
Movement is the most pervasive and fundamental of
Infants earliest actions show inklings of prospec-
all psychological activity. The body is constantly in
tivity. At 1 month of age, infants predict the trajec-
motion. Some movements occur in the background
tory of a moving target and smoothly follow it with
(breathing, swallowing, postural compensations),
their eyes, but prospective control is fragile and easily
some are spontaneous by-products of arousal and
disrupted. The target must be large and slow moving
brain activity (twitches, shakes, flails), and some
or eye movements will lag behind. The development
are goal-directed (looking, talking, reaching, walk-
of prospective looking is protracted over several
ing). The massive amounts and variety of childrens
months. By 4 to 5 months of age, predictive looking
motor experiences facilitate discovery of new skills
is sufficiently stable for infants to track targets mov-
and their improvement. New forms of movement
ing behind an occluder, so that their eyes wait on the
also set the stage for changes in other psychological
far side to spot the target when it reappears.
domains by creating new opportunities to explore
As with looking, the development of prehension
the environment and engage in social interactions.
involves increasing prospectivity. In general, infants
Movements in the face and throat make possible
demonstrate prospective control of looking before
behaviors that are fundamental for life, such as
reaching, and once they can reach, they frequently
sucking, chewing, and swallowing; those required
bring objects to their eyes for visual inspection.
to produce speech are among the most sophisticated
Newborns are highly motivated to keep their hands
movements learned by humans.
in view. In a dim room illuminated with only a nar-
The first self-produced movements occur prena-
row shaft of light, newborns move their hand when
tally. Fetuses nod and turn their heads, open and close
the light beam moves and slow their arm movements
their jaws, yawn, suck, and swallow amniotic fluid.
before the hand arrives in the light, rather than after
They wrinkle their foreheads, move their lips and
their hand appears. Reaching for stationary objects
tongue, and, after 25 weeks, open and close their eyes.
appears at 12 weeks and intercepting moving objects
Whole body movements and large movements of the
appears at 18 weeks, but infants first reaches and
arms and legs peak at 14 to 16 weeks postconception,
catches are jerky and crooked. Infants arms speed
then decrease as the growing body fills the uterine
up, slow down, and change directions several times
space. Some fetal movements are not random: Fetuses
before the hand finally contacts the toy. After a few
direct hand movements toward their own faces and
months, reaches and catches become more adult-
bodies, the wall of the uterus, and the umbilical cord.
like, with one large movement to bring the hand
The sheer amount of movement is staggering. By
near the target and a subsequent smaller movement
3.5 months of age, infants have performed 3 to 6
to grasp it. Infants reach for glowing objects in the
million eye movements. By 10 months, infants have
dark at the same age that they reach in the light,
accumulated enough crawling steps to travel more
suggesting that they can gauge the location and
than half the length of Manhattan. By 12 months,
size of the object and use muscle-joint information
infants have experienced over 110,000 bouts of
about arm position to guide the reach. By 9 months,
wiggles, waves, kicks, and flaps of 47 different types
infants pre-orient their hands to grasp in the dark.
of spontaneous stereotypies. At 14 months of age,
By 11 months, infants catch moving objects as they
infants take about 15,000 walking steps per day.
appear from behind an occluder.
Sleep does not quiet newborns active bodies. While
Prospective control of locomotion also takes
sleeping, they stretch, roll, wave, and twitch.
months to develop. When approaching a sheer
drop-off or steep slope, novice crawlers and walkers
Actions Are Prospective
plunge right over the edge. After several weeks of
For motor actions to be adaptive, they must be con- locomotor experience, they guide locomotion pro-
trolled prospectivelyguided into the future based spectively by using perceptual information gathered
534 Motor System, Development of
from exploratory looking and touching to decide two-legged kicks as infants explore the contingencies
when cliffs and slopes are safe or risky. With suf- between their movements and the jiggling of an over-
ficient experience, infantslike adultscan adapt head mobile yoked to their legs. By the second half
locomotor actions to changes in the environment of the first year, infants explore the sound-making
and in their own bodies and skills. For example, properties of objects and surfaces and eventually
when experimenters load experienced toddlers with bang the hard side of objects against the hard side of
lead-weighted shoulder-packs to make their bodies a tabletop. Visual, manual, and oral exploration are
more top-heavy, infants instantly recalibrate their coordinated into bouts of rotating, fingering, and
judgments of risky slopes to their new, restricted mouthing objects.
abilities. They correctly treat the same slopes as risky Variable routes to development suggest that
while wearing lead-filled shoulder-packs and safe individual infants explore multiple solutions before
while wearing feather-filled shoulder-packs. settling on the most efficient solution. For example,
The ability to create new possibilities for action prior to crawling on hands and knees, infants dis-
with tools also requires prospective control, but play a variety of locomotor strategies. They hitch
before 1 year of age, infants have difficulty plan- in a sitting position, crab on their backs, and log
ning tool use strategies. For example, 9-month-olds roll. Belly crawling is so variable that infants change
grab a spoon by the bowl-end instead of the handle the configuration of limbs used for support and pro-
or hold it with the bowl pointing away from their pulsion and the timing between limbs from cycle to
mouths. They correct grasp errors reactively by cycle. Infants move ipsilateral limbs together like a
switching hands or awkwardly rotating their hand camel, move contralateral arms and legs together in
to bring the bowl to their mouth. By 18 months of a near-trot, lift front then back limbs like a bunny
age, infants know which end of a tool to grasp, how hop, and swim with all four limbs lifted into the
to grasp it, and how to plan their motor actions in air at once.
advance, but they are still inefficient when using a When the constraints of infants growing bod-
tool to act on another object (hairbrush on doll) ies and nascent skills preclude adultlike solutions,
rather than performing an action centered on their infants find temporary placeholder actions that
own body (hairbrush on self). By 24 months of age, get the job done. Although 12-month-olds chew
infants prospectively adjust their typical strategies to well enough to break down food and swallow it,
use tools in a novel way, such as gripping a spoon they chew with lateral rather than rotary jaw move-
with a bent handle to scoop food from a bowl. ments. It takes years before the lips and tongue are
involved and cooperating in a planful and deliberate
way and before rotary movements are incorporated
Solutions Are Creative and
into the chewing action. Moreover, infants chew the
Enlist a Variety of Means
same way for every kind of food, whereas older chil-
The movements of infants (and novices of any age) dren flexibly adapt their jaw movements to the food
are notoriously variable and unreliable, whereas consistency and to the emergence of new teeth and
movements of adults and experts are smooth and molars. Even habitual actions such as moving the
consistent. Over weeks of practice, infants visual bolus to a consistent working side of the mouth
scanning patterns, reaches, and steps become increas- take years to develop.
ingly efficient, reliable, and predictable. However, Sometimes infants ignorance about conventional
all infants do not solve the problem of moving their motor solutions opens up new means for solving
bodies in the same way. More lethargic infants learn motor dilemmas. When challenged to cross nar-
to reach by powering up the muscle forces; more row bridges with only a wobbly rubber handrail for
lively infants hone reaching skills by dampening support, 16-month-olds use a light touch strat-
down inertial forces from ongoing arm flaps. egy, grazing their hands along the rail to generate
Variety in infants spontaneous exploration pro- somatosensory information for controlling posture,
vides information about objects and surfaces and and a heavy touch strategy, where they exploit the
about the efficacy of the self in control. Spontaneous deformability of the handrail to rappel as if moun-
leg kicks in 2- to 4-month-olds transform into tain climbing or lean back as if wind surfing. When
deliberate one-legged, alternating, or simultaneous faced with impossibly steep slopes, infants descend
Multimodal Conversational Systems 535
in a conventional sitting position but also slide In the United States, the recent practice of putting
down backward feet first or head first with arms infants to sleep on their backs rather than their
outstretched like Superman. stomachs has resulted in delayed onset of crawl-
ing and other prone skills. In cultures that do not
encourage crawling (including American infants
Development Is Malleable
circa 1900), large proportions of infants skip crawl-
Traditionally, motor development was described as ing altogether, either bum-shuffling or proceeding
a universal series of stages with little deviation in straight to walking.
order and timing. However, the apparently invariant
Karen E. Adolph and Sarah E. Berger
sequence resulted from ordering normative data by
average onset ages. In actuality, infants acquire skills See also Motor Learning, Practical Aspects
such as rolling, sitting, crawling, cruising, walking,
and stair ascent and descent in a large variety of
orders, and infants can skip optional skills such as Further Readings
crawling and cruising. Adolph, K. E., & Berger, S. E. (2005). Physical and motor
Moreover, onset ages are extremely malleable. development. In M. H. Bornstein & M. E. Lamb (Eds.),
True experiments with random assignment to treat- Developmental science: An advanced textbook
ment and control groups and historical/cultural dif- (5th ed., pp. 223281). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
ferences in child-rearing practices show that the age Adolph, K. E., & Berger, S. E. (2006). Motor development.
at acquisition of motor skills can be hugely acceler- In W. Damon & R. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of
ated with practice and delayed with lack of oppor- child psychology: Vol. 2. Cognition, perception, and
tunity. For example, 3-month-olds normally lack language (D. Kuhn & R. S. Siegler [Vol. Eds.]) (6th ed.,
the motor skill to grasp and manipulate objects. But pp. 161213). New York, NY: Wiley.
after practice wearing sticky mittens with Velcro- Bertenthal, B. I., & Clifton, R. K. (1998). Perception and
covered palms as they play with Velcro-edged toys, action. In W. Damon & R. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of
3-month-olds pick up toys and explore them as well child psychology: Vol. 2. Cognition, perception, and
as 5-month-olds who have acquired their manual language (D. Kuhn & R. S. Siegler [Vol. Eds.]) (5th ed.,
pp. 51102). New York, NY: Wiley.
skills naturally. With a few minutes of daily prac-
Campos, J. J., Anderson, D. I., Barbu-Roth, M. A.,
tice moving their legs in an upright position, infants
Hubbard, E. M., Hertenstein, M. J., & Witherington,
begin walking at younger ages than infants in a
D. C. (2000). Travel broadens the mind. Infancy, 1,
control group who received only passive experiences
149219.
moving their legs. Gibson, E. J. (1988). Exploratory behavior in the
Natural experiments resulting from differ- development of perceiving, acting and the acquiring of
ences in how caregivers hold, carry, bathe, dress, knowledge. Annual Review of Psychology, 39, 141.
exercise, and toilet their infants provide additional Gibson, E. J., & Pick, A. D. (2000). An ecological
evidence for malleability. In some regions of Africa, approach to perceptual learning and development. New
the Caribbean, and India, caregivers vigorously mas- York, NY: Oxford University Press.
sage and exercise infants as part of daily bathing Thelen, E., & Smith, L. B. (1994). A dynamic systems
routines, stretching infants limbs, tossing them into approach to the development of cognition and action.
the air, and propping them into sitting and walking Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
positions. Infants who receive massage and exercise von Hofsten, C. (2004). An action perspective on motor
begin sitting and walking at earlier ages than infants development. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 266272.
who do not. Infants with stairs in their home learn
to ascend stairs at a younger age than children with-
out stairs in their home. MULTIMODAL CONVERSATIONAL
Lack of opportunity to practice movements has
the opposite effect. In northern China, the practice SYSTEMS
of toileting infants by laying them on their backs
in sandbags for most of the day delays the onset of Multimodal conversational systems are computer
sitting, crawling, and walking by several months. systems that engage human users in intelligent
536 Multimodal Conversational Systems
speech
gesture
Multimodal
Interpreter
gaze
..
graphics
speech
Multimodal
embodied
Generator
behavior
System
multimodal grammar (e.g., grammar that encodes coordinate, and present multimedia information,
temporal relationships between pen-based gestures for example, with synchronized graphical and
and linguistic units). Probabilistic approaches have speech output. In systems with embodied conversa-
been used to merge semantic representations from tional agents, automated generation of multimodal
individual modalities based on constrained optimi- behaviors is a major research focus. In addition to
zation (e.g., minimizing or maximizing an objective natural language generation and speech synthe-
function based on a set of constraints). sis, recent work also generates synchronized facial
Psycholinguistic studies have shown that human expressions to reflect the different emotional states
eye gaze reflects attention and engagement. Eye of an agent, models eye gaze and head nodding to
gaze is tightly linked with human language process- indicate grounding, enables hand gestures to indicate
ing. Recent advances in eye tracking technology emphasis, and produces shifts in posture to signal
have made it possible to incorporate human eye the beginning or ending of a conversational turn or
gaze during human-computer interaction. Studies segment. The same issues concerning behavior gen-
have shown that incorporating eye gaze in a con- eration are also applied to situated dialogue agents
versational interface improves automated language where agents/robots often have physical bodies (e.g.,
understanding at multiple levels, from speech rec- head, face, arms, etc.) which require hardware con-
ognition and reference resolution to automated lan- figurations. To address the challenges of integrating
guage acquisition. multiple modalities and generating natural interactive
behaviors for embodied agents, representation lan-
guages (e.g., behavior markup language) are devel-
Multimodal Generation
oped to describe behavior elements (e.g., individual
Different types of multimodal conversational sys- modalities such as head, gesture, gaze, speech, etc.)
tems require different capabilities for multimodal and synchronization of behaviors to control an agent.
generation. In conversational interfaces, graphical In summary, computational models and
visualization is important to provide better access approaches in multimodal conversational systems
to, and allow better understanding of, the requested are developed based on empirical observations
information. Thus, multimodal generation is mostly of human-machine interaction and are guided by
concerned with how to automatically plan, allocate, the cognitive and communicative principles in
538 Multinomial Modeling
human-human conversation. Research advances modeling is to identify which underlying factors are
are made possible by contributions from multiple important in a cognitive task, explain how those
disciplines, including psychology, cognitive science, processes combine to create observable behavior,
linguistics, and computer science and engineering. and then use experimental data to estimate the rela-
With synergistic collaboration among these disci- tive contributions of the different cognitive factors.
plines, further technological advancement is antici- In this way, multinomial models can be used as tools
pated. This will benefit a wide range of applications to measure unobservable cognitive processes.
from information search and task assistance, to This entry is organized as follows. First, the type
training, education, and entertainment. of data used in multinomial modeling is described,
and how these data can be used to develop mod-
Joyce Chai
els of this type is explained. A detailed example of
multinomial modeling is provided as an illustration.
See also Conversation and Dialogue; Gesture and
Next, a number of common aspects of multino-
Language Processing; Machine Speech Recognition;
Natural Language Generation; Speech Perception
mial modeling are discussed, including validation
testing, models for complex data structures, and
the use of multinomial models to test hypotheses
Further Readings about cognitive processing. Finally, current work
Cassell, J. (2001). Embodied conversational agents: and future directions for multinomial modeling are
Representation and intelligence in user interface. outlined.
AI Magazine, 22(3), 6783.
Chai, J., Prasov, Z., & Qu, S. (2006). Cognitive principles Data Structure and Model Development
in robust multimodal interpretation. Journal of Artificial
Intelligence Research, 27, 5583. Multinomial models are developed for categori-
Kuppevelt, J., Dybkjaer, L., & Bernsen N. O. (Eds.). cal data, where each participants response falls
(2005). Advances in natural multimodal dialogue into one and only one of a finite set of observable
systems. New York, NY: Springer. data categories. These data usually come from a
Oviatt, S. L. (2002). Breaking the robustness barrier: cognitive experiment, where each participant in an
Recent progress on the design of robust multimodal experimental group produces a categorical response
systems. Advances in Computers, 56, 305341. to each of a series of items; for example, pictures are
Qu, S., & Chai, J. Y. (2010). Context-based word recognized or not recognized or letter strings
acquisition for situated dialogue in a virtual world. are judged to be words or nonwords. Most
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 37, 347377. data sets for multinomial modeling involve more
Traum, D., & Rickel, J. (2002). Embodied agents for than two response categories, and in addition there
multi-party dialogue in immersive virtual world. may be more than one type of item, each with its
Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference own system of response categories. For example, in
on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems a source-monitoring experiment, participants study
(pp. 766773). New York, NY: Association for
a list of items from two sources, Source A or Source
Computing Machinery.
B (e.g., presented in a male vs. female voice, or pre-
sented visually vs. auditorily). Later, participants are
given a recognition memory test consisting of three
MULTINOMIAL MODELING types of items, namely, the two types of old list items
and new distracter items, and they must classify
Multinomial modeling is a formal approach to each tested item as Source A, Source B, or New. The
measuring cognitive processes, such as the capacity resulting multinomial data structure consists of three
to store and retrieve items in memory, or to make category systems (A, B, or New), each with three
inferences and logical deductions, or to discriminate response categories (i.e., participants indicate if each
and categorize similar stimuli. Although such pro- item is from Source A, Source B, or is new). If the
cesses are not directly observable, theoretically they responses in different category systems are indepen-
can be assumed to interact in certain ways to deter- dent and category counts within a system follow a
mine observable behaviors. The goal of multinomial multinomial distribution, the probability of the data
Multinomial Modeling 539
structure is given by the product of three multino- governed by guessing biases corresponding to vari-
mial distributions, one for each category system. ous states of incomplete information. Each series of
To express this more formally, assume that the processing possibilities leads to different observable
data structure for an experimental task consists of responses, and there are usually many of these pro-
J categories and N experimental response observa- cessing patterns, each represented by the branches
tions, where nj observations fall into category Cj, of the tree architecture.
j = 1, 2, . . . J. Then if the observations are indepen-
dent and identically distributed with probability pj
An Example: Batchelder and Riefers
of falling into category Cj, the category count vector,
Pair-Clustering Model
D = (n1, n2, . . . nJ), follows the multinomial distribu-
tion given by One early example of an MPT model is the pair-
clustering model developed by Batchelder and Riefer.
J pj nj Their model was designed to separately measure
Pr[D|p = (p1, . . ., pJ)] = N! _ , storage capacity from retrieval capacity in human
j=1j=1 n !
j memory. The data for the model involve a specially
designed free-recall task where participants study a
where the category probabilities are nonnegative list of words one at a time, and then, at a later time,
and sum to one. memory is tested by having the participants recall as
The key to creating a multinomial model is to many of the studied words as they can in any order.
take a multinomial data structure such as the one The list consists of pairs of exemplars from several
above and express the category probabilities in terms categories such as vehicles (taxi, car) or flowers
of underlying, cognitively interpretable parameters. (rose, daisy). Recall of each category pair is scored
One needs to specify a cognitive processing architec- into one of four categories: (1) both words recalled
ture along with formal computational rules that can successively, C1; (2) both words recalled but not
generate the count data in terms of the parameters. successively, C2; (3) exactly one word recalled, C3;
Once the model is constructed and data are col- and (4) neither word recalled, C4. The model pos-
lected, standard tools in statistical inference can be tulates three parameters each designed to measure
used to analyze the data and evaluate the adequacy a different cognitive process: (i) a storage parameter
of the fit of the model to the data. In addition, one c representing the probability that a pair of words
can estimate the values of the cognitive parameters is clustered and stored in memory during study,
that are likely to have created the data. In this way, (ii) a retrieval parameter r representing the probabil-
unobservable cognitive processes can be measured ity that a word pair is recalled given that it is stored
indirectly with the use of the model. as a cluster, and (iii) a parameter u for the probabil-
Multinomial models of various types have been ity that a word in a pair that was not clustered is
used in cognitive psychology since the 1960s; how- recalled as a singleton. Because the parameters refer
ever, in the 1980s and 1990s, a particular approach to probabilities of successful cognitive processes,
called multinomial processing tree (MPT) mod- their values must be between zero and one.
eling was developed at a general level by William The connection of the parameters to the category
Batchelder, David Riefer, and Xiangen Hu. The cen- probabilities is based on a combination of psycho-
tral characteristic of MPT models is that they have a logical considerations and reasonable approxima-
particular type of cognitive architecture represented tions. In particular, it is assumed that both members
as a rooted tree structure. Such a structure assumes of a category pair are recalled successively if and
that cognitive processes follow one another, and only if the words in the pair are clustered and the
subsequent processes are conditionally dependent cluster is retrieved (joint probability cr). Also, if a
on the success or failure of earlier processes. For cluster was stored but not retrieved, then neither
example, if a model has parameters for item atten- word is recalled. In contrast, with probability (1 c),
tion, item storage, and item retrieval, then success- the words in a pair are not clustered, and in this case
ful storage depends on successful attention. In turn, each word in the pair is or is not recalled individu-
successful retrieval depends on successful storage. If ally with probability u, subject to the condition that
any of these processes fail, then responses may be if both non-clustered words are recalled, they are
540 Multinomial Modeling
not recalled successively. These assumptions can be are used to estimate the parameters. Second, the
displayed in the processing tree found in Figure 1. pair-clustering model involves just one system of cat-
To briefly turn to the mathematical details, it is egories, but many MPT models are developed for
easy to use this tree to express the category prob- several category systems, each of which is associated
abilities, pj = Pr(Cj) for j = 1, 2, 3, 4, in terms of the with its own processing tree. For example, MPT
parameters. The result expresses each category prob- models for the source monitoring experiment dis-
ability as a sum of the probabilities of the branches cussed earlier specify three processing trees, one for
that lead to that category as follows: p1 = cr, p2 = each item type (Source A, Source B, or New).
(1 c)u2, p3 = (1 c)u(1 u) + (1 c)(1 u)u, and Finally, unlike the example of the pair-clustering
p4 = c(1 r) + (1 c)(1 u)2. It is a matter of simple model, most applications of MPT models involve
algebra to show that if we collect data D = (n1, n2, n3, two or more experimental groups of participants,
n4) and estimate the category probabilities by rela- where the same model with possibly different param-
tive frequencies, Pj = nj /N, then we can solve the four eter values is assumed to govern each groups cat-
model equations for parameter estimates (denoted egory count data. In this case, MPT models are used
by *) yielding u* = 2P2 /(2P2 + P3), c* = 1 P2 /(u*)2, to conduct hypothesis tests in an effort to discover
and r* = P1 /c*. In order for these equations to yield which cognitive processes account for differences
estimates of the parameters in the interval (0,1), it is between the groups. This approach contrasts with
necessary that (P3)2 < 4P2(1 P2 P3). the usual approach in experimental psychology for
analyzing data from multiple experimental groups,
Common Aspects of Multinomial Modeling which is to apply standard statistical tools like anal-
The example of the pair-clustering model illustrates ysis of variance or linear regression. Although these
the basic properties of multinomial modeling, which tools are well developed to detect group differences
are the tree architecture and the computational rules and associate them with experimental manipula-
that tie the cognitive processing parameters to the tions, they do not allow one to pinpoint the cogni-
categorical data. However, the example does not tive bases for the differences.
illustrate three aspects typical of most applications As can be seen, MPT models are simple statis-
of MPT models. First, in the example, there were tical models that are easy to develop and analyze.
three parameters representing cognitive processes However, before an MPT model can be used as a
and only three degrees of freedom in the data struc- measurement tool, it must be validated. A validated
ture (as the four category probabilities are required model is one in which the parameters can be shown
to sum to one). In cases where there are more degrees to represent the cognitive processes they stand for.
of freedom in the categorical data than parameters, Establishing validation involves conducting simple
the system of equations expressing category prob- cognitive studies where experimental manipula-
abilities in terms of parameters is overdetermined, tions are designed to affect some parameters and
and standard techniques in mathematical statistics not others. These experiments attempt to dissociate
the parameters by showing that they can be inde-
pendently manipulated in ways that are consistent
with established psychological theory. For example,
r C1 for the pair-clustering model providing retrieval
c cues during recall should increase the value of the
1r C4 retrieval parameter r but not the value of the clus-
ter storage parameter c. Other manipulations, such
u C2
as increased study time, should affect the storage
u
1 u C3
parameter but probably not the retrieval parameter.
1c
u C3 Current and Future Directions
1u
1 u C4 Since the 1990s, MPT modeling has become
an increasingly popular approach to cognitive
Figure 1 The pair-clustering model modeling, and its use has been facilitated by several
Multiple Intelligences Theory 541
software packages that can perform parameter esti- Riefer, D. M., & Batchelder, W. H. (1988). Multinomial
mation and hypotheses testing. To date there have modeling and the measurement of cognitive processes.
been more than 100 examples of the application Psychological Review, 95, 318339.
of MPT modeling. Most of these applications have
been in the standard cognitive areas of memory, rea-
soning, and perception; however, clinical, social, and MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES THEORY
developmental psychology are also areas where MPT
modeling is active. There are also a number of ongo- Multiple intelligences theory was proposed by psy-
ing projects that explore the statistical properties of chologist Howard Gardner in 1983 to oppose the
these models. For example, there has been recent narrow meritocracy of g, or general intelligence,
work creating hierarchical MPT models to handle and to reflect evidence for the possible brain basis
variation in parameter values due to individual dif- of content-specific information processing. Gardner
ferences in the participants, as well as latent class argued that the general intelligence factor g should
MPT models that can be used to model subgroups of be replaced by seven intelligences: linguistic, musi-
participants with different cognitive abilities. cal, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic,
William H. Batchelder, Xiangen Hu, intrapersonal (sense of self), and interpersonal.
and David M. Riefer Gardner proposed that the intelligences were innate
and that each intelligence had its own unique brain
See also Memory Recall, Dynamics; Modeling Causal mechanism comprised of 50 to 100 micro modules.
Learning Gardners list and characterization of intelligences
changed somewhat over time. In 2000, Gardner
Further Readings proposed an eighth intelligence, naturalist, involving
the comprehension of natural things, and suggested
Batchelder, W. H., & Riefer, D. M. (1986). The statistical that there might be a ninth intelligence, existential-
analysis of a model for storage and retrieval processes in ist, involving ones sense of the relation of the self to
human memory. British Journal of Mathematical and the cosmos. In 2004, Gardner suggested two addi-
Statistical Psychology, 39, 129149. tional mental abilities, which he later characterized
Batchelder, W. H., & Riefer, D. M. (1990). Multinomial
as profiles. He suggested that creative specialists in
processing models of source monitoring. Psychological
the arts, sciences, and trades have more narrowly
Review, 97, 548564.
focused laser-like intelligence and that leaders with
Batchelder, W. H., & Riefer, D. M. (1999). Theoretical and
high scholastic IQ may have a more broadly scan-
empirical review of multinomial process tree modeling.
ning mental searchlight.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 6, 5786.
Batchelder, W. H., & Riefer, D. M. (2007). Using
multinomial processing tree models to measure cognitive Multiple Intelligences Theory Was
deficits in clinical populations. In R. Neufeld (Ed.), Applied Widely in Education
Advances in clinical cognitive science (pp. 1950).
Multiple intelligences theory was widely dissemi-
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
nated in the field of education, and many teachers
Erdfelder, E., Auer, T.-S., Hilbig, B. E., Afalg, A.,
and psychologists published articles that described
Moshagen, M., & Nadarevic, L. (2009). Multinomial
the application of the theory to classroom practice.
processing tree models: A review of the literature.
Journal of Psychology, 217, 108124.
Theory adherents claimed that successful classroom
Hu, X., & Batchelder, W. H. (1994). The statistical analysis application validated the existence of multiple intel-
of general processing tree models with the EM ligences. Educators and theory supporters argued
algorithm. Psychometrika, 59, 2147. the varied intelligences provided better cognitive
Hu, X., & Phillips, G. A. (1999). GPT.EXE: A powerful skill profiles of typical students, savants, prodigies,
tool for the visualization and analysis of general and individuals with brain injuries than did the ver-
processing tree models. Behavior Research Methods, bal and visual subskill tests of IQ measures.
Instruments, & Computers, 31, 220234. Moreover, many educators saw multiple intelli-
Klauer, K. C. (2006). Hierarchical multinomial processing tree gences theory as a means to assess children with-
models: A latent-class approach. Psychometrika, 71, 731. out using culturally biased standard IQ tests. In
542 Multiple Intelligences Theory
addition, educators valued Gardners view that mul- tions. Cultural Intelligence was claimed to include
tiple intelligences testing would allow students to be four dimensions: emotional resiliency, perceptual
enthusiastic about cognitive assessment. The ideal acuity, flexibility and openness, and personal auton-
of multiple intelligences testing was to allow chil- omy. Spatial Intelligence was identified as the basis
dren to solve problems in many different contexts. for skill in architecture, because this intelligence
Standard paper-and-pencil, single-answer tests were was proposed to reflect individual ability to move
thought inappropriate for determining the strengths through varied spaces and recall accurate images of
and weaknesses of the different intelligences, and those spaces.
educators promoted the assessment of multiple These six theorized intelligences and many addi-
intelligences through interesting materials. Teacher tional proposals for unique content intelligences
observations, student work portfolios, and learning invoked Gardners multiple intelligences theory
inventories were recommended as a means of assess- as valid supporting scientific evidence that the
ing the multiple intelligences of a student. brain was indeed partitioned into many possible
A key corollary of multiple intelligences theory intelligences.
was that assessing all of the intelligences would per-
mit teachers to find each students strongest intel- Neuroscience Research Has Not Validated
ligences, and students would have the opportunity Multiple Intelligences Theory
to find an intelligence in which they might feel a Gardner argued multiple intelligences theory was
greater competence. Teachers would then be able validated through its basis in cognitive neuroscience
to avoid the students weaker intelligences and use research, through its successful classroom applica-
the students stronger intelligences to create learning tion, and through its ability to successfully account
materials unique to each child. For example, mul- for cognitive skill patterns of individuals. Gardner
tiple intelligences testing of the naturalist intelligence also claimed that neuroscientists were conducting
asked students to play with different natural objects, research to explore the specific brain circuits govern-
such as a feather and a stone. Students would be ing each of the multiple intelligences. It is true that
asked to observe the differences and similarities neuroscience research has explored brain circuits
between these objects, describe them in detail, and and systems underpinning human skills. However,
address why some objects sink and some float. researchers such as Lynn Waterhouse have noted that
Similarly, musical intelligence was tested by asking no neuroscience research had tested the theory of
students to sing a range of songs from simple to multiple intelligences and that neuroscience research
more complex. The assessment recorded whether a had disconfirmed the existence of the putative sepa-
student was sensitive to pitch, rhythm, and melody. rate content processing modules in the brain.
Multiple intelligences theory was never a focus
Multiple Intelligences Theory Led to the
for cognitive neuroscience researchers, because
Meme of Many Types of Intelligence
even in 1983 when Gardner initially proposed his
The popularity of Gardners theory of multiple intel- model, there was evidence that content processing
ligences led others to theorize individual content- did not occur in separate brain circuits. For exam-
specific intelligences. Six intelligences had currency ple, in 1983, Robert Dykes outlined the division of
in different disciplines. Business Intelligence was pro- components of sensorimotor information and the
posed as skill with processes, trends, tools, and ideas melding of that information with spatial and visual
current in business practices. Social Intelligence was processing. Nearly 20 years later, Dana Strait, Jane
hypothesized as four skills: self-awareness, social Hornickel, and Nina Kraus confirmed that music,
awareness, positive social beliefs and attitudes, reading, and speech processing occurred in the same
and skill and interest in managing complex social shared brain circuits.
change. Musical Intelligence was characterized as Neuroscience evidence from the early 1980s to
notable sensitivity to pitch, melody, and rhythm. the present confirmed two major interacting brain
Emotional Intelligence was hypothesized to include pathways for information processing. The ventral
perceiving and understanding emotions, using ones path computes the nature of an object, while the
own emotions to facilitate problem solving, limiting dorsal path computes where an object is in space.
negative emotions and maintaining positive emo- The music we hear, our spatial analysis of an
Multitasking and Human Performance 543
performance on each task that is inferior to the per- suffers. In 1984, Christopher Wickens developed a
formance of the two tasks when they are performed multiple-resource model, suggesting that some dual-
separately. In fact, the literature is replete with stud- task combinations may draw on separate processing
ies that have examined multitasking performance resources. This multidimensional framework con-
and found patterns of interference indicating that ceptualizes modalities of input (auditory vs. visual),
people cannot perform two or more attention- codes of operation (verbal vs. spatial), and modali-
demanding tasks simultaneously without costs. Why ties of response (vocal vs. manual) as separable
are there limits on human ability to multitask? pools of attentional resources, with performance
in dual-task situations varying as a function of the
overlap in demand for processing resources; the less
Types of Processing
overlap there is, the more proficient the multitask
There are two general categories of multitasking performance will be. Other researchers have sug-
activity. On the one hand, a person may alternate gested that it may be better to consider multitask
performance between tasks, switching attention performance with regard to the degree of cross-talk
between them in discrete units of time. This creates between the cognitive operations and mental repre-
a form of serial processing in which the performance sentations of the separate tasks. Interestingly, the cell
of one task creates a bottleneck, briefly locking out phone/driving dual-task combination would seem
the processing of other tasks. There are obvious dec- to represent a fly-in-the-ointment for this class of
rements in performance associated with this process- theories because driving is primarily a visual/spatial/
ing bottleneck. An alarming real-world example of manual task and conversing on a phone is primarily
attention switching comes when a driver attempts an auditory/verbal/vocal task. That is, even though
to text message on his or her cellular phone. Here, these two tasks should, in theory, draw on distinct
visual attention can be allocated to driving, or tex- processing resources, they nevertheless produce con-
ting, but not both at the same time. This may be siderable dual-task interference. It seems then that
an extreme example of a bottleneck that involves bottlenecks in performance may still be present even
both cognitive and structural limitations; however, in circumstances where parallel processing can, at
one can find these limitations separately as well. least in principle, take place.
Another example based on a large body of labo-
ratory research using the psychological refractory Task Switching
period (PRP) paradigm has found that the process-
In addition to the central-processing bottleneck
ing of one task systematically delays the processing
costs, persistent costs are also observed when atten-
of another concurrent task. The processing delay is
tion is switched from one task to another. In this
thought to stem from a central-processing bottleneck
case, switching from one task to another results in
in information processing that is stubbornly resis-
a cost in reaction time associated with performing
tant to practice, and empirical efforts to bypass the
the first trial in a series (i.e., the switch cost), and
bottleneck have largely been unsuccessful. Together,
this cost often persists for several trials following the
these findings indicate that a fundamental character-
initial switch. That is, it takes time for performance
istic of the cognitive architecture is a limited ability
to settle into a stable state following a switch from
to perform more than one attention-demanding task
one task to another. Here again, the costs of switch-
at a time.
ing are largely resistant to the effects of practice.
On the other hand, some multitask combinations
Taken together, a general characteristic of attention
may allow parallel processing, in which attention
switching is that performance, particularly perfor-
is shared between two or more concurrent tasks.
mance requiring speeded reactions, is not as good
In this context, attention has been conceptualized
in multitasking contexts as it is if the tasks are not
as a resource that can be flexibly shared between
performed concurrently.
concurrently performed tasks. However, given the
limited capacity characteristics of attention, there is
a reciprocal relationship between the tasks such that Processing Duration
as one task prospers, because attention is allocated Distinguishing between switching and sharing mod-
to its processing, performance on the other task els of multitasking often proves difficult based on
Multitasking and Human Performance 545
empirical data. Indeed, some estimates of rapid extensive practice. Indeed, in such cases, persistent
switching of attention make virtually indistinguish- costs are observed despite years of real-world prac-
able predictions from sharing models of attention. tice. Thus, despite some claims in the literature of
Thus, it may be more profitable to think about perfect time-sharing, a critical analysis of these find-
multitasking in terms of the processing duration of ings suggests that perfect time-sharing, if it exists, is
the cognitive operations underlying each task. As an elusive exception rather than the general rule.
the processing duration increases, the evidence for As mentioned earlier, a number of researchers
serial processing bottlenecks becomes more compel- have also explored whether practice can eliminate
ling (e.g., the text messaging and driving example the bottleneck in performance associated with the
discussed earlier). Interestingly, one situation where PRP effect. In the PRP paradigm, two stimuli from
PRP bottlenecks may potentially be bypassed is different tasks are presented in rapid succession, and
when the processing demands of the second of two the reaction time to the second of the two stimuli sys-
tasks is relatively simple (i.e., with a short process- tematically increases as the time between the begin-
ing duration). Moreover, there are suggestions in the ning of the stimuli (the stimulus onset asynchrony)
literature that practice can improve task efficiency, decreases. In circumstances where both of the tasks
reducing processing time, and thereby improving require a manual response, the PRP effects are little
multitasking performance. Can practice altogether changed with practice. However, with separate input
eliminate the bottleneck in multitasking perfor- and output modalities for the two tasks, participants
mance? were able to significantly reduce, but not eliminate,
the PRP effects. However, others have argued that,
even in the best of circumstances, there is virtually
Practice and Automatization
no evidence for perfect time-sharing. Thus, the data
Under certain circumstances, practice can result from the PRP literature suggest that, even with rela-
in task performance transitioning from slow, con- tively simple tasks and extensive practice, significant
trolled, and effortful to fast, automatic, and effort- dual-task interference is the rule, at least for the
less. In the conditions where performance can be majority of individuals.
characterized as automatic, researchers have often
questioned whether these routines can be per- Neural Mechanisms
formed in combination with another task without
There is growing body of neuropsychological evi-
measurable cost (i.e., an example of perfect time-
dence that a subregion of the prefrontal cortex, spe-
sharing). Some of the early research addressing this
cifically the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC),
topic reported that, with high levels of practice, a
plays a significant role in maintaining the process-
few hardy souls could learn to play the piano while
ing goals for task completion. Switching between
shadowing words, or to take dictation while reading
tasks places a load on this brain region as one goal,
aloud, although in both instances error rates were
and its related processing operations, is supplanted
higher in dual-task situations than when each task
by another. Moreover, individual differences in the
was performed by itself. One of the most carefully
functioning of DLPFC are correlated with differ-
controlled studies on this topic claimed that, after
ences in multitasking ability. Indeed, a small portion
extensive practice, subjects were able to perform two
of the population (e.g., 2%3%) seems to be able
visual search tasks without noticeable deficit after
to perform complex multitasking operations such as
one of the search tasks became automatic; however,
talking on a cell phone while driving with no mea-
even in this study, a careful inspection revealed that
surable decrement in performance on either task.
the accuracy of detection dropped significantly from
Current speculation is that these supertaskers use
single- to dual-task conditions. At the other end of
more broadly distributed brain regions to control
the spectrum are situations where there is inherent
multitasking performance.
unpredictability in the environment, such as in the
case of talking on a cell phone (where each conver-
Threaded Cognition
sation is unique) and driving (which often requires
reacting to unpredictable events). In these cases, Despite the general lack of evidence support-
performance cannot become automatic even with ing perfect time-sharing, people do multitask at
546 Multitasking and Human Performance
performance levels greater than chance (e.g., people their performance would indicate otherwise. Second,
do not immediately drive off the road when they talk practice can improve multitasking performance
on a cell phone). What is the mechanism underlying in situations where performance on one or more
multitasking performance? One group of research- of the tasks can be automated. However, practice
ers recently developed an ACT-R based threaded does not eliminate all sources of interference asso-
cognition model of multitasking in which the task ciated with multitasking. Third, as the complexity
procedures are entered into a queue and processed of the constituent processes of each task increases,
in the order in which they enter the queue (i.e., least the impairments in multitasking performance will
recently processed rule). Given that productions fire become more pronounced. In sum, despite the ever-
one at a time, threaded cognition creates a central increasing demands placed on attention in the mod-
processing bottleneck to the extent that the process- ern world, bottlenecks in the cognitive architecture
ing of one production locks out the others in the of the mind/brain place significant limits on the abil-
queue. Moreover, as the processing duration of a ity to multitask, creating tradeoffs between the qual-
thread increases, the apparent costs in multitask- ity and quantity of processing.
ing become more apparent. Likewise, as practice
David L. Strayer,
strengthens a production (thereby speeding its pro-
cessing), the lockout period for concurrent opera- Nathan Medeiros-Ward, and
tions decreases, reducing the overall interference that Joel M. Cooper
this production has on multitasking performance.
See also Attention, Resource Models; Attention and
Action; Automaticity; Divided Attention and
Implications for Multitasking
Memory; Psychological Refractory Period
It is noteworthy that the distinction between a
reduction in dual-task interference and no dual-task Further Readings
interference (i.e., perfect time-sharing) is both prac-
Kahneman, D. (1973). Attention and effort. New York,
tically and theoretically important. The first inter-
NY: Prentice Hall.
pretation suggests that the inherent structure of the Navon, D., & Gopher, D. (1979). On the economy of the
cognitive architecture places important, potentially human-processing system. Psychological Review, 86,
insurmountable, limitations on doing more than one 214255.
cognitive task at a time. The second interpretation Pashler, H. (1992). Attentional limitations in doing two
suggests a different structural design such that, with tasks at the same time. Current Directions in
sufficient practice, it may be possible to perform Psychological Science, 1, 4448.
independent cognitive operations simultaneously Salvucci, D. D., & Taatgen, N. A. (2008). Threaded
and without costs. On the whole, the data tend to cognition: An integrated theory of concurrent
support the former rather than the latter interpreta- multitasking. Psychological Review, 115, 101130.
tion for the architecture of mind. Some researchers Strayer, D. L., & Johnston, W. A. (2001). Driven to
have speculated that the structural limitations arise distraction: Dual-task studies of simulated driving and
from competition for specific brain regions, such as conversing on a cellular telephone. Psychological
the DLPFC, that are essential for controlling and Science, 12(6), 462466.
coordinating cognition and action. Tombu, M., & Jolicoeur, P. (2004). Virtually no evidence
for virtually perfect time-sharing. Journal of
General Principles Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance, 30, 795810.
Several general principles can be distilled from the Van Selst, M., Ruthruff, E., & Johnston, J. C. (1999). Can
literature on multitasking. First, with the exception practice eliminate the psychological refractory period
of a few cases, performance in a multitasking context effect? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human
is worse than when each of the tasks is performed Perception and Performance, 25, 12681283.
alone. That is, performing two or more attention- Wickens, C. D. (1984). Processing resources in attention. In
demanding tasks at the same time always produces R. Parasuraman, J. Beatty, & J. Davies (Eds.), Varieties
interference. Even though many people believe that of attention (pp. 63102). New York, NY: Academic
they are experts in multitasking, a careful analysis of Press.
Music and the Evolution of Language 547
vertebrates, and that it often does so in a song by Simon Kirby and his colleagues, and can, over
context, like that of songbirds or whales. many generations, produce a significant vocabulary.
Further support for the musical protolanguage Interest in Darwins musical protolanguage
hypothesis comes from computational characteris- hypothesis has undergone a resurgence in recent
tics shared by music and language. Both are hier- years; the topic is reviewed by archaeologist Steven
archically structured: Just as words are made up Mithen in his book The Singing Neanderthals. New
of separate meaningless syllables, musical phrases data from neuroscience, musicology, and animal
are built up from meaningless notes. Just as words communication have augmented Darwins original
can be arranged into longer and more complex sen- arguments, and although all models of protolan-
tences, musical phrases are typically combined to guage remain controversial, musical protolanguage
form larger melodies. Both systems are capable of is a leading model for the evolution of language in
generating an unlimited diversity of signals, and only contemporary discussions. Further research compar-
some of these are grammatical, obeying unstated ing the neural and genetic mechanisms underlying
rules of combination. Similar properties would have music and language offers considerable hope in the
been present in musical protolanguage. coming decades for the resolution of these age-old
The main difference between music and language debates about human cognitive evolution.
concerns the expression of meaning. In language,
W. Tecumseh Fitch
propositional meanings can be expressed explicitly
with great precision. Music, although ill-suited for See also Language Development; Music Perception;
expressing explicit propositions, is well suited for Speech Perception
expressing dynamic, feeling-laden contours, which
can be mapped in continuous fashion onto emo-
Further Readings
tions, movement, or other more abstract cogni-
tive dimensions. Thus, music is often better suited Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man and selection in
to expressing feelings, or eliciting movements like relation to sex. London, UK: John Murray.
dance, than is language. This aspect of protolan- Fitch, W. T. (2006). The biology and evolution of music.
guage has not disappeared in modern humans, Cognition, 100, 173215.
and it remains an important function of music. As Mithen, S. (2005). The singing Neanderthals. London, UK:
predicted by Darwins hypothesis, spoken language Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
retains a prosodic or musical component, and Patel, A. (2008). Music, language, and the brain. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press:
tone of voice, melodic contour, and speech rhythm
Wallin, N., Merker, B., & Brown, S. (Eds.). (2000). The
continue to play an important role in speech (though
origins of music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
not the written word) today.
The problem of how propositional meaning came
to be associated with protolinguistic utterances has
been addressed by linguists Otto Jespersen and (later) MUSIC PERCEPTION
Alison Wray with their holistic model of proto-
language. In a second evolutionary stage, musical Most people assume that the world is just as they
protolanguage was augmented with more specific perceive it to be. But experiments have forced
meanings, but still tied to whole musical perfor- researchers to confront the reality that this is not the
mances. Just as Happy Birthday signifies birthday case. What we perceive represents the end of a chain
celebrations, Jespersen envisioned songs becoming of mental events that give rise to a mental repre-
explicit indicators of hunting, gathering, or festiv- sentation of the physical world. Our brain imposes
ity, or signaling particular individuals or objects. The structure and order on certain sequence of sounds
crucial transformation came when listeners began to and thereby creates what we call music. Molecules in
detect possible connections between components of the air vibrate but do not themselves make a sound.
propositional meaning and individual subsections of Soundand three of its musical components, pitch,
the vocal performance: This was the birth of words loudness, and timbreare psychological construc-
as we know them today. Such a process of analy- tions, present only in the minds of perceivers. Thus,
sis has been demonstrated in computer simulations to answer Bishop Berkeleys famous question, if a
Music Perception 549
tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it tones. (We reserve the word note for a tone that is
(even if it falls on top of a stack of pianos!), it doesnt notated, or written on paper.) A sequence of tones
make a sound, although it may make physical dis- spread out over time constitutes a melody; simul-
turbances in the atmosphere. Music perception can taneously sounded tones constitute harmony. Two
thus be defined as those processes undertaken by pitches define a musical interval, and a sequence of
the human mind in creating music from the physical intervals define contourthe direction of movement
properties of sound. This entry reviews the compo- of the sequence (up, down, or same) without regard
nents of music, experimental methods for studying to the size of the intervals. This kind of directional
music perception, and a few of the most prominent movement also exists in speech where it is known
topics in the field, including the neuroanatomy of as prosody. Contour is especially salient and may be
music (music and the brain), music and emotion, subject to preferential processinginfants attend to
and music and personality. it more readily than they do intervals, and contour
The focus of research in music perception and is more easily remembered by adults learning a new
cognition encompasses the mental and neural opera- melody than are the precise intervals.
tions underlying music listening, music-making, Tones typically are written or performed with
dancing (moving to music), and composing. The different durations, and the sequence of durations
science is interdisciplinary, drawing principally on gives rise to rhythm, tempo (the pace or speed of
methods from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, the piece, loosely related to the temporal interval at
and music theory, as well as from musicology, com- which one would tap a foot or snap fingers), and
puter science, linguistics, sociology, genetics, and meter (the way in which tones are perceived to be
evolutionary biology. Music processing is a com- temporally grouped or organized, the most com-
plex, high-level cognitive activity, engaging many mon in Western music being groups of two, three,
areas of the brain and employing many distinct or four). Our brains assemble these fundamental
cognitive operations. As such, it is a useful tool for perceptual attributes into higher level concepts such
understanding functions of the mind and brain and as melody and harmony (just as a painter arranges
informing larger issues in cognitive science, such as lines into shapes, contours and forms in creating a
memory, attention, categorization, and emotion. cohesive whole). When we listen to music, we are in
The field traces its origins to experimentation fact processing these multiple attributes or dimen-
with musical instruments in ancient Greece and sions and their interactions.
China. Aristoxenus (364304 BCE) argued that one Although our subjective experience of music may
must study the mind of the listener, not merely the be seamless and complete, its perceptual compo-
collection of sounds impinging on the ear. In the late nents are processed in separate areas in the brain.
1800s, Hermann von Helmholtz, Gustav Fechner, For example, pitch heightthe dimension of pitch
and Wilhelm Wundt first applied modern scientific perception that is correlated with frequencyis
methods to study musical experience. Today, music encoded in primary auditory cortex, which contains
psychology is experiencing a renaissance, with an a tonotopic map: a map of pitches from low to high
exponential increase in scholarly activity over the that mirrors the neuronal pitch map in the cochlea.
preceding decades. This surge of interest follows In addition to relying on absolute pitch information,
increasing communication across scholarly disci- human appreciation of music relies on pitch rela-
plines, the emergence of cognitive psychology in the tions; in this regard, human music perception may
1960s, and new technologies that facilitate the pres- be qualitatively different from that of most animal
ervation, presentation, and manipulation of sound species.
(e.g., magnetic tape, hard disks, computers, digital Melodies are defined by the pattern or relation
signal processing). of successive pitches across time; most people have
little trouble recognizing a melody that has been
transposed in pitch. In fact, many melodies do not
Building Blocks of Music
have a correct pitch, but simply float freely in
Although music can be defined in many ways, most pitch space. Happy Birthday is an example of
would consider that to be called music, more than this, typically sung with nave disregard to whether
one tone must be present, creating a sequence of it is being sung in the same key from one occasion to
550 Music Perception
the next. One way to think about a melody, then, is Music and Emotion
that it is an auditory object that maintains its iden-
Music has been called the language of emotion,
tity under certain transformations. So, for example,
but it is unclear whether our ancestors used music
when we hear a song played louder or slower than
in this way. Unlike visual art, such as cave paint-
were accustomed to, we can still identify it.
ings, which left a permanent trace for scientists to
study, music made an impression only in the minds
Music and Evolution
of those contemporaries who heard it; music record-
Darwin argued that music was an evolutionary ing has existed for scarcely 100 years. Inferences
adaptation, used for signaling sexual fitness. The must be drawn from extant writings about music
past 10 years have seen an increased interest in ques- (some of which date to 6,000 years ago) and from
tions surrounding the evolutionary origins of music the study of contemporary preliterate and preindus-
and its relation to language evolution: which came trial cultures. To contemporary humans, music rep-
first, or to what extent they may have coevolved. resents a dynamic form of emotionthe conveying
Evidence comes from archeological findings (e.g., of emotion is considered to be the essence, if not the
bone flutes at ancient burial sites), anthropology (the purpose, of music and the reason that most people
study of contemporary preliterate and preindustrial report spending large amounts of time listening to
societies), biology (especially the study of communi- music. Recent laboratory studies have focused on
cation among closely related species, such as chim- the biological underpinnings of musical emotion,
panzees), and neuroscience (differential activation particularly the involvement of neural reward sys-
of brain circuits by music and language, with music tems. This has been studied through investigating
tending to activate phylogenetically older struc- the chill response, a physical sensation up the spine.
tures). Music is characterized by its antiquity and It varies from individual to individual and is based
its ubiquityno known culture now or anytime in on a number of factors, such as structural compo-
the past lacked music. Music has clearly shaped the nents and loudness of the music as well as character/
course of human culture, societies, and history. In personality organization of the listener and his or
addition, specific neurochemical processes accom- her musical experience. When people listen to music
pany musical activities, including the modulation of which they report consistently gives them chills,
dopamine levels in response to music listening. blood flow increases to centers of the brain that are
implicated in reward, emotion, and arousal, regions
Musicology and Musical Grammar that modulate dopaminergic levels.
Each human culture develops its own traditions for Our emotional reactions to music are believed to
the ways in which its music is created. In general, be caused in part by the meeting and violating of
Western music tends to employ duple or triple meter, musical expectations. Listeners track the progression
corresponding to what we would perceive as a sim- of music over time, noting the pitches and rhythms
ple march or a waltz, respectively, whereas other employed, and form subconscious predictions about
cultures routinely employ more complex meter in what will occur next. A musical piece that we find
their music. The system of rules or conventions by pleasing strikes the balance between meeting those
which sounds are assembled in a given culture can predictions some of the time and violating them in
be thought of as the grammar for that music and interesting ways the rest of the time.
as reflecting a musical style, syntax, and idiom.
Musical Preferences
Musical phrases are composed of notes, chords, or
both, but as in language, these are not randomly Measures of personality and individual differences
ordered, and a reordering of elements produces a have been shown to correlate with taste in music; the
different melody. Some musical experiences that we correlations are relatively small but significant and
take for granted are in fact culturally dependent. For robust. From research using the Big Five personality
example, in Western tonal music, minor chords and inventory and a cross-section of songs representing
keys are often associated with sadness and major major genres and subgenres of Western tonal music,
chords with happiness, although this is not a cross- certain consistencies have emerged. Although such
cultural universal. research is still in its early stages, results indicate
Music Perception 551
that extraverted individuals tend to like music that is are normally extraverted, for example, may help to
characterized as energetic and rhythmic. Individuals maintain their self-identity and typical level of stim-
who rate high on Factor 5, openness to new expe- ulation by listening to energetic music. Some listen
rience, show no correlation with such music, but to fast-paced or uplifting music to get going in
rather with music that is described as reflective and the morning. In times of sadness or sensitivity, indi-
complex. Upbeat and conventional music correlates viduals may listen to an artist who conveys the same
with Factor 2, agreeableness. kinds of feelings they are going through, in order to
Several hypotheses exist as to why musical taste feel understood. Music may also maintain a persons
might be related to personality. In some cases, mood when it is simply music they enjoy.
people may prefer and seek out styles of music that
Daniel J. Levitin and Anna K. Tirovolas
reflect and reinforce aspects of their personalities.
Personality influences how individuals think, feel,
See also Audition, Neural Basis; Emotion Regulation;
and behave. For example, people with high levels
Music and the Evolution of Language
of extraversion may seek out situations that allow
them to be talkative and sociable. In contrast, more
introverted people tend to seek out environments Further Readings
where they have limited contact with others, espe-
Deutsch, D. (Ed.). (1999). The psychology of music. San
cially people they dont know. Just as people seek
Diego, CA: Academic Press.
out and create social environments that reinforce Huron, D. (2006). Sweet anticipation: Music and the
aspects of their personalities, so, too, might people psychology of expectation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
seek out auditory or musical environments that con- Juslin, P., & Sloboda, J. A. (2001). Music and emotion.
form to aspects of their personalities. Because music Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
is a component of social identity in contemporary Levitin, D. J. (2008). The world in six songs: How the
society, people may also seek out music that they musical brain created human nature. New York, NY:
believe will create a desirable impression of them. Dutton.
Adolescents, in particular, use music as a way of Meyer, L. (1956). Emotion and meaning in music. Chicago,
communicating their status and affiliation with a IL: University of Chicago Press.
particular peer group or style. Individuals of all ages Thompson, W. F. (2008). Music, thought and feeling. New
report using music for mood induction. Those who York, NY: Oxford University Press.
N
goes along with a piece of cognitive psychologi-
NAVE REALISM cal doctrinethat visual experiences represent the
world. What distinguishes nave realism from more
Although the label nave realism has been used sophisticated theories within cognitive psychology
for different theories in different contexts, the theo- is the further claim that the representation is both
ries it names tend to be those that play a certain role perfectly faithful and passively created.
in a discipline. More specifically, nave realism tends
to be used as a name for a theory that would, within Nave Realism in the
a discipline or subdiscipline, be a starting pointa Philosophy of Perception
theory that is motivated by an initial appeal to how This feature of Neissers characterization of nave
things seem to us, pretheoretically speaking. This realism actually serves to render it inconsistent with
entry briefly considers nave realism as it is discussed philosophical nave realist theories of experience.
in cognitive psychology, the philosophy of percep- Within the philosophy of perception, nave realism
tion, and metaphysics, and how these different theo- has been used to name two closely related theses.
ries are related to one another. The first is the view that the things that we perceive
are actually constituents of the perceptual experi-
Nave Realism in Cognitive Psychology
ences we have. So, for example, if I see a tugboat,
The eminent cognitive psychologist, Ulric Neisser, then the tugboat itselfpart of the external world
uses the label nave realism to name a simplistic view is literally a constituent of my experience. If I merely
that claims, among other things, that a subjects seem to see a tugboatsay, I have a tugboat dream
visual experience directly mirrors the stimulus pat- or tugboat hallucination that is completely indis-
tern; . . . [is] a passive . . . copy of the stimulus, and tinguishable from my experience of actually seeing
begins when the pattern is first exposed and termi- onebecause there is no suitably situated tugboat
nates when it is turned off (p. 16). This nave view in the world, the experience I have when I merely
is then taken to be refuted by, for example, evidence seem to see a tugboat could not be the same kind
that expectancy can alter a subjects visual experi- of experience I have when I actually see one. The
ence and evidence that the visual experience can per- experience of actually seeing something and merely
sist beyond the extinction of the stimulus. seeming to see something are experiences of funda-
It is important to note that, although nave real- mentally different kinds. The second claim differs in
ism is supposed to be a pretheoretic starting point, as virtue of being specifically about consciousness: It
Neissers characterization shows, this does not stop says that, according to nave realism, the things that
the views so labeled from being theoretically loaded. we perceive actually shape the conscious character
On the characterization just given, nave realism of our experiences. Thus, according to such a view,
553
554 Narcissistic Personality Disorder
the pink color that we are consciously presented were true, then metaphysical nave realism would
with when we see a flamingo just is the flamingos have to be true too. Given this, if metaphysical nave
pinkness. Again, this has the consequence that we realism were shown to be false, then this would show
could not have such a conscious experience of pink- nave realism about perceptual experience to be false
ness without there being some pink thing that we are in turn. And over the years, metaphysical nave real-
aware of. Both of these claims are inconsistent with ism has been subject to an important criticism. For
nave realism as Neisser conceives of it because they instance, note that, while orange juice normally tastes
deny that visual experiences are representations of quite sweet, the same juice can actually taste quite
the world, claiming instead that they are states or bitter if it is preceded by something sugary, such as
events that actually involve the world in some way. pancakes with maple syrup, say. This suggests that
The major objection to these characterizations the property of being sweet is not a property that the
of nave realism turns on the possibility of mislead- orange juice has independently of us but is rather
ing experiences, such as hallucination or illusion. a way we experience the orange juice. This kind of
Consider a case in which a subject sees a tugboat. contention can also be supported by scientific find-
According to this kind of nave realist, the tugboat is ings. For example, it has been claimed that empiri-
either a constituent of the subjects visual experience cal research into the workings of our visual systems
or shapes the contours of the subjects (conscious) shows that colors are, so to speak, in the eye of
visual experience. Yet, the objection goes, Couldnt the beholder rather than on the surfaces of objects.
we have an experience just like this in the case of Again, then, defenders of nave realism will also need
a suitably convincing hallucination? Because hal- to show how the scientific world view can be recon-
lucinations just are visual experiences that occur in ciled with a conception of the world as containing
the absence of appropriate objects of perception, such things as colors, textures, smells, and tastes.
a real-world tugboat could not be a constituent of
William Fish
such an experience nor could it shape the conscious
contours of that experience. Yet if this experience is See also Conscious Thinking; Disjunctive Theory of
just like the experience of actually seeing a tugboat, Perception; Realism and Instrumentalism; Smell,
then doesnt it show that nave realism is false: that Philosophical Perspectives; Theory of Appearing
we can have the kind of experience we have when
seeing a tugboat without a tugboat being a constitu-
Further Readings
ent of and/or shaping the conscious character of that
experience? Defenders of nave realism therefore Cornman, J. W. (1975). Perception, common sense, and
need to offer an account of how nave realism can science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
be made consistent with the possibility of such hal- Hardin, C. L. (1988). Color for philosophers: Unweaving
lucinations. Similar problems arise when consider- the rainbow. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
ing the evidence, mentioned above, that the visual Martin, M. G. F. (2004). The limits of self-awareness.
experience of a stimulus can persist for a short time Philosophical Studies, 120, 3789.
after that stimulus is extinguished. Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive psychology. New York, NY:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
personality disorder, the narcissistic emotions, cogni- 6. willingness to exploit or take advantage of other
tions, and behaviors need to be pervasive (i.e., evi- people,
dent across all aspects of a persons life) and enduring 7. low levels of empathy for others,
(i.e., part of a persons disposition for an extended 8. envy for others or sense that others envy him or
period of time, beginning in early adulthood). For her, and
a person to be diagnosed with NPD, the individu-
als personality must deviate from cultural expec- 9. arrogance.
tations in at least two of the following four areas:
Because a full five of nine of these criteria are
thought processes (cognition), emotional life (affect),
needed to diagnose NPD, the prevalence of clinically
relationships (interpersonal functioning), or self-con-
significant NPD is thought to be somewhat rare. The
trol (impulsivity). NPD can be related to difficulties
point prevalence, or number of people in the gen-
in each of these areas (e.g., cognition: overconfidence
eral population estimated to currently have NPD in
and resistance to accurate feedback; affect: anger,
the population, is around 1%. The lifetime preva-
depression, anxiety; interpersonal functioning: infi-
lence, or number of people who have ever had
delity, aggression, difficulties with commitment;
NPD, is higher at around 6%. Some have posited
impulsivity: problems related to sensation and nov-
that narcissism and NPD are increasing; recent data
elty seeking such as abuse of illegal substances and
suggest that individuals in their 20s have a lifetime
gambling). A diagnosis of NPD also requires evi-
prevalence of approximately 9%.
dence that the personality traits are causing the indi-
vidual distress or resulting in impairment. Finally, for
an NPD diagnosis to be made, other problems and Relationship With Other
disorders must be ruled out. For example, the abuse Personality Disorders
of some drugs such as cocaine may lead to grandios- Narcissistic personality disorder is located in the
ity and lack of empathy. Likewise, manic states can Cluster B group of personality disorders (i.e., NPD,
include grandiosity and overconfidence that may borderline personality disorder, antisocial person-
be mistaken for NPD. Diagnoses of NPD should ality disorder, and histrionic personality disorder).
be made by a clinical psychologist, psychiatrist, or NPD shares characteristics with each of these dis-
trained professional. This diagnosis will often entail orders but differs in important ways as well. For
a structured interview that covers the specific diag- instance, relative to narcissistic individuals, border-
nostic criteria for NPD. The use of clinical interview line individuals are more anxious, depressive, and
and inclusion of informant reports (i.e., significant impulsive. In contrast, antisocial individuals are
others) may be particularly important with NPD more likely to be aggressive and impulsive and often
because there is evidence that individuals with NPD manifest cognitive deficits. Finally, histrionic individ-
lack insight into the nature of their traits. This entry uals are more likely to be dramatic, shallowly emo-
describes the features and prevalence of NPD, its tional, and inappropriately seductive.
relationship with other personality disorders, treat- Narcissism is also related to psychopathic per-
ment issues, and some ongoing controversies. sonality. Specifically, narcissism is thought to be
strongly linked to the interpersonal and affective
Specific Diagnostic Features and Prevalence characteristics of psychopathy but is less strongly
related to the socially deviant behaviors and impul-
The DSM-IV-TR describes nine specific criteria for sivity-related traits of psychopathy. Overall, the lines
the diagnosis of NPD. To warrant a diagnosis of between these personality disorders are not bright.
NPD, a person must meet five of these nine criteria. They share many features in common, and often an
These (paraphrased) include individual will have characteristics consistent with
more than one personality disorder.
1. grandiose self importance,
2. a preoccupation with grandiose fantasies, Treatment
3. a sense of specialness,
Treatment for NPD is universally described as dif-
4. a need for admiration, ficult. Most individuals with NPD avoid treatment
5. psychological entitlement, because they experience only limited distress and
556 Natural Action Selection, Modeling
tend to externalize blame for their functional impair- environmental influences are less well understood.
ment. In addition, much of the suffering caused by For grandiose narcissism, there may be a small link
NPD is actually experienced by individuals who are with permissive parenting and noncontingent praise;
in close contact with the narcissistic individual (i.e., in contrast, for vulnerable narcissism, there seems
romantic partners, parents, children, colleagues). to be an association with cold and controlling par-
Even when individuals with NPD enter psycho- enting and some forms of childhood abuse. More
logical or psychiatric treatment, the dropout rate research is needed on NPD and narcissism as there
is high. Individuals with NPD do not react well to has been an imbalance between theoretical specula-
criticism, and feedback given in therapy can lead the tion and empiricism.
individual with NPD to end treatment. In addition,
William Keith Campbell and
practitioners find it difficult to treat individuals with
NPD because of problems in establishing clinical Joshua David Miller
rapport.
See also Borderline Personality Disorder; Emotion and
There is limited empirical evidence as to which Psychopathology
treatments work best for NPD. There are reports
that various forms of treatment, including cogni-
tive behavioral, interpersonal, schema based, and Further Readings
psychodynamic, can work in some instances. There American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and
is no well-established pharmacological treatment statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed., text rev.).
for NPD. Washington, DC: Author.
Betan, E., Heim, A. K., Conklin, C. Z., & Westen, D.
Controversies (2005). Countertransference phenomena and personality
pathology in clinical practice: An empirical investigation.
The scientific literature on NPD is relatively small,
American Journal of Psychiatry, 162, 890898.
and there are still many controversies and unan-
Cain, N. M., Pincus, A. L., & Ansell, E. B. (2008).
swered questions. One prominent question is
Narcissism at the crossroads: Phenotypic description of
whether there are multiple forms or types of NPD.
pathological narcissism across clinical theory, social/
The emerging consensus is that there are at least two personality psychology, and psychiatric diagnosis.
forms of NPD. The first is a grandiose form that Clinical Psychology Review, 28, 638656.
includes a sense of personal dominance, a callous Miller, J. D., Campbell, W. K., & Pilkonis, P. A. (2007).
interpersonal style, and the experience of more posi- Narcissistic personality disorder: Relations with distress
tively valenced affect and self-esteem. The second and functional impairment. Comprehensive Psychiatry,
is a vulnerable or covert form that includes more 48, 170177.
paranoia and envy, a similarly callous interpersonal Levy, K. N., Reynoso, J., Wasserman, R. H., & Clarkin, J.
style, and greater negative affect (i.e., depression and F. (2008). Narcissistic personality disorder. In W.
anxiety) and low self-esteem. The DSM-IV diag- ODonohue, K. A. Fowler, & S. O. Lillenfeld (Eds.),
nostic criteria for NPD appear to focus entirely or Personality disorders: Toward the DSM-V (pp. 233277).
predominantly on the grandiose form, although the Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
descriptive text does reference the vulnerable form.
A related issue is whether narcissism is a defense
against hidden feelings of low self-worth. The data NATURAL ACTION SELECTION,
do not support this view. Individuals with grandi-
ose narcissism do not manifest evidence of hidden MODELING
low self-esteem and individuals with vulnerable nar-
cissism, who do seem more defensive, are aware of Put simply, action selection is the task of deciding
their lower self-esteem. what to do next. As a general problem facing all
Finally, the etiology of NPD is unclear. Given autonomous entitieswhether animals or artificial
the evidence supporting the heritability of general agentsaction selection exercises both the sciences
and pathological personality traits, it is safe to concerned with understanding the biological bases of
assume there are some genetic roots. The specific behavior (e.g., ethology, neurobiology, psychology)
Natural Action Selection, Modeling 557
and those concerned with building artifacts (e.g., Assessing behavior from a normative perspective
artificial intelligence, artificial life, and robotics). The has particular value when observations deviate from
problem has two parts: What constitutes an action, predictions, because we are forced to consider the
and how are actions selected? origin of the apparently suboptimal behavior. One
Models of natural action selection allow us approach is via the notion of ecological rationality:
to test the coherence of proposed social and bio- Cognitive mechanisms fit the demands of particular
logical theories. Although models cannot generate ecological niches and may deliver predictably subop-
data about nature, they can generate data about timal behavior when operating outside these niches.
theories. Complex theories can therefore be tested Models assist this approach by determining the
by comparing the outcome of simulation models behavioral consequences of hypothesized optimal
against other theories in their ability to account for mechanisms. Modelers can also use automated opti-
data drawn from nature. Each model attempts to mization techniques such as genetic algorithms (a
account for transitions among different behavioral machine learning technique inspired by Darwinian
options. A wide range of modeling methodologies is selection) to find mechanisms delivering near opti-
currently in use. Formal mathematical models have mal behavior in specific contexts.
been complemented with larger scale simulations
that allow the investigation of systems for which Neural Substrates
analytical solutions are intractable or unknown.
These include models of artificial animals (simulated An important open question is whether there are spe-
agents or robots) embedded in simulated worlds, cialized mechanisms for action selection in brains.
as well as models of underlying neural control sys- Arguably, such a mechanism should have properties
tems (computational neuroscience and connection- including (a) inputs that signal internal and exter-
ist approaches). A potential pitfall of more detailed nal cues relevant to decision making, (b) some cal-
models is that they may trade biological fidelity for culation of urgency or salience appropriate to each
comprehensibility. available action, (c) mechanisms enabling resolu-
General challenges facing models of action selec- tion of conflicts between competing actions based
tion include the following: Is the model sufficiently on their relative salience, and (d) outputs that allow
constrained by biological data that it captures inter- the expression of winning actions while disallowing
esting properties of the target natural system? Do losers. Recent computational modeling has focused
manipulations of the model result in similar out- attention on the basal ganglia (a group of function-
comes to those seen in nature? Does the model make ally related structures in the vertebrate midbrain
predictions? Is there a simpler model that accounts and forebrain) as meeting these criteria. Other large-
for the data equally well? Or is the model too scale models encompass both cortical and subcor-
abstract? Are its connections to data trivial, making tical mechanisms, indicating that in animals there
it too obvious to be useful? may be a range of selection mechanisms interacting
Models of natural action selection have deliv- at different levels of the neuraxis.
ered new insights in many domains. What follows
is a review of several: (a) the relationship between Behavioral Sequencing
evolved behavior and optimality, (b) biological Adaptive action selection requires generating behav-
mechanisms of action selection, (c) whether or not ioral sequences appropriate to achieve longer term
sequencing behavior can require special representa- outcomes. Such sequences often appear to have a
tions, (d) the role of perception, (e) explanations of hierarchical decomposition, with selection tak-
disability or disease, and (f) finally individual action ing place at multiple levels of abstractionfrom
selection in a social context. choosing among high-level objectives (e.g., whether
to eat, drink, or rest) through to selecting specific
Action Selection and Optimality movements implementing the same immediate
When an animal does one thing rather than another, goal (e.g., which grasp to use in picking up a cup).
it is natural to ask why? A common explanation is Computational models have explored not only this
that the action is optimal with respect to some goal. approach but also the alternativethat apparently
558 Natural Language Generation
hierarchical behavior may be implemented by a science. These domains have in common a complex-
framework without a hierarchical decomposition. ity that benefits from advanced modeling techniques,
exemplifying the notion of understanding by
Perceptual Selection in Decision Making building. These techniques can help answer many
Action selection is mediated by perception as much important questions such as why animals, including
as by motor control. For example, selective attention humans, sometimes act irrationally; how damage to
can guide action by linking specific motor outputs to neural selection substrates can lead to debilitating
one among a range of stimuli. Recent models such neurological disorders; and how action selection by
as the leaky competing accumulator show that noisy individuals impacts on the organization of societies.
sensory evidence supporting each of a range of alter- Anil Seth and Joanna J. Bryson
natives can be accumulated until one option passes a
threshold, triggering an action. This model explains See also Decision Making, Neural Underpinnings;
experimental data and is mathematically optimal in Decision Making and Reward, Computational
some conditions. More generally, action selection Perspectives; Layered Control Architectures
is sometimes modeled via competing, nested, sen-
sorimotor loops with no clear decomposition into Further Readings
sensory or motor components.
Gurney, K., Prescott, T. J., Wickens, J., & Redgrave, P.
(2004). Computational models of the basal ganglia:
Disorders of Action Selection
From membranes to robots. Trends in Neurosciences,
The normal flow of integrated behavior can become 27, 453459.
disrupted following neurological damage or disease. Pratt, S. C., Sumpter, D. J. T., Mallon, E. B., & Franks, N.
Models have suggested that conditions including (2005). An agent-based model of collective nest choice
Parkinsons disease, schizophrenia, Huntingtons by the ant Temnothorax albipennis. Animal Behaviour,
disease, and obsessive-compulsive disorder can be 70, 10231036.
linked to the same corticobasal ganglia circuits that Prescott, T. J., Bryson, J. J., & Seth, A. K. (Eds.). (2007).
have been identified as possible substrates for action Modelling natural action selection [Special issue].
selection. Computational models of these substrates Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B:
have been used to provide improved explanations Biological Sciences 362, 15191529.
for how these disorders arise and to investigate pos- Usher, M., & McClelland, J. L. (2001). The time course of
sible avenues for treatment. perceptual choice: The leaky, competing accumulator
model. Psychological Review, 108, 550592.
Action Selection in Social Contexts
In nature, action selection usually involves a social
context. Agent-based models of social action selec- NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION
tion explore interactions among individuals medi-
ated both directly and indirectly via, for example, Natural language generation (NLG) systems are
resource consumption. Examples include minimalist computer software systems that automatically gen-
models of factors that influence the troop structure erate texts in a human language (English, French,
of primate species and models of how ants deter- Chinese, etc.) from nonlinguistic input data, using
mine when and where to move a colony to a new techniques from computational linguistics and artifi-
nest; models can even explore patterns of voting in a cial intelligence. This entry gives a brief overview of
democratic society. Modeling also allows examina- NLG from the perspective of the choices that NLG
tion of evolutionary mechanisms operating on indi- systems must make, using examples from the spe-
viduals that lead to social outcomes. cific NLG task of generating weather forecasts.
A number of NLG systems have been built that
Summary
automatically generate textual weather forecasts.
The study of action selection integrates a broad range These systems take as input a set of numbers that
of topics including, but not limited to, neuroscience, predict temperature, precipitation, wind speed,
psychology, ecology, ethology, and even political and other meteorological parameters at different
Natural Language Generation 559
locations at various time periods. These numbers are perature changes throughout the day? In general,
usually produced by a supercomputer that is running a an NLG system can communicate only part of the
numerical weather simulation model. From this input, information available to it. Indeed, in some weather
the NLG system produces a textual weather forecast applications, the NLG system is expected to gener-
that is targeted to the needs of a particular user group; ate a few sentences of text from 30 megabytes (!!)
for example, an Arabic text that summarizes marine of input data. The decision on what to communi-
weather in the Persian Gulf for offshore oil rig work- cate is usually based on a model of what is impor-
ers or an English text that summarizes road icing con- tant and significant to the user and often uses
ditions for local government staff who must decide artificial intelligence reasoning techniques such as
whether salt and grit should be put on roads. knowledge-based systems.
NLG can largely be regarded as a process of mak-
Structure: How should the information be
ing choices. There are usually thousands if not mil-
structured? In Example 3 above, for instance, should
lions of possible texts that could be produced from
this information be communicated in two sentences
a particular data set. For example, consider the tem-
(as in the texts shown), or should a single sentence
perature prediction data set in Table 1. A number of
be used? More generally, what order should infor-
texts could be generated from this data, including
mation be presented in and how should information
the following:
be grouped into sentences, paragraphs, and other
1. Tomorrow will be a cool day. document structures? In theory this can be based on
linguistic models of document structure; for exam-
2. Temperatures increasing from 10 at midnight
ple, if the NLG system is producing a story, then it
to 16 at noon, then falling back to 12 at the end
should use a narrative structure (e.g., generally order
the period.
events by the time they occurred at). But in practice,
3. Chilly nighttime temperatures will rise to a structure is often determined by the genre; this is
comfortable 15 degrees by morning. usually the case for weather forecasts, for example.
Temperatures will stay at about this level
throughout the day, before falling to 12 degrees Lexical and syntactic choice: Which words
in the evening. should be used to communicate domain concepts?
For example, if temperature is going up, should this
Deciding which text to generate requires making be lexicalized as rising or increasing? Similarly,
several kinds of decisions: what syntactic structures should be used; for exam-
ple, should we use simple active voice sentences (as
Content: What information should be pre- in Example 1), gerund-based sentences (as in
sented in the text? In the above example, for Example 2), or some other structure, such as passive
instance, should the system simply give an overall voice? In theory, it would be nice to make many of
summary (as in Example 1), or describe how tem- these choices on the basis of psycholinguistic mod-
els of reading comprehension, but unfortunately
current psycholinguistic models are often not
Table 1 Example weather input data for an NLG system detailed and robust enough to support this.
Reference: How should domain objects and
Time Temperature (C)
entities be referred to? For example, should we refer
0000 10 to the time 2100 as end of period or evening? If
0300 11 referring to a previously mentioned object, should
0600 12
we use a pronoun or a definite noun phrase? NLG
researchers have developed a number of algorithms
0900 15
for making reference choices, and these appear to
1200 16 work well in many cases, but many areas are under-
1500 15 explored. For example, we have reasonably good
1800 14 models for deciding when to use pronouns but much
less satisfactory models for deciding how to refer
2100 12
to times.
560 Neural Correlates of Consciousness
The above decisions can be made in a number of Reiter, E., Sripada, S., & Robertson, R. (2003). Acquiring
ways. The most common approach is to manually correct knowledge for natural language generation.
write decision rules, usually based on a combination Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 18,
of (psycho)linguistic theory, corpus analysis of 491516.
human-authored texts, and discussions (or more for-
mal knowledge elicitation sessions) with domain
experts. However, recently, there has been growing NEURAL CORRELATES OF
interest in trying to learn decision rules automatically,
by using machine learning techniques that automati-
CONSCIOUSNESS
cally analyze large corpora (collections) of human-
written texts and attempt to infer from the texts the It is widely agreed that some neural activity must
decision rules used by the human writers who created correlate very closely with the occurrence of con-
these texts. Such machine learning approaches have sciousness and, further, that neuroscience has the
been very successful in other areas of natural lan- ability to discover these neural correlates of con-
guage processing, such as machine translation. sciousness (NCC). This agreement contrasts with
A general issue in NLG decision making is the widespread disagreement about whether neuro-
whether the system should try to make decisions science can ever explain how consciousness arises
that imitate what human writers and speakers do or from brain activity.
whether it should try to make decisions that lead to After defining the NCC, this entry summarizes
texts that are optimal in some sense for human hear- the two basic approaches to the NCC search, using
ers. These strategies lead to different systems, since examples of experimental paradigms. It looks at
human speakers of course do not generally produce recent findings and developments and touches on
texts that are optimal for human listeners. methodological and philosophical controversies.
The best current NLG systems can produce short
texts (such as weather forecasts) that are regarded Definition
by readers as being as good as (or even better than)
Finding the NCC means finding the sufficient neural
human-written texts. However, no current NLG sys-
conditions for the occurrence of consciousness and
tem can produce long texts (more than one page)
then narrowing down this set of conditions to the
that are as good as human texts. This reflects the
minimally sufficient conditions: the neural activity
fact that our current understanding of low-level syn-
that most closely correlates with consciousness. For
tactic, lexical, and reference choices is much better
example, blood supply to the brain is part of the
than our understanding of higher level content and
sufficient conditions for consciousness but is not a
structure choices.
minimally sufficient condition because it is impor-
Ehud Reiter tant for much else besides consciousness. Similarly,
certain processes in the cerebellum may influence a
See also Conversation and Dialogue; Discourse given conscious state but may not be closely corre-
Processing, Models of; Multimodal Conversational lated with it because the state may be able to occur
Systems; Production of Language even if the cerebellum processes differ. In contrast,
it seems that, normally, activity in the inferior tem-
Further Readings poral cortex (together with other areas) is needed
ACL Special Interest Group on Natural Language for some aspects of consciousness, and this therefore
Generation: www.siggen.org seems to belong with the minimally sufficient condi-
Belz, A. (2008). Automatic generation of weather forecast tions for consciousness. The NCC is normally not
texts using comprehensive probabilistic generation-space defined in terms of finding the necessary conditions
models. Natural Language Engineering, 14, 431455. for consciousness since it is generally agreed that,
Goldberg, E., Driedgar, N., & Kittredge, R. (1994). Using at least in principle, different neural states could be
natural-language processing to produce weather sufficient for the same aspect of consciousness. (For
forecasts. IEEE Expert, 9, 4553. example, it should not be ruled out that different
Reiter, E., & Dale, R. (2000). Building natural language neural systems in a developing juvenile brain and
generation systems. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge an aging brain could correlate with the same type of
University Press. conscious state.)
Neural Correlates of Consciousness 561
having the experience is introspectively unaware visual processing comes mainly from psychophysical
of. In that case, neuroscience should expect to find experiments using visual search tasks such as those
distinct NCCs for access consciousness and for phe- developed by Anne Treisman. In visual search tasks,
nomenal consciousness. Experimental paradigms subjects examine a display containing randomly
that clearly distinguish these NCCs are yet to be positioned items to detect a previously defined tar-
fully developed, and it is unclear how this distinction get. Items in the display that are different from the
relates to the distinction between the state-based and target are distracters. The main phenomenology can
the content-based approaches to the NCC search. be understood from the dependence of the measured
reaction time on the number of items in the display.
Jakob Hohwy
There are two main types of search displays: fea-
See also Access Consciousness; Anesthesia and
ture search or pop out and conjunction or serial
Awareness; Blindsight; Consciousness and the search. In a feature search task, the target differs
Unconscious; Introspection; Sleep and Dreams; from the distracters on a single feature (e.g., only in
Subliminal Perception; Unconscious Perception its color). In this case, search times are independent
of the number of distracters. A typical example of
pop-out search is the detection of a red bar within
Further Readings
an array of differently tilted green bars. The result
Block, N. (2005). Two neural correlates of consciousness. can be trivially explained with the activation of only
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(2), 4652. parallel processes, and therefore the unique feature
Chalmers, D. (2000). What is a neural correlate of defining the target pops out. In a conjunction search
consciousness? In T. Metzinger (Ed.), Neural correlates task, the target is defined by a conjunction of fea-
of consciousness: Empirical and conceptual issues tures; each distracter shares at least one of those
(pp. 1739). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. features with the target. Conjunction search experi-
Haynes, J.-D. (2009). Decoding visual consciousness from ments show that search time increases linearly with
human brain signals. Trends in Cognitive Sciences,
the number of distracters, implying a serial process.
13(5), 194202.
An example of conjunction search is the detection of
Hohwy, J. (2009). The neural correlates of consciousness:
a red vertical bar within a display containing vertical
New experimental approaches needed? Consciousness
green or tilted red bars as distracters; that is, there is
and Cognition, 18(2), 428438.
only one item sharing simultaneously (a conjunction
Koch, C. (2004). The quest for consciousness: A
neurobiological approach. Englewood, CO: Roberts.
of) the two features defining the target, but each dis-
tracter shares one feature with the target.
The classical hypothesis accounting for atten-
tional selection in vision is that attention enhances
NEURODYNAMICS OF VISUAL the responses of neurons representing stimuli at a
SEARCH single relevant location in the visual field. This
enhancement model is related to Hermann von
Helmholtzs spotlight metaphor for focal attention.
This entry describes the synaptic, neuronal, and
In this metaphor, a spotlight of attention illuminates
cortical mechanisms underlying visual attention. It
part of the visual field; stimuli in the spotlight are
further discusses how these mechanisms, based on
processed in higher detail, while information out-
more general principles of competition and coop-
side the spotlight is filtered out. In this classical view,
eration between neurons, underlie the processes
an object searched for in a cluttered scene is found
involved in visual search.
by rapidly shifting the spotlight from one object to
the next until the target is found. In this view, atten-
The Psychophysics of Visual
tion is based on explicit serial mechanisms. Based
Attention in Search Tasks
on these concepts, Anne Treisman proposed the so-
The visual system cannot process simultaneously the called feature integration theory of visual selective
immense amount of information conveyed in a com- attention. This theory is based on numerous psycho-
plex natural scene. To cope with this problem, atten- physical experiments on visual search and offers an
tional mechanisms are needed to select relevant scene interpretation of the binding problem, which asks
information. Evidence for attentional mechanisms in how features detected by different cortical feature
Neurodynamics of Visual Search 563
maps are assembled into objects. The feature inte- with bottom-up processes as proposed by Gustavo
gration theory distinguishes two processing stages. Deco and Edmund Rolls. In particular, it sche-
In the first stage, called preattentive, processing done matizes how the dorsal (also called where) visual
in parallel across the visual field extracts primitive stream (which reaches the posterior parietal cortex
features (e.g., colors, orientation) without integrat- [PP]) and the ventral (what) visual stream (via V4
ing them. In the second, attentive, stage information to the inferior temporal cortex [IT]) interact in early
from limited parts of the field is integrated. visual cortical areas (such as V1 and V2), account-
ing for many aspects of visual attention. This type
The Neurophysiology of Attention of architecture implements at the local and global
brain area level the principle of biased competition
Recent neurophysiological studies, performed
described above. In the original model of Deco and
mainly in the lab of Robert Desimone, have shown
Rolls, the system was composed of six modules
that the effects of the enhancement of attention on
(V1 [primary visual cortex], V2V4, IT, PP, ventral
neuronal responses can be understood in the con-
prefrontal cortex v46, and dorsal prefrontal cortex
text of competition among the stimuli in the visual
d46), reciprocally connected as schematized in the
field. This neurophysiologically more realistic mech-
figure. Information from the retina reaches V1 via
anism for selective attention, originally proposed by
the lateral geniculate.
John Duncan and Robert Desimone, is called the
The attentional top-down signal biasing intra-
biased competition hypothesis. The biased compe-
and intercortical competition is assumed to come
tition hypothesis assumes that populations of neu-
from prefrontal cortex area 46 (modules d46 and
rons encoding different locations and features of the
v46). In particular, feedback connections from area
multiple stimuli in the visual field are simultaneously
v46 to the IT module could specify the target object
activated and therefore are competing. Attention to
in a visual search task; feedback connections from
a stimulus at a particular location or with a particu-
area d46 to the PP module could generate the bias to
lar feature biases this competition in favor of neu-
a targeted spatial location created by a spatial atten-
rons encoding the location or the features attended.
tional cue in an object recognition task. Each brain
This biased competition leads to an up-modulation
area consists of mutually coupled neuronal popula-
of the firing activity of the neuronal populations
tions whose dynamics are described by conductance-
encoding the attended location or features and to
based synaptic and spiking neuronal models. The
a down-modulation of the activity of the neuronal
equations describing the detailed neuronal dynamics
populations associated with distracting stimuli. The
can be further reduced using mean-field techniques,
attentional biasing comes through feedback connec-
which in this case replace the temporally averaged
tions from areas outside the visual cortex. In this
discharge rate of a neuron with the instantaneous
framework, it is clear that the neurodynamics under-
ensemble average of the activity of the neuronal
lying visual search result from a top-down process
population. The dynamical evolution of activity
biasing the competition between neurons in early
within a cortical area can be simulated in the model
visual areas, which selects one stimulus in the visual
by integrating the population activity in the area
field. In other words, attention is an emergent prop-
over space and time.
erty of competitive parallel interactions across the
The computation of a visual search works as fol-
visual field.
lows. An external top-down bias from prefrontal
Precursors for this type of mechanism include
area v46 drives the competition in IT in favor of the
earlier neural network models such as the adaptive
population encoding the target object. Then, inter-
resonance model of Steven Grossberg and the inter-
modular back projection attentional modulation
active activation model of James McClelland.
pathways from ITV4V1 enhance the activity of
populations in V4 and V1 encoding the component
The Computational Neuroscience
features of the target. Only locations in V1 matching
of Attention
the back-projected target features are up-regulated.
Let us now see in more detail which kind of corti- The enhanced firing of the neuronal populations
cal architecture is behind visual attention. Figure 1 encoding the location of the target in V1 leads to
shows a functional cortical architecture that con- increased activity in the spatially mapped forward
siders attentional top-down processes interacting pathway from V1 to V2V4 to PP, resulting in
564 Neuroeconomics
Input
Further Readings
Figure 1 The systems-level architecture of a model of Deco, G., & Rolls, E. T. (2005). Attention, short term
the cortical mechanisms of visual attention and memory memory, and action selection: A unifying theory.
Progress in Neurobiology, 76, 236256.
Source: Deco, G., & Rolls, E. T. (2005). Attention, short
Desimone, R., & Duncan, J. (1995). Neural mechanisms of
term memory, and action selection: A unifying theory.
selective visual attention. Annual Review of
Progress in Neurobiology, 76, 236256; reprinted with
Neuroscience, 18, 193222.
permission.
Moran, J., & Desimone, R. (1985). Selective attention gates
Note: The system is essentially composed of six modules visual processing in the extrastriate cortex. Science, 229,
that model the two known main visual pathways of the 782784.
primate visual cortex. Information from the retina via the Rolls, E. T., & Deco, G. (2002). Computational
lateral geniculate nucleus enters the visual cortex through neuroscience of vision. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
area V1 in the occipital cortex and proceeds into two Press.
forward or bottom-up processing streams. The occipital-
temporal stream leads ventrally through V2V4 and IT
and is mainly concerned with object recognition. The
occipital-parietal stream leads dorsally into PP and is NEUROECONOMICS
responsible for maintaining a spatial map of an objects
location. Both posterior visual pathways send connections
The study of decision making has occupied research-
to and receive connections from the lateral prefrontal
ers in neuroscience, psychology, and economics for
cortex, where short-term memory functions take place.
Forward connections are indicated by solid lines; back
centuries. Since the late 1990s a group of scholars
projections, which could implement top-down processing, have begun to combine theories and methods from
by dashed lines; and recurrent connections within an area these three disciplines, forming the interdisciplinary
by dotted lines. The letter s = superficial pyramidal cells; field of neuroeconomics. What these scientists came
d = deep pyramidal cells. to believe is that the highly different approaches of
Neuroeconomics 565
the natural and social sciences to the study of decision underlies the same behavior that economists seek to
making could benefit from mutual interaction and predict. Traditionally, such research was based on
constraint. In one direction, theories from econom- brain lesions in humans and animals and on electro-
ics and psychology could serve to organize the ever- physiological recordings in anaesthetized animals.
increasing amounts of neurophysiological data into a Those techniques were very helpful in unraveling the
coherent framework. In the opposite direction, neuro- neural circuits for simple sensory and motor func-
scientific data could provide biological constraints for tions but were not sufficient for the study of higher
models of choice behaviors in economics and psychol- cognitive functions. The introduction of electro-
ogy. A series of papers, meetings, and books has been physiological recordings in awake behaving animals
shaping this field for more than a decade, attracting in the 1960s and of noninvasive imaging methods in
general public interest but also criticism from scholars humans in the 1980s and 1990s enabled neurosci-
in the three parenting disciplines. entists to examine neural activity while humans and
other animals were engaged in complex behavior.
Background In turn, those technological advances raised a new
The different strategies employed by economics, psy- challenge: Huge amounts of data could now be eas-
chology, and neuroscience in the study of decision ily generated, but these data needed to be sorted out
making can be thought of as three different levels of and interpreted in a meaningful way.
abstraction. At the highest level, economists strive The gap between the highest and lowest levels
to predict human choice behavior based on rigor- of abstraction is bridged by psychologists, who are
ous mathematical models. These are typically as if interested in the mental states and processes, includ-
models, with as if meaning that they do not attempt ing thoughts and emotions, that are caused by neu-
to unravel the actual decision-making mechanism at ral activity and that lead to choice behavior. In the
an algorithmic level and are only concerned with the second half of the 20th century, both economics and
behavioral accuracy of the predictions they make. neuroscience embraced concepts and methods from
This approach has dominated economics at least psychology, two processes that eventually resulted in
since the 1940s when the neoclassical school began the birth of neuroeconomics.
to dominate economic thought. Paul Samuelson and On the economics side, in the 1950s economists
others developed this approach around the specifica- began to pay attention to cases in which human
tion of a set of assumptions or axioms from which choices deviate from the normative predictions of
choice behavior could be mathematically derived. the mathematical models. Maurice Allais was the
Based on a small number of axioms as simple as first to describe behavior that violates one of the core
if a person prefers oranges to apples she will not axioms of the neoclassical school, a behavior better
also prefer apples to oranges, John Von Neumann known as the Allais paradox. Allais was followed
and Oskar Morgenstern developed their model for by Daniel Ellsberg, who described the now famous
choice between uncertain outcomes (expected util- Ellsberg paradox that violated yet another (although
ity), which was extended by Leonard Savage to admittedly less critical) axiom. By the 1970s and
include subjective estimations of outcome probabil- 1980s the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and
ity (subjective expected utility). Von Neumann and Amos Tversky had widely extended these early find-
Morgenstern also laid the foundations for game the- ings by demonstrating that robust axiomatic viola-
ory, in which decisions are affected by choices made tions were more common than has been previously
by many players with competing interests. Although suspected. In a series of experiments they revealed
these models were meant to describe empirical a wide range of choice patterns that falsified one or
human behavior, their mathematical construction more of the axioms of expected utility theory, lead-
gave them a more normative nature, in the sense ing many economists and psychologists to conclude
that they described how people should behave more that economic models could benefit from psycho-
than how they do behave. logical data and insights. This realization gave rise
At the lowest level of abstraction, neuroscien- to the discipline of behavioral economics, which lay
tists aim to reveal the neuronal architecture that at the boundary of economics and psychology.
566 Neuroeconomics
At about the same time that these processes took joined Daniel Kahneman, Hans Breiter, and others
place in the economic world, neuroscientists began to map the neural responses to expectation and
to feel the need to use models of mental processes in experience of monetary gains and losses. Breiter
designing their experiments and analyzing their data. and colleagues based their experimental design on
The ability to record the activity of single neurons in two principles from Kahneman and Tverskys pros-
awake behaving animals and to image the activity pect theory: that the evaluation of a risky prospect
of populations of neurons in humans allowed more depends on its framing as a gain or a loss and that
than a simple correlation between neural activation losses loom larger than gains of equal magnitude.
and observed behavior. Using models of cognitive In the second paper, a group of economists, includ-
function, neuroscientists could now look for corre- ing Kevin McCabe and Vernon Smith, together with
lates of hidden variables of these models. Studies of MRI specialists, were the first to use game theory in
this type constituted the new discipline of cognitive a human neurobiological experiment. Playing either
neuroscience, which lay at the boundary of neuro- against a human opponent or against a computer,
science and psychology. subjects had to decide whether to trust the other
In the mid-1990s these cognitive neuroscientists player. Results showed that those subjects who
and behavioral economists who were interested in tended to trust their opponents had higher neuronal
choice behavior went a step further: Some neuro- activation in regions of the medial prefrontal cortex
scientists began to examine economic models and while playing against humans compared to playing
contemplate their use as a normative theory for against computers.
neurobiological data. At the same time, a few econo- Shortly after the publication of these first papers,
mists considered a further logical reduction of their Glimcher published a book titled Decisions,
models, taking into account mechanistic constraints Uncertainty, and the Brain in which he articulated
and algorithmic features of the human nervous sys- the need for the use of normative theory in the study
tem. These steps set the stage for the emergence of of the neurobiology of higher cognitive function.
the new discipline of neuroeconomics. Glimcher proposed that economics could provide
such theory and called for neuroscience and econom-
ics to join forces in the study of decision making.
From Economics to Neuroscience
In the next few years, a growing number of neu-
The first neuroeconomics paper is probably a 1996 robiological papers on humans and other animals
review published by Peter Shizgal and Kent Conover that relied on economic theory in the design and
in Current Directions in Psychological Science, titled analysis of their experiments have been published.
On the Neural Computation of Utility. The paper Some examples are papers dealing with the eco-
explicitly employed normative economic theory nomic value of goods, game theory, the framing
to describe the neurobiology of choice in rats per- effect, loss aversion, intertemporal choice, and ambi-
forming intracranial self-stimulation. Following this guity aversion.
paper, in 1999, Michael Platt and Paul Glimcher While the contribution of economics to neurosci-
published their paper Neural Correlates of Decision ence is widely recognized in the neuroscience com-
Variables in Parietal Cortex in Nature. The authors munity, many economists maintain that economics
showed in that paper that neurons in monkey pari- does not stand much to gain from neurobiological
etal cortex encoded both the probability and the insights. Nevertheless, several recent papers suggest
magnitude of reward, a finding compatible with the a potential role for the use of neuroscientific data in
idea that these neurons played an algorithmic role in developing economic theories.
decision making closely aligned with the basic mod-
els of neoclassical economic theory.
From Neuroscience to Economics
In 2001, the neuroeconomics approach was
extended to human studies with the publication of In 2005, the economists Colin Camerer, George
two imaging studies that resulted from collabora- Loewenstein, and Drazen Prelec published a paper
tions between economists, psychologists, and neu- in the Journal of Economic Literature, in which
roscientists. In the first of these papers, Peter Shizgal they made the case for neuroeconomics from the
Neuroeconomics 567
economics side. Camerer and his colleagues argued on neuroeconomics was made by Faruk Gul and
that understanding the neural mechanism of deci- Wolfgang Pesendorfer in their article The Case for
sion should provide algorithmic insights that will Mindless Economics. Gul and Pesendorfer argued
constrain possible economic theories and may direct that the goal of economic theories is to make predic-
future studies in economics. In essence, what they tions about behavior and that the actual machinery
proposed was that instead of settling for as if by which choice is accomplished must remain irrel-
models, economists could now use neural data to evant to economists.
look for more mechanistic models.
At about the same time, Michael Kosfeld, Ernst
An Emerging Field
Fehr, and colleagues published a paper in Nature,
which is probably the first to show the potential A major role in the formation of neuroeconomics
role neuroscientific data can have in the shaping of was played by several meetings and conferences that
economic theory. In that study, subjects played a allowed scientists from different disciplines to inter-
trust game similar to the one used by McCabe and act and to define themselves as neuroeconomists.
colleagues described above. Critically in this study, This series of meetings eventually led to the forma-
however, in some of the subjects the brain levels of tion of the Society for Neuroeconomics. The society
oxytocin, a neuropeptide that is believed to play a has been holding annual meetings since 2005, fea-
role in social attachment, were increased before they turing the most recent studies in neuroeconomics,
made their decision. Kosfeld and colleagues found with the number of participants from around the
that those subjects treated with oxytocin were subse- world rising every year. In 2009, the society pub-
quently more trusting compared to a control group. lished a volume titled Neuroeconomics: Decision-
The next step was taken 2 years later by Glimcher Making and the Brain, which was edited by
and colleagues, who showed that neurobiologi- Glimcher, Camerer, Russell Poldrack, and Fehr and
cal data could be used to falsify existing economic authored by all the central scholars in the field. This
theories. By having subjects make choices between edited volume summarizes nearly all the most recent
possible gains of different monetary amounts and advances in neuroeconomics and serves both as an
different times of receipt the authors explored the introduction to the discipline and as a handbook for
neural correlates of intertemporal choice. What they researchers in the field.
found was that the neural architecture underlying Recognizing neuroeconomics as an academic
this kind of choice process is not compatible with a discipline, many universities around the world have
prominent economic theory of intertemporal choice. opened specialized centers for neuroeconomics,
One step further was taken by the neuroscientists offering both some graduate-level training in neuro-
Mauricio Delgado and Elizabeth Phelps in collabo- economics and support for independent researchers.
ration with the economists Andrew Schotter and These scientists, together with scholars in traditional
Erkut Ozbay. In that study, the authors first used departments for neuroscience, psychology, and eco-
neuroimaging to gain insight about the psychologi- nomics, continue to investigate the behavior and
cal processes that underlie the tendency of most peo- neurobiology of decision making.
ple to overbid in auctions and then used that insight
Ifat Levy and Paul W. Glimcher
as a basis for behavioral predictions that they tested
and confirmed. See also Allais Paradox; Decision Making, Neural
Thus, the first attempts to use neurobiological Underpinnings; Decision Making and Reward,
data in the development of economic models have Computational Perspectives; Decision Theory,
already been made. However, the degree of influence Philosophical Perspectives
that studies of this sort will have on economic the-
ory remains to be seen. Moreover, there is a strong
debate in the economics community not only about Further Readings
whether neurobiological measurements could affect Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2005).
economic models but also whether they should Neuroeconomics: How neuroscience can inform
affect those models. Perhaps the most famous attack economics. Journal of Economic Literature, 43, 964.
568 Neuroeconomics
Glimcher, P. W. (2003). Decisions, uncertainty, and the Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory:
brain: The science of neuroeconomics. Cambridge, MA: Analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47,
MIT Press. 263291.
Glimcher, P. W. (2011). Foundations of neuroeconomic Kosfeld, M., Heinrichs, M., Zak, P. J., Fischbacher, U., &
analysis. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Fehr, E. (2005). Oxytocin increases trust in humans.
Glimcher, P. W., Camerer C., Fehr E., & Poldrack, R. A. Nature, 435, 673676.
(Eds.). (2009). Neuroeconomics: Decision making and Shizgal, P., & Conover, K. (1996). On the neural
the brain. London, UK: Elsevier/Academic. computation of utility. Current Directions in
Glimcher, P. W., Kable, J., & Louie, K. (2007). Psychology, 5, 3743.
Neuroeconomic studies of impulsivity: Now or just as
soon as possible? American Economic Review, 97,
142147.
O
object dependence and some objections to it coming
OBJECT-DEPENDENT THOUGHT from rival conceptions of singular thought.
569
570 Object-Dependent Thought
no one else, not even your identical twin, could have is thinking about. Sometimes the debate over object
had the very same thought. The thesis that singular dependence hinges on the role of singular thoughts in
thoughts expressed with other indexicals, demon- action explanation. Here, we shall briefly sketch the
stratives, and proper names are object dependent is, strongest argument in favor of object dependence.
however, highly controversial, because of its alleg- The argument has three main premises. The first
edly paradoxical consequences. is a very general claim about the nature of thought
contentnamely, that it is essentially represen-
Allegedly Paradoxical Consequences tational, in that it represents the world as being a
of Object Dependence certain way. When you have what seems to be a
(perceptual demonstrative) singular thought, for
It is a consequence of the object-dependent view that
example, such as that lime tree is tall, your percep-
a thinker in an empty possibility could suffer the illu-
tion-based thought represents the world as being a
sion of having a thought when he was not, because
certain waynamely, that that lime tree (the very
his would-be thought failed to pick out an object.
one you are seeing) is tall. In other words, there is
But can we really be mistaken about whether we are
a certain condition necessarily associated with the
having a thought? That the answer to this last ques-
thoughtthe thoughts truth conditionwhich is
tion is no is the very reason why Bertrand Russell
such that, if it is fulfilled, then thought is true, and
notoriously restricted the possibility of genuine sin-
if it is not fulfilled, then the thought is false. The
gular thought about particulars to those whose exis-
second premise is specific to the nature of singular
tence we cannot be mistaken aboutnamely, mental
thoughts: The truth conditions in question must be
entities, such as after-images and other so-called
genuinely singular. What this means is that when the
sense data. A person may be mistaken about whether
truth conditions are stated, reference must be made,
he or she is actually seeing a tree but not about
not just to any object fulfilling certain conditions but
whether he or she is having a visual experience as of
to a particular objectnamely, the very object of
a tree. Another allegedly problematic consequence
your thought. It will not do, according to the object-
arises when we consider the duplicate possibility. In
dependent theorist, to state the truth conditions for
such a case, everything will seem the same to you:
your thought as follows: That lime tree is tall is true
The duplicate object (a qualitatively indistinguish-
if and only if there is a lime tree of such-and-such
able tree, say) does not appear to affect your con-
characteristics and it is tall (see the next section for
scious awareness in any way differently from how
one way of filling out such-and-such). Rather, the
the actual object affects it. Many of those opposed
truth conditions must make reference to the very
to object dependence, such as so-called internalists
tree you are seeing: That lime tree is tall is true if
about mental content, argue that in order for there
and only if that lime tree (the very one you are see-
to be a genuinely mental difference between the two
ing) is tall. The third premise has two parts: (a) in
cases, you must be able to detect the difference.
the absence of any object (i.e., in the empty possibil-
ity), it is impossible for there to be a singular truth
The Central Argument for
condition; (b) in the presence of a different object
Object Dependence
(i.e., in the duplicate possibility), the singular truth
A number of different arguments have been condition will necessarily be different. From these
advanced in favor of an object-dependent con- three premises, the object-dependent theorist infers
ception of singular thought. Many of these, espe- that singular thoughts are object dependent.
cially those of Gareth Evans and John McDowell,
involve a synthesis of key ideas of Gottlob Frege
and Bertrand Russell. Some of these arguments are
Rival Conceptions
unconvincing to their opponents because they rely Most parties to the debate accept the first premise.
on questionable epistemic principles as premises. The second premise is challenged by those, such
For example, some of Evanss arguments appear to as John Searle, who, influenced by Russells views,
rely on an unacceptably strong reading of Russells seek to give nonsingular truth conditions based on
principle that, roughly speaking, to have a singular quantificationally analyzed definite description con-
thought, one must know which object it is that one cepts. A definite description concept is a concept of
Objects of Memory 571
the form the such-and-such that purports to describe languages, can be applied to all types of singular
something uniquely. According to Russells quanti- thoughts in a psychologically realistic way.
ficational analysis, to say that the such-and-such is
Sean Crawford
so-and-so is to say that there is one, and only one,
such-and-such and it is so-and-so. For example, See also Anti-Individualism About Cognition;
to say that the present king of France is bald is to Descriptions; Descriptive Thought; Indexical Thought;
say that there is one, and only one, present king of Knowledge by Acquaintance
France and he is bald. If there is no such thing as the
present king of France (because France is a repub-
Further Readings
lic), then the original statement saying that he is bald
is not meaningless but simply false because part of Burge, T. (1974). Truth and singular terms. Nos, 8,
what it claims is that there is such a thing and there 309325.
is not. Burge, T. (1977). Belief de re. Journal of Philosophy, 74,
We can apply Russells analysis to our earlier 338362.
example as follows: The thought that lime tree is tall Crawford, S. (1998). In defence of object-dependent
is true if and only if the lime tree causing this very thoughts. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 98(2),
experience is tallthat is, if and only if there is one, 201210.
and only one, lime tree causing this experience, and McDowell, J. (1986). Singular thought and the extent of
it is tall. On this analysis, if you are in an empty inner space. In J. McDowell & P. Pettit (Eds.), Subject,
thought, and context (pp. 137168). Oxford, UK:
possibility, then, contrary to the doctrine of object
Clarendon Press.
dependence, you can still have a thought, but your
Searle, J. (1983). Intentionality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
thought will be false. This approach to demonstra-
University Press.
tive singular thoughts seems problematic, however,
for at least two reasons. First, the truth condition
in question implausibly overintellectualizes thought
content, counterintuitively prohibiting ordinary peo- OBJECTS OF MEMORY
ple, children, and animals, who either do not possess
or are not currently exercising the concepts of causa- Memory is a kind of mental state that has an object.
tion and experience, from having singular thoughts. Memories are about things. But what entities are
Second, it assumes without argument the Russellian the objects of memories? Are those entities mental?
view that only demonstrative thoughts about mental Are they states of affairs in the world? This entry
phenomena (this experience) can be truly singular. will examine three different approaches to this issue.
Opponents of object dependence who accept The approach will be philosophical (or conceptual)
Premise 2 of the main argument, such as Tyler rather than psychological (or empirical).
Burge, attack Premise 3. They seek to give genuinely Two preliminary points are necessary. First, what
singular but nevertheless object-independent truth counts as the object of a mental state? The key char-
conditions by employing a logic free of existence acteristic of memories here is their capacity to be
assumptions. Unlike classical logic, such a free accurate or correct. We can think of the object of
logic is designed to incorporate non-denoting a memory as that object, property, state of affairs,
singular terms, such as Pegasus, and accordingly or event whose presence makes the memory correct
places restrictions on some of the classical rules of and whose absence makes it incorrect. Second, we
inference, prohibiting, for example, the inference need to draw a distinction between experiential and
(via the rule of existential generalization) of there propositional memories. This distinction is drawn in
exists something that flies directly from the prem- different ways in philosophy and psychology. If you
ise Pegasus flies. If such a nonclassical free logic is propositionally remember that there is a computer
employed, singular truth conditions for some state- in my office, then you believe that there is such a
ments containing non-denoting terms can be formu- computer and you believe it because you acquired
lated. It remains to be seen, however, whether this that belief some time in the past and it has been pre-
relatively unexplored rival approach, whose genesis served until now. By contrast, if you experientially
and application lie in formal semantics for natural remember that there is a computer in my office, then
572 Objects of Memory
you are in a state wherein my office is presented to a false mental state could have turned into a true
you as having contained a computer (you have a mental state just because time has gone by.
sort of memory image of the computer) and you
are in that state because, sometime in the past, you Memory Is Its Own Object
seemed to perceive the computer. The question that According to John Searles token-reflexive view,
will concern us here is what kinds of entities make the object of a memory experience is a causal rela-
our experiential memories correct. tion that involves world and mind. The object of a
memory experience wherein Janes car appears to
The World as the Object of Memory you as having been blue is the following complex
At first glance, one would think that the objects of event: The car being blue caused a perceptual expe-
memory are worldly entities. After all, we say things rience of it as being blue, which in turn caused this
such as, I remember that you were at the party on very memory experience. This happens neither in
Saturday, or I remember that Janes car is blue. Situation 1 nor in Situation 2, so the token-reflexive
This way of talking suggests that the objects of my view accounts for the intuitions that our memories
memories are those states of affairs that consist in, are false in those situations. A concern for this view,
respectively, your being at the party on Saturday and however, is that it may build too much into the con-
Janes car being blue. Call this the world-directed tents of our memory experiences. What if the car is
view. The difficulty for it is the following. Suppose blue, you have a perceptual experience that presents
I perceive Janes car as being green, but it is really it as being blue, and it elicits in you a memory expe-
blue. Days later, I am trying to remember what color rience of it as being blue, but it so happens that your
it was and I happen to have a memory image of it as perceptual experience was not caused by the pres-
being blue. Call this Situation 1. Intuitively enough, ence of the car? Philosophers disagree on whether
we would say that my memory has failed me here. these perceptual experiences are true. To the extent
However, the world-directed view commits us to that you feel inclined to think that they are, this case
saying that, in Situation 1, I am not misremembering is a problem for the token-reflexive view, for it com-
the car. mits us to saying that your memory experience is, in
this situation, false.
Sensory Experience as the
Object of Memory Conclusion
One is then inclined to turn to the idea that the It seems that we have different notions of what
objects of memory are ones own past perceptual memory is supposed to do, and they pull us in dif-
experiences. This suggests a picture of memory as ferent directions regarding the objects of memory.
being similar to introspection. The idea would be We think that memory gives us knowledge of the
that, in both cases, we are attending to our own past just like perception gives us knowledge of the
mental states. In memory, those mental states are present. This pushes us toward the world-directed
past perceptual experiences, whereas, in introspec- view. We also think that it should preserve per-
tion, they are current mental states. This view, which ceptual experiences just like propositional mem-
we may call the introspective view, accounts for our ory preserves beliefs. This pushes us toward the
intuitions about Situation 1. However, imagine now introspective view. Despite the fact that the token-
that your memory experience of Janes car presents reflexive view seems, at first glance, unnecessar-
it to you as being green. The car is really blue and ily complicated, it seems that some version of that
your memory image originates in a past perceptual approach might be the best way to relieve the ten-
experience of it as being green. Call this Situation sion between these seemingly conflicting intuitions
2. The introspective view commits us to saying that about memory.
your memory experience of Janes car as being green Jordi Fernndez
is correct. But we would not want to say that. If you
misperceived the car as being green in the past, how Authors Note: This research was funded by two grants
can you be remembering it correctly now when it from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology for
appears to you as being green? It is hard to see how projects HUM2007-61108 and HUM2006-09923.
Optic Flow 573
Further Readings
Bernecker, S. (2008). The metaphysics of memory.
Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.
Searle, J. (1983). Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy
of mind. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. B
Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In
W. Donaldson & E. Tulving (Eds.), Organization of
memory (pp. 381403). New York, NY: Academic
Press.
Von Leyden, W. (1961). Remembering: A philosophical
problem. London, UK: Duckworth.
OPTIC FLOW C
or path rotation. However, up to now very few stud- flow cues used for visual feedback-driven control of
ies have examined how these cues are used for the self-motion are summarized below.
perception of path trajectory.
For the relationship between heading and path Walking Toward a Target
perception, given that heading is the tangent to James Gibson states that to steer toward a tar-
the curved path (Figure 2) and observers can infer get, we move in such way to keep the FOE in optic
heading as soon as they perceive path, recent stud- flow (i.e., heading) on the target. However, work by
ies from Lis lab have found that while heading and Simon Rushton and others has challenged this claim.
path perception are two separate processes, path They find that when observers wearing a prism are
does help heading perception when the display does asked to walk toward a target, they walk on a curved
not contain sufficient optic flow information for rather than a straight path. The prism deflects the
accurate heading estimation. Furthermore, accurate visual direction of the target from the observer, but
perception of path but not heading from optic flow it does not deflect the FOE in the optic flow pat-
depends on where we are looking, thus supporting tern from the target. The results thus support the
the claim that heading is a more reliable cue for the idea that observers rely on the visual direction of the
online control of locomotion. target but not the FOE in optic flow to walk toward
the target. Nevertheless, testing people in a virtual
Neural Basis environment in which optic flow information can
Many species have neural pathways that selec- be rigorously controlled, recent work by William
tively respond to optic flow patterns. The neuro- Warren and others finds that both the FOE in optic
physiological basis of heading perception includes flow and the visual direction of the target contribute
several cortical areas. Earlier single-neuron studies to control of locomotion on foot. The FOE appears
by Charles Duffy, Robert Wurtz, and others report to increasingly dominate control as more flow and
that neurons in macaque dorsal medial superior motion parallax information is added to the scene.
temporal cortex (MSTd) selectively respond to
radial, lamellar, and spiral patterns of optic flow. Braking
More recent functional magnetic resonance imag- The rate of expansion in optic flow specifies the
ing (fMRI) studies on macaque and human brains time-to-contact with objects and can thus be used
by Frank Bremmer, Andrew Smith, David Burr, and for the control of braking during driving. David Lee
others reveal that the ventral intraparietal area (VIP) proposes that by adjusting deceleration so that the
is also involved in heading perception as well as a rate of change in time-to-contact is near the mar-
human homologue of primate MST, the MT com- gin value of 0.5, one would stop at the moment
plex (MT+). of contact. Several naturalistic studies by Lee and
For the cortical areas involved in path perception, others report that hummingbirds indeed follow this
recent brain-imaging work on humans by David strategy in docking on feeding tubes. A behavioral
Field and others reports that the presence of road study from William Warrens lab also confirms that
markers, which clearly defined the path trajectory, observers adopt this strategy to control the direction
activates the superior parietal lobe (SPL) bilaterally and magnitude of braking for a linear brake with
in addition to the MT+ area. Presenting observers no higher order control dynamics during simulated
with distant road markers during heading judgment driving. However, recent work by Brett Fajen shows
reproduces the SPL activation, whereas presenting that observers do not rely on a single optical variable
observers with near road markers results in activa- for braking control during driving. As the dynamics
tion only in the MT+ area. of the controlled system influences the visual cues
observers see in the display due to their control
actions, observers rely on different optic flow cues
Control of Self-Motion
(such as global flow rate) to modulate deceleration
Gibson proposes that we use the information that during braking depending on the dynamics of the
we perceive from optic flow to guide our movement braking system (i.e., the mapping between brake
in the world. The main research findings on optic position and deceleration).
576 Optic Flow
The topic of perceptual consciousness has been of The Relationship Between Perceptual
great interest to researchers in recent years, ever
Consciousness and Attention
since the surge of research on what is called implicit If perceptual consciousness refers to those perceptions
perceptionthat is, perception without awareness. we are aware of, what is the contribution of attention
Prior to that, most researchers would have consid- to these kinds of perceptions? One frequently given
ered the term perceptual consciousness redundant answer, supported by a very large body of experi-
since the term perception was generally defined as mental evidence, is that attention is necessary for
the awareness of objects and events through the perceptual awareness. In fact, there are a number of
medium of our senses. Defined in this way, there perceptual phenomena that strongly suggest this. One
simply was no perception without awareness. It was of them is inattentional blindness, a phenomenon first
only when evidence began to accumulate that we reported by Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, which refers
could, in some sense, perceive objects and events to the failure to consciously perceive an unexpected
without being aware of themin other words, object that may appear exactly where ones eyes are
implicitly perceive themthat serious interest in focused when attention is engaged in some other task.
perceptual consciousness emerged. The primary evi- As shown by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris,
dence for implicit perception derives from evidence this can occur even when the unseen event would seem
of what is called primingthat is, that an object or to be highly salientfor example, a man dressed in a
event present in our environment can affect our sub- gorilla suit walking across a room in which people are
sequent behavior. For example, if a picture of a corn passing around a basketball. The gorilla may not be
stalk is flashed in front of us so quickly that we do seen when the observers are busy counting the num-
not see it, if we now are shown the word stalk and ber of passes among the players wearing either the
asked to define it, the first definition we are likely white or the black uniforms. Another closely related
to give is something on which corn grows rather phenomenon is that of change blindness, which refers
than the act of following someone obsessively. to the frequent failure to perceive a change in a scene
This is so even though the latter is the more frequent that you are viewing and monitoring for changes.
use of the word and is the definition most frequently The standard technique for demonstrating this phe-
given by observers who have not been primed by nomenon in a laboratory, devised by Ronald Rensink
the flashed picture of the corn stalk. Evidence of and his colleagues, involves presenting an alternat-
perceptual priming forces us to distinguish between ing pair of real life scenes separated by gray, blank
577
578 Perceptual Consciousness and Attention
fields. (The interleaved blank fields serve to eliminate mentioned, this additional phenomenon only
the motion transients that otherwise would signal the occurs in people who have suffered cortical dam-
presence of a change.) The scenes are identical except age (usually to the right cerebral hemisphere, more
that one or more elements are removed or changed specifically to the right posterior parietal lobe). This
in one of the pictures. Change blindness frequently disorder is called either unilateral, hemispatial, or
occurs unless the change(s) is central to the gist of visual neglect. It is characterized by the failure to
the scene. Another closely related phenomenon is the see (i.e., to consciously perceive) objects on the left,
attentional blink, which is normally demonstrated by located opposite the side of the lesion despite the
experiments in which observers are asked to search fact that if the objects were located on the right, they
for two sequentially occurring targets embedded in a would be seen. All explanations of this failure to see
series of rapidly presented other items. If the second point to inattentionthat is, the inability to attend
target appears between 200 and 500 milliseconds of to objects on the left. So here again, inattention is
the first, it is very likely not to be perceived. invoked to account for the failure to consciously
perceive objects that are otherwise visible.
Sighted Blindness
Attentional Load and Perceptual Consciousness
The above phenomena, which can be considered
instances of sighted blindness, that is, blindness Additional evidence of the centrality of attention
that occurs in normally sighted observers looking for conscious perception comes from evidence, pri-
at above threshold stimuli, are thought to be caus- marily gathered by Nilli Lavie and her colleagues,
ally related to the absence of attention. In the case relating conscious perception to attentional load.
of inattentional blindness, the observer is engaged This evidence suggests that the greater the atten-
in some task that requires attention when an unex- tional load, where load refers to the amount of
pected stimulus appears that, because it is not the attentional capacity required by a task, the less likely
object of attention, is not seen. Change blindness are stimuli that are irrelevant to the perceptual task
also is attributed to an absence of attention although to be seen. This again testifies to the importance of
it involves more processing steps than inattentional attention for conscious perception.
blindness. In change blindness the relevant ele-
ments in one array must be encoded in memory Is Attention Either a Necessary or a Sufficient
and remain there long enough so that they can be Condition for Perceptual Consciousness?
compared with the comparable elements in the other There are a series of difficult questions that arise from
array, while inattentional blindness simply involves the linking of conscious perception to attention. If
detecting the presence of a new object. The fact that attention is necessary for conscious perception, then
changes which affect gist are likely to be detected it must follow that there are no instances of perceiv-
is consistent with the failure-to-attend account of ing that do not entail attention. Furthermore, if it is
change blindness since the meaning of the scene is necessary, then where in the processing stream lead-
what we are most likely to pay attention to. Finally, ing to conscious perception does it operate? Is pay-
in the case of the attentional blink, the second target ing attention also a sufficient condition for seeing?
is missed because attention is still engaged in pro- That is, does attending always entail seeing, which,
cessing the first one and so is unavailable for the if true, would make visual awareness and attention
processing of the second one, which is therefore not indistinguishable?
seen. In each of these instances, it is the absence of It is difficult if not impossible to find an instance
attention that leads to the failure to see something in which conscious perception is independent
that is completely visible. It therefore would seem of attention. One example, suggested by Victor
to follow that attention is a necessary condition for Lamme, comes from the study of binocular rivalry,
perceptual awareness. which arises when the images viewed by the left and
right eyes are different. It has been suggested that
Visual Neglect
what we see under these conditions is not a func-
At least one other phenomenon also lends sup- tion of attention. There is, however, considerable
port to this conclusion, but unlike the three already evidence that attention does influence which of the
Perceptual Consciousness and Attention 579
two rivalrous images is seen, so this does not seem Attention Amplifies the Input
to qualify as a persuasive example of conscious The most common answer to the second ques-
perceiving without attention. In the absence of such tion about what attention adds that causes a stimu-
evidence, the hypothesis that attention is necessary lus which is the object of attention to be perceived
for conscious perception stands. is that attention amplifies the neuronal responses.
While it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up In other words, it enhances the level of activation
with instances in which conscious perception occurs produced by the stimulus, making it more salient.
in the absence of attention, it is not at all difficult to This is thought to be analogous to the way in which
come up with instances of attending and not seeing increasing stimulus contrast increases stimulus
anything. For example, paying attention to a loca- salience. This view is consistent with evidence show-
tion in space where there is nothing to see, or if what ing that variations in the direction of attention lead
there is to see is not visible either because it is pre- to qualitative differences in performance compa-
sented too briefly or is of too low contrast, does not rable to those found when stimulus quality is varied.
result in a conscious percept. This therefore must It is also consistent with the proposal made by Petra
mean that while attention is necessary for conscious Stoerig and Alan Cowey in 1997 that the cortical
perception, it is not sufficient for it, although in 2008 damage that produces visual neglect leads to deg-
Robert Kentridge and his colleagues presented evi- radation in the quality of the representation of the
dence that attending to below threshold or masked contralesional input of the sort generally associated
stimuli increases their capacity to act as primes. This with the absence of attention.
latter kind of evidence does indicate that attention
affects processing even when no conscious percept
Does Attention Foster Conscious
occurs.
Perception or Memory?
How Does Attention Enable If attention acts as an amplifier of input, does this
Conscious Perception? make the representation of the stimulus more salient,
which is why we are aware of it, or does attention
Assuming that attention is necessary for con- only enable the encoding of the attended input into
scious perception, at what point does it oper- working memory so that we are able to report it?
ate and how? These are large questions but brief The difference here is whether the amplification of
descriptions of suggested answers are possible. The the neural response to the stimulus, which is said to
first question has led to two competing accounts of be a function of attention, increases the likelihood
where attention operates in the processing of visual of our perceiving it or only of our reporting it. If it
input. In one account (early selection theory), were the latter, then our failure to report a stimulus
attentional selection occurs early in the processing to which we are inattentive would not be due to our
of inputs, while in the other (late selection theory) failure to see it but only to our failure to consciously
it occurs late. In a third account (see above), the remember and report it. It would be what Jeremy
level at which attention operates is a function of Wolfe has called inattentional amnesia. If it were the
the attentional load, such that the lower the load, former, then it would be a true failure of perception
the later the filtering and consequently the more and rightly termed sighted blindness or inattentional
input that is consciously perceived. The preponder- blindness. There is some disagreement over which of
ance of current evidence suggests that the atten- these two accounts is correct.
tional filter occurs late, after meaning has been
analyzed. This evidence is seen in findings showing
Priming
that highly meaningful stimuli, such as ones own
name, are seen even when viewed under conditions As mentioned at the outset, there is considerable
of inattention, which normally cause inattentional evidence that stimuli we do not see because they are
blindness or the attentional blink. Moreover, Arien flashed too quickly or because we have not attended
Mack and her colleagues have reported evidence to them, as is the case in inattentional blindness, the
that such stimuli are even seen with a high atten- attentional blink, and unilateral neglect, are capable
tional load. of priming. It is not clear, however, which account
580 Perceptual Constancy
this kind of evidence supports. What is clear from Researchers have studied color constancy as a func-
this evidence, however, is that the unseen stimuli are tion of illumination, color surround, chromatic
processed and encoded to some extent by the per- adaptation to prolonged exposure to a color, and
ceptual system in the absence of attention; otherwise off-color objects known to have a specific color
they could not act as primes. (such as an orange-colored cherry). Others have
examined lightness constancy as a function of over-
Arien Mack
all illumination, shadows, and brightness of the sur-
See also Attention and Consciousness; Attentional Blink
round. Another area of interest is shape constancy
Effect; Blindsight; Change Blindness; Inattentional where researchers have examined perceived shape
Blindness; Psychological Refractory Period; Visual as a function of object orientation and distance from
Masking the observer to the object. Others have looked at
slant constancy as a function of object shape and
configuration. Space is too limited to fully describe
Further Readings
all aspects of perceptual constancy here, so this entry
Kentridge, R. W., Nijboer, T. C., & Heywood, C. A. (2008). focuses in detail on the oldest and most thoroughly
Attended but unseen: Visual attention is not sufficient researched area of perceptual constancy research:
for awareness. Neuropsychologia, 46, 864869. size constancy.
Lamme, V. A. (2003). Why visual attention and awareness
are different. Trends in Cognitive Science, 7, 1217.
Size Constancy
Lavie, N., & Tsal, Y. (1994). Perceptual load as a major
determinant of the locus of selective attention. In the typical size constancy experiment, a compari-
Perception and Psychophysics, 56, 183197. son stimulus of adjustable size is located near the
Mack, A., & Rock, I. (1998). Inattentional blindness. observer, and a standard stimulus of constant size is
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. located at several distances from the observer. The
Rensink, R. A. (2002). Change detection. Annual Review observers task is to adjust the comparison stimulus
of Psychology, 53, 245277. until its size matches each standard. As one would
Shapiro, K., Driver, J., Ward, R., & Sorenson, R. B. (1997). expect, observers accurately reproduce the standard
Priming from the attentional blink: A failure to abstract when it is close to the observer (at the same distance
visual tokens but not visual types. Psychological Science, away as the comparison). However, adjustments
8, 95100.
can become increasingly erroneous as the standard
Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our
grows more distant from the observer.
midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic
If the observer accurately adjusts the near com-
events. Perception, 28, 10591074.
parison to match the standard at all distances,
Wolfe, J. M. (1999). Inattentional amnesia. In V. Coltheart
the data are said to show constancy. On the other
(Ed.), Fleeting memories: Cognition of brief visual
stimuli (pp. 7194). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
hand, if the observer sees distant standards as being
smaller than they really are and adjusts the compari-
son to be physically smaller than the standard, the
data are said to show underconstancy. Conversely,
PERCEPTUAL CONSTANCY if distant standards dispose the observer to make
the comparison too large, the data are said to show
Perception concerns the relationship between physi- overconstancy.
cal properties of the world and our conscious experi-
Historical Review
ence of them. One area of great interest to perceptual
psychologists is perceptual constancy. Perceptual Scholars have been interested in size constancy
constancy concerns the degree to which a percep- since ancient times. Euclid (c. 300 BCE), Ptolemy
tion remains the same under varying conditions. (2nd century CE), Plotinus (c. 300 CE), Ibn al-
Research in this area typically involves keeping some Haytham (c. 1030), Ren Descartes (1637), and
characteristic of a stimulus physically constant and Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1500) all described their
asking observers to make judgments concerning that observations concerning size constancy and offered
characteristic under varying contextual conditions. explanations for the phenomenon.
Perceptual Constancy 581
Empirical work on size constancy began in ear- window showed strong underconstancy, and mon-
nest during the late 1920s. Egon Brunswik super- ocular viewing through a dark tube displayed very
vised much of this research and provided the first strong underconstancy that almost (but not quite)
theoretical account for size constancy. Brunswik achieved a projective match, where the visual angle
believed that size judgments reflect a compromise of the comparison would actually be equal to the
between an objective attitude, where the observer visual angle of the standard. Subsequent research
attempts to adjust the comparison to accurately followed their multiple standard methodology.
reflect the physical size of the standard, and a sub-
jective attitude, where the observer defines size as an Summary of Empirical Research
artist would and attempts to adjust the comparison
In 2006, Mark Wagner conducted a meta-anal-
so that its visual angle matches the visual angle of
ysis of size constancy research (totaling 118 data
the standard. Here, the visual angle refers to the per-
sets) from the time of Brunswik to the present, the
centage or proportion of the field of vision taken up
majority from the post-Holway and Boring period.
by the standard, not its physical size.
A number of factors were found to influence size
Since all size judgments should reflect some com-
constancy data.
bination of these two attitudes, Brunswik suggested
For frontally oriented targets under full-cue
that all size judgments should vary between con-
conditions, objective instructions (which require
stancy, when the objective attitude predominates,
the observer to adjust the comparison to physically
and strong underconstancy, when the subjective
equal the standard) show overconstancy, the most
attitude does. Overconstancy is theoretically impos-
distant standard was seen as being +28% too large.
sible, and any data that show overconstancy must
On the other hand, apparent instructions (which
result from experimental error.
ask the observer to adjust the comparison to look
Unfortunately, empirical research of this period
or appear equal to the standard) approximate con-
often was at odds with this theoretical formula-
stancy, on average displaying a slight undercon-
tion. First of all, observers seemed incapable of
stancy of 2%. Projective instructions (which ask
fully assuming the subjective attitude. When asked
observers to match the visual angle of the standard)
to assume a subjective attitude, observers adjusted
show marked underconstancy, averaging 37% for
the comparison to be much larger than it should
the most distant standard.
have been to correctly match the visual angle of the
Reduced conditions (such as viewing in a dark-
standard. Brunswik described this phenomenon as a
ened room or through a small window) are asso-
regression to the real, and it showed that observers
ciated with underconstancy for both objective and
are incapable of fully assuming a subjective attitude
apparent instruction. When cues to depth are com-
and ignoring physical size. Trained, intelligent, or
pletely eliminated by controlling for the illumina-
artistic subjects were better at assuming the subjec-
tion of nearby objects, judgments approach a visual
tive attitude, but even these subjects could not fully
angle match.
overcome regression to the real. Second, a number
Flat stimuli (oriented parallel to the ground)
of empirical studies of this era resulted in theoreti-
under full-cue conditions also show strong under-
cally impossible results indicating overconstancy.
constancy, averaging 30%. For projective instruc-
Early research analyzed each standard separately.
tions, this overconstancy averages 70%.
Size constancy methodology changed significantly
Another factor that appears to influence size
after Alfred Holway and Edwin Boring introduced
judgments is age. Young children usually display
a new research paradigm in 1941. They asked five
underconstancy with an increasing tendency toward
observers to judge the apparent size of circular
overconstancy with increasing age.
standards located between 10 and 120 feet from
the observer by adjusting a variable comparison
Explanations for Size Constancy Phenomena
located 10 feet away under four viewing conditions.
Under binocular conditions, they found a slight The standard explanation for most size constancy
overconstancy (the comparison was made too large research is William Epsteins size-distance invariance
for distant standards), monocular viewing resulted hypothesis (SDIH). The great majority of studies
in constancy, monocular viewing through a small support the SDIH and find that perceived size (s') is
582 Personal Identity
related to perceived distance (d') and the visual angle Ross, H. E., & Plug, C. (1998). The history of size
subtended by the object () by the equation constancy and size illusions. In V. Walsh & J.
Kulikowski (Eds.), Perceptual constancy: Why things
s' = d' tan look as they do (pp. 499528). Cambridge, UK:
However, other explanations for size constancy Cambridge University Press.
phenomenon have been offered, including V. R. Wagner, M. (2006). The geometries of visual space.
Carlsons perspective size hypothesis. According to Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
this theory, observers are aware that in some sense
objects appear to shrink as they get farther from
them observer. Objective instructions incline the PERSONAL IDENTITY
observer to overcompensate for this effect, while
apparent and projective instructions cause observ- This entry is concerned with the concepts of a per-
ers to embrace this effect in differing degrees. son and of personal identity and with various the-
Suzanne McKee and Harvey Smallman propose the ories of persons and their identity. A paradox is
dual calculation hypothesis, which suggests that unearthed: We have strong reasons for thinking that
perceived size not only depends on perceived dis- any (human) person is identical to a human being
tance but also on surface texture and the inclusion yet equally strong reasons to deny this. Our concept
of objects of known size. Instructions can alter the of a person thus harbors a contradiction.
relative weights given to these different sources of
information. John Baird and Mark Wagner are able Some Terminology
to successfully mathematically model past size con-
stancy research with their transformation theory. In The phrase personal identity means different things
this theory, the physical sizes of stimuli are trans- in philosophy, psychology, and everyday life. Our
formed into visual angles at the retina. To recover concern here is with the phrase as it has been under-
perceived size, the visual system must engage in an stood by philosophers. Typically what philosophers
inverse transformation. However, this inverse trans- who discuss personal identity want to know is what
formation can lead to errors in perceived size if the makes it the case that a person at one time is the
visual system does not register the correct distance same as a person at some later time. Though less
to and orientation of the stimulus. Instructions, cue frequently discussed, philosophers have also wanted
conditions, stimulus orientation, and age can influ- to know under what conditions a single body
ence one or the other of these factors. houses one person or two (as in, e.g., cases of split
personality).
Mark Wagner Since the phrase personal identity derives from
person and identity, these two notions are concep-
See also Depth Perception; Stereopsis; Visuospatial tually prior to that of personal identity. However,
Reasoning this doesnt mean that they are prior in every
sense. Certainly, if we know what a person is, then
Further Readings we know what it is for the same person to persist
through time. Still, it may be that the best way to
Carlson, V. R. (1977). Instructions and perceptual
constancy judgments. In W. Epstein (Ed.), Stability and
discover the nature of persons is by sifting through
constancy in visual perception: Mechanisms and competing theories of what it is for a person to
processes (pp. 217254). New York, NY: Wiley- persist through time. If we know what changes a
Interscience. person may or may not survive, we will have more
Epstein, W., Park, J., & Casey, A. (1961). The current idea of what kind of thing is a person. This is what
status of the sizedistance hypothesis. Psychological motivates and justifies the methodology of thought
Bulletin, 58, 491514. experiments.
McKee, S. P., & Smallman, H. S. (1998). Size and speed Some comments on identity and person: In this
constancy. In V. Walsh & J. Kulikowski (Eds.), discussion, we mean identity in the sense of strict
Perceptual constancy: Why things look as they do (pp. numerical identity, not in the sense of qualitative
373408). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. identity. So we are not concerned with the sense of
Personal Identity 583
identical as it appears in identical twins. Twins may what it is for that person to persist is for that human
be very similar (qualitatively identical), but numeri- being to persist; if persons are bundles of percep-
cally they are two people, not one. Note also that in tions, then what it is for that person to persist is for
talking of identity our concern is metaphysical not that bundle to persist (though, unlike the persis-
epistemic. That is, we are not asking about the kind tence of a substance, the persistence of a bundle is a
of evidence we typically rely on in making judgments largely conventional matter). In this sense, the ques-
of personal identity (e.g., physical appearance). Our tion What are we? is prior to the question What
concern is with what, if anything, constitutes per- is it for the same person to exist through time? Lets
sonal identity. What makes it the case that a person examine various answers to the first question.
at one time is the same (numerically) as a person
at some later time? The answer to this constitutive Dualism
question will not be the same as the answer to the
evidential question, since evidence such as appear- Many modern philosophers are dissatisfied with
ance, or even fingerprints, is never a logical guaran- Descartes answer, for a variety of reasons. First,
tee of personal identity. Descartes dualism of soul and body may have
What of the term person? Why do we have such seemed reasonable when mentality admitted of no
a term? What distinctive work does it do? It would other explanation. But now that we increasingly
not be too controversial to maintain that we use understand mental activity in terms of brain activity,
person to delineate a certain kind of mental being the need to postulate a nonphysical soul as the bearer
namely, a self-conscious mental being. This defini- of mental states has vanished. Charles Darwins dis-
tion puts no restriction on the kind of entity that can covery, two centuries after Descartes, further rein-
be a person. As far as the definition goes, persons forced this effect. Second, many philosophers have
could be bodies, brains, nonphysical souls, robots, claimed not to understand how a nonphysical soul
Martians, parrots, dolphins, or creatures yet to be and its nonphysical mental states are supposed to
encountered. This liberality is a strength but also a interact with the physical realm. For interact they
weakness. For one might have hoped that an answer plainly do: Stick a pin in your leg and you cause a
to the question What is a person? would tell us sensation of pain. Descartes tried to address this
what ontological category (or category of being) worry, but few find his response plausible.
we belong to; that is, it would answer the question
What are we? Humes Answer
What of the Humean answer? In Derek Parfits ver-
What Is a Person?
sion of it the key idea is this: Just as the people and
Here then are some ontologically committing land that make up a republic can be understood
answers to the question What are we? We are without reference to the concept of a republic, so
the union of a nonphysical soul and a physical body a persons body and mental states (elements of the
(Ren Descartess answer); we are animals, specifi- bundle) can be understood without reference to the
cally human beings (the answer of contemporary concept of a person. (Only so can we think of the
Animalists such as Paul Snowdon and Eric Olson); self as reducible to the bundle.) However, Parfits
we are not substances (psychic or biological), rather Humean view faces serious problems. First, it is hard
we are bundles of perceptions with no substan- to make sense of simple mental states, such as pains
tial self to bind or unify members of the bundle and tickles, other than as had by a subject or per-
(David Humes answer). Hume famously compared son. We can make little sense of an unowned or free-
the self to a republic, an idea endorsed recently by floating tickle. Second, a special problem is posed by
Derek Parfit and called by him reductionism about more sophisticated mental states such as memory and
persons. intention. These states seem to have reference to per-
Clearly these answers would also answer the sons built into their content. My memory of tasting
question of personal identity. If persons are souls, coffee yesterday not only requires a current bearer
then what it is for that person to persist is for that but appears to implicate me in its content: I remem-
soul to persist; if persons are human beings, then ber that I tasted coffee yesterday. Parfit is aware of
584 Personal Identity
these problems and has an ingenious response, but it We have the mental states we have because of the
is fair to say that the view that mental states can be brain states we are in. But in that case it seems unfair
understood without reference to a person stands in to deny mentality to Alf. He has a complex human
need of considerable defense. brain (indeed the very brain I have), so why is he not
the bearer of mental states?
Animalism Suppose we say, Yes, fair enough, Alf does have
What of the animalists answer? Let us be clear what mental states and is a person as much as Garrett.
that answer does and does not involve. Animalists do But remember that the question were answering
not hold that it is a necessary truth that all persons arose on the assumption that Garrett is not identi-
are human beings. Perhaps dolphins or chimpanzees cal to Alf. So if Garrett is a person and it is now
qualify as persons. Perhaps there are nonhuman per- conceded that Alf is a person, then it follows that
sons on other planets. What animalists do hold is there are two people in my shoes! Generalizing
that we (human persons) are human beings. That is, from my case, it follows that the population of the
you are numerically identical to the human animal planet is twice what we thought it was. But this is
in your shoes. absurd. So to deny that Garrett = Alf leads to one
A human being can survive in a coma, irretriev- of two absurdities: Either we are forced to fly in the
ably devoid of mentality. According to animalism, if face of the well-established thesis that mental states
this fate befell me, I would continue to exist, but no depend on, and are generated by, brain states or we
person would then occupy my body. So I can exist are forced into a bizarre exercise in double counting.
without being a person, and hence, person (unlike Hence, concludes the animalist, we should accept
human being) is not the concept of a fundamental that Garrett = Alf.
kind of thing. Contrary to traditional views, the
question of personal identity is not the same as the The Case Against Animalism
question of our identity, since we are not essentially This is a powerful argument. It is unclear exactly
persons. where it goes wrong, but go wrong it must, for its
conclusion is manifestly false. If I were identical to
The Case for Animalism
Alf, then there could be no possible circumstance in
The animalist view strikes many as the merest com- which I survive but Alf does not or in which Alf sur-
mon sense. Are we not flesh and blood creatures, vives but I do not. Yet there are such circumstances.
members of the animal kingdom? Moreover, animal- Many would argue that, in the irreversible coma
ists have recently offered a compelling argument for example, Alf survives but I do not.
their view. The form of the argument is this: Suppose There are more fanciful examples in which I sur-
animalism to be false and we end up with an absur- vive yet Alf does not. As a highly trained athlete, I
dity, so animalism must be true. am naturally invited to be part of the first mission
Let us set up a version of the argument. Garrett is to Mars. The mission is a success and after a few
my name, the name of a person. We need a name of months on Mars we return to Earth. After a routine
the human being in my shoescall him Alf. The ani- checkup, doctors discover, despite no change to my
malists claim is simple: Garrett = Alf. (Analogous appearance or mental life, that all my biological mat-
identity claims hold for everyone else.) Suppose it is ter has been transformed into a hitherto unknown
denied that Garrett = Alf. Then the following ques- silicon-based life form. There is no animal (human
tion arises: Garrett has mental states, but does Alf? or otherwise) in my shoes anymore! Alf is an animal,
Either answer to this question faces a significant and essentially so: He could not survive without
obstacle. Suppose we say, No, Garrett is a person being an animal. Hence, Alf no longer exists. But
and he has mental states, but Alf is just an animal, I continue to exist. So I cannot be identical to Alf,
so he has no mental states only physical ones. The contrary to animalism.
trouble with this answer is that Alf has all my physi- This reasoning might be thought sophistical.
cal attributes, including all my brain states. It is now How can some bizarre and merely possible scenario
generally accepted that mental states, if not identi- in which I exist but Alf doesnt have any bearing
cal to brain states, are causally dependent on them. on whether I, here and now, am identical to Alf?
Personal Identity, Development of 585
the roles and opportunities afforded one by the com- to questions of personal identity. There are two
munity. Ones ego identity is, however, distinct from styles of commitment: identity achievement and
ones social roles. While the well-functioning indi- foreclosure. The identity achieved individual, as
vidual may have many social roles in life, he or she per Eriksons definition, has undergone a period
has only one ego identity (unless there is serious psy- of exploration and experimentation prior to mak-
chopathology). The foundations of personal identity ing meaningful identity-defining commitments on
development begin in infancy through the images of his or her own terms. The foreclosed individual
and experiences with significant others whom one has also adopted firm, identity-defining commit-
internalizes. Identity evolves during childhood based ments but has done so without prior exploration;
on the significant others with whom one emulates the identity-defining commitments of the foreclosed
and tries to identify. However, in Eriksons view, are based on identifications with significant others,
identity formation is more than the summation of particularly parents. Similarly, there are two styles
all significant identifications of childhood; rather, of identity noncommitment: moratorium and dif-
identity formation is the sifting, sorting, and synthe- fusion. The moratorium individual is in the process
sizing of earlier important identifications into a new of searching for meaningful identity commitments,
structure, greater than the sum of its parts. while the diffuse individual is uninterested in mak-
Initial identity resolutions are generally under- ing such commitments. These four identity statuses
taken during late adolescence, though identity for- have been differentially linked with various attach-
mation and reformation remain lifelong processes, ment styles, patterns of family communication, per-
according to Erikson. It is during adolescence that sonality variables, behavioral consequences, and
the biological changes of puberty, alongside ones developmental patterns of change.
growing capacities for pursuing psychological
interests and values, in combination with societal Additional Theoretical Approaches
demands for the assumption of adult roles and
Other general approaches to defining personal iden-
values that personal identity concerns, often first
tity include the following: (a) the narrative approach,
come to a head. He described the main psychosocial
in which writers suggest that personal identity does
undertaking of adolescence to be that of finding an
not exist until one constructs and tells a story about
optimal resolution to the identity versus role confu-
the self; (b) the sociocultural approach, wherein
sion task. A time of identity exploration and experi-
writers emphasize the roles of culture, society, and
mentation are vital to optimal identity formation.
the media as primary forces in defining individual
Failure to undergo this identity formation process
identity; (c) the structural-stage approach, in which
will leave the individual either drifting and center-
intrapsychic elements are emphasized in the individ-
less, an uninvolved spectator in life, or oppositional
ual identity formation process; and (d) an historical
and antagonistic, devising an identity based all those
perspective, in which changing historical conditions
values that parents would hate most, according to
are regarded as primary in regulating personal iden-
Erikson. Optimal identity formation serves as the
tity development.
cornerstone to the eventual expression of intimacy,
both with friends as well as a life partner. Jane Kroger
Marcia, J. E. (1966). Development and validation of ego- answered affirmatively, the casual responsibility is
identity status. Journal of Personality and Social attributed to her personality and not to the situation.
Psychology, 3, 551558. The attribution framework not only specifies the
Marcia, J. E., Waterman, A. S., Matteson, D. R., Archer, S. process of assigning causality, but it also, more prac-
L., & Orlofsky, J. L. (Eds.). (1993). Ego identity: A tically, provides a way of formulating predictions. If
handbook for psychosocial research. New York, NY: the attribution is internal, attributed to something
Springer-Verlag. about the gesturing driver, then one can predict that
he or she is more likely to show that behavior in
other settings, while if it is external, attributed to the
PERSONALITY: INDIVIDUAL VERSUS situation, then one can predict that other people are
also likely to exhibit the same behavior in a similar
SITUATION DEBATE situation. In this way, the distinction between person
and situation is connected to two other notions: the
The division of responsibility for a given behavior stability of individual differences and the power of
between the individual and the situation is cen- the situation.
tral to much work and debate in psychology. This
distinction is the foundation of attribution theory, Personality Consistency
underlies the division of personality from social
psychology, and bears on debates about the consis- Questions of the stability of personality, however,
tency of personality across situations. The division have troubled the study of individual differences for
in many ways resembles the debate between nature some time. While people are stable across time in the
and nurture, though both of these, being aspects of same setting, they appear quite inconsistent across
the individual, fall into the personality camp. Also situations. People who are aggressive in one setting
as in that debate, there has been a growing sense of will, in another setting, be quite meek, and those
the inadequacy and artificiality of the opposition of who are honest in one domain may be quite duplici-
person and situation and increased emphasis on an tous in another. In fact, such findings led Walter
interactionist perspective. This view of the interplay Mischel to suggest, in a controversial book that still
of aspects of the person and the situation in produc- frames much of the debate in the field, that person-
ing behavior is to some extent an empirical issue, ality consistency correlations across situations rarely
based on data on the limited predictive power of exceed .3 and that the search for broad predictive
pure person and situation accounts, and also partly traits is unlikely to prove fruitful. Those consisten-
a theoretical issue, based on a closer examination of cies that are found are frequently a result of method
what is meant by explanation and causality. variance or self-report bias. People who say they are
generally honest also report that they do not often
lie; it is when specific concrete behaviors are mea-
Internal Versus External Attributions
sured that consistency proves elusive.
Attribution theory, in its most basic form, provides Efforts to overcome the difficulty of predicting
the rules by which people distinguish, or ought to specific behaviors have taken several forms. One
distinguish, between behaviors that are caused by approach has been to suggest that it is a matter
attributes of the individual versus those that are the of reliability and that aggregating over multiple
result of the situation. When a woman is observed instances of concrete behavior will make prediction
gesturing rudely to another motorist, one can inquire possible. Another approach has been to move from
whether that indicates a short-tempered hostility in nomothetic approaches, which should apply to all
her or whether instead being cut off on the highway people, to more ideographic ones, suggesting that
represents an intolerable provocation. In Harold for only a subset of the populationfor example,
Kelleys classic formulation, one would gather infor- those to whom honesty is an important dimension
mation on whether she consistently gestures in that will there be consistency from one setting to another.
manner, whether she is alone in behaving that way, Another approach is to suggest that superficial traits
and whether, in other situations, she displays such may be unstable, but that central ones, such as the
behavior. To the extent that such questions are big five, form a stable core to personality. Such
588 Perspective Taking in Language Processing
approaches, while they have made some headway, than while waiting in line for popcorn is a result of
have not come close to establishing a way of charac- the situation. To suggest that either the person or the
terizing broad consistencies in behavior. situation is generally more causally powerful is not
a meaningful question. One can view the strength
Interactionism of personality as being the degree to which indi-
What has been an effective approach is to incor- vidual differences in a situation are predictive. The
porate the person-by-situation interaction into the strength of the situation can be viewed as the degree
model. The critical aspect of this approach is not to to which the average behavior deviates from what
expect consistency in behavior across all situations one might intuitively expect in such a situation (as
but instead only across ones that share essential fea- with the Milgram experiment) or from behavior in
tures. One might find, for example, that a person an apparently similar setting (as is shown in findings
is consistently shy in situations involving groups of of limited generalizability of dispositions). Thus, the
older people but that this trait is not manifest with strength of either person or situation has no bearing
peers or one-on-one. In essence, it is a way to find on the weakness of the other. Nonetheless, it does
clusters of situations that are psychologically simi- seem to be the case that it is harder to predict from
lar and so tap the same aspects of personality. Or personality than most people, including psycholo-
viewed another way, it allows one to predict behav- gists, expect and also that small changes in the situa-
ior based on consistency over time in what are effec- tion have a more profound effect than most expect,
tively similar situations. and so there is some meaning, albeit an ambiguous
This limited view of the power of personality in one, to the suggestion that the person is weak and
behavior appears to be addressing the same ques- situations strong.
tion as that addressed by attribution theory. It also Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld
seems consistent with conclusions about the power
of the situation from such findings as those of See also Attitudes and Behavior; Attribution Theory;
Stanley Milgrams classic experiment. In this work, Character and Personality, Philosophical Perspectives
perfectly normal people are led, by the situation
and the instructions of the impassive experimenter, Further Readings
to administer apparently lethal shocks to an inno-
cent stranger, regardless of their own personality. Kelley, H. H. (1973). The process of causal attribution.
American Psychologist, 28, 107128.
However, the notion of limited generalizability of
Mischel, W. (1968). Personality and assessment. New York,
personality across situations is, in important ways,
NY: Wiley.
orthogonal to those issues. The exquisite sensitiv-
Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Mendoza-Denton, R. (2002).
ity of personality to nuances of the situation makes
Situation-behavior profiles as a locus of consistency in
it hard to predict behavior from personality, but it personality. Current Directions in Psychological Science,
does not mean that personality plays any smaller 11, 5054.
a role. Nor does the narrowness of the expression
of traits mean that situations are powerful. The
variability in behavior from one person to another, PERSPECTIVE TAKING IN LANGUAGE
in a given situation, is a result of individual differ-
ences, regardless of whether they are predictable PROCESSING
or stable. That is, if one person cries and another
does not at the end of a tragic movie, there is no Perspective taking is the spontaneous consider-
question of person versus situation as an explana- ation of anothers mental statesthoughts, beliefs,
tion, and the debate is just about in what other and goalsto understand how they interpret a
situations he will cry. given situation. The ability to appreciate simi-
This issue is also captured with a closer look at larities and differences in perspective is important
attribution theory. If one asks whether that crying whenever it is necessary to coordinate ones own
behavior is due to the movie or the situation, one actions with those of other people. Such coordi-
needs first to specify the implied comparison group. nation problems arise in many different social
His crying more than other people is due to some- activities, such as in economic games involving
thing about him; his crying more during the movie cooperation and competition. Perspective taking
Perspective Taking in Language Processing 589
has thus been studied extensively by cognitive and busy, such as when they are multitasking, their abil-
social psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, ity to tailor their speech to the listener is drastically
computer scientists, and economists. reduced.
Participating in a conversation requires coordina- To design what they say for their addressees,
tion of thought and action on many different lev- speakers also need to be able to interpret their utter-
els. Language users must coordinate their thoughts ances from the perspective of the addressee. But
and actions because language is ambiguous: There speakers encounter major difficulty doing so. For
is no one-to-one mapping between what people say example, they do not fully take into account the con-
and what they mean. A critical question in modern straints of the medium. Utterances are more ambigu-
psycholinguistics is the extent to which perspec- ous on email than when spoken, but people expect
tive taking is necessary for coordination to suc- addressees to understand them to the same degree.
ceed. The audience design hypothesis assumes that Furthermore, when people try to use intonation to
people speak and understand vis--vis their common disambiguate what they say, knowledge of their own
ground: the set of information that they believe intention makes the utterance seem less ambiguous
to be mutually shared. Under this view, speakers than it really is. Consequently, when they try to
should take their audiences informational needs take the perspective of the addressee, they routinely
into account when deciding what to say. Similarly, overestimate how well the addressee will understand
listeners should consider speakers knowledge when them. Speakers even have the same difficulty taking
interpreting what they mean. Many theories of the perspective of their future selves, overestimat-
language use assume that perspective taking plays ing their own ability to understand what they meant
a fundamental role in speaking and understanding. when they listen to a recording of themselves in the
However, psycholinguistic studies suggest that per- future. This idea was foreshadowed in the 16th cen-
spective taking may play a more limited role than tury by Michel de Montaigne, who wrote that when
previously believed. reading his own writing he could not always find his
original thought: I do not know what I meant to
Perspective Taking by Speakers say, and often I get burned by correcting and putting
Experiments show that speakers include information in a new meaning, because I have lost the first one,
in their speech that is obviously crucial for under- which was better (pp. 425426).
standing. For example, when they identify a building
Perspective Taking by Listeners and Readers
to someone from out of town, they are more likely
to use a description than a name. But in numerous Although listeners do consider the perspective of the
cases where speakers could phrase their speech in speaker when they interpret speech, their ability to
ways that would reduce ambiguity for the addressee, do so is limited. For instance, when asked for help,
they often do not. They may call a baseball bat the listeners interpret the request based on the physi-
bat, even when the listener could think that they cal constraints of the speaker. Listeners do expect
are talking about the animal, a bat. They choose speakers to design what they say for them, and they
among different sentence structures based on what is attempt to take the speakers perspective. But it is
easy or hard to produce, not on what would be easy currently a matter of debate just how completely
or hard for the listener to understand. Although cer- listeners are able to use this information to con-
tain sentence structures can be made unambiguous strain how they process what is said. Under some
for the listener by using certain forms of phrasing, circumstances, listeners appear able to use this infor-
emphasis, or intonation, the evidence again suggests mation during the early moments of the processing
that speakers do not do so. Similarly, speakers tend of a word or phrase. Even young children seem to
to pronounce a word more clearly when it is less use perspective information in this way. However,
predictable, but this depends more on how recently experiments that have more closely examined the
the speaker has produced the word, not on the lis- time course of language processing suggest a differ-
teners need to understand. ent story: Listeners may be able to take the speak-
When speakers do tailor their speech to a lis- ers perspective into account to anticipate what the
teners needs, it seems to require much conscious speaker might refer to, but they cannot immediately
attention and active monitoring for potential ambi- integrate this information when they process what
guities. Consequently, when speakers are cognitively the speaker actually says.
590 Persuasion
Occasionally, listeners show complete disregard Clark, H. H., & Murphy, G. L. (1982). Audience design in
of the speakers perspective. This results in a sur- meaning and reference. In J-F. Le Ny & W. Kintsch
prising degree of egocentric-based errors when the (Eds.), Language and comprehension (pp. 287299).
perspectives of the listener and the speaker diverge. Amsterdam, Netherlands: North-Holland.
Such perspective errors are more prevalent in young de Montaigne, M. (1943). The complete essays of
children but are also present with adults. This sug- Montaigne (D. M. Frame, Trans.). Stanford, CA:
gests a developmental continuum in which listeners Stanford University Press.
learn over time to make better use of the speakers Pickering, M. J., & Garrod, S. (2004). Toward a
mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and
perspective but not to completely incorporate it into
Brain Sciences, 27, 169226.
the comprehension process.
Readers of literary works may also adopt the per-
spective of protagonists when they interpret what
the protagonists say or how they would understand PERSUASION
language. Yet when studies unconfound the perspec-
tive of the reader from the perspective of the pro- The way people change their attitudes, beliefs, and
tagonist, they discover that readers interpret text behavior is often influenced by their experiences
from their own perspective. It is later in the process and their interactions with others. The mechanism
of understanding that attempts are made to allow through which people adopt and change their atti-
for the perspective of the protagonist, if it is different tudes and behaviors based on contextual factors is
from their own. called social influence. Robert Cialdini defines social
influence as a change in ones attitudes, beliefs, or
Perspective Taking and Successful behaviors, which may be due to real or imagined
Communication external pressure(s). Typically people are exposed
to a number of influence attempts daily, sometimes
The idea that perspective taking plays a limited role without being consciously aware of it. On any given
in the coordination of meaning may be seen as con- day, a person may be prompted to apply for a credit
flicting with the intuition that speakers and listen- card, buy a product advertised on television or radio,
ers are routinely successful in communicating their and change his or her opinion about a politician by
intentions. Instead, it may indicate that the coordi- reading a news article online. Persuasion is one com-
nation of meaning proceeds via other mechanisms. ponent of social influence. Specifically, persuasion
For instance, there is evidence that a community of is the process by which an individual is influenced
agents can coordinate meaning without a representa- to adopt or change a particular attitude or belief.
tion of any agents perspective. To conclude, people People can be persuaded through a number of dif-
sometimes use perspective to coordinate meaning, ferent avenues (other people, advertisements, books,
but they need not do so to successfully communi- TV, Internet, etc.).
cate. During a conversation peoples perspectives This entry focuses on the influence of persuasive
typically come into alignment, thereby making messages on peoples attitudes and beliefs by review-
the active consideration of the others perspective ing the prevailing theoretical models of persuasion.
superfluous. These dual process models indicate that when form-
Boaz Keysar and Dale J. Barr ing or changing an attitude, people either think
deeply about the content of a persuasive message or
See also Conversation and Dialogue; Folk Psychology; make decisions based on surface characteristics asso-
Production of Language ciated with the message, such as the attractiveness of
the individual trying to persuade them. This entry
Further Readings also reviews general factors that may affect message
processing, and the six principles of influence.
Barr, D. J., & Keysar, B. (2007). Perspective taking and the
coordination of meaning in language use. In M. J.
Key Definitions
Traxler & M. A. Gernsbacher (Eds.), Handbook of
psycholinguistics (2nd ed., pp. 901938). San Diego, As stated above, social influence refers to the change
CA: Academic Press. in ones attitudes, behavior, or beliefs because of
Persuasion 591
external pressure that is real or imagined. There are to be long lasting. In other situations, people are
two general types of social influence: persuasion more likely to process a persuasive message through
and compliance. Compliance research examines the peripheral route. Peripheral processing occurs
changes in behavior resulting from a direct request. when an individual pays more attention to nonmes-
For instance, if an individual is asked to sign a peti- sage relevant factors, such as attractiveness of the
tion advocating that the U.S. government adopt a influence agent or the quantity of his or her persua-
universal health care system and he or she agrees to sive arguments. In this case, any resulting changes in
this request, the individual is complying with this attitudes or beliefs tend to be short term because the
request. Persuasion is focused on the change in a influence target is not considering the central theme
private attitude or belief as a result of receiving of the message.
a message. So, for instance, if an individual reads In their 1984 experiment, Petty and Cacioppo
a newspaper editorial that contains compelling rea- found evidence for these two different routes to
sons why the government should adopt a universal persuasion. They reported that when an issue under
health care plan and the individuals opinion on this consideration would directly impact the target of
topic is changed as a result of reading the arguments, persuasion, individuals were more likely to think
the individual has been persuaded. about and be persuaded by stronger arguments and
Additional terms relevant to an understanding by larger numbers of arguments, indicating central
of persuasion describe the individuals involved in processing of the message. However, when the issue
an influence attempt. First, influence practitioner, was not directly relevant to the target of persuasion,
communicator, or agent of influence are terms used arguments were not considered as carefully and the
to describe the individual who attempts to influ- number of arguments rather than the quality was
ence others. For instance, in the example above, the more persuasive. This is because the message was
person who made the request to sign the petition to peripherally processed and the number of argu-
change the health care system and the person who ments, rather than argument quality, served as a cue
wrote the editorial are the influence practitioners. of message validity.
Next, the target or target of influence refers to the
person who has the influence attempt directed at The Heuristic Systematic Model
him or her. In 1980, Shelly Chaiken proposed a dual process-
ing model of persuasion known as the HSM. Similar
Dual Process Models of Persuasion to the ELM, the model proposes two routes to per-
The prevailing theoretical models of persuasion are suasion: systematic processing or heuristic process-
the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and the ing. However, unlike the ELM, the HSM proposes
heuristic systematic model (HSM). These compli- that it is possible for message processing to occur
mentary models explain how individuals process simultaneously through both routes. According to
persuasive information and make predictions about the HSM, it can be both the quality of the argu-
how that information influences an individuals own ments and the quantity that simultaneously provide
attitudes or beliefs. information relevant to persuasion. When system-
atically processing a persuasive message, a person
engages in more effortful thinking, scrutinizing the
The Elaboration Likelihood Model
message carefully and engaging in more cognitive
Richard Petty and John Cacioppo introduced the effort. Heuristic processing is less thoughtful pro-
ELM in 1981. The ELM proposes that there are two cessing in which individuals rely more on cues, such
routes through which attitude change occurs: a cen- as the likeability of the influence agent to determine
tral route or a peripheral route. Central processing the validity of the message.
occurs when an individual thinks carefully about a In one of her 1980 experiments, Chaiken dem-
persuasive message. That is, a person will carefully onstrated the different message processing routes
consider the persuasive message to determine how to persuasion. Similar to Petty and Cacioppo, she
much merit the argument(s) have. In this case, higher found that when an individual had more of a per-
elaboration is involved with processing the message sonal stake with an issue, they were more likely to
and any resulting change in attitudes or beliefs tend systematically process a persuasive message. On
592 Persuasion
the other hand, when issue involvement was low message centrally or systematically. For example,
because they had no stake in the issue, influence someone who cares deeply about animal rights may
targets were more likely to use heuristic process- be more inclined to think effortfully about a poten-
ing. Under conditions of high issue involvement, tial law involving the treatment of animals. Similarly,
people showed more opinion change when there a person will more carefully consider voting for a
were more arguments, suggesting more thoughtful law banning after hours operation of an airport if
and systematic processing. However, when an issue their home is near the airport.
was less relevant, persuasion was impacted more Motivation and ability also play a significant role
by likeability of the influence agent rather than the in determining how a message will be processed
number of arguments, indicating a reliance on more and subsequent persuasion. Under certain condi-
heuristic processing and use of cues. Furthermore, tions a person may vary in the cognitive ability or
individuals in the study who were more involved the motivation to carefully process a message. For
with the issue spent more time thinking about the instance, a person who has spent a week studying
arguments, recalled more arguments, and generated hard for a biology exam may not be able or moti-
more message-relevant thoughts. vated to thoughtfully process a message advocating
a new university-wide security policy. Thus, he or
Additional Factors Impacting Persuasion she may resort to peripheral or heuristic process-
ing. A person who has had a relatively stress-free
Over the years, research on persuasion has exam-
week and no exams may be more likely to elabo-
ined many different factors that affect which route to
rate carefully on the new security policy, especially
persuasion a person will use to process a persuasive
if he or she believes the proposed policy will impact
message. Some factors that have been consistently
his or her life, because both motivation and ability
found to affect the processing of persuasive mes-
will be high. Finally, the quality and quantity of the
sages and the overall effectiveness of the persuasion
persuasive arguments may also influence persuasion.
attempt include issue importance or personal rele-
In general, research indicates that stronger, higher
vance (as noted above), source credibility and attrac-
quality arguments are more persuasive than weaker,
tiveness, motivation and ability, and the strength or
poorer quality arguments.
quality of the argument(s) in the message.
Overall, there is consensus in the literature on
Specifically, individuals process persuasive mes-
persuasion that a combination of these factors work
sages differently depending on whether the source
together to influence the processing of persuasive
of the messagethe influence agentis someone
messages. Generally, when a person has high moti-
they perceive to be credible. For instance, an indi-
vation and ability to process, the argument is strong,
vidual may be persuaded to adopt a more healthy
and the issue is relevant, more elaboration will occur
diet based on the advice of his or her doctor but may
and this will produce an enduring shift in attitude.
not have been persuaded based solely on the advice
On the other hand, if motivation and ability to pro-
of a friend. This is because doctors are assumed to
cess are low, people may rely more on cues such as
have more expertise in health-related knowledge. In
source attractiveness or likeability to make a judg-
this case, people rely more on heuristic processing,
ment that will likely produce short-term persuasion.
by using the expertise and status of the communica-
tor to evaluate the message. Similarly, attractiveness
The Six Principles of Influence
is another cue people often use as a peripheral or
heuristic cue when evaluating a persuasive message. While people are capable of processing persua-
That is, people may judge a persuasive message to be sive messages using the different routes reviewed
more valid if the source of the message is attractive above, people tend to be cognitive misers. That
because people generally associate positive charac- is, people process information using heuristics or
teristics with attractive people. rules of thumb that help simplify decision making.
As noted above, when a message has more per- Robert Cialdini proposes that most influence targets
sonal relevance or when people are more highly respond to a set of trigger features for persuasion
involved with it (i.e., when it may directly impact and compliance. Specifically, he argues that there
them), people are more inclined to process the are six common principlesheuristics or short cut
Persuasion 593
rulesthat people are likely to use when confronted celebrities make effective agents of persuasion
with a persuasion attempt by an influence agent. because they tend to be both well liked and also per-
Responding heuristically allows individuals to react ceived as experts.
quickly, saving time and mental energy. Heuristic
responding is not only efficient, but it allows indi- Scarcity
viduals to make informative and accurate judgments Another heuristic cue involves scarcity. The scar-
when mentally overloaded. As a result such auto- city heuristic states that if it is rare, it must be good.
matic processing can often lead individuals to make That is, if something is not widely available, then
accurate decisions. These six principles of persua- it is perceived as valuable. For example, during the
sion are as follows: authority, liking or friendship, 1990s Beanie Babies became a popular stuffed ani-
scarcity, social validation, reciprocity, and commit- mal. Many of these stuffed animals were rare and
ment or consistency. This entry will review each of limited in production. This scarcity led to an increase
these principles below. in prices, ultimately leading to a higher demand for
the toys. People came to believe that this product
Authority
was more valuable and increased their desire to have
When relying on heuristics, people tend to be the product. Because of the scarcity of the plush toy,
more persuaded by an influence agent if they per- an item that cost around $0.25 to produce some-
ceive the source as an authority figure. The authority times sold for hundreds of dollars.
heuristic indicates that if an expert says its true, then One study illustrated the importance of scarcity
it must be. One study on the influence of an author- in the context of sales of Australian beef. A com-
ity indicated that people were 3.5 times more likely pany selling beef knew there would be a shortage
to follow a jaywalker in a suit than one in casual of a certain type of beef from Australia. To examine
clothing. Other research indicates that people heed the impact of this scarcity, the researchers created 3
the recommendations of experts such as doctors, different sales scripts. With the standard script, cus-
scientists, or executives because these are authority tomer service representatives called customers and
figures that are assumed to have more knowledge took their orders as usual with no mention of the
than laypersons. This aspect of the authority heuris- upcoming shortage. With the scarcity script, the rep-
tic also often appears in advertisements that feature resentatives called customers and took their orders
product endorsements from actors who portray while mentioning the upcoming shortage. With
doctors on television shows. Thus, targets of influ- the scarcity and exclusivity of information script,
ence will be influenced by agents who appear to be the representatives called customers and took their
authority figures. orders while mentioning the upcoming shortage and
made it clear that this information was genuinely
Liking and Friendship not well known in the market. The average amount
Research on the influence of liking on persuasion of beef ordered using each version of the script illus-
indicates that under most circumstances, people are trates the persuasive impact of scarcity. With the
more persuaded by individuals that they like or find standard script, an average of 10 loads of beef was
attractive. This is typically based on a second heu- ordered; with the scarcity script, an average of 24
ristic involving the reliance on likeable individuals loads of beef was ordered; and with the scarcity and
as good sources of information. This liking heuristic exclusivity of information script, an average of 61
indicates that if a likeable person (especially if he or loads of beef was ordered. Thus, these results indi-
she is also similar) endorses something, it must be cate that scarcity in terms of both product supply
good. For instance, dating or wardrobe advice from and information is very persuasive.
a friend will likely be more influential than similar
Social Validation
advice from an acquaintance or stranger. Specific
research on this question indicates that negotiators Social validation or social proof is the tendency
who find common goals and shared interests with for people to look to others to determine appro-
the opposing negotiator will be more successful in priate attitudes or behaviors. Across cultures and
finding mutually beneficial outcomes. Additionally, situations, people follow social norms or rules for
594 Persuasion
behavior and change their behavior to match the one experiment, housewives who were contacted via
actions of others. This phenomenon is enhanced in telephone and asked to complete a short survey on
ambiguous situations where an individual is unsure household products were more likely to later agree
of the appropriate response. For example, one study to allow men to come into their house and classify
examined the extent to which people are influenced all their household products. Those housewives who
by the actions of others by varying the number of were not first asked to participate in the telephone
people looking up at nothing and observing the survey were far less likely to comply with the request
number of passersby who also stopped to look up. to classify household products.
The researchers placed either one person or five Overall, these six principles of influence are
people on a busy street looking up and staring at widely used cognitive shortcuts that people rely on
nothing. They found that 5% of passersby stopped to efficiently respond to social influence attempts.
and looked up too when only one person was look- Since persuasive attempts may be directed at indi-
ing up but 80% of passersby looked up when it was viduals in a quick and unexpected manner, this use
the group of five. of peripheral or heuristic processing can allow an
individual to process and respond to the persuasive
Reciprocity communication in a timely manner. Such heuristics
The rule of reciprocity states that people are or cues may lead to changes in ones attitudes and
obliged to give back to others what they have also in ones behaviors. However, relying on cues
given to us. People are more likely to be persuaded such as these principles can lead to errors in mes-
if they feel they owe the influence agent a favor. sage processing as well. For instance, by relying on
For example, if a person asks some of his or her heuristics, one may come to reject a strong and valid
coworkers to help him or her move, the coworkers argument in favor of one that comes from a well-
that had called on this person to help them move liked source.
in the past will likely be the ones to volunteer. Rosanna E. Guadagno and Nicole L. Muscanell
Reciprocity is influential both within individuals
social networksresearch indicates that widowed See also Attitude Change; Attitudes and Behavior;
women who gave and received equal amounts of Political Psychology; Social Cognition
emotional support were happier than those who
either solely gave or received too muchand out-
Further Readings
side them tooa study that examined charitable
donation rates reported that the inclusion of free Chaiken, S. (1980). Heuristic versus systematic information
address labels from the charity increased donation processing and the use of source versus message cues in
rates from 18% to 35%. persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 39, 752766.
Commitment and Consistency Cialdini, R. B. (2001). Influence: Science and practice (4th
ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
People are creatures of habit. The last prin-
Cialdini, R. B., & Trost, M. R. (1998). Social influence:
ciple, commitment and consistency, capitalizes on
Social norms, conformity, and compliance. In D.
tendency. Generally, people will look to previous
Gilbert, S. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of
attitudes and behaviors when confronted with an
social psychology (4th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 151192). New
influence attempt. Individuals will act or think in York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
accordance with previous actions or thoughts. For Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1981). Attitudes and
example, if a person was previously gregarious at persuasion: Classic and contemporary approaches.
a party, he or she may act the same way at another Dubuque, IA: W. C. Brown.
party to remain consistent with past behavior. Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration
Furthermore, if a person makes a commitment to a likelihood model of persuasion. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.),
certain behavior or idea, he or she will be more likely Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 19,
to be persuaded to commitment to a related request pp. 123205). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
at a later time. A well-studied example of this is called Pratkanis, A. R. (Ed.). (2007). The science of social
the foot-in-the door effect, which was introduced in influence: Advances and future progress. New York,
1966 by Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser. In NY: Taylor & Francis.
Phenomenology of Action 595
about actually occurs. In this respect, actional and subject matter is not. At least since Socrates, philoso-
perceptual experience are treated in exactly paral- phers have been concerned with the problems and
lel fashion despite their fundamental difference, as questions now gathered under that label. Essentially,
perception is also constituted by satisfied, veridical, the philosophy of action seeks to offer an account
perceptual experience. In contrast, the perceptual of distinctively human behaviorin particular, of
account treats action as independent of the experi- behavior that is characteristic of, to use Aristotles
ence of acting, which is denied a constitutive role. phrase, rational animals. This is behavior on the
Whether actional experience is perceptual or not, basis of which we make judgments about peoples
there is a wealth of empirical data on the relation goals, characters, and values, and it is the behavior
between these kinds of experience. It is tempting that grounds ascriptions of causal and sometimes
to think that proprioceptive experience is a prereq- also moral and legal responsibility to people for cer-
uisite for the experience of action. But the famous tain occurrences, outcomes, and states of affairs.
case of Ian Waterman, a patient who lost all sen- A philosophical account of the behavior just men-
sory input below the neck but still experiences him- tioned requires a good understanding of issues such
self as an agent, seems to show that this is not so. as what exactly actions, and their counterparts
Indeed, it has been suggested that the attenuation omissionsare; when an action is voluntary and
of proprioceptive experience rather indicates the intentional; whether there are genuinely free actions
presence of action. Many studies show that the pro- or whether freedom is an illusion; and, if there are
prioceptive consequences of ones own actions are free actions, what roles do reasons, intentions, and
attenuatedthis is why one cant tickle oneself. By the will play in such actions (which introduces the
comparison, exteroceptively accessed effects of ones problem of akrasiathe possibility of acting against
purposive movements are bound together with these ones better judgment because of weakness of the
movementsfor example, a sound and the bodily will). Other issues include how we should under-
movement that produces it are experienced to be stand the explanation of actions by reference to rea-
temporally closer than they actually are. sons, the role of emotions and of the unconscious
in actions, whether moral responsibility for actions
Michael Schmitz
(and omissions and their consequences) requires free
See also Action and Bodily Movement; Philosophy of
agency, how to understand collective agency, and the
Action agency of non-human animals.
One distinctive feature of the philosophy of
action is that its boundaries are relatively vague. The
Further Readings
reason for this is that the core questions in this area
Jeannerod, M. (2006). Motor cognition. Oxford, UK: of philosophy cannot be addressed without resolv-
Oxford University Press. ing problems in other areas, such as metaphysics,
Pacherie, E. (2007). The sense of control and the sense of the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language,
agency. Psyche, 13(1). Available at http://www.theassc ethics, and legal philosophy. Throughout its history,
.org/files/assc/2667.pdf the agenda of the philosophy of action has been
Roessler, J., & Eilan, N. (Eds.). (2003). Agency and self- defined by different questions, and, as a result, the
awareness. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. central debates have, at different times, been closely
Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality. Cambridge, UK: tied to different areas in philosophy. This entry pro-
Cambridge University Press. vides an overview of some of the central questions
Sebanz, N., & Prinz, W. (Eds.). (2006). Disorders of and arguments in the philosophy of action, as well
volition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. as an indication of which issues have been at the
center of contemporary philosophy of action.
PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION
From Aristotle to the 20th Century
The use of the label philosophy of action gained cur- Aristotle is probably the philosopher who dealt most
rency roughly in the second half of the 20th century. thoroughly with the various issues in the philoso-
However, although the label is relatively new, the phy of action. Throughout the centuries, most of the
Philosophy of Action 597
great philosophers grappled with the problems he caused and/or causally explained by a reason (a
raised and introduced new ones, but it seems right combination of mental states) that rationalizes
to say that the 20th century saw a revival of interest the action when the latter is considered under the
in this area of philosophy. This was partly due to the right descriptionthe description under which
publication in 1957 of Intention, a deceptively short the action is intentional. An action is also the cause
book by Elizabeth Anscombe, a disciple of Ludwig of other events (the actions effects), on account
Wittgensteins, who was also much influenced by of which new descriptions can be applied to the
Aristotle and by St. Thomas Aquinas. Intention original (basic) action. Accordingly, when someone
was greatly influential, and although many of the does one thing by doing another, there is only one
views she defended there have been forgotten or eventan actionamenable to many descriptions.
were never embraced, many of the contemporary Thus, on this picture, my action of pumping water
debates on action are framed in relation to her treat- is an event (the motion of my arm) caused by my
ment of the subject. Among other things, her dis- desire to replenish the water supply and my belief
cussion placed questions about intentional actions, that pumping water is the way to do so. The basic
which she characterized, roughly, as actions done for action, the motion of my arm, is an event that can be
a reason, center stagedisplacing questions about redescribed as my pumping water, as my replenish-
voluntary actions, which the tradition she was writ- ing the water supply, and so on, because that action
ing against had characterized as actions caused by event causes further events: the motion of the water
volitions (acts of will) and which had been the staple along the pipes, the filling up of the water tank, and
of earlier discussions. In the years following the pub- so on.
lication of Intention and especially after the publica- This doctrine about the relation between actions
tion in 1963 of Donald Davidsons paper Actions, and reasons, known as the causal theory of action,
Reasons, and Causes, the theory of action concen- was articulated by Donald Davidson. It is still prob-
trated mainly on questions about the metaphysics ably accepted by most philosophers even if some dis-
of actions and about the relation between actions agree on details and even though its detractors have
and reasons in the production and explanation of emphasized its various shortcomings.
intentional action. More recent work has focused One of these shortcomings is that accounts based
on debates about free will and moral responsibility, on this picture tend to deal with omissions mostly
autonomy and control, reasons and rationality, and as an afterthought. But omissions are an impor-
knowledge and action, among other things. tant part of the behavior of agents that falls within
the province of the philosophy of action, not least
because omissions and their outcomes are suscepti-
The Metaphysics and Explanation of Actions
ble to questions about causal and moral responsibil-
As mentioned above, a central question in this field ity and also because agents often omit to do things
is what actions are, together with related problems intentionally and for a reason. A central question
concerning the individuation and spatiotemporal relating to the distinction between actions and omis-
location of actions. In Intention, Anscombe empha- sions is whether there is, or there must always be,
sizes the fact that agents, whether intentionally or any morally significant difference between them, or
not, often do one thing in, or by, doing another. between making something happen and allow-
For instance, I may replenish the water supply of a ing it to happenfor instance, between killing and
house by pumping, which I may do by moving my letting die. Another is that of the relation between
arm up and down. So, in cases when one does one causal and moral responsibility. It is often assumed
thing by doing another, we need to decide whether that direct causal responsibility for an event is a
we are dealing with one particular action (perhaps necessary condition for someone to be held morally
amenable to various descriptions) or with many. responsible for that event. But omissions seem to
And if many, we may wonder how these actions are undermine that thought. For it seems that an agent
related: As part and whole? As cause and effect? In might be morally responsible for an event that she
some other way? did not contribute to causing if by causing we mean
Since the mid-1980s, the dominant doctrine has that some motion of her body caused, however
been that an action is an event (a bodily movement), indirectly, that eventfor example, when the agent
598 Philosophy of Action
failed to prevent the event in question through an the causal theory, either actions are causally overde-
omission. In other words, it seems that, when certain termined, or the mental is irrelevant or epiphenome-
conditions obtain, just allowing an event to happen nal. According to the standard causal theory, actions
could justify an attribution of moral responsibility are events caused by reasons, which are mental
for that event to the agent that allowed it to happen. events (or states). But actions are typically conceived
(An example might be someone who allows a child of as motions of the body and hence as physiologi-
to drown, knowing that he could have saved the cal events, and if so, these motions are, we are told
child without danger to himself, even when he was by neurophysiologists, caused by other physiological
not causally or morally responsible for the childs and neural events. So either reasons are identical to
predicament.) the neurophysiological events and states that cause
Other difficulties associated with Davidsons actionsin which case reason explanation (and cau-
view concern the idea that actions are events. For sation) seem superfluous, or they are not identical
instance, the idea that a basic action is to be identi- to thembut this has the consequence that every
fied with an event that is a motion of ones body action is causal both by a reason and by the cor-
seems to generate problems: To name one, if the responding neurophysiological events and states.
causing of the motion (my moving of my arm) and Most philosophers reject the possibility of this sort
the motion caused (the motion of my arm) are iden- of causal overdetermination. But then, any sense
tical, it seems to follow that the causing of an event in which reasons causally explain actions becomes
is identical to the event thus caused, which seems obscure. This conclusion has been expressed differ-
absurd. Moreover, although it seems easy to give ently (e.g., as the claim that the mental is causally
some actions a precise location in space and time irrelevant or epiphenomenal or that mental proper-
(e.g., my action of opening a tap), this is not so for ties have no causal role or that they are inert).
other actions: Where and when are we to locate Another reason for dissatisfaction with the causal
Johns action of killing James, when he kills him by theory is a sense that, on examination, it appears to
shooting him on Monday in the park, but James dies leave the agent out of the picture. The causal theory,
on Tuesday in a hospital? The same does not seem this objection goes, makes the agent appear, at most,
true of ordinary (nonaction) events. as the locus for the causal transactions between
The causal theory also faces the so-called prob- events (or states) that constitute her reasons and her
lems of deviant causal chains and of the irrelevancy actions. Thus, on this picture, the agent herself turns
of the mental in the causation of action. Davidson out to be passive where her actions are concerned!
himself diagnosed the problem of deviant causal This would be an ironic consequence for the causal
chains, for he realized that invoking causation, if theory to have since it was introduced supposedly to
necessary, is certainly not sufficient for a satisfactory explain what it is for someone to act for a reason.
account of what it is for an agent to act for a reason. Thus, unless it can bring the agent back into the pic-
The problem is that an action might be caused by ture, the causal theory does not explain why agents
a reason that rationalizes it without its being true should be thought to act at all, let alone to act freely
that the agent acted for that reason. Davidsons own or with moral responsibility. This objection has led
example is of a climber in danger who wants to rid some to revisit the traditional concept of agent cau-
himself of the weight of his companion and believes sationthat is, the view that there is an irreducible
that he can do so by loosening his grip on the rope, relation between an agent and her actions, while
and where these very considerations so unnerve him others have sought to revise this concept to free it
that they cause him to loosen his grip. So his belief from its traditional problems. But most contempo-
and desire cause him to loosen his grip and yet he rary philosophers tend to be skeptical of the very
does not loosen it for the reason he had for doing so: idea of agent causation, because, they claim, agent
He doesnt loosen his grip for any reason. This sug- causation is not an explanatory notion and it is
gests that a reason must not just cause the action but reducible to event causation: To say that an agent
must cause it in the right way. However, there is no causes an event, they would claim, is just to say that
widely accepted account of what this right way is. an action of the agent (an event) does. Part of what
The difficulty generated by the threat of the irrel- is at issue in these problems is how to specify the
evancy of mental can be expressed as a dilemma: In conditions under which an agent can be said to have
Philosophy of Action 599
performed a free actionan action for which he or her actionthat is, has second-order attitudes
can be held morally responsible. This brings us to (roughly, of endorsement) toward the first order
the much-debated old issue of the compatibility or attitudes of desire, which are said to be the origins
incompatibility of free will and moral responsibility of his actions. Since then, many philosophers have
with determinism. tried to develop accounts along these lines, which
are characterized by the prominence they give to the
concepts of control and autonomy.
Agency, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility
A related feature of current debates on free will
The traditional debate on these issues assumed that is that they are often informed by the thought that
moral responsibility requires freedom and that free- free action must be, in some substantial sense, action
dom requires alternative possibilitiesthe ability that comes about as a result of agents responsive-
to act otherwise. The question then was whether, ness to reasons: That is, agents must be acting for
if determinism is true, freedom and hence moral the reasons they take themselves to have. This of
responsibility are possible and justified, respectively. course raises the issue what reasons for action are.
That is, if actions have causes and if all causes neces-
sitate their effects, then actions seem to be deter-
Actions and Reasons for Acting
mined and agents, it would seem, are not free to act
(or to refrain from acting) and hence should not be A recent development in the philosophy of action
held to be morally responsible for their behavior. can be traced to work on practical reasoning (rea-
(The causal theory would face this problem because soning about how to act) and normativity (a much
it says explicitly that actions are events caused by used but underdefined term that concerns, roughly,
reasons, but anyone who accepts that the events that the kinds of requirement that norms, reasons, and/or
agents are said to cause could be necessitated faces values place on agents). This has resulted in a reex-
similar difficulties.) amination of the previously prevalent conception of
The abundant recent literature on the topic has reasons for action. Since the 1960s, most philoso-
a distinctive flavor for several related reasons. One phers of action conceived of an agents reason for
is that in the mid-1960s, Harry Frankfurt published acting, called the agents motivating (or explanatory)
a paper challenging the idea that moral responsibil- reason, as a combination of a belief and a desire.
ity does indeed require the ability to act otherwise. Beliefs and desires were usually thought of as propo-
In that paper, Frankfurt claims to offer an example sitional attitudes: mental states of agents that consist
where people on both sides of the debate about the in the agents taking a certain attitude to a proposi-
compatibility of free will and determinism would tion (to the content of the attitude). Thus, a motivat-
intuitively agree that the agent is morally responsible ing reason was typically construed as a mental state
for his action even though he could not have done with a content, which could (perhaps via a trigger-
otherwise. Much ink has been spilled on whether ing event) cause events (actions, or intentions that in
Frankfurts challenge succeeds, whether it begs the turn cause actions). But this conception of reasons
question against incompatibilists (who hold that free for action has come under pressure in recent years.
will and determinism are incompatible), and indeed This pressure has largely come from consider-
whether the thought experiments on which his argu- ations about the relation between motivating rea-
ments depend are cogent. Be that as it may, this has sons (the reasons for which agents actually act) and
led to a revision of the concept of an agent (or a normative reasons (the reasons there are for agents
person). Frankfurt, for example, argues that agents to act in certain ways, regardless of whether they rec-
(or persons) are characterized by their capacity for ognize these reasons)considerations that seem to
second-order mental states (that is, attitudes one support the conclusion that motivating reasons can-
has toward first-order attitudes, such as my belief not be mental states or indeed psychological entities
that I want to be liked by all or my desire not to of any type. The arguments for this conclusion vary
act according to that desire), and he has developed but its defenders tend to agree that what motivates
an account of agency in terms of identification. In an agent is not that he believed something but rather
this view, an action is properly an agents only if the what he believed. We are motivated, say, by what we
latter identifies with the springs or sources of his believe (e.g., that the food is poisoned) and not by
600 Physicalism
our believing it. And what we believe (i.e., that the Fischer, J. M. (1994). The metaphysics of free will: An
food is poisoned) is not a mental state. To put the essay on control. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
point differently, the reasons that motivate agents Frankfurt, H. (1969). Alternate possibilities and moral
are not their own mental states but rather aspects responsibility. Journal of Philosophy, 66, 829839.
of reality (as some would say, not mental states but Kenny, A. J. P. (1975). Will, freedom and power. Oxford,
facts). And while, traditionally, the response might UK: Basil Blackwell.
have been that this rests on a confusion between OConnor, T., & Sandis, C. (Eds.). (2010). A companion to
normative and motivating reasons, the insight that the philosophy of action. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
Raz, J. (1999). Engaging reason: On the theory of value
normative and motivating reasons must be closer
and action. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
in character than they have traditionally been sup-
von Wright, G. H. (1963). Norm and action. New York,
posed to be undermines this response.
NY: Routledge.
Thus, considerations about normativity have put
von Wright, G. H. (1971). Understanding and explanation.
pressure on the traditional view of motivating rea- New York, NY: Routledge.
sons as mental states with causal powers. However, Williams, B. (1995). Making sense of humanity.
it should be noted that the attempt to bring together Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
normative and explanatory reasons calls for an
explanation of the connection between motivation
by reasons, which are not mental states, and psy- PHYSICALISM
chological explanations that seem to refer to men-
tal states. In short, reflection about normative and
motivating reasons suggests that we need to think Physicalism is the claim that everything in the uni-
afresh the connection between deliberation, norma- verse is physical. That doesnt mean that there
tivity, motivation, and reason explanation. is nothing living or mental; otherwise, physical-
This brief overview of the philosophy of action ism would attract few believers. Instead, physical-
leaves out many important issues, such as the prob- ists hold that the living and the mental are types of
lem of akrasia, the role of emotion and the uncon- physical things. Physicalism is viewed as the default
scious in human action, the topics of collective or assumption for scientific approaches to the under-
social action, rationality and rational choice, and standing of mental life. The first main section of
the rise of so-called experimental theory of action. this entry focuses on what makes something physi-
But both what is included and what is left out show cal and refines our understanding of the claim that
how rich, interesting, and relevant this field of phi- everything is physical. The second focuses on the
losophy is. main argument for this position, while the third con-
siders the main problem with physicalism.
Maria Alvarez
The Nature of Physicalism
See also Action and Bodily Movement; Collective
Action; Explanation of Action; Freedom of Action; Earlier physicalistssuch as Thomas Hobbes
Mental Action; Phenomenology of Action provided a substantive characterization of the
nature of the physical as, for example, occupying
space and/or possessing mass. With the develop-
Further Readings ment of physics, the emphasis changed. The objects
Alvarez, M. (2010). Kinds of reasons. Oxford, UK: Oxford and properties characterized by modern physics
University Press. seemed very different from our everyday under-
Alvarez, M., & Hyman, J. (1998). Agents and their actions. standing of physical objects, yet it seemed a mis-
Philosophy, 73, 219245. take to take developments in modern physics to
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957). Intention. Oxford, UK: Basil prove that physicalism was incorrect. Thus modern
Blackwell. day physicalists, such as J. J. C. Smart, sought to
Dancy, J. (2000). Practical reality. Oxford, UK: Oxford define physicalism in terms of physics. They rec-
University Press. ognized that physics may conceivably develop in
Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on actions and events. Oxford, ways that would recognize nonphysical entities and
UK: Oxford University Press. that not everything physical is identified by physics.
Physicalism 601
For example, the properties of being a mammal or However, although this kind of supervenience
of being a chair seem to be physical but arent iden- labeled an intimate connection between types of
tified by physics. So they eventually came up with a properties, the nature of the relationship remained
characterization on the following lines: A property mysterious. When there is identity between those
is a broadly physical property if and only if either properties identified by physics and properties iden-
it is identified by a physics that sufficiently resem- tified by other means, then no further explanation
bles our own current physics (where by this they is needed. When there is no identity, the need for
mean the postulates of that body of physical theory some kind of explanatory connection is far more
broadly accepted in the late 20th and early 21st pressing. Talk of the properties identified by phys-
century, including the special and general theory of ics constituting all the other properties provided one
relativity and quantum mechanics) or it supervenes kind of popular answerjust as the arrangement
on those properties identified by physics (superve- of pieces of cardboard can constitute a box or the
nience will be described below). The basic idea is arrangements of bricks make up a wall. The desire
that a physics that postulated nonphysical entities for an explanatory connection, and attendant talk of
would be a significant departure from, and hence constitution, was popular for another reason. Many
not resemble, current physics as just understood. felt that physicalism must involve the idea that the
Physical objects and events are those that only have properties identified by physics determined the pres-
physical properties in the specified sense. Narrowly ence of all the other properties and were, in some
physical properties are just those identified by sense, the fundamental properties of the universe.
physics of the type indicated. As a way of cashing this out, the laws identified by
Great energy was then devoted to identifying what physics were taken to be the fundamental laws of
kind of supervenience was involved. Supervenience the universe.
is a type of covariation between members of speci- While these additional features (the presence of
fied families of properties, for example, between an explanatory connection, constitution, physical
properties of arrangements of bricks and properties laws being fundamental) certainly capture the kind
of being brick constructions such as walls. Although of physicalism that many find attractive, it is doubt-
identity between properties is a limiting case of ful whether they should be taken to be definitive of
supervenience, supervenience does not require iden- physicalism for, at least, two reasons. The first is
tity between them; otherwise, it would be ill-suited that this type of characterization of physicalism rests
to the task at hand since it would require that all on a highly ordered conception of reality in which
properties are identified by physics. Nor can this everything ultimately is based on physics. Physics
kind of supervenience be simply a lawful relation- may be important in characterizing the nature of the
ship between properties. Those who deny that physical but it is by no means clear that reality does
physicalism is true dont have to deny that there is have such an ordered character. Instead, physics
such a relationship between physical and nonphysi- could be seen as one of a range of sciences each with
cal properties. For example, suppose you believed its own subject matter and various kinds of relations
in ghosts and that, in the presence of ghosts, there between the subject matters. If physics was just the
would be a drop in temperature. Then there would science of the very small, then it is easy to see how
be a lawful relationship between ghostly properties the universe might be thought to be based on phys-
and physical ones but this, alone, would not make ics, but the subject matter of physics is broader than
ghosts physical. Thus, many philosophers appealed that with its own emergent phenomenasuch as
to a metaphysically necessary relationship, for quantum superposition and entanglementreaching
example, the kind that holds between having angles across wide areas of space. The second reason for
adding up to 180 and being three sided. No matter being dubious is that this type of characterization
how things might otherwise might be, the thought of physicalism ignores the possibility of emergent
ran, if two universes were identical in their arrange- physicalism. Emergent physicalism rests on the pos-
ment of the properties identified by physics (and no sibility that other sciencespsychology, biology,
other properties were added), then the distribution chemistrymay identify emergent causal powers
of all other properties, including, specifically, mental of arrangements of narrowly physical properties
properties, would be fixed. that cannot be understood in terms of the kind of
602 Physicalism
arrangements of properties that have been of interest The unattractiveness of these consequences has
to physicists. been questioned. Perhaps the causal influence of P
is hidden or revealed in systematic ways that need
The Main Argument for Physicalism not conflict with the apparent causal completeness
The main arguments for physicalism have derived of physics. Maybe systematic and extensive overde-
from causality. Often, it has been put, especially in termination is not so bad because it can be explained
the past, as a worry about whether something non- by psychophysical laws. It may not be a central com-
physicalethereal, or outside space and time, or the ponent of our understanding of our mental lives that
likecould influence the passage of physical events. P has an influence. Instead, epiphenomenalism may
So formulated, it has little real bite as there is no be true.
reason to expect that fundamental causal relations There has also been substantial debate over
should be readily intelligible and so no reason to whether those physicalists who deny that all proper-
deny that the nonphysical could influence the physi- ties are identical to those identified by physics are in
cal. More recently, systematic causal considerations a better position to avoid the argument. After all,
have been advanced that trade on no such assump- they too allow that P is not identical to N and P is a
tion. These are laid out in what is generally dubbed cause of the behavior. Responses to this latter worry
the overdetermination argument with its focus, center around taking causation between events not
invariably, on mental properties that are taken to be identified by physics as constituted in some way
the main candidates for being nonphysical. from causation between events that are identified by
Consider the feeling of awful pain you have (P) physics, in much the same way that broadly physical
after having just put your hand in a flame and, put- properties are taken to be constituted from narrowly
ting it neutrally, the neural state in the brain that physical properties.
neuroscientists have identified as concerned with Whatever the success of the argument from over-
pain (N). Suppose that P is not identical to N (or determination and its ramifications for physicalism,
anything else physical) but is correlated, perhaps, physicalism remains an independently attractive posi-
lawfully with it. The supposition that P is not iden- tion because it is seen as acknowledging the impor-
tical to N might be tempting because it can seem tance of scientific investigation into the nature of the
that, while neuroscience can explain why we feel mental and other phenomena and the central impor-
pain, its descriptions cannot exhaust how pain feels tance that physics can play in such investigation.
to us. As a result of being in pain, you withdraw
Problems for Physicalism
your hand from the flame. Whats the cause of this
withdrawal? If you say P or N + P, then you must Although challenges to physicalism have been
accept that there is something identified by physics derived from the nature of life, freewill, and inten-
(some component[s] of the arm) that is partly caused tionality (the power of thoughts to represent the
by something nonphysical: P. But then, either this world), the main challenge is generally agreed to be
conflicts with the apparently plausible thesis that the consciousness and phenomenal consciousnessthe
world described by physics is causally complete what its likeness of consciousnessin particular.
only those things identified by physics are required Physical descriptions of the character of phenome-
in the causal explanation of other things identified nal consciousness have been felt to be inadequate by
by physicsor we have overdetermination (which many philosophers. The point has been put in vari-
promises to be systematic and extensive because the ous ways, for instance, being unable to imagine what
argument can be run for many mental properties an alien creatures experience is like (such as a bat)
and their neural associates), or P is epiphenomenal. even if we have a full physical description of it or
We would have overdetermination if both P and N being unable to know what it is like to experience a
individually were sufficient to explain the activity red tomato if color blind. Each of these ways involves
in the armjust as somebody might be killed by additional factors such as the limits of imagination
two assassins bullets each of which, individually, or the nature of knowledge, which can obscure the
would have been enough to kill him or her. P would point. The clearest way to present the challenge is
be epiphenomenal if it had no effect on the arm, in to observe that there seems to be an explanatory
roughly the way that the color of a piece of fruit has gap between the nature of the physical properties
no effect on how much it weighs. of the brain (and its surroundings) and the nature
Placebo Effect 603
of color experience (say). We cant understand why Levine J. (2001). Purple haze: The puzzle of consciousness.
color experience supervenes on these other properties Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
whereas, in contrast, we can understand why liquid- Nagel, T. (1979). Mortal questions. Cambridge, UK:
ity supervenes on the relatively weak forces between Cambridge University Press.
layers of molecules. Noordhof, P. (2003). Not old . . . but not that new either:
The obvious explanation of an explanatory Explicability, emergence and the characterisation of
gap is that, in fact, we are talking of two wholly materialism. In S. Walter & H.-D. Heckman (Eds.),
distinct types of properties: physical properties and Physicalism and mental causation: The metaphysics of
mind and action (pp. 85108). Charlottesville, VA:
the properties of experience. This is an answer that
Imprint Academic.
physicalists cannot give. So their basic response has
Papineau D. (2002). Thinking about consciousness.
been to argue that it only appears to us that there
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
are radically different properties because the con-
cepts we have concerning the nature of our own
experiencesoften dubbed phenomenal concepts
have distinctive features not shared by concepts of PLACEBO EFFECT
either the entities identified by science or everyday
objects in the world. Nevertheless, it has proved to The placebo effect is a change produced by the
be very difficult to identify the precise features of administration of a substance or physical procedure
phenomenal concepts that explain why there seems that is not produced by the physical properties of
to be an explanatory gap. that substance or procedure. It is, instead, an effect
According to one line of thought, phenomenal produced by the psychological effects of administer-
concepts share with demonstrative and indexical ing the treatment. A placebo is a substance or pro-
concepts (e.g., that, I) the feature of being applicable cedure that cannot produce a particular effect by
without appeal to description. With an indexical, virtue of its physical properties. This entry describes
we dont need to describe ourselves in any particular the history of the placebo concept, its use in clini-
way in order to refer to ourselves by the pronoun cal trials, factors affecting the magnitude of the pla-
I. Likewise, with a demonstrative, we dont need cebo effect, and theoretical accounts of how placebo
to, indeed find it hard to, describe our experience effects are produced.
in any way in recognizing it as feeling like that. The word placebo comes from the Latin word
Unfortunately, while I am Paul Noordhof and placebo meaning I shall please, and for centuries,
A-delta firing [one type of pain] feels like that may it was assumed that placebos could placate troubled
both be informative, the latter remains additionally patients but not produce any real changes. It was
puzzling. Why should it feel like that? Lack of a not until the mid 20th century that researchers
satisfactory response has seen physicalism moving began to appreciate that placebos might produce
from being apparently irresistible to being a default changes in symptoms. Once that realization became
hypothesis that remains to be fully justified. widespread, placebos became commonplace in the
Paul Noordhof process of approving new drugs. Randomized con-
trolled trials (RCTs) soon became the gold standard
See also Access Consciousness; Emergence; Explanatory for testing new medications.
Gap; Mind-Body Problem; Reductive Physicalism In an RCT, subjects are randomly assigned to
at least two groups, an active treatment group and
a placebo group. Some trials may include three or
Further Readings more groups. For example, two different drugs may
Chalmers D. (1996). The conscious mind. Oxford, UK: be compared to each other and to a placebo, or sub-
Oxford University Press. jects might be randomized to receive different doses
Crane T., & Mellor D. H. (1990). There is no question of of the same drug. Assignment to treatment condi-
physicalism. Mind, 99, 185206. tion is double-blind, which means that neither the
Jackson, F. (1998). Mind, method and conditionals: physician nor the patient is told to which group the
Selected essays. New York, NY: Routledge. patient has been assigned. The placebo is made so
Kim, J. (2005). Physicalism, or something near enough. as to be indistinguishable from the real drug. It is
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. the same color, size, and shape. The idea is to keep
604 Placebo Effect
According to expectancy theory, placebos pro- the placebo effect in clinical practice. This has led to
duce placebo effects by altering response expec- an ongoing debate about whether deception might
tancies. For example, placebo analgesics produce be justified when it is likely to benefit the patients
expectancies of reduced pain, placebo antidepres- who are being deceived.
sants lead one to expect to feel less depressed, and
Irving Kirsch
placebo caffeine produces expectations of feeling
aroused. These response expectancies then elicit the See also Behaviorism; Reinforcement Learning,
expected responses in the form of placebo effects. Psychological Perspectives
Expectancy theory seems to do a particularly good
job of explaining some of the factors that affect the
strength of the placebo effect. People expect brand Further Readings
name medications to be more effective than generic Beecher, H. K. (1955). The powerful placebo. Journal
equivalents, for example, and they know that mor- of the American Medical Association, 159(17),
phine is more potent than aspirin. 16021606.
Benedetti, F., Pollo, A., Lopiano, L., Lanotte, M., Vighetti,
Conditioning and Expectancy S., & Rainero, I. (2003). Conscious expectation and
Although conditioning theory and expectancy unconscious conditioning in analgesic, motor, and
theory are sometimes pitted against each other as hormonal placebo/nocebo responses. Journal of
Neuroscience, 23(10), 43154323.
alternatives, modern forms of conditioning theory
Harrington, A. (Ed.). (1997). The placebo effect: An
are compatible with response expectancy theory.
interdisciplinary exploration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
According to these formulations, conditioning is not
University Press.
an automatic, unconscious process. Instead, it works
Kaptchuk, T. J. (1998). Intentional ignorance: A history of
by producing expectancies, which in turn elicit con-
blind assessment and placebo controls in medicine.
ditional responses. In the example of Pavlovs dogs, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 72(3), 389433.
conditioning trials lead the animal to anticipate food Kaptchuk, T. J., Kelley, J. M., Conboy, L. A., Davis, R. B.,
whenever the bell is rung. It is the anticipation of the Kerr, C. E., Jacobson, E. E., . . . Lembo, A. J. (2008).
food that then produces the salivation. Components of the placebo effect: A randomized
As applied to placebo effects, the integration of controlled trial in irritable bowel syndrome. British
conditioning theory and expectancy theory holds Medical Journal, 336, 9981003.
that conditioning trials are one meansperhaps Kirsch, I. (1985). Response expectancy as a determinant of
the most effectiveof producing the expectancies experience and behavior. American Psychologist, 40(11),
that then elicit placebo effects. Consistent with this 11891202.
approach, studies have shown that conditioning Kirsch, I. (2006). Placebo: The role of expectancies in the
procedures aimed at enhancing placebo pain reduc- generation and alleviation of illness. In P. Halligan &
tion produce expectancies for reduced pain and that A. Mansel (Eds.), The power of belief: Psychosocial
the expectancies are correlated with the amount of influence on illness, disability and medicine (pp.
pain subsequently reported. 5567). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Kirsch, I. (2010). The emperors new drugs: Exploding the
Future Directions antidepressant myth. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Moerman, D. E. (2006). The meaning response: Thinking
The importance of the placebo effect is now widely about placebos. Pain Practice, 6(4), 233236.
accepted. Besides its use as a means of distin- Montgomery, G. H., & Kirsch, I. (1997). Classical
guishing between drug effects and psychological conditioning and the placebo effect. Pain, 72(12),
effects in clinical trials, the placebo effect is increas- 107113.
ingly recognized as a component of active treat- Stewart-Williams, S., & Podd, J. (2004). The placebo effect:
ments. For that reason, the task of harnessing the Dissolving the expectancy versus conditioning debate.
placebo effect so that it can be used clinically is Psychological Bulletin, 130(2), 324340.
important. Hindering this effort is the ethical prob- Voudouris, N. J., Peck, C. L., & Coleman, G. (1985).
lem of deceiving patients and the general assumption Conditioned placebo responses. Journal of Personality
that deception may be necessary for effective use of and Social Psychology, 48, 4753.
Planning in Language Production 607
However, it is less clear when speakers select verbs, phonological plans, the generalizability of results
but speakers need not select them before encoding from simple descriptions of objects, variation in
other parts of an utterance. Disagreement centers on planning scope with speech rate, effects in articu-
whether speakers can select words from the same lation durations, similarities with other forms of
grammatical class within a phrase (i.e., two adjec- action planning, and developing theories that are
tives or two nouns) simultaneously or if they select less dependent on discrete symbolic representations.
them one at a time with selection affected by such
Zenzi M. Griffin
composite message representations.
Closed-class, functional elements such as articles See also Aphasia; Language Production, Incremental
(a, the) and verb tense markers (-ed, -ing) appear Processing in; Production of Language; Prosody in
to be selected via a different process than content Production
words are. The extremely high frequency of use
for functional elements should make their retrieval
Further Readings
very fast and accurate. Indeed, they appear to take
relatively little time to plan. However, these elements Brown-Schmidt, S., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2006). Watching
are acquired later than content words in language the eyes when talking about size: An investigation of
acquisition and may be selectively impaired with message formulation and utterance planning. Journal of
brain damage. Perhaps contributing to their diffi- Memory and Language, 54(4), 592609.
culty in acquisition and planning is the abstractness Chang, F., Dell, G. S., & Bock, K. (2006). Becoming
of their meanings (e.g., I walked vs. I was walking). syntactic. Psychological Review, 113(2), 234272.
Theories of language production tend to link the Dell, G. S., Oppenheim, G. M., & Kittredge, A. K. (2008).
retrieval of functional elements to the same mecha- Saying the right word at the right time: Syntagmatic and
nism that determines grammatical structure. paradigmatic interference in sentence production.
Language and Cognitive Processes, 23(4), 583608.
The selection of a word and retrieval of its sounds
Griffin, Z. M., & Ferreira, V. S. (2006). Properties of
appear separable although they nearly always occur
spoken language production. In M. J. Traxler & M. A.
in immediate succession. For example, speech errors
Gernsbacher (Eds.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (2nd
often involve selecting an unintended semantically
ed., pp. 2159). London, UK: Elsevier.
related word but retrieving its sounds perfectly (e.g., Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999).
substituting bike for car) or selecting the intended A theory of lexical access in speech production.
word but then flubbing its sounds (saying urvan Behavioral and Brain Science, 22(1), 145.
for urban). Sometimes speakers are able to select a Martin, R. C., Crowther, J. E., Knight, M., Tamborello,
word successfully but then fail to retrieve most of F. P., II, & Yang, C.-L. (2010). Planning in sentence
its sounds, resulting in a feeling of having a word on production: Evidence for the phrase as a default
the tip of the tongue. planning scope. Cognition, 116(2), 177192.
the view that peoples inherent tendencies to aggress Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). Adorno and
required a strong state and Rousseau contending colleagues argued that these diverse methods
that people are naturally inclined toward peaceful revealed a coherent portrait of potential authoritar-
coexistence). This entry describes modern political ians: Unrealistically positive about themselves and
psychology, beginning with Theodor Adorno and about parental figures, they redirect hostility toward
colleagues The Authoritarian Personality. It then socially marginalized outgroups. They value status
covers critiques of Adornos approach, the redis- and material success. Mentally, they are rigid, inflex-
covery of ideology in the 1980s, and modern ible, and intolerant of ambiguity, preferring to see
research on ideology and personality as well as on the world in black and white.
incidental factors that affect policy preferences and In the wake of The Authoritarian Personality,
voting behavior. Finally, charges of ideological bias there was a flurry of interest in personality correlates
among political psychologists are discussed. of ideology and in the validity of the specific meth-
ods used by Adorno and his team. Although there
Ideology and Personality were numerous criticisms of Adorno and colleagues
methods, especially of the reliance on subjectively
Political psychology in its current sense emerged as scored tests and interviews, the most lasting dam-
a discipline following World War II. Shocked by the age was inflicted by political psychologys increasing
ease with which prewar Germany had turned to skepticism about whether people (or, at any rate, U.S.
authoritarianism, researchers sought to understand citizens) possessed coherent ideologies to begin with.
the personality factors that predisposed individu- The most damning critique, advanced by Philip
als to support authoritarian leaders and regimes. Converse in The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass
Generally, they adopted a Freudian model that Publics, was that most people showed little or no
regarded early childhood as determinative of adult evidence of a coherent ideology. With the exception
personality. The most influential work in this tradi- of the roughly 10% of the population who were,
tion was Adorno and colleagues The Authoritarian in Converses terminology, ideologues or near ideo-
Personality. Published in 1950, it was an ambi- logues, survey respondents showed little evidence of
tious attempt to link personality characteristics a coherent ideological belief systemjust because
(and the childhood experiences that were thought people took a liberal (or conservative) stance on an
to have produced these characteristics) with politi- issue did not mean that they would take similar posi-
cal ideology, and it exerted a singular influence on tions on related issues. Furthermore, the temporal
the nascent field of political psychology. Adorno stability of attitudes was quite low: If a respondent
and colleagues were interested in the psychological was for, say, affirmative action in 1974, odds were
underpinnings of anti-Semitism and, more broadly, little better than chance that he or she would still hold
in support for authoritarian regimes. As such, their that position in 1976. Even awareness of ideologi-
research focused mainly on the personality charac- cal terms was strikingly lowvery few respondents
teristics of authoritarians, specifically authoritarian could correctly assign the terms liberal and conser-
submissivesthe followers rather than the leaders vative to the Democratic and Republican parties
in authoritarian regimes. A particular concern was and explain what each meant. Converses argument
the emergence of authoritarianism in a democracy, was extremely influential, and until the early 1980s,
and so Adorno and colleagues studied U.S. citizens researchers made few serious attempts to study ide-
rather than citizens of actual authoritarian regimes. ology. Rather, survey researchers of the 1960s and
The ultimate goal was to understand the personali- 1970s attempted to predict political attitudes and
ties of supporters of authoritarianism and thus to voting behavior on the basis of other factors, most
understand how authoritarian regimes can arise notably demographics and party identification.
and rapidly gain support, as was the case in prewar
Weimar Germany.
The Rediscovery of Ideology
The Authoritarian Personality drew on ques-
tionnaire measures (the most well known is the Possibly because of increasingly sharp partisan
potentiality for fascism, or F, scale), semistruc- divides in the United States, the 1980s saw a resur-
tured interviews, and projective tests such as the gence of interest in ideology, especially conservative
610 Political Psychology
ideology. Instruments such as Robert Altemeyers opposed to those whose polling place was in another
right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) scale, James location) were more likely (by about 2 percentage
Sidanius and colleagues social dominance orienta- points) to support an increase in the sales tax to
tion (SDO) scale, and John Jost and Erik Thompsons increase school funding.
economic system justification scale were intended to
measure broad attitudes toward authoritarian gov- Is Political Psychology Biased?
ernment and social and economic inequality.
It is probably fair to say that most political psychol-
Recently, John Jost and his colleagues have argued
ogists are personally politically liberal. Throughout
that conservative ideologywhich they define as a
the history of modern political psychology, this
resistance to change and a tolerance of inequality
has led critics to contend that the field is prone to
between social groupsis motivated by the psycho-
political bias. One kind of critique has focused on
logical need to control uncertainty and threat. In
how political psychologists formulate research ques-
its conception of conservatism as a product of deep
tions. The Authoritarian Personality was criticized
psychological needs, this model is akin to Adorno
for focusing on political conservatives as an other to
and colleagues view of support for authoritarian-
be explained; similarly, Jost and colleagues view of
ism as the result of peoples refusal to acknowl-
conservatism as motivated cognition has been criti-
edge negative feelings toward the self, parents, and
cized for assuming that the political views of conser-
authority figures. However, there are important
vatives, not of liberals, demand explanation in terms
differences: Adorno and colleagues took a Freudian
of underlying psychological needs and motives. A
perspective that treated the authoritarian personality
second type of critique deals with how key concepts
as the product of an overly punitive parenting style.
are definedfor example, Philip Tetlock has argued
In contrast, Jost and colleagues see conservatism as a
that the concept of modern racism (as advanced by
way of imposing order on an unpredictable, danger-
David Sears and colleagues) is inherently politically
ous world. In Political Conservatism as Motivated
biased in that it labels people who are opposed to
Social Cognition, they summarize a great deal of
income redistribution and school busing as mod-
research in the last 50 years showing a relationship
ern racists by definition. The validity of these cri-
between conservatism and personality constructs
tiques has been hotly debated, but recent work in
relevant to needs for safety and order: Conservatism
political psychology has been influenced by them, at
correlates positively with measures of anxiety, posi-
least implicitly. One recent example is the work of
tively with aversion to ambiguity and uncertainty,
Jon Haidt and colleagues on the moral foundations
and negatively with sensation seeking and openness
underlying the political views of liberals and conser-
to new experiences. Although Jost and colleagues
vatives, which argues that the two groups rely on
conclusions (and Josts focus on conservatism in
divergent but equally valid moral intuitions.
particular) have been vigorously debated, it seems
clear that the study of ideology and the psychologi-
Conclusion
cal motives that underlie it are once again central to
political psychology. Political psychologythe study of how human
This is not to say that political psychologists see nature shapes political lifehas attracted the interest
people as having completely coherent political views. of philosophers dating back to the ancient Greeks.
In fact, a robust stream of research has examined the More recently, empirical researchers have sought to
effect of normatively irrelevant factors on peoples apply the tools and paradigms of modern psychol-
policy evaluations and voting behavior. For example, ogy to the study of political beliefs and behavior.
Geoffrey Cohen has shown that people often attend Political psychology emerged as a discipline follow-
to the political party advocating a policy, rather ing World War II with Theodor Adorno and col-
than to the policys actual content, when deciding leagues studies of the authoritarian personality.
whether to support or oppose it. Even more startling Although interest in ideology waned for a time as
is the effect of completely irrelevant contextual fac- researchers focused on nonideological predictors
tors on peoples actual voting behavior. Candidates of voting behavior, personality-driven research into
who were listed first on the ballot gained an aver- political ideology, especially conservative ideology,
age advantage of 2.5 percentage points across 118 has enjoyed a recent revival. This focus on conser-
Ohio races, and Arizonans who voted in a school (as vative ideology has been criticized as ideologically
Preconscious Free Will 611
biased, and some recent research has sought to they may roughly but accurately represent precon-
explain the moral intuitions underlying both lib- scious mental processes that are responsible for such
eral and conservative ideologies. Complementary acts.
research has examined the effects of incidental fac-
tors, such as ballot position or polling place, on vot- How Free Will Is Normally Experienced
ers choices.
Within philosophy, free will is commonly thought
Yoel Inbar and David A. Pizarro of as free to the extent that its operations are
not entirely determined by physical causal laws.
See also Intergroup Conflict; Intergroup Conflict, However, freely willed actions are not usually expe-
Models of; Motivated Thinking; Persuasion rienced as being entirely free of determining factors.
Rather, choices, decisions, and actions are nor-
Further Readings mally experienced as operating, with some degrees
of freedom, within complex mental, physical, and
Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., &
social constraints. Consequently, psychologists
Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality.
have typically focused their interest on the systems
New York, NY: Harper.
Altemeyer, R. A. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism.
that enable humans to have the freedom to choose,
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: University of Manitoba
decide, and act that they actually experience them-
Press. selves to havea form of constrained free will.
Berger, J., Meredith, M., & Wheeler, S. C. (2008). Studies of voluntary action in humans have made it
Contextual priming: Where people vote affects how they clear that such systems need to include inner needs
vote. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and goals, a global knowledge store (based on pre-
105(26), 8846. vious interactions with the world), processes for
Converse, P. E. (1964). The nature of belief systems in mass modeling current inner and external states of affairs,
publics. In D. Apter (Ed.), Ideology and discontent (pp. alternative strategies for action, methods for assess-
206261). New York, NY: Free Press. ing the likely success of alternative strategies in the
Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. (2009). Liberals and light of existing physical and social constraints, and
conservatives use different sets of moral foundations. the ability to learn from experience. Although such
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, systems follow deterministic principles, their opera-
10291046. tion can be partly self-organizing and flexible, and
Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. their complexity can allow sufficient degrees of free-
(2003). Political conservatism as motivated social dom to accurately model the ability to make choices
cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339375. and decisions, within the available alternatives, that
Miller, J. M., & Krosnick, J. A. (1998). The impact of humans actually experience. Given this, there is
candidate name order on election outcomes. Public nothing within current psychological understand-
Opinion Quarterly, 62(3), 291. ing of the mind, viewed as a complex system, which
Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An rules out a form of constrained free willa position
intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression.
known in philosophy of mind as compatibilism.
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Tetlock, P. E. (1994). Political psychology or politicized
Distinguishing Free Will From
psychology: Is the road to scientific hell paved with
good moral intentions? Political Psychology, 15,
Conscious Free Will
509529. Free will does, however, have to be distinguished
from conscious free will, because in principle, the
operations of such decision-making systems do not
have to be conscious. If the detailed information
PRECONSCIOUS FREE WILL processing involved could be sufficiently well speci-
fied, it could, for example, operate equally well in a
This entry presents scientific evidence that the con- nonconscious robot. Neuropsychological findings
scious feelings of wishing and deciding that we usu- have also cast doubt on the role of the conscious
ally think of as determining our voluntary acts are experiences associated with willing and deciding in
not themselves responsible for those acts, although the operation of the volitional processes themselves.
612 Preconscious Free Will
It has been known for over 40 years that volun- measured over frontally placed electrodes that acts
tary acts are preceded by a slow negative shift in as an index of response inhibition, occurring about
electrical potential recorded at the scalp known 200 ms after a conscious cue not to act appears.
as the readiness potential (RP) and that this shift
can precede the act by up to one second or more. Where Free Will Fits Into Mental Processing
More significantly, the neurophysiologist Benjamin Given such findings, is conscious free will an illu-
Libet found that, for simple spontaneous acts such sion? In assessing this, it is important to note that
as flexing the wrist or fingers, RP even preceded free will is not a special case. As Max Velmans has
the experienced wish to flex the wrist or fingers by pointed out, just as conscious wishes and decisions
around 350 milliseconds, suggesting that the brain follow the neural processing required to gener-
is preparing to act even before the conscious wish to ate them, conscious percepts follow the perceptual
act appears! processing required to produce them, conscious
Given its radical consequences, this finding and thoughts follow the cognitive processing required
the experimental methods used to obtain it have been to produce them and so on. In these cases, the
the subject of considerable discussion and debate. conscious phenomenology that results from brain
The broad consensus, however, is that the findings processing represents the outcome of that process-
are not just artifacts. They were confirmed, for ing without itself being that processingand it is
example, by Patrick Haggard and Martin Eimer who indeed illusory to confuse the products of mental
went on to investigate the preparedness of the brain processing with the processing itself. Such conscious
to act with either the left or right hand, indexed by experiences can nevertheless give useful information
the lateralized readiness potential (LRP), a negative about their mental antecedents. Visual experiences
shift in electrical potential in the cerebral hemisphere give useful information about the visual features
on the opposite side to the active hand, when com- of the world that have been processed; thoughts in
pared to the electrical potential in the one on the the form of inner speech provide useful information
same side. Again, as with RP, LRP occurred before about the nature of prior cognitive processing and so
the conscious wish to move a given hand, although on. Similarly, feelings of being able to choose among
in this case by around 100 milliseconds (ms). alternatives can accurately reflect the operation of
In an attempt to find a role for the conscious preconscious decision-making processes constrained
experiences of willing themselves, Libet pointed out by inner goals and needs, social and physical con-
that although conscious wishes follow the RP by straints, and so onsupporting a form of what
around 350 ms, they precede the act by around 150 Velmans refers to as preconscious free will.
ms, time enough to veto the wish. So he suggested
that the ability to veto the wish is the function of Max Velmans
conscious volition (rather like a conscious Freudian
ego controlling the unconscious id). However, a See also Consciousness and the Unconscious; Freedom of
decision not to act (after a readiness to do so) can Action; Voluntary Action, Illusion of
be shown to have its own antecedents. Using go or
no-go tasks where subjects were given a signal to Further Readings
either press a button or withhold pressing that but- Banks, W., & Pockett, S. (2007). Benjamin Libets work on
ton, Gethin Hughes found that response inhibition the neuroscience of free will. In M. Velmans & S.
could be preconsciously influenced in various ways. Schneider (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to
For example, he found that a signal not to press the consciousness (pp. 657670). Malden, MA: Basil
button presented 100 ms before the conscious no-go Blackwell.
signal, produced earlier response inhibition, even Hughes, G. (2008). Is consciousness required to inhibit an
when the preconscious signal was prevented from impending action? Evidence from event-related brain
entering consciousness by a masking signal that potentials (Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of
obscured it. To solve the problem that there is no London).
overt behavior in the no-go condition, the onset of Velmans, M. (2002). How could conscious experiences
response inhibition was determined from the onset affect brains? Journal of Consciousness Studies,
of the no-go N2, a negative going cortical potential 9(11), 329.
Prediction, Clinical Versus Actuarial 613
Velmans, M. (2003). Preconscious free will. Journal of comparing SPR predictions to human predictions in
Consciousness Studies, 10(12), 4261. which (a) the humans and SPRs made predictions
Wegner, D. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. about the same specific cases and (b) the SPRs never
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. had more information than the humans (although the
humans often had more information than the SPRs).
Their research yielded 136 studies comprising 617
PREDICTION, CLINICAL VERSUS distinct comparisons between SPR and human pre-
dictions. These studies covered a wide range of pre-
ACTUARIAL dictive efforts, including medical and mental health
diagnoses; treatment prognoses, recommendations,
Successful prediction is an essential activity in scien- and outcomes; descriptions of personality; adjust-
tific and lay life, and this entry traces the nature and ment to institutional life in both the military and cor-
lessons of successful prediction. Suppose you have rectional facilities; success in training or employment;
to make a prediction about some target property socially relevant aggregate behaviors such as business
(e.g., a childs adult height or whether a prisoner will performance; and many others. Of the 136 studies
recidivate) on the basis of n lines of evidence (e.g., Grove and Meehl analyzed, 64 clearly favored the
the childs height at 3 years of age, the heights of SPR, 64 showed approximately equivalent accu-
the childs parents). It doesnt matter how those lines racy, and eight clearly favored the human predictor.
of evidence were acquiredwhether via a clinicians The eight studies in which the human clinician out-
judgment or a mechanical procedure (e.g., a com- performed the SPR appeared to have no common
puter-graded aptitude test). To arrive at a prediction, characteristics and therefore are not indicative of a
one must weigh and combine those lines of evidence unique domain in which expert prediction reliably
and come to a judgment. Clinical prediction is any beats statistical prediction; they are simply outliers
prediction in which the weighing and combining of (given 136 chances, the better reasoning strategy is
evidence is done by an expert human. Actuarial pre- bound to lose sometimes, after all).
diction is a purely mechanical procedure in which
the weighing and combining of evidence is done
algorithmically, via a transparent formula that could What Explains the Golden Rule?
be applied equally well by a trained clinician or by a There are many sophisticated prediction models on
clerical worker. the market (e.g., neural networks, nave Bayes classi-
The literature comparing clinical and actuarial fiers, classification and regression trees, support vec-
prediction begins with Paul Meehls 1954 classic, tor machines). The most sophisticated of these are
Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical optimizing models: They begin with a data set that
Analysis and a Review of the Evidence. Meehl consists of various lines of evidence that are corre-
reports on 20 studies in which actuarial predictions, lated with the target property and then they employ
based on very simple actuarial rules, were more sophisticated mathematical techniques with the aim
accurate than clinical predictions. Since the publi- of weighing those different lines of evidence so as to
cation of what Meehl called his disturbing little best predict new data. Perhaps the most common
book, psychologists have developed many success- optimizing model is the proper linear (or regression)
ful actuarial models or statistical prediction rules model. An intuitive way to understand proper lin-
(SPRs). ear models is to suppose we are trying to predict a
target property (a persons weight) on the basis of a
The Golden Rule of Predictive Modeling single line of evidence (the persons height). Suppose
There is now overwhelming evidence for the golden we take a set of data (for example, the heights
rule of predictive modeling: When given identi- and weights of a large number of people) and plot
cal evidence, well-constructed SPRs predict at least them on a graph. When doing so, a proper linear
as reliably, and typically more reliably, than human model will draw a straight line on the graph that
experts. The most decisive case for the golden rule comes closest to all the data points. This line can be
has been made by William Grove and Paul Meehl, described by the formula, y = k + cx, where y stands
who reported on an exhaustive search for studies for weight, x stands for height, k is the y-intercept,
614 Prediction, Clinical Versus Actuarial
and c is the slope of the line. In most real-life cases, 3. Randomized models: The bootstrapping models
however, we will have more than just one predictor discussed above can also be altered to produce a
cue, and so we need a multiple regression equation. random linear model. In random linear models,
The trick to building a proper (optimizing) linear there is no attempt to assign optimum weights
model given complex data involves choosing the to variables. Instead, variables are given random
coefficients (cnin the above example, the weights) weightswith one important qualification: All
so that the model best fits the data in the training set. the cues are defined so they are positively
Such equations have the form correlated with the target property. Even given
this stipulation, random linear models are still
y = k + c1x1 + c2x2 + c3x3 as reliable as the proper models and more
reliable than human experts.
What explanation can be given for the reliability
of the golden rule? The obvious answer seems to be A fascinating principle underlies these seem-
that unaided experts cannot possibly hope to be as ingly counterintuitive findings: The flat maximum
accurate as optimizing models. On this explana- principle says that for a certain class of prediction
tion, unaided experts simply cannot construct and problems, as long as the signs of the coefficients
implement an optimizing model in their heads are right, any one linear model will predict about
because they cant absorb and process all the avail- as well as any other. It is important to recognize
able evidence, and even if they could, they cant that the flat maximum principle is restricted to
assign optimal weights to the different lines of evi- certain kinds of problems in which the following
dence, and even if they could do that, they cannot conditions obtain:
solve the models complex formula to arrive at the
models prediction. However, this explanation cant 1. The judgment problem must be difficult and
be right because, in practice, some fairly simple one in which no proper model will be especially
nonoptimizing models are also more accurate than reliable, because the world is messy.
human experts. Consider three such models:
2. The evidential cues in the problem must be
reasonably predictive. For example, the best
1. Bootstrapping models: The bootstrapping model
cues for predicting academic performance (GPA,
is a proper linear model of a persons judgments
test scores) are reasonably predictive. Certainly,
about a target property but an improper linear
a reasonably predictive cue is one that is at least
model (a model that does not best fit the
more reliable than chance.
available data) of the target property itself. The
bootstrapping model is built to, in essence, 3. The evidential cues must be somewhat
predict the human experts prediction. And it redundant. For example, people with higher
will, from time to time, be wrong about what GPAs tend to have higher test scores.
the expert will predict. But when it is wrong
about the expert, its more likely to be right Given how common these circumstances are, it
about the target property! is in fact not uncommon for the improper unit
2. Unit weight models: The unit weight model
weight models to be more reliable than the proper
assigns equal weights to standardized
models.
predictor cues so that each input has an equal
bearing on the final prediction. Given the
The Golden Rule in Practice
success of unit weight models, an unweighted The best way to get a sense of the power of actuarial
sum of a few of the most predictive variables prediction is to consider some examples.
will tend to be preferable to more complicated
regressions equations. What is so surprising is 1. Given a patients marital status, length of
how simply these formulas can be calculated: psychotic distress, and the patients insight into
All you need is knowledge of what those most his or her condition, an SPR was more reliable
relevant variables are and then be able to add at predicting the success of electroshock therapy
them all up. than medical and psychological staff.
Production of Language 615
2. Criminologists were less reliable in predicting As these examples suggest, actuarial prediction
criminal recidivism than an SPR based on remains the province of specialized domains such as
criminal and prison records. criminal recidivism or credit risk executed by profes-
3. An SPR was more reliable than clinical sionals trained in predictive modeling. If actuarial
psychologists in diagnosing patients as either methods are to actualize their potential to improve
neurotic or psychotic, initially using the basis of clinical and lay judgment, they will have to be made
a Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory more widely available, easier to use, and applicable
(MMPI) profile and then assessing diagnostic to a broader range of problems.
accuracy on follow-up. Even when psychologists Michael A Bishop and J. D. Trout
were given the SPRs results before they made
their predictions, they were still less accurate See also Decision Improvement Technologies; Modeling
than the SPR. Causal Learning; Scientific Reasoning; Thinking
4. SPRs predict academic performance (in terms of
graduation rates and GPA at graduation) better Further Readings
than admissions officers at selective colleges,
law schools, medical schools, and graduate Arkes, H. (2003). The nonuse of psychological research at
two federal agencies. Psychological Science, 14, 16.
school in psychology. This discrepancy holds
Bishop, M., & Trout, J. D. (2002). 50 years of successful
even when the admissions officers have access
predictive modeling should be enough: Lessons for
to considerably more evidence than the models.
philosophy of science. Philosophy of Science: PSA 2000
5. SPRs predict loan and credit risk better than Symposium Papers, 69(Suppl.), S197S208.
bankers. SPRs, not human experts, are now Bishop, M., & Trout, J. D. (2005). Epistemology and the
standardly used by banks to make loans and by psychology of human judgment. New York, NY:
credit card companies to approve and set credit Oxford University Press.
limits for new customers. Bootz, B., & Bishop, M. (2007). Goodbye justification.
6. SPRs predict newborns at risk for sudden infant Hello world. Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 7,
death syndrome (SIDS) with much greater 269285.
accuracy than human experts. Dawes, R. (1994). House of cards. New York, NY: Free
Press.
7. An SPR predicts the quality of the vintage of a
Faust, D., & Meehl, P. (1992). Using scientific methods to
red Bordeaux wine better than expert wine resolve enduring questions within the history and
tasters who are able to swirl, smell, and taste philosophy of science: Some illustrations. Behavior
the young wine. Therapy, 23, 195211.
8. An SPR correctly diagnosed 83% of cases of Grove, W., & Meehl, P. (1996). Comparative efficiency of
progressive brain dysfunction on the basis of informal (subjective, impressionistic) and formal
input cues in the form of intellectual tests, while (mechanical, algorithmic) prediction procedures: The
clinicians working from the same data did no clinical-statistical controversy. Psychology, Public Policy,
better than 63%. When given the results of the and Law, 2, 292323.
actuarial formula, clinicians still did worse than Meehl, P. (1954). Clinical versus statistical prediction: A
the model, scoring no better than 75%. theoretical analysis and a review of the evidence.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
9. An SPR outperformed experienced clinicians as
well as a nationally renowned neuropsychologist
in predicting the presence, location, and cause
of brain damage. PRODUCTION OF LANGUAGE
10. When predicting violence in a legal setting, one
will actually be more reliable than forensic Producing a linguistic expression involves retrieving
psychologists simply by predicting that people a set of words, arranged in a grammatical hierarchi-
will not be violent. In addition, SPRs are more cally organized sequence so as to convey speakers
reliable than forensic psychologists in predicting intended thoughts. This is accomplished through a
relative likelihoods of violence. series of processing steps. A speaker begins an act
616 Production of Language
of language production by deciding what to say: Each of these processing components is discussed
message formulation. For example, a cat owner in turn.
might want to tell you his or her pet happened to
eat an unspecified arachnid. Then a speaker must
Message Formulation
decide which words to use to express that message,
lexical selection, and then retrieve those words, The first step a speaker must take to produce a lin-
lexical retrieval. The cat owner might choose the guistic expression is to formulate a message. Based
words my cat, ate, and a spider. A speaker must on logical analysis, message formulation is seen as
also assign these words to roles that convey who proceeding through macroplanning and microplan-
did what to whom, function assignment. The cat ning. Macroplanning involves determining a goal for
owner might assign my cat to the subject func- an utterance and choosing the information needed
tion and a spider to the object function. At least to express it. Microplanning involves taking a par-
in spoken languages such as English, words can ticular perspective on the meaning to be expressed
only be produced one after another, so a speaker and determining the more versus less important ele-
must then use the principles of the grammar of ments of that meaning. The point of all these steps is
the speakers language to order the role-assigned to formulate a complete, dynamic representation of
words, constituent assembly. In English, the sub- the information a speaker aims to convey in words
ject goes before the verb and the object after, so and phrases.
the cat owners sentence will use the sequence my One aspect of message formulation that has been
cat ate a spider. With words and their order (at heavily studied concerns how we adopt the per-
least partly) determined, a speaker can send a plan spective of our addressees to choose the right bits
off to phonological encoding so that the sound of meaning to linguistically encode. Specifically,
of an utterance can be formulated, followed by any informative utterance includes some informa-
articulation so that a signal is actually generated tion a speakers addressee does not yet knowwhat
for an audience. Additionally, most approaches to the speaker wants to conveydescribed in terms
language production allow monitoringthat is, of information the addressee already knows. An
assessing formulated speech (before or after articu- utterance out of the blue such as Steve ran the
lation) for adequacy and accuracy. Boilermaker will likely be uninformative, but an
To be precise, though it is convenient to pre- utterance such as My friend Steve ran a 15 kilome-
sent these processing components as operating in a ter race in upstate New York called the Boilermaker
strictly sequenced or staged fashion, it is not clear will likely be more informative. The reason is the
that the language system works this way. Certainly, latter utterance describes new information (Steve,
it is not the case that each component must finish the Boilermaker) by using information the addressee
its tasks completely for an entire sentence before will know (social relationships, common knowledge
the next stage can start. Rather, production is incre- about running events, and geography). Information
mental in the sense that once some initial part of speakers know their addressees already know is
an utterance has been formulated at one level of called common ground, and speakers ability to use
processing, that part can be sent for processing at it properly is critical for successful communication.
the next level of processing as upcoming parts of Common ground is not easy to determine, how-
the utterance are formulated at the first level. For ever. Information is common ground for a particular
example, once a speaker has retrieved the words speaker and addressee if the speaker knows it, the
my and cat, they can be sent off for phonological addressee knows it, the speaker knows the addressee
encoding as the word ate is selected. Such incre- knows it, the addressee knows the speaker knows
mentality allows speakers to start their utterances the addressee knows it, and so forth. Given this infi-
sooner and, more generally, permits some parallel nite regress, speakers must use heuristics and strate-
processing so as to make production more efficient. gies to determine whether some bit of information is
A more controversial aspect of production planning, in common ground.
whether processing is strictly staged or is more free- These heuristics are of two general types. One
flowing, is discussed below where lexical selection type helps determine what sort of information speak-
and retrieval are detailed further. ers might use when trying to determine common
Production of Language 617
ground. The other type describes the processing more accessible, the selection of a target will happen
strategies speakers might use to compute common more slowly, but if only one word is highly accessi-
ground. Of the first type, speakers might assume ble, selection will be quicker. For example, a speaker
that if a fact had been mentioned in the presence of might want to name an unusual bug she or he saw.
some interlocutors then that fact should be ascribed Visualizing the bug will cause its meaning features to
to common ground. Similarly, if some noticeable become represented in the speakers message, which
feature is in the immediate environment of interlocu- in turn will lead the words that can express those
tors, it could be ascribed to common ground. Of the meaning features to be accessed. If the bug looked
second type, speakers might track the statistical reli- much like a beetle but also somewhat like a tick or
ability of different sorts of cues to common ground a roach, then the lexical representation of beetle will
(e.g., whether a partners visual perspective tends to be accessed to a greater degree and the lexical rep-
indicate that they do or do not know about some resentations of tick and roach to lesser degrees. The
element of the environment), or they might assume more (the speaker represents that) the bug looked
that their addressees know everything they them- like the beetle and the tick and the roach, the closer
selves know except for explicitly excluded privileged these accessibility levels will be and (if selection is
information, or they might specifically track rela- competitive) the longer it will take for selection to
tively simple bits of information that can be used to occur. If the bug looked more like a beetle and less
ascribe knowledge to specific addressees. In all these like a tick or roach, then the accessibility level of
cases, the point is to be able to know what knowl- beetle will be much greater than the accessibility lev-
edge speakers and addressees share so that it can be els of roach and tick, and so selection will happen
relied on to successfully convey new knowledge. more quickly.
It is important to note that this selection process
(competitive or otherwise) is restricted. For exam-
Lexical Selection and Retrieval
ple, when speakers make speech errors where they
Given a message, speakers must retrieve a set of con- select a wrong word, an intended noun is very often
tent wordswords describing entities, states, and replaced with another noun, a verb with another
actionsthat can convey the meaning specified in verb, and so forth. This suggests that lexical selec-
the message. This is typically thought to proceed tion operates within syntactic category; for example,
through two steps: First, speakers must find and only nouns are considered if a noun is to be selected.
select the words that convey the intended meaning; It may be that other sorts of categories similarly
then speakers must retrieve the phonological fea- restrict lexical selection (e.g., whether a word is at
tures that represent the sounds of the words. an intended level of abstraction; for bilingual speak-
Given a particular meaning to convey, mul- ers, what language a word is in).
tiple lexical forms similar in meaning to the to- Production processing may be discrete, if selec-
be-expressed meaning are accessed. Each of these tion must complete before retrieval begins, or cas-
becomes accessible in proportion to its degree of caded, if retrieval can begin for accessible forms even
meaning similarity to the to-be-expressed meaning. before they are selected. Also, if lexical selection and
This can be thought of as a kind of search: Given retrieval is cascaded, it may allow feedback, if the
that a given to-be-expressed meaning will not nec- retrieval of phonological properties can affect lexical
essarily correspond neatly to an individual word, selection. There are good reasons to allow cascading
a process of accessing a range of candidates to (it presumably speeds retrieval if it is begun sooner)
varying degrees allows an appropriate word to be or to forbid it (there is no point retrieving the pho-
found. This also allows other factors to influence the nological features of forms that will not be selected),
selection process, possibly including the accessibility and there are good reasons to allow feedback (it may
or suitability of the phonological properties of the be good to allow sound properties to affect selec-
potential word. tion) or to forbid it (it may be bad to allow sound
According to most (though not all) approaches to properties to affect selection). A range of evidence
word production, a competitive process then oper- suggests that lexical selection and retrieval is indeed
ates to select the to-be-produced word. This will cascaded; whether lexical selection and retrieval
make it so that if many possible words are relatively allows feedback is less certain.
618 Production of Language
According to some views, lexical retrieval begins The complex task of determining the relative order
with the retrieval of a whole word (or more precisely, of words is carried out by constituent assembly pro-
whole morphemethe atomic unit of meaning in cesses. This is made complex by the fact that multiple
language) representation. Then individual speech relationships can be embedded in a to-be-expressed
soundsphonemes or segmentsare retrieved. thought, and all these must be encoded in a simple
Phonemes are arranged into syllables (a unit of sound linear sequence of words (possibly with case mark-
including a vowel and some of its immediately sur- ers, in a case-marking language). For example, My
rounding consonants), which in turn are specified for friend Steve ran the Boilermaker conveys a relation-
metrical properties such as whether they should be ship between running, Steve, and the Boilermaker
pronounced with more stress (louder, longer) or less but also between friend and Steve, and all these must
(e.g., different metrical patterns need to be retrieved be appropriately nested with respect to one another.
to produce the noun or verb forms of a word such To determine the right way to convey such nestings,
as record: REcord vs. reCORD). At this point, lan- constituent assembly processes in some cases must
guage production processes have completed their consult representations of the principles of the speak-
lexical job, and speech and motor processing begins. ers grammar to determine what the linear sequence
of words should be so that (in English) the adjective
ends up preceding the noun, the subject preceding
Function Assignment and
the verb, and so forth. But the grammar does not
Constituent Assembly
determine all ordering of words. As noted, case-
Utterances do not just convey the individual bits of marking languages such as Japanese do not use word
content that words express. Utterances also convey order to indicate subject and object roles, and so con-
the relationships among those bits of contentthe stituent assembly is free to order subjects and objects
who did what to whom of language. To do this, without regard to grammatical principles (and
to-be-produced content words must be assigned to because of this, case marking languages are some-
grammatical roles that indicate what relationship times called free word order languages). So Steve-ga
they bear to some event. This is the job of function Boilermaker-o hasitta, and Boilermaker-o Steve-ga
assignment: to assign content words to grammatical hasitta both convey the same (overall) meaning.
functions such as subject and object so that their role And even in English, the order of nouns in a conjunc-
with respect to an event can be expressed. tion is not grammatically determined (Steve and
Words and their grammatical functions must Kim or Kim and Steve are both grammatical). In
somehow be outwardly encoded in the to-be- these cases, other factors will influence relative order-
produced utterance. Spoken languages use differ- ing, such as the prominence or personal importance
ent strategies for expressing grammatical functions of the to-be-ordered items or how easily the sentence
such as subject and object. Languages such as material can be retrieved from memory.
English largely use the relative positions of words in Different factors affect function assignment and
utterances to convey grammatical functions; these constituent assembly, revealing the nature of these
languages are thus termed word order (or more processes. Speakers tend to repeat the hierarchical
precisely, fixed word order) languages. In contrast, structures of sentences they recently heard or said, a
languages such as Japanese largely use special mor- phenomenon termed structural or syntactic priming.
phemes (usually suffixes) to convey grammatical Structural priming has been profitably used to deter-
functions; these languages are sometimes called mine the representational nature of the hierarchical
case-marking languages. So in English, most sen- frames that are enlisted for production. Speakers
tences require that the subject precedes the verb and also will tend to produce sentence structures that
the object (if present) follows it. So Steve ran the allow easily accessed material to be produced sooner
Boilermaker conveys that Steve is the subject and and harder to access material later. These are often
the Boilermaker the object, because of the position termed accessibility effects and may be motivated by
of those words with respect to the verb. In Japanese, efficiency (saying words as they are retrieved reduces
this is conveyed with Steve-ga Boilermaker-o memory demands). Agreement, whereby different
hasitta, where the -ga and -o suffixes convey sub- parts of a sentence must systematically covary (e.g.,
ject and object, respectively. the subject and verb in English agree in number),
Production of Language 619
has been heavily investigated. Research on agree- the error (externally) and halted production on that
ment has shown that sentence production processes basis. Monitoring based on external speech is evident
enlist formal, abstract representations that underlie whenever speakers notice that they have produced
the relevant agreement properties (e.g., singular vs. some utterance they did not intend or when they
plural in English). realize an utterance did not come across right.
Different mechanisms might be responsible for
Phonological Encoding carrying out monitoring. One common proposal,
the perceptual loop hypothesis, is that formulated
Above, the processes involved in retrieving the
speech (both inner and external) is monitored with
phonological properties of individual words were
the same comprehension mechanisms we use to
described. But words are of course produced as parts
comprehend others (external) speech. The idea is
of longer utterances, and those utterances have their
that formulated speech is comprehended to the level
own phonological properties. Most prominently,
of meaning and then the comprehended and to-be-
extended utterances have prosodythe melody and
expressed meanings compared; if they differ in any
rhythm of an utterance that conveys different sorts of
important way, the speaker can stop and reformu-
information. Specifically, prosody can convey syntac-
late. But other monitoring mechanisms (and more
tic information, including where phrase boundaries
generally, error-detecting mechanisms) may operate
are between words in a sentence; whether a sentence
in addition to or instead of the perceptual loop. For
is a declarative, an interrogative, or something else;
example, one strategy for monitoring for errors is to
emotional information, such as whether a speaker
detect when some representation at a later level of
is excited or sullen; and so forth. Consequently, the
processing has been selected even though its ante-
mechanisms responsible for formulating prosody
cedent representation has not. If a speaker intends to
must take into account all these sorts of information.
say cat but formulates lat instead, production
An important aspect of prosody that must be
mechanisms can detect the error if they are sensi-
computed concerns how long the words and pauses
tive to the fact that the 1 segment was accessed for
should be in an utterance. Production research sug-
production even though no word including an 1 was
gests that prosodic production mechanisms specify
selected during lexical selection and retrieval.
at least some of the duration properties of the
slots words are to be spoken in, and this is done Conclusions
relatively independently of the content of the words
themselves. This implies that when a word is shorter, The ease with which we produce speech belies the
speakers will compensate by producing a longer complexity of the cognitive mechanisms underlying
pause after it and vice versa. This is an elegant dem- this ability. This allows us to convey our thoughts to
onstration of the relative independence of different other members of our species with a level of detail
production mechanisms, here, between prosodic for- and breadth that would not otherwise be possible.
mulation and lexical retrieval mechanisms. This ability, one of only a handful unique to humans,
is critical to our survival and success as a species.
Monitoring Victor S. Ferreira
The task of language production is not completed
when an utterance is fully formulated and ready for See also Conversation and Dialogue; Language
Production, Agreement in; Language Production,
articulation. Production mechanisms also engage
Incremental Processing in; Natural Language
in monitoring, whereby the adequacy and accuracy
Generation; Perspective Taking in Language
of a formulated expression is checked. Formulated Processing; Planning in Language Production; Prosody
utterances are monitored both before they begin to in Production
be articulated, based on some form of inner speech,
and after they are articulated, through standard lan-
Further Readings
guage comprehension mechanisms. Evidence for
the former is that speakers will sometimes halt the Bock, J. K. (1982). Toward a cognitive psychology of
articulation of an erroneous utterance quicklyso syntax: Information processing contributions to sentence
quickly that it is not possible that the speaker heard formulation. Psychological Review, 89, 147.
620 Prosody in Production
different types of prosodic phrases and how they if they are aware of the ambiguity. However, Tanya
might differ, whether and how these phrases are Kraljic and Susan Brennan have found that in sen-
represented hierarchically, whether accents differ in tences like (4), speakers disambiguate the sentence
form and meaning, how intonational contours are whether they are aware of the ambiguity or not. One
structured, and the nature of the interface between critical difference between (3) and (4) is utterance
prosodic structure and other aspects of language. length: Sentence (4) is longer. If prosodic boundary
placement is partly influenced by production con-
Production straints, then one would expect boundaries to occur
Traditionally, it has been assumed that the role of more often in long, difficult sentences than short,
prosody is to convey pragmatic, discourse, and syn- easy sentences, independent of the needs of the lis-
tactic information to listeners. However, a growing tener, and this appears to be the case. However, the
body of evidence suggests that there might also be a extent to which boundary placement is speaker or
link between speaker internal production processes listener centered is currently under debate.
and prosody: Speakers are more likely to produce This debate also extends to the literature on
prosodic boundaries and accents at points of pro- accents. Word lengthening, a correlate of accenting,
duction difficulty. co-occurs with disfluencies and boundaries, suggest-
For example, the likelihood of producing a ing that production difficulty may underlie both.
prosodic boundary either before or after a syntac- Words that are unpredictable, informative, and low
tic constituent such as the subject of a sentence is frequency are more likely to be accented than those
directly correlated with the constituents length. that are not. These words are likely to be difficult to
produce although it is unclear whether prominence
(2a) The judge who the reporter for the in these cases is the result of production difficulty or
newspaper ignored // fired the secretary. whether speakers mark words that might be difficult
for the listener in order to facilitate comprehension.
(2b) The judge who the reporter ignored (//)
This question is one that researchers are currently
fired the secretary.
wrestling with.
Overall, it is clear that prosody can signal infor-
In (2), a boundary is more likely to follow the sub-
mation about syntax, discourse, and pragmatics,
ject of the sentence in (a) than (b) because the subject
and recent work suggests that prosody may also
in (a) is longer. Boundaries may provide speakers
play an important role in language production.
with time to plan upcoming structure or recover
after encountering production difficulty. Duane G. Watson
A question of much debate in this literature is
whether speakers purposely produce boundaries in See also Planning in Language Production; Production of
locations that are helpful to listeners, particularly Language; Speech Perception
ambiguous sentences such as the ones in (1e) and
(1f), or whether they produce boundaries to help Further Readings
themselves. While some researchers have found that
Kraljic, T., & Brennan, S. E. (2005). Prosodic
speakers do not use boundaries to consistently dis-
disambiguation of syntactic structure: For the speaker or
ambiguate syntactically ambiguous sentences for lis-
for the addressee? Cognitive Psychology, 50, 194231.
teners, others have found that they do. Many of the
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., & Turk, A. E. (1996). A prosody
experiments investigating this question have used tutorial for investigators of auditory sentence processing.
tasks in which a speaker must instruct a listener to Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25, 193247.
manipulate a set of objects. Snedeker, J., & Trueswell, J. (2003). Using prosody to
avoid ambiguity: Effects of speaker awareness and
(3) Tap (a) the frog (b) with the flower. referential context. Journal of Memory and Language,
(4) Put the dog (a) in the basket (b) on the star. 48, 103130.
Watson, D. G., & Gibson, E. (2004). The relationship
Jesse Snedeker and John Trueswell have found that between intonational phrasing and syntactic structure in
in sentences such as (3), speakers disambiguate the language production. Language and Cognitive
sentence using boundaries at positions (a) or (b) only Processes, 19, 713755.
622 Psychological Refractory Period
the direction of an arrow. In such cases, the stimulus Central Bottlenecks: Structural Limitation
might strongly activate the corresponding response or a Strategic Choice?
without any assistance from central mental resources.
The central bottleneck model implies that people
Perhaps not surprisingly, PRP effects are reduced
cannot perform central operations on more than one
with such tasks. However, stubborn residual PRP
task at a time because of some cognitive resource
effects have often been reported, hinting that even
limitation. This limitation is often described as a
these tasks might be subject to resource limitations.
single-channel cognitive mechanism that can process
Other investigators have taken a different
only one task at a time. Strictly, speaking, however,
approach. Instead of using inherently easy tasks,
most data merely show that people do not perform
they have used somewhat more difficult tasks but
central operations at the same time. Perhaps people
allowed subjects the opportunity to master them.
are entirely capable of parallel central processing
Obviously, tasks are performed faster with practice,
but typically choose serial processing as a matter of
so the PRP effect should inevitably decrease. The
strategy.
critical question is whether practice can eliminate
This issue remains controversial. At low levels
the PRP effect altogether and, more to the point,
of practice, attempts to induce subjects to choose a
whether practice eliminates competition for mental
parallel processing strategy, and eliminate the PRP
resources. This type of automaticity with practice
effect, have not been very successful. Parallel pro-
has in fact been clearly documented in a few recent
cessing does seem to be possible at higher practice
studies. Most of these demonstrations, however,
levels, as noted above, although it is not clear that
have thus far involved relatively trivial tasks, involv-
the transition reflects a voluntary choice, per se.
ing a very small number of stimuli and responses.
Ultimately, the strategic versus structural debate
What about highly practiced real-world tasks,
might not have a simple answer. For instance, a
for which the array of possible stimuli is essentially
structural limitation in central mechanisms might
infinite? Consider, for example, driving while talk-
lead to a strategic choice to perform central opera-
ing on a cell phone. Despite being extremely well
tions serially (one at a time). Computer simula-
practiced, these tasks nevertheless interfere with each
tion of possible cognitive architectures has shown
other. Such interference has been documented both
that serial central processing might be the optimal
in analyses of actual accident reports and in numer-
strategy even if parallel central processing were
ous experiments with simulated driving tasks. It has
possible.
been estimated that cell phone use quadruples the
frequency of accidents and is as detrimental to driv-
ing as a blood-alcohol level of .08 (considered legally Conclusion
intoxicated in some states). Interestingly, this interfer-
The PRP effect refers to a kind of dual-task inter-
ence is not ameliorated by using hands-free phones
ference, wherein it is difficult to simultaneously
rather than handheld phones. This finding hints
perform two tasks presented in close succession.
that the problem lies in interference between central
One of the tasks (usually the one presented sec-
processes (i.e., cognitive distraction) rather than in
ond) is performed quite slowly. The PRP effect is
competition between tasks for the hands. Ignoring
remarkably robust, with only rare exceptions, such
these consistent research findings, lawmakers typi-
as when tasks are simple and highly practiced or
cally outlaw the use of handheld cell phones while
merely involve movements of the eyes. The primary
driving yet permit the use of hands-free cell phones.
source of the interference appears to be that central
Another interesting exception to the PRP effect
mental processes, such as response selection, must
occurs when the second task merely requires moving
compete for access to limited mental resources. In
the eyes (whose position is monitored using special
many cases, there is compelling evidence that cen-
equipment) to a specified type of stimulus, such as
tral mental operations take place strictly serially
any red object. Eye movements might evade the PRP
one task a time. These findings might shed light on
effect because they are quasi-reflexive, supported by
the persistent interference that occurs in many real-
special neural circuitry. An alternative view is that
world situations, such as driving while talking on a
fixating ones eyes on a target is a highly practiced
cell phone.
action, and it is the unusually high levels of practice
that enabled subjects to escape the PRP effect. Eric Ruthruff
Psychological Refractory Period 625
See also Attention, Resource Models; Attention and Pashler, H. (1984). Processing stages in overlapping tasks:
Action; Automaticity; Divided Attention and Evidence for a central bottleneck. Journal of
Memory; Multitasking and Human Performance Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance, 10, 358377.
Further Readings Strayer, D. L., & Johnston, W. A. (2001). Driven to
distraction: Dual-task studies of simulated driving and
Lien, M.-C., Ruthruff, E., & Johnston, J. C. (2006). conversing on a cellular telephone. Psychological
Attentional limitations in doing two tasks at once: The Science, 12, 462466.
search for exceptions. Current Directions in Telford, C. W. (1931). Refractory phase of voluntary and
Psychological Science, 15, 8993. associative responses. Journal of Experimental
McCann, R. S., & Johnston, J. C. (1992). Locus of the Psychology, 14, 135.
single-channel bottleneck in dual-task interference. Tombu, M., & Jolicoeur, P. (2003). A central capacity
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception sharing model of dual-task performance. Journal of
and Performance, 18, 471484. Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Meyer, D. E., & Kieras, D. E. (1997). A computational Performance, 29, 318.
theory of executive cognitive processes and multiple-task Welford, A. T. (1952). The psychological refractory
performance: Part 2. Accounts of psychological refractory period and the timing of high-speed performance:
phenomena. Psychological Review, 107, 749791. A review and a theory. British Journal of Psychology,
Navon, D., & Miller, J. O. (2002). Queuing or sharing? A 43, 219.
critical evaluation of the single-bottleneck notion.
Cognitive Psychology, 44, 193251.
R
1. Norms of success. No entity can be assessed
RATIONALITY OF EMOTION for rationality unless it is liable to success and fail-
ure. Rationality is not equivalent to success, nor
It is sometimes said that emotions in general are can it ever guarantee success, but X can be said to
irrational or that they cannot be judged in terms of be more rational than an alternative Y, insofar as
reason: that they are somehow beyond the reach of X has the greater likelihood of success. Truth is the
reason. Yet in particular cases we often deem some- norm of success for a belief; hence, B1 is more
one irrational for feeling some specific emotion: rational than B2 if it is more likely to be true.
Your anger is unreasonable, we might say, or Similarly, of two alternative actions, the more
You should be glad that your friend got the job. rational is the more likely to achieve a given goal.
The grounds for such judgments, however, remain
2. Intentionality. The existence of a norm of
disputed. Rationality has been exhaustively stud-
success implies that whatever can be rational is
ied in belief and action. Emotions are causally and
susceptible of teleological explanationthat is,
conceptually linked to both, but they are not reduc-
explanation in terms of some function or purpose.
ible to either belief or action tendencies. If there are
But the converse does not hold. Biological pro-
canons of emotional rationality as such, they can-
cesses typically call for teleological explanations,
not therefore be simply imported from epistemic
but only those that are intentional can be said liter-
and practical rationality. This entry explores how
ally to be rational. Intentionality is informally
far standards of rationality that are derived from
characterized as aboutness and is widely thought
the relatively clear cases of belief and action might
to be an essential property of mental states. One
apply to emotions. Emotions are seen to pose some
could speak metaphorically of ants, plants, cells,
special problems, particularly in regard to the evalu-
or even genes as communicating and as choosing
ation of the future or the past and to the elaboration
alternative strategies of survival or mating. But it
of a relevant concept of consistency. Their rational-
would be eccentric to ascribe mentality literally to
ity is also seen to be significantly affected by social
all biological organisms. Only intentional states
context.
can be rational.
3. Origins. Rationality is systematically related
Standard Constraints on Rationality
to future success, but ascriptions of rationality do
The criteria of rationality commonly accepted for not await the verdict of success. On the contrary,
thought and action suggest four abstract constraints rationality hangs on provenance: It depends in part
on rationality in general. These provide a starting on the origin of the action or belief. If one belief
point for any discussion of emotional rationality. derives from the consultation of astrological signs,
627
628 Rationality of Emotion
while another is soundly inferred from scientific is directedfor the emotion to be appropriate. That
evidence, the latter is the more rational regardless feature is what many philosophers refer to as the
of its truth. emotions formal object. Truth is the formal object
of belief: Because its true gives a trivial answer to
4. Context dependency. If origin determines
the question Why do you believe p? Similarly, one
rationality, how do we identify the appropriate
can give gives a trivial answer to the question Why
antecedents? In statistical reasoning, it may be
are you E-ing? for any given emotion E. But there is
rational to believe p relative to one set of facts and
no global answer for all emotions: Each emotion has
not-p relative to another, though both sets are
its own formal object. Some have obvious names:
equally correct and relevant. Beliefs and actions
for fearing, the fearsome; being sad, loss; loving,
may be fairly judged both rational and irrational,
lovable; being disgusted, the disgusting. Others call
depending on the extent of the background circum-
for awkward explanatory phrases. Just as the for-
stances taken into account. This context depen-
mal object of the sense of touch has no single name
dency may be illustrated in terms of the tragic
but relates to hardness, texture, and relative heat, so
real-life case of Andrea Yates, who was induced by
the formal object of anger has no single name but
voices she heard to drown her five children. At her
is awkwardly describable in terms of unjust harm
first trial, the insanity defense was disallowed, on
or insult to oneself or others. Whether or not a for-
the ground that her careful planning and execution
mal object has a handy name doesnt seem to cor-
of the drownings proved her rationality. But if one
relate with how easily we can tell whether it applies
zooms out from its methodical implementation to
in a particular case. To find something fearsome, for
the project of drowning ones five children, in obe-
example, is to perceive it as dangerous: an arguably
dience to the voice of God, to save them, one is
objective, albeit probabilistic property. By contrast,
bound to see that project itself as irrational. Yet
shame is successful if its object is shameful, but the
while both Agamemnon and Abraham formed, in
appropriateness of shameful, unlike dangerous, does
obedience to divine command, the project of kill-
not yield easily to objective confirmation.
ing their child, neither is usually thought to have
been insane. Unlike truth, a verdict of rationality is
never definitive. The framework of its assessment Social Context
can in principle be extended or modified in an The reason for the difference relates to the third and
indefinite number of defensible ways. fourth constraints. While success depends on a match
between formal object and target, rationality is deter-
Applying Standard Constraints to
mined by an emotions origin. If a particular case of
Emotional Rationality
fear is caused by factors independent of objective dan-
To apply these constraints to emotion, we must first ger, the fear is irrational. Other cases are less clear:
make any sense of the notion of emotional suc- There are few objective constraints, for instance, on
cess. One approach to this is in terms of biological appropriate origins for love. To be sure, I love him
function: Emotions appraise typical life situations because he is lovable, but that places virtually no con-
and prime the organism for appropriate response; straints on the causes of my devotion. Whether he is
any given emotion is successful if it fulfils that func- really lovable is a question that barely makes sense,
tion. This evolutionary psychological approach has because there is little consensus about the proper-
yielded many insights. But it doesnt quite get at a ties that constitute being lovable. Indignation, guilt,
notion of success that would be relevant to the ques- and embarrassment, like shame, lie somewhere in
tion of rationality, for not all functional processes or between the objectivity of rational fear and the inde-
states are intentional. The intentionality requirement terminacy of rational love, but for all of these and
disqualifies even some of the states we loosely refer to many other emotions, what determines rationality are
as emotions: Moods, insofar as they lack intention- mostly social facts relating to the norms endorsed by
ality, also lack conditions of success of the relevant members of a given group in historical context.
sort. Any emotion that is clearly about something, Where social norms rule, one pertinent dimension
by contrast, intrinsically defines what must be true of of evaluation is intensity, a factor generally absent
its targetthe thing, person or situation at which it from appraisals of action or belief. In the case of
Rationality of Emotion 629
fear, we have seen that an ascription of irrationality has seemed puzzling, however, that recalcitrant emo-
rests in part on the objective absence of danger, but it tions are regarded as irrational, whereas visual illu-
is also based on an assessment of the intensity of the sions are not. Michael Brady has suggested that this
emotion itself. It seems the intensity of fear should is explained by the role of emotions in monopolizing
be proportional to the extent of the danger (which in our attention so as to enhance emotional stimuli.
turn consists in both the importance and the prob- Where the emotion embodies an evaluation that we
ability of the undesirable outcome). The intensity know to be incorrect, this is counterproductive. A
of anger, guilt, or shame is deemed irrational if it related but more general explanation is suggested
is disproportional to the seriousness of the offense by the long history of disciplines aimed at master-
inflicted or defect contemplated. Here again, actual ing emotion. From Stoicism through Buddhism and
social norms and expectations are more important Christianity to Ren Descartes, David Hume, and
than any other objective facts, and the word rational William James, it has been assumed that techniques
is interchangeable with reasonable, used to mean can be devised to correct, redirect, and tame emo-
something like Id feel the same way under the tion. There is no need, and therefore no comparable
circumstances. set of techniques, for the correction of sensory per-
A good illustration of the interaction of biological ception.
origins and social expectations is provided by jeal-
ousy, which Jesse Prinz has plausibly characterized Rationality in Memory and Expectation
as an acquired blend of anger, fear, sadness and
Worries about emotional rationality range more
disgust [that] . . . arise in the context of infidelity
widely than is accounted for by the framework
(p. 280). If that is right, conditions of appropriate-
described so far. What makes for the rationality of
ness for jealousy will be highly complex and depend
emotions toward the past or future is obscure. Is he
heavily on prevalent social mores in the spheres
who regrets always twice unhappy or twice impo-
of sexual orientation and behavior on relations
tent, as Benedict de Spinoza (in his Proposition 54)
between unmarried persons of the same or opposite
claimed? When evaluating a past experience, should
sexes, on conventions and expectations governing
we realistically rate every sequence of moments as
spouses and sexual exclusiveness, and so forth.
the sum of their hedonic value weighted by their
In a different way, the importance of context
duration? Or should we ignore, as Daniel Kahneman
to assessments of rationality is also illustrated by
has shown we actually do, most of the past moments
depth psychology. Recent psychology has confirmed
except for a peak and an end one? As for the future,
Freuds observation that our understanding of our
at what rate is it rational to discount it? Sometimes a
own motives is riddled with ignorance and confabu-
fervently desired experience proves to be dust and
lation. The fact that we can be ruled by unconscious
ashes; if I predict that I will be disappointedthat
motives can turn the rational into the irrational and
I wont feel as intensely happy when it happens as
vice versa. For when we construe an apparently
I now feel I shouldshould I maximize utility by
rational act as motivated by an unconscious motive,
enjoying the prospect anyway or reduce my antici-
we expose its irrationality. Conversely, the bearing
pation to fit the way I will eventually feel?
of an unconscious motive on an acte manqu, or
Freudian slip, brings previously inexplicable behav-
Consistency and Constancy
ior under the aegis of the belief-desire explanation
typical of rational agency. Many puzzles remain concerning both the standards
that bear on verdicts of irrationality and the scope of
such verdicts. The examples mentioned so far have
The Regulation of Emotion
been of single emotions experienced at some par-
A case frequently discussed is that of recalcitrant ticular time. But one can also ask whether there are
emotions, where the judgmental component of an constraints on sets of simultaneous emotions and on
emotion contradicts the agents own belief. Such emotional change through time.
emotions are comparable to visual illusions such as The former question is about emotional consis-
the Mueller-Lyer lines, in that the agent is aware of tency. Consistency is not compatibility: If two states
the failure of fit between target and formal object. It are incompatible, they cannot coexist in a single
630 Reaction Time
agent; to say they are inconsistent, by contrast, is Prinz, J. (2007). The emotional construction of morals.
to say that they ought not to coexist, which pre- New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
supposes that they can do so. Whether two emo- Spinoza, B. D. (1985). Ethics. The collected works of
tions are compatible is likely to have to do with the Spinoza (E. Curley Ed. & Trans; Vol. 4). Princeton, NJ:
physiological mechanisms that underlie them: If one Princeton University Press. (Original published 1677)
involves excitation while the other entails inhibition Wilson, T. D. (2002). Strangers to ourselves: Discovering
of a certain neurohormonal system, for example, the adaptive unconscious. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
they cannot take place together for mechanical rea- University Press.
sons. Genuine inconsistency would derive from the
logical conditions on their formal objects. But just
what those might be remains obscure. REACTION TIME
Questions about the rationality of emotional
change through time concern not consistency but
constancy. When is it irrational to stop loving some- Reaction time, sometimes referred to as response
one? How long is it irrational to grieve? The impor- time or latency, is measured as the time that elapses
tance of social conventions is particularly obvious in between the onset of a stimulus and a persons
those cases. What remains puzzling, and worthy of response to that stimulus. Reaction times (RTs) are
investigation, is the extent to which the conventions widely used in the study of human performance,
in question and the variance among them are them- from testing models of cognitive processing in cogni-
selves dependent on biological factors. tive psychology to evaluating the design of human-
machine interfaces and assisting in diagnoses of such
Ronald de Sousa conditions as schizophrenia, learning disorders, and
other psychological disorders. This entry presents a
See also Emotion, Cultural Perspectives; Emotion, brief history of the use of RT, a survey of different
Structural Approaches; Emotion and Moral kinds of RT experiments, and a summary of how
Judgment; Emotions and Consciousness;
RTs are influenced by other variables.
Intentionality of Emotion
History
Further Readings
Some of the earliest recorded attempts to evalu-
Ainslie, G. (1992). Picoeconomics: The strategic interaction ate human performance with RT were made by
of successive motivational states within the person. 17th-century astronomers. They worried about the
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. personal equation, which is simply the fact that dif-
Brady, M. (2008). Recalcitrant emotions and visual ferent observers vary in their estimates of the transit
illusions. American Philosophical Quarterly, 44(3), times of stars as the stars moved across the visual
273284.
field. These astronomers were not as interested in
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2000). Evolutionary psychology
why observers had different personal equations as
and the emotions. In M. Lewis & J. M. Haviland-Jones
they were in how much they needed to recalibrate
(Eds.), Handbook of emotions (pp. 91115). New York,
their equipment so that transit times were as accu-
NY: Guilford.
rate as possible. The first serious attempt to explain
de Sousa, R. (1987). The rationality of emotion.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
why RTs varied under different conditionsthe
de Sousa, R. (2003). Paradoxical emotions. In S. Stroud & first use of RT to determine how peoples brains
C. Tappolet (Eds.), Weakness of will and practical perform mental taskswas made by F. C. Donders
irrationality (pp. 274297). New York, NY: Oxford (18181889).
University Press. Donderss idea, called the method of subtraction,
Kahneman, D. (2000). Evaluation by moments: Past and was to estimate the time taken by different compo-
future. In D. Kahneman & A. Tversky (Eds.), Choices, nents of a mental task. The tasks he used are now
values, and frames (pp. 693708). New York, NY: called simple reactions, go/no go reactions, and
Cambridge University Press-Russell Sage. choice reactions. These tasks, he reasoned, could be
Nussbaum, M. (1994). The therapy of desire: Theory and broken down into smaller stages of processing: per-
practice in Hellenistic ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton ceptual encoding, stimulus identification, response
University Press. selection, and response execution.
Reaction Time 631
Consider, for example, a task where an observer increasing the set size should prolong the search
must respond to the presentation of red and green stage but not the encoding stage. A factorial design
lights by pressing a button. For a simple reaction, should, therefore, produce additive effects of encod-
an observer presses a button as soon as he sees any ing difficulty and search set sizethat is, there
light, no matter what color it is. Donders reasoned should be no interaction between these factorsif
that this task could be performed only with percep- perceptual encoding and memory search are serial
tual encoding and response execution. For a go/no processes.
go reaction, however, the observer presses the but- Sternbergs additive factors method is still very
ton only when the light is green. This requires not influential, even though it can be demonstrated that
only the perceptual encoding and response execution other kinds of mental architectures can produce RTs
stages but also stimulus identification. For a choice that are indistinguishable from those produced by
reaction, the observer presses one button for a green a serial process. Donderss and Sternbergs methods
light and a different button for a red light. The task use measures of mean RT, and many researchers
now requires response selection, by requiring an still rely on mean RT to explore hypotheses about
observer to determine which of the two possible but- mental processing. However, many researchers now
tons are appropriate for a presented stimulus. work with models of the cognitive system that can
Donders measured his observers RTs in the sim- predict the entire distribution of RTs, as well as the
ple, go/no go, and choice reaction tasks. To estimate accuracy of different responses. These models have
the duration of the stimulus identification stage, he led to the development of new experimental designs
subtracted the simple RT from the go/no go RT. as well as new methods of analysis.
To estimate the duration of the response selection
stage, he subtracted the go/no go RT from the choice
RT Experiments
RT. This method of subtraction assumed that the
task stages were arranged in serial order (so no two RT experiments can be categorized according to the
stages could be operating at the same time) and that extent to which information provided by the stimulus
the stages were independent from each other (so if is compressed in the response. Many RT experiments
one stage took a very long time to complete, that have fewer possible responses than the number of
would not affect how long it took any other stage to stimuli that can be presented. Simple RT tasks can
complete). present any number of different stimuli, but only
Long after Donderss seminal work, Saul a single response is required to all of them. Choice
Sternberg began an investigation of the serial order RT tasks have more than a single response but usu-
and independence assumptions. Using a memory ally fewer possible responses than possible stimuli.
search task, in which observers were asked to deter- Two-choice RT tasks are by far the most common, in
mine whether a numeral had been previously pre- which observers are asked to respond yes or no
sented in a small set of numerals, he observed that to a potentially very large number of stimuli. Word
(choice) RT to respond yes or no increased as recognition memory experiments, for example, ask
a linear function of the size of the set. He argued observers to respond yes (old) to studied words
for a serial process, in which the target numeral is and no (new) to novel words. The number of stud-
compared to each numeral in the memory set one at ied and novel words can number in the hundreds,
a time. He then extended this logic to task stages in but the number of responses is only two.
his additive factors method. Choice RT tasks may have more than two
The additive factors approach examines the possible responses, in which case they are called
difference between RTs in different experimental N-choice RT tasks. For example, a word recognition
conditions. In particular, the method requires that memory experiment may ask observers to rate their
the experimenter identify experimental factors that confidence that a word was previously studied or
selectively influence different independent stages of not by using an N-point scale (e.g., 1 = confident
processing. For example, the memory search task old, 2 = probably old, 3 = maybe old, . . . 6 = con-
presumably requires at least two stages: perceptual fident new). Such a task is sometimes called a judg-
encoding and memory search. Making the stimuli ment task. Categorization tasks, where objects are
difficult to see will prolong the encoding stage but to be classified as members of N different groups,
should not influence the search stage. Similarly, are also N-choice RT tasks. When the number of
632 Reaction Time
possible responses is equal to the number of pos- Choice-RT will increase as both the number of
sible stimuli, the choice-RT task becomes an identi- stimuli and responses increases. This is the Hick-
fication taskeach stimulus is identified by one and Hyman law of mean RT: RT is a linear function of
only one correct response. the amount of uncertainty in the task. Uncertainty
The go/no go task can be viewed as a choice-RT is a dimensionless quantity that depends on the
task where one of the possible responses is not to number of possible outcomes in an experiment and
respond at all. Related to the go/no go task are stop- their probability. It can be used to describe many
signal tasks. These are choice-RT tasks in which, things, but in this context it refers to the amount of
for some trials, a stop signal is presented at some information provided by the occurrence of an event.
time after the stimulus, indicating that the observer For example, if there is only one possible response,
should not respond. Stop-signal tasks are used to observing that response does not tell you very much.
explore the dynamics of response preparation. As If there are n equally likely responses, observing one
the stop-signal delay increases, observers are less of them is very informative.
able to inhibit their responses, which suggests that Both choice-RT and identification tasks may
the choice process has components that are gradual be influenced by stimulus-response compat-
and build up over time. ibility. Compatibility refers to the ease with which
The stop-signal task asks observers to do two stimuli can be associated to different responses.
things at the same time: Select a response to a stimu- Compatibility experiments have often focused on
lus and also prepare to stop that response. Two other the spatial features of stimuli and responses or on
kinds of RT experiments that are closely related to where the stimuli appear relative to the location of
the stop-signal task are dual-task and task-switching the responses to be made to them. Highly compatible
experiments. These are used to explore mechanisms spatial relationships (e.g., responding with a right
of response inhibition and automaticity of process- button to the stimulus that appears on the right)
ing. Results from these kinds of experiments inform result in faster RTs than less compatible spatial rela-
our understanding of executive processing, or how tionships. Compatibility effects can also occur when
people are able to control their behaviors, starting the spatial stimulus dimension is task irrelevant and
and stopping them at appropriate times, and also of for nonspatial stimulus dimensions such as positive-
the factors that contribute to uncontrollable (auto- negative affect of stimuli and verbal responses.
matic) behaviors. Perhaps the most important issue that arises in
choice-RT experiments is the correlation between
accuracy and RT: The faster an observer responds,
Influences on RT
the more errors she makes. Earlier studies such as
Apart from any independent variables an experi- those of Sternberg and Donders assumed that if the
menter chooses to manipulate in an experiment, error rate were small then error responses could
there are a number of other variables that influence be safely ignored. While in general this is true, it is
RT in simple, choice, and identification tasks. If also true that very small changes in error rate may
these other variables are not controlled, they may reflect a very large change in processing strategy
confound the independent variables. Some variables and hence RT.
that influence RT are arousal, age, intelligence, and For this reason, there has been much attention
fatigue. Other variables are more specific to the kind paid to the speed-accuracy trade-off in RT experi-
of task the observer is asked to perform. ments. Much of our current understanding about
In simple-RT tasks, RT is positively related to how people make simple decisions has come from
stimulus intensity (e.g., brightness or loudness); as models of RT designed to explain the speed-accuracy
stimuli become easier to detect, simple responses to trade-off. These models assume that responses
them can be made more quickly. This relationship arise from a process of information accumulation.
is captured by Pirons law, which states that mean Observers sample evidence toward alternative
RT is equal to a + bIc, where a, b, and c are param- responses from a display, and when that evidence
eters, all greater than zero, to be estimated from the reaches a threshold, a response can be initiated. The
data, and I is stimulus intensity. Modality is also speed-accuracy trade-off arises naturally as subjects
very important in simple-RT tasks: Auditory stimuli raise and lower their thresholds for responding. If
evoke faster RTs than visual stimuli, for example. thresholds are low, it will require less evidence and
Realism and Instrumentalism 633
therefore less time to reach them, but it will be Proctor, R. W., & Vu, K.-P. L. (2006). Stimulus-response
easier for an inappropriate response to accumulate compatibility principles: Data, theory, and application.
evidence enough to reach a lower threshold. If the Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
thresholds are higher, RTs will be slower, but inap- Ratcliff, R., & McKoon, G. (2008). The diffusion decision
propriate responses will be less likely to reach the model: Theory and data for two-choice decision tasks.
threshold. Neural Computation, 20, 873922.
Evidence accumulation models, sometimes called Schall, J. D. (2003). Neural correlates of decision processes:
sequential sampling models, now are applied to Neural and mental chronometry. Current Opinion in
Neurobiology, 12, 182186.
problems across the spectrum of brain sciences,
Sternberg, S. (1969). The discovery of processing stages:
including neuroscience aging, developmental disor-
Extensions of Donders method. In W. G. Koster (Ed.),
ders, and clinical psychology. We now have good
Attention and performance (Vol. 2, pp. 276315).
evidence suggesting that at least some parts of the
Amsterdam, Netherlands: North-Holland.
brain function control decisions through groups of Townsend, J. T., & Ashby, F. G. (1983). Stochastic
neurons that act as evidence accumulators. modeling of elementary psychological processes. New
York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Conclusion Van Zandt, T. (2002). Analysis of response time
It has always seemed incredible so simple a depen- distributions. In H. Pashler & J. Wixted (Eds.), Stevens
dent variable as RT could ever tell us anything handbook of experimental psychology (3rd ed., pp.
really important about how the brain works. As 461516). New York, NY: John Wiley.
R. Duncan Luce described in 1986, this endeavor Welford, A. T., & Brebner, J. (Eds.). (1980). Reaction times.
is similar to trying to reverse engineer the mother- New York, NY: Academic Press.
board of a computer by measuring how long it takes
to run different programs. In fact, using RT alone, it
will not be possible to learn anything of the brains REALISM AND INSTRUMENTALISM
intricacies. However, by linking measurements of
RT to other behavioral variables and to neural data
The choice between realism and instrumentalism
such as single-cell recordings or functional magnetic
is at the core of concerns about how our scientific
resonance imaging, we have learned a great deal
models relate to reality: Do our models aim to be lit-
about how simple choices are made, including how
erally true descriptions of reality, or is their role only
people control their behaviors and attend to differ-
to be useful instruments for generating predictions?
ent features of their environments. Understanding
Realism about X, roughly speaking, is the claim that
these simple choices is fundamental to understand-
X exists and has its nature independent of our inter-
ing more complex human behavior.
ests, attitudes, and beliefs. An instrumentalist about
Trisha Van Zandt X denies this. He or she claims that talk of X should
be understood as no more than a locution for gen-
See also Aging, Memory, and Information Processing erating predictions; such talk should not be under-
Speed; Automaticity; Decision Making and Reward, stood as taking on a commitment to the existence
Computational Perspectives; Divided Attention and of X. According to an instrumentalist, we should
Memory; Multitasking and Human Performance;
either flatly not believe that X is out there or else
Psychological Refractory Period; Stroop Effect
should suspend judgment about the existence of X.
The most we need acknowledge is that talk of X is
Further Readings useful in making predictions.
Duncombe, R. L. (1945). Personal equation in astronomy. The question of realism versus instrumentalism
Popular Astronomy, 53, 213, 6376, 110121. can be asked about almost any theoretical entity in
Logan, G. D. (2003). Executive control of thought and science. It is likely, and seems reasonable, that differ-
action: In search of the wild homunculus. Current ent answers will be given in different cases. Someone
Directions in Psychological Science, 12, 4548. may wish to be a realist about certain theoretical enti-
Luce, R. D. (1986). Response times: Their role in inferring ties (e.g., electrons) but an instrumentalist about oth-
elementary mental organization. New York, NY: ers (e.g., centers of gravity). Not every noun phrase
Oxford University Press. in a scientific theory should be taken as expressing
634 Realism and Instrumentalism
an ontological commitment. Psychological theories beliefs, desires, and so on appear as sentences. Just as
are no exception. Almost every theoretical entity expressions in a computers machine code control a
posited by psychology has been questioned as to machines behavior and cause the occurrence of fur-
whether it is really out there or just a useful theo- ther expressions of machine code inside the machine,
retical fiction. This entry focuses on two such major so sentences in our language of thought enter into
theoretical entities: (a) propositional attitudes (e.g., causal relations, control our behavior, and cause
beliefs, desires) and (b) conscious states (qualia). the occurrence of new sentences in our language of
thought (new beliefs, desires, etc.). Like a computers
machine code, sentences in our language of thought
Propositional Attitudes
exist as a pattern of physical activity inside our
Psychological theories, both in science and our heads. Hence, propositional attitudes such as beliefs
folk conceptions, often use propositional attitudes and desires are discrete, reoccurring, entities with
(beliefs, desires, hopes, assumptions, fears, etc.) to causal powers. They are the causal agents behind
explain and predict how people think. These men- our behavior, just as patterns of electrical activity
tal representations seem to figure as causal agents instantiating a computers machine code instructions
in our best explanations of how agents behave and are the causal agents behind a computers behavior.
reason (e.g., If one believes x and desires y, that In contrast, Paul Churchland argues for a robust
causes one to z). Should psychological theories form of instrumentalism about propositional atti-
using propositional attitude terms be taken at face tudes. According to Churchland, belief and desire
value as referring to concrete entities that have an terms fail to latch onto any entities in the world and
objective existence, that cause action, combine with at best serve as a useful way of talking for ordinary
one another, are caused by sensation, and so on? Or folk. Churchland concedes that psychological theo-
should talk of propositional attitudes be understood ries employing propositional attitudes enjoy some
as no more than a theoretical fiction that allows our predictive success; however, he thinks that Fodor
psychological theories to achieve their predictive overestimates the degree of that success in light of
success but does not correspond to entities that are the potential of future neuroscientific theories to
really out there? explain behavior without reliance on propositional
Jerry Fodor argues for a robust form of realism attitudes. Churchland points out that many theories
about propositional attitudes. His reasoning is based are instrumentally useful yet false. Ptolemaic astron-
on the empirical success of psychological theories that omy, which posited celestial spheres, makes many
employ propositional attitude terms. We do astonish- true predictions but is nevertheless false. Churchland
ingly well at predicting how people behave if we are claims that beliefs and desires will go the way of
allowed to talk in terms of beliefs, desires, and other celestial spheres. Churchlands main argument for
propositional attitudes. There are no rival accounts the nonexistence of propositional attitudes can be
of human psychology that enjoy similar predictive broken into two steps. The first step is to argue that
success and that do not make use of propositional folk psychology is a theory and that the meaning
attitudes. According to Fodor, there is therefore at of propositional attitude terms (expressions such
least a presumptive inference that talk of beliefs and as belief and desire) is fixed by their role in that
desires latches onto real entities that pull the strings theory. What belief and desire mean is wholly, and
behind our behavior. Just as the success of our physi- exclusively, specified by folk psychology: What it
cal theories gives us reason to infer that their theoret- means to be a desire is to be something that com-
ical terms refer to real entities (e.g., electrons), so the bines with beliefs and causes action in precisely the
success of our psychological theories gives us reason way described by folk psychology. Churchlands
to infer that their propositional attitude terms latch second step is to argue that folk psychology is false.
onto objective features of the world. If the folk psychology theory is false, then nothing
If propositional attitudes are real, what sort satisfies the role ascribed to beliefs and desires, and
of entities are they? According to Fodor, in order consequently, beliefs and desires, as traditionally
adequately to account for the explanatory success conceived, do not exist. Both steps in Churchlands
of psychology, one has to understand propositional argument have been questioned. Against the first,
attitudes as having a sentence-like structure. Fodor Ronald Mallon and colleagues have argued that it
consequently posits a language of thought in which is far from clear the extent to which the meaning
Realism and Instrumentalism 635
of propositional attitude terms such as belief and Dennetts instrumentalism about propositional
desire ride on the fortunes of folk psychology. It is attitudes raises questions about exactly how one
not obvious how much, or indeed if any, of folk psy- should draw the line between realism and instrumen-
chology needs to be true in order to fix the meanings talism. The simple characterization of realism and
of propositional attitude terms. Against the second instrumentalism given at the beginning of this entry
step, Terence Horgan and James Woodward have fragments into a number of different theses that can,
argued that Churchland underestimates the success in principle, be affirmed or denied separately. Dennett
of folk psychology and overestimates the demands denies two key realist theses about propositional
we should place in order to be justified in believing attitudes: (a) Mind-independencepropositional
it is true. attitudes of an agent have their existence and nature
There are many ways of developing the instru- independent of the interpreting interests of observ-
mentalist thought. Daniel Dennett offers a milder ers; (b) discrete causal powerspropositional atti-
form of instrumentalism about propositional atti- tudes are discrete, reoccurring, entities inside the
tudes than Churchland. On Dennetts view (unlike head with the causal powers to produce behavior.
Churchlands), talk of beliefs and desires is true, but However, in contrast to Churchland, Dennett affirms
(unlike Fodors) such talk does not succeed in refer- a realist intuition about propositional attitudes:
ring to entities that have an objective existence or (c) existencepropositional attitudes existthey are
representational content independent of our inter- really out there, unlike celestial spheres. According to
ests. According to Dennett, what is involved in an Dennett, propositional attitudes exist as patterns that
agent having a belief or desire is not that there is are available to an interpreter to be used for predic-
a discrete entity inside the agentthe belief that tion. These patterns are real and objective in the
pwith causal powers pulling the strings behind the sense that there are objective facts about what is and
agents behavior but merely that there is a predictive what is not predictively successful to assume within
payoff in describing the agent as if it were controlled the intentional stance. In other words, some belief
by such an entity. To describe an agent in terms of and desire attributions pay off in that they yield suc-
propositional attitudes is to adopt what Dennett cessful predictions of behavior, and others do not.
calls the intentional stance: a mode of explanation These real patterns of predictive success and failure
that attributes to the agent the beliefs and desires are the facts in the world that make claims about
that a rational being placed in its shoes ought to propositional attitudes true or false.
have. According to Dennett, if the intentional stance
is reliable as a method of predicting the behavior of
Qualia
a system S, then ipso facto system S has those beliefs
and desires. All that is required for a system to have We often report that there is a phenomenal aspect
a belief is for it to be useful in predicting the behav- to our experience: Seeing red feels a certain way,
ior of that system to assume that it has that belief. having a mouse cupped in ones hand feels a certain
A consequence of Dennetts instrumentalism is that way, and the qualitative aspects of different expe-
beliefs are easy to achieve. It is often helpful to pre- riences are different. Distinctive qualitative experi-
dict the behavior of cats, robots, washing machines, ences accompany large parts of our mental life. Do
computers, plants, bacteria, cars, and thermostats our reports of qualitative experiences describe really
by treating them as if they have beliefs and desires. existing entities (phenomenal properties or states
According to Dennett, there is no difference between inside our head), or do they serve some other pur-
this as if and genuine possession of beliefs. It also pose? Are qualia real, or does talk of qualia fail to
becomes harder for some systems to achieve beliefs refer to anything in the world?
on Dennetts view. Patients suffering from mental ill- An immediate problem that realism and instru-
ness often cannot be profitably viewed as rational mentalism about qualia face is that it is hard even
agents when it comes to predicting their behavior. to describe what qualia are, and hence, hard to say
Therefore, on Dennetts view those patients lack what one is or is not being a realist about. Often, the
beliefs and desires. Their behavior would have to best one can do is point to examples of qualia, such
be explained in some other way than intentional as those above. Daniel Dennett develops a strong
psychologyfor example, by dropping down to the instrumentalist line against qualia. His target is the
level of their neurophysiology. widespread assumption that qualia have certain
636 Reductive Physicalism
special properties: They are ineffable, intrinsic prop- Dennett, D. C. (1991). Real patterns. Journal of
erties of experience, private and directly accessible to Philosophy, 88, 2751.
the experiencer. Dennett argues that nothing satis- Dennett, D. C. (2002). Quining qualia. In D. J. Chalmers
fies this specification, and hence, there are no such (Ed.), Philosophy of mind: Classical and contemporary
things as qualia. Dennetts position is similar to readings (pp. 226246). Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Churchlands strong line against propositional atti- Press.
tudes: Just as the falsity of Ptolemaic astronomy jus- Fodor, J. A. (1975). The language of thought. Sussex, UK:
tifies the inference that there are no celestial spheres, Harvester.
Fodor, J. A. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA:
so the falsity of philosophical claims about qualia
MIT Press.
justifies the inference that there are no qualia. Talk
Horgan, T., & Woodward, J. (1985). Folk psychology is
of qualia still serves a purpose according to Dennett
here to stay. Philosophical Review, 94, 197226.
in that it provides a shorthand summarizing our
Mallon, R., Machery, E., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. P. (2009).
ability to detect certain properties in the world, such Against arguments from reference. Philosophy and
as color properties, that lack a compact description Phenomenological Research, 79, 332356.
in any other terms. Tye, M. (1995). Ten problems of consciousness.
Dennetts instrumentalism has drawn heavy criti- Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
cism, not least because it runs up against the robust
impression that there are real qualitative proper-
ties of our mental states that have at least some of REDUCTIVE PHYSICALISM
the properties mentioned above. However, realism
comes at a price. If one grants realism about qua-
One way in which something utterly mysterious
lia, then the question arises of what kinds of enti-
can be unraveled is to reduce it to something we
ties qualia are. Are qualia represented features of
can understand. Not surprisingly, then, philosophy,
the world encoded by our nervous system, similar to
which often tries to understand mysteries, takes
our unconscious encoding of features of the world
reduction as one of its tools. Is knowledge reducible
such as position, size, and shape information? If so,
to true, justified belief? Are moral codes reducible
what makes conscious felt representations differ-
to personal preferences? Are meaningful statements
ent from unconscious representations? Or are qualia
reducible to constructions of immediate experience?
intrinsic physical properties of our nervous system,
And is the mind reducible to the brain? This entry
independent of our ability to represent? Or are qua-
provides an introduction to the concept of reduc-
lia something different entirely, requiring properties
tion, as it is used in philosophy of mind, and an
that float free from the physical world and any repre-
overview of the various reductive accounts of the
sentations it encodes? No consensus currently exists
mind posited by philosophers, culminating with a
to the question: the hard question of consciousness
brief discussion of the relative merit of these views
the nature of qualia under a realist understanding.
and of reduction in general.
Mark Sprevak
Reduction
See also Access Consciousness; Eliminative Materialism;
Folk Psychology; Mind-Body Problem; Nave Realism; What is reduction? What does it mean to say that
Representational Theory of Mind; Smell, the mind is or is not reducible to the brain? Like
Philosophical Perspectives many terms, both in and out of philosophy, the
word reduction is used in a variety of ways. In
everyday language, we often understand reduction,
Further Readings quite naturally, to mean lessening or reducing in
Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The conscious mind. Oxford, UK: size. You might go on a reducing dietfor exam-
Oxford University Press. ple, by eliminating those luscious French sauces that
Churchland, P. M. (1981). Eliminative materialism and the require reduction when cooking. In philosophy, the
propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy, 78, word reduction is sometimes used with this ordi-
6790. nary meaning, as philosophers often take it to mean
Dennett, D. C. (1987). The intentional stance. Cambridge, simplification. When we reduce one ontological
MA: MIT Press. category to another, by showing the one category
Reductive Physicalism 637
to be nothing but the other, we simplify our ontol- eliminative reduction of at least some of what
ogy by cutting down the number of kinds of things we currently think of as mental processes. Those
that exist in the world. However, the philosophical who uphold such a view, eliminativists, as they are
notion of reduction can also encompass an explana- called, think that we should not expect to explain
tory element. One category reduces to another, in the mental in terms of any other more fundamental
this sense, if can be explained in terms of the other. theory. But this is not because they hold, as does
In philosophy of mind, these two notions of the dualist, that mental processes are distinct from
reductionthe nothing but notion and the explana- physical ones. Rather, they hold that much of what
tory notionoften (though, as well see, not always) we currently think of as mental is just a madeup
overlap. For example, one way in which the mind fiction. Correlations between the mental and neu-
can be understood as nothing but the brain (or, more ral, they believe, will not be found. Thus the mind,
accurately, certain parts of the brain) is by reductively they think, should go the way of witches and phlo-
explaining mental processes entirely in terms of the giston. Although it was once commonly thought
neural processes. Not all explanations of one thing in that witches existed, we now simply deny their
terms of something else are reductive explanations. existence; although it was once thought that when
I might explain the reason for the spill on the floor wood burns or metal rusts phlogiston is released,
in terms of why it happened: My cat jumped on the we now deny that phlogiston exists. The mind,
table. But reductive explanations are not like this, according to eliminativists, is more like phlogis-
they do not tell us the cause of something; rather, ton than like the gene. Eliminativism is reductive
they aim to tell us what something is. For example, in as much as is simplifies our ontology (reduces
genetic material is reductively explained in terms of it in the ordinary sense of the term), but rather
DNA, water in terms of H2O, temperature in a gas than explaining the mental in neurological terms,
in terms of mean molecular momentum, and if the it explains it away.
mental is reductively explainable in terms of neural Eliminativism, apart from being reductive in one
processes, mental processes in terms of neural ones. sense, is also most definitely a case of physicalism
For example, one version of reductive physicalism since it posits only physical processes. Although
holds that pain is reducible to C-fiber activity (or, dualism is not a reductive theory, other antiphysi-
more accurately, to whatever neural process that is calist positions can be thought of as reductive. For
found to be perfectly correlated with pain). Such a example, phenomenalists hold that physical objects
reduction aims to explain pain by showing that it is are nothing but sense data; the tomato on your
nothing but C-fiber activity. If pain could be entirely plate, on this view, is something like a concatenation
explained in terms of processes in the brain, such as of mental images. Idealists are also reductivists of
C-fiber activity, we would have both simplified our an antiphysicalistic stripe. For the idealist, physical
ontology and found out what pain really is. objects are reducible to ideas. The reductive physi-
calist, however, turns this theory on its head: Ideas
Physicalism (and everything else mental) are reducible to physi-
cal objects.
What makes reductive physicalism a form of physi-
Eliminative reduction is a version of reductive
calism? Physicalism holds, roughly, that everything
physicalism, but it is not the most common one.
is physical. Reductive physicalism is simply the view
Many physicalists are optimistic that we will find
that the mind is reduciblein one of the various
robust correlations between mental and physical
senses to be specified belowto either neural pro-
processes. And among these some accept that what
cesses or behavior. Assuming that neural processes
we think of as mental can, at least in principle, be
and behavior are both entirely physical, such a view
explained by physical processes, while others think
deems physicalisms primary nemesis, the mental, to
that although mental processes, such as twinges of
be physical.
pain and showers of tickles, will never be explained
Eliminative Physicalism in terms of physical processes, mental processes are
identical to physical processes nonetheless. These
The explanatory and simplifying elements of reduc- two groups of reductive physicalists do not advo-
tion sometimes come apart. For example, some cate eliminative reduction, as they maintain that
see neuroscience as paving the way toward an all or nearly all that we know and love about the
638 Reductive Physicalism
mental exists. Rather, they advocate what is some- the brain, but as they see it, we lack an explanation
times called retentive reduction; eliminative reduc- of how this could be so.
tion eliminates the mental from our ontology, while
retentive reduction involves explaining it or at least Behaviorism
identifying it in terms of the brain.
So we have two different sorts of reductive accounts
of the mind: eliminativism and the type identity the-
Explanatory Mind-Brain Identity Theory
ory. And the latter can be divided into explanatory
One form of retentive reduction in philosophy of type identity and what is sometimes called myste-
mind is the mind-brain identity theory, also called rianism. Another form of reductive physicalism is
the type identity theory or sometimes just the iden- behaviorism. On the most basic understanding of
tity theory. Philosophers who accept the identity this view, the mind is nothing over and above behav-
theory think that mental processes are one and ior. Pain, for example, is just the bodily movements
the same thing as neural states. For example, the you make when you are in pain. The desire for car-
type of thing we call pain, according to this view, is rots is just the bodily movements you make when
nothing more than the type of thing we call C-fiber you desire carrots. An obvious problem with this
stimulation (or, rather, the type of thing we call P, view is that sometimes one deliberately suppresses
where P refers to the neural state that is perfectly such movements. If its not mealtime, for example,
correlated with experiences of pain). Pain exists, youll need to suppress your urge to open the fridge.
claims the identity theorist, and it is reducible to However, more sophisticated forms of behaviorism
activity in the brain. Just as the uncanny connection claim not to reduce pain to certain forms of behav-
between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde led the London ior, per se, but rather to the disposition to behave in
lawyer Utterson to eventually conclude that the certain ways. To be fragile, for example, is to have
misanthropic Hyde was none other than his dear the disposition to break if dropped on a hard sur-
old friend Dr. Jekyll, those who uphold the identity face. A glass has this disposition even when it is not
theory think that a correlation between pain and dropped. Similarly, the behaviorist will say, to be in
C-fiber stimulation might lead us to conclude that pain is to have the disposition to wince, say ouch,
pain and C-fiber stimulation are one and the same and so forth.
thing as well.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Mysterianism
Are there reasons to accept one reductive view over
As some see it, the mind-brain identity theory is the others? All have at least some apparent flaws.
explanatory in the sense that it provides what some Eliminativism is criticized for being too pessimistic
see as a simple answer to the question of why pain is about the prospects for mind-brain correlations.
correlated with C-fiber stimulation: The correlation Neuroscience, the argument goes, is in its infancy
holds because pain is C-fiber stimulation. If pain is and it may be that what seems utterly inexplicable
just C-fiber stimulation, if pain and C-fiber stimu- neuroscientifically now will be understood later.
lation are just two names for the same thing, there And behaviorists are criticized for not being able to
is no more question about why every time people spell out the relevant dispositions. What, exactly,
are in pain their C-fibers are firing than there is a are the relevant background conditions under which
question about why every time I shut the door I also you would say that you are in pain? What, exactly,
close it. are the relevant mitigating circumstances? It is not at
Other reductive physicalists, however, although all clear how to answer these questions. Moreover,
they accept the identities, deny that identities of this there are some mental states, such as the belief that
form provide explanations; they still think that there seven is a prime number, that do not even have
is a question of how the activity of C-fibers could any standard associated behaviors. What does one
be pain or, to use another example, how the activ- typically do when one believes that seven is a prime
ity of pyramidal cells could be consciousness. Pain, number? The question is rather absurd.
in their view, is reducible to neural processes in the The mind-brain identity theory, according to
sense of it being nothing but something going on in which mental process M is necessarily physical
Regret 639
processes P, is more widely held than either elimi- Which view is preferable: reductive physicalism
nativism or behaviorism. However, it is open to or nonreductive physicalism? As with many ques-
criticism as well, the central one being that it is tions in philosophy, the jury is still out.
chauvinistic since it does not allow for M to be any-
Barbara Montero
thing other than P. Going back to pain and C-fiber
stimulation, if there were a creature from another See also Anomalous Monism; Eliminative Materialism;
planet who behaved as if it were in pain yet did Emergence; Explanatory Gap; Idealism; Mind-Body
not have C-fibers, the classic mind-brain identity Problem; Physicalism
theory implies that this creature would not feel pain.
No matter how similar its behavior and outward
Further Readings
appearance to ours when we are hurt, the creatures
lack of C-fibers would imply, according to the classic Butler, J. (1736). Analogy of religion, natural and revealed,
mind-brain identity theory, that crushing the crea- to the constitution and nature. London, UK: Knapton.
tures foot would not cause it to feel pain. Thus just Feigl, H. (1967). The mental and the physical: The essay
as John Smith, the CEO at a high-powered account- and a postscript. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
ing firm, is chauvinistic because he refuses to hire Press.
women merely because they are women, the propo- Kim, J. (1999). Mind in a physical world: An essay on the
nents of the classic identity theory are chauvinistic mind-body problem and mental causation. Cambridge,
because they hold that extraterrestrials cannot feel MA: MIT Press.
pain merely because they are extraterrestrials. Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and necessity. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
There are two further rather subtle objections to
Lewis, D. (1966). An argument for the identity theory.
the view. The first is that, as some see it, it falls into
Journal of Philosophy, 63, 1725.
eliminativism. If the mind is nothing but the brain,
Lewis, D. (1980). Mad pain and Martian pain. In N. Block
then the mind, according to this objection, does not
(Ed.), Readings in the philosophy of psychology (Vol. 1,
really exist. There are certain neural processes that pp. 216222). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
are being labeled mental processes as well, but as Press.
for real feelings, emotions, thoughts, or perceptions, Montero, B. (2009). On the philosophy of mind. Belmont,
goes the objection, this view leaves them out. A CA: Wadsworth Press.
complementary objection is that mind-brain identity Place, U. T. (1956). Is consciousness a brain process?
theory makes the brain something nonphysical. If British Journal of Psychology, 47, 4450.
the mind is identical to the brain, then the brain is Smart, J. J. C. (1959). Sensations and brain processes.
identical to the mind, and if this is so, according to Philosophical Review, 68, 141156.
this objection, the brain is, itself, something mental;
it is made out of something like tiny experiences and
thus is not physical.
There are various responses to these criticisms.
REGRET
But there are also alternatives. Dualism is one alter-
native. However, a physicalistic alternative is non- We feel regret when realizing or imagining that our
reductive physicalism. The nonreductive physicalist present situation would have been better had we
finds fault in reductionism in general. Guided by the decided differently. This entry addresses how regret
idea, as Bishop Butler put it in 1736, that everything is experienced, whether we regret actions more than
is what it is and not another thing, the nonreduc- inactions, how regret relates to counterfactual think-
tivist accepts the reality of the mental and does not ing and decision making, and how regret influences
think that it is something other than it is, such as the behavior.
neural. For the nonreductive physicalist the world
The Experience of Regret
is composed of levels, which roughly mirror the
disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, neurology, Regret stems from a comparison between outcomes
psychology. The objects of psychology, according to of chosen and nonchosen alternatives in which the
the nonreductive physicalists, are just as real as the latter outperform the former. It is a painful emotion
objects of neurology but are not identical to them. that reflects on our own causal role in the current,
640 Regret
suboptimal situation. The emotion regret is accom- in nonchoice situations. For example, one can be
panied by feelings that one should have known bet- disappointed in the weather and happy with a birth-
ter and having a sinking feeling, by thoughts about day present, but one cannot regret these instances
the mistake one has made and the opportunities lost, (unless, of course, if the disappointing present was
by tendencies to kick oneself and to correct ones suggested by oneself).
mistake, by desires to undo the event and get a sec- The relation between regret and decision mak-
ond chance, and by actually doing this if given the ing is also apparent in regrets connection to coun-
opportunity. It is a cognitively based emotion that terfactual thinking. Counterfactual thoughts are
motivates one to think about how the current nega- thoughts about what might have been. Note that not
tive event came about and how one could change it all counterfactual thoughts produce regret but only
or how one could prevent its future occurrence. those that change a bad outcome into a good one
by changing a prior choice or decision. Thus, when
Action and Inaction Regret it rains on the way home from work and I get wet, I
feel regret when I generate a counterfactual thought
We may regret sins of omission and sins of commis-
in which I brought an umbrella but not when I gener-
sion. Early regret research indicated that people tend
ate a counterfactual in which it would be a beautiful
to regret their actions (commissions) more than their
day. In the latter case, counterfactual thoughts about
inactions (omissions). Later research showed that
better weather that could have been would result in
time plays a crucial role here. In the short run, people
disappointment but not in regret (I could not change
tend to feel more regret over their actions (the stu-
the weather, so there is nothing to regret).
pid things they did or bought), but in the long run,
they tend to feel more regret over their inactions (the
school they never finished, the career or romance Experienced and Anticipated Regret
never pursued). This temporal pattern to regret is due Psychologists became interested in studying regret
to a number of factors that decrease the regret for partly because it is not only a passive emotional
action over time (e.g., we take more reparative action reaction to bad decisions but also a major influence
and engage in more psychological repair work for our day-to-day decision making. This influence can
action regrets than for inaction regrets) and to fac- take two forms. First, the experience of regret may
tors that increase the regret for inaction over time produce a behavioral inclination to reverse ones
(e.g., over time we may forget why we did not act on decision or undo the consequences. Second, decision
opportunities, making the inaction inexplicable). makers may anticipate possible future regret when
Another factor determining the intensity of regret making decisions and choose in such a way that this
is the justifiability of the decision. People feel most future regret will be minimal.
regret over decisions that are difficult to justify. The influence of retrospective regret on behavior
Decisions that are based on solid reasons produce can be functional. The aversive experience prompts
less regret than decisions that are not well thought us to undo the cause of the regret. For example,
through. This justifiability may also explain when after buying a product that proves to be suboptimal,
actions are more regretted than inactions and when regret can motivate us to ask for our money back,
the reverse is true. or it may result in apologies in the case of inter-
personal regrets. In both instances, regret can help
Regret, Decision Making and
us to satisfy our needs. It protects us from wasting
Counterfactual Thinking
money and helps us maintain good social relation-
Regret is unique in its relation to decision making. ships. Additionally, regret can be functional in the
One only experiences regret over a bad outcome sense that the painful self-reflective nature of the
when at some point in time one could have pre- experience is one of various ways by which we learn.
vented the outcome from happening. Other emo- The feeling of regret over bad decisions and wrong
tions can also be the result of decisions; for example, choices makes them stand out in our memory and
one may be disappointed with a decision outcome helps us make better decisions in the future.
or happy about the process by which one made a The idea that people, when making decisions,
choice. But these emotions can also be experienced might take into account future emotional reactions
Rehearsal and Memory 641
to possible decision outcomes has some history in Loomes, G., & Sugden, R. (1982). Regret theory: An
research on decision making, starting with econo- alternative theory of rational choice under uncertainty.
mists studying rational choice in the early 1980s. We Economic Journal, 92, 805824.
now know that the influence of anticipated future Roese, N. J. (2005). If only. New York, NY: Broadway
regret on current decision making can take several Books.
forms. First, people may avoid deciding in order to Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2007). A theory of regret
avoid making the wrong decision. However, this regulation 1.0. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 17,
inactive attitude may result in regret as well, since 318.
we know that in the long run inactions produce
most regret. People may also avoid or delay their
decisions because they want to gather more informa- REHEARSAL AND MEMORY
tion in order to make a better decision. Research has
shown that these anticipations of regret can influ-
Rehearsal refers to the overt or subvocal recitation
ence many real-life decisions, among others, stock
of to-be-remembered (TBR) verbal material dur-
market investments, salary negotiations, lottery play,
ing encoding, storage, or retrieval from memory.
prenatal screening decisions, and condom use.
This entry reviews the considerable evidence that
Taken together, regret is an aversive emotional
rehearsal is a major determinant of memory perfor-
state that is related to counterfactual thoughts about
mance in many situations, involving both short-term
how the present situation would have been bet-
and long-term retention. Rehearsal has played an
ter had one chosen or acted differently. Therefore,
explanatory role in otherwise highly diverse theo-
people are motivated to avoid or minimize post-
ries of memory, for example that of Alan Baddeley.
decisional regret. This has several implications for
In recognition of the potential circularity of an
decision making since people may employ different
unobservable explanatory construct (e.g., whenever
strategies in order to prevent regret from happening
memory performance is good, there must have been
or to cope with regret when it is experienced. In prin-
effective rehearsal, and whenever performance is
ciple, the effects of regret can be considered rational,
poor, rehearsal must have been absent), much effort
because they protect the decision maker from the
has focused on the identification, operationalization,
aversive consequences of the experience of regret.
and experimental control of rehearsal.
There might be cases, however, in which an aversion
to regret leads one to avoid counterfactual feedback
Elaborative Versus Maintenance Rehearsal
(i.e., any knowledge about what the outcome would
have been had they chosen differently) and hence One influential proposal involved the distinc-
results in reduced learning from experience. This tion between elaborative rehearsal (also known
might be considered irrational. But irrespective of as Type II rehearsal) and maintenance (Type I)
this rationality question, regret has shown to be a rehearsal advanced by Fergus Craik: During elab-
fundamental emotion in the behavior decisions of orative rehearsal, new material is meaningfully
most, if not all of us. related to other informationfor example, by
deciding whether a TBR word fits into a sentence.
Marcel Zeelenberg Maintenance rehearsal, by contrast, involves rote
repetition of items without relational processing,
See also Decision Making, Neural Underpinnings;
Decision Theory, Philosophical Perspectives; Emotion
usually with the express purpose to maintain already
Regulation; Rationality of Emotion encoded information in awareness.
There is consensus that increasing elaboration of
TBR material leads to better long-term retention; for
Further Readings example, judgments involving the meaning of the
Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (1995). The experience of TBR material lead to better subsequent recall than
regret: What, when, and why. Psychological Review, judgments of its sound, which in turn yields better
102, 379395. memory than judgments of surface structure (e.g.,
Landman, J. (1993). Regret: The persistence of the possible. reporting the number of letters). By contrast, the
New York, NY: Oxford University Press. effect of maintenance rehearsal is more ambiguous:
642 Rehearsal and Memory
On the one hand, when people are led to believe the pattern of overt rehearsals and item presenta-
that long-term retention of the material is unimport- tions during study. Lamings theory emphasizes the
ant, the number of overt recitations of TBR words importance of considering subject-generated events
is often unrelated to subsequent surprise recall (rehearsal) on par with experimenter-controlled
performance. On the other hand, when memory is events (presentation of study items). Overall,
tested by recognition, the duration of maintenance rehearsal patterns indubitably are a major determi-
rehearsal is usually correlated with performance, nant of long-term memory performance, and the
as shown by Robert Greene in an extensive review. success of recall can be predicted from preceding
The distinction between maintenance and elabora- rehearsals with quantitative precision. To a first
tive rehearsal might therefore be best considered approximation, the data warrant the conclusion that
as a continuum involving the amount of attention an items probability of recall is determined by the
that is paid to rehearsal. When attention is minimal, recency of its last rehearsal.
then the number of rehearsals may fail to correlate
with measures of memory. In all other situations, Rehearsal in Memory Over the Short Term
the number of articulations of TBR material is cor- Turning to memory over the short term, relevant
related with enhanced performance. models have frequently invoked rehearsal as an
explanatory construct. In contrast to long-term
Linking Rehearsal to Performance
memory research, the imputed role of rehearsal in
Going beyond mere correlation, support for a causal short-term memory has focused less on encoding
link between rehearsal patterns and memory per- and more on the protection of information against
formance has been adduced both empirically and loss, often presumed to occur through temporal
theoretically. Lydia Tan and Geoff Ward provided decaythat is, the inexorable decline in memory
a detailed analysis of rehearse-out-loud protocols in strength over the passage of time.
free-recall experiments. In immediate free recall, per- Accordingly, research in short-term memory has
formance at all list positions was primarily a func- often focused on the effects of wholesale manipula-
tion of the recency of an items last rehearsal, to the tions that prevent rehearsal altogether. Rehearsal is
exclusion of other experimental variables (e.g., pre- commonly thought to be abolished by articulatory
sentation rate, list length, and participants age) that suppression (AS from here on)that is, the repeated
affect recall when rehearsal patterns are ignored. It articulation of an irrelevant word. AS is particu-
follows that those other variables exert their effect larly diagnostic because, if it successfully suppresses
on performance only indirectly, via modulation of rehearsal, then the effects of temporal decay should
peoples rehearsal patterns. It is noteworthy that the become observable. Contrary to that expectation
recency-of-rehearsal analysis accommodated the pri- of decay-based models, Stephen Lewandowsky
macy effect (better recall for items that were pre- and colleagues have shown in 2004 and 2008 that
sented early in the list), because early items tended to performance is unaffected when AS-filled retention
be rehearsed again much later in the list. In delayed intervals are extended. The hitherto tight coupling
recall, other factors such as the number and spacing between a presumed mechanism of forgetting
of rehearsals become relatively more important than namely, decayand rehearsal therefore appears
recency, and those factors may also explain why unnecessary.
maintenance rehearsal is sometimes ineffective. Tan and Ward in 2008 reported the only analysis
Intriguingly, Tan and Ward found no additional to date of (spontaneous) overt rehearsal protocols
advantage for spontaneous self-generation of the involving short lists and immediate serial recall (i.e.,
rehearsal schedule in comparison to articulation of the recall of list items immediately upon presentation
an identical protocol that was generated by a dif- in their original order). Performance was found to
ferent participant. The process of choosing items be strongly associated with the length of the longest
for rehearsal thus appears less important than their forward-rehearsal sequence; that is, a person who
effective re-presentation by articulation. rehearsed the first five items in sequence performed
David Laming presented a detailed mathematical better than a person who rehearsed only two items
model that predicts entire sequences of recall from in sequence.
Reinforcement Learning, Psychological Perspectives 643
sound of a tone) occurs before another stimulus stimulus if the environment is to acquire control
(such as taste stimulated by food in the mouth) that of the arbitrary response as well as the reinforcer-
already evokes behavior (such as salivation). After elicited response. Together, findings from these pro-
several occurrences of this sequence of events, the cedures identified the first factor that is necessary
formerly neutral stimulus begins to evoke salivation for selection by reinforcementtemporal contiguity
when it is occasionally presented by itself. Evoking between the events.
salivation after the tone allowed the tone to acquire The second factor necessary for selection by rein-
control of the salivary response. The stimulus that forcement was discovered through an elaboration
evoked behavior at the beginning of the procedure of the basic classical procedure: A response was first
(food in the example) functioned as a reinforc- conditioned to one stimulus (S1) by presenting it in
ing stimulus, or reinforcer. Reinforcers change and temporal contiguity with a reinforcer until condi-
strengthen the ability of stimuli to guide behavior. tioning had become strong. Then, a second stimulus
Pavlovs procedure enabled an arbitrary stimulus (S2) was introduced at the same time as S1 and the
(the tone) to guide a response (salivation) that was reinforcer now followed both stimuli in the same
originally evoked by another stimulus (food). In temporal relation as before. For example, a tone
Thorndikes procedure, called operant conditioning, would first precede food until salivation had been
a response (such as pressing a lever) occurs before a conditioned. Then, a light would be introduced and
stimulus (such as food) that already evokes behav- the tone and a light together would both precede
ior (such as salivation). After several such sequences food. Note that in this procedure, S2 stands in the
of events, lever pressing and salivating both become same temporal relation to the reinforcer as S1, a
more likely when the learner sees the lever. Thus, temporal relation known to permit conditioning. If
the operant procedure enables the environment to temporal contiguity were all that was required for
guide two sets of responsesthe relatively arbitrary conditioning, then S2 should also acquire control
response that preceded the reinforcing stimulus of the reinforcer-elicited response. However, tests
(lever pressing) as well as the response evoked by showed that when S2 was presented by itself con-
the reinforcer (salivating). B. F. Skinner most clearly ditioning had not occurred. In terms of the previ-
appreciated that the operant procedure allowed ous example, the tone evoked salivation but the
the full behavioral capabilities of the learner to be light did not. Prior conditioning to the tone blocked
modified by experience, not just those responses that conditioning to the light even though the light had
could already be elicited by some stimulus. As expe- occurred in temporal contiguity with the food.
rience accumulatedthus expanding the behavioral This basic result was first clearly identified with the
repertoire of the learnerthe potential increased for classical procedure but was soon replicated with
the selection by reinforcement of ever more complex the operant procedure. Various control procedures
behavior. The change in the guidance of behavior eliminated alternative interpretations of the block-
produced by both the classical and operant proce- ing effect. The conclusion from this work was that a
dures is called conditioning because the change is second factor in addition to temporal contiguity was
conditional on (that is, dependent on) events in required for selection by reinforcement. That fac-
the individual experiencea stimulus-reinforcer tor is typically called discrepancy. For conditioning
sequence in Pavlovs case and a response-reinforcer to occur, a reinforcer must not only appear close in
sequence in Thorndikes case. time to the stimulus in Pavlovs procedure or to the
Research with both the classical and operant response in Thorndikes procedure, but the reinforcer
procedures indicates that the events in the sequence must also evoke a change in behavior. Returning to
must occur very close together in time for condition- the example, salivation already occurred when the
ing to occur. In the classical procedure, the neutral light was first introduced because the accompanying
stimulus must precede the reinforcing stimulus by tone had already been paired with food. As a result,
no more than a few seconds if the neutral stimulus is the introduction of food after the light did not pro-
to acquire control of the reinforcer-elicited response. duce a change in behavior that was large enough to
Similarly, in the operant procedure the arbitrary produce selection by reinforcement. The discrepancy
response must immediately precede the reinforcing requirement may be stated as follows:
Reinforcement Learning, Psychological Perspectives 645
neurons that make up the nervous system. A goal of McClelland, J. L., Rumelhart, D. E., & PDP Research
neural network research is to demonstrate that when Group. (1986). Parallel distributed processing:
the inputs to the network are activated in sequences Explorations in the microstructure of cognition:
that mimic the experience of an organism, the out- Psychological and biological models (Vol. 2).
puts of the network simulate the behavior observed Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
in experienced organisms. The strengths of connec- Rescorla, R. A., & Wagner, A. R. (1972). A theory of
tions between units in artificial neural networks are Pavlovian conditioning: Variations in the effectiveness of
modified by computational procedures that simu- reinforcement and nonreinforcement. In A. H. Black &
W. F. Prokasy (Eds.), Classical conditioning (Vol. 2, pp.
late the action of reinforcement and other experi-
6499). New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
mentally identified processes on synaptic efficacies.
Rogers, T. T., & McClelland, J. L. (2004). Semantic
Neural networks of interest to experimental science
cognition: A parallel distributed processing approach.
are those that are informed and constrained by find-
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
ings from behavioral and biological research. Other Waelti, P., Dickinson, A., & Schultz, W. (2001). Dopamine
fields that exploit neural networks, such as artificial responses comply with basic assumptions of formal
intelligence, need not honor these constraints but are learning theory. Nature, 412, 4348.
primarily concerned with whether the outputs of the
network are effective for the task at hand. Exploring
the implications of reinforcement by means of neu-
ral networks is in a relatively early stage of develop- RELATIONSHIPS, DEVELOPMENT OF
ment but already shows promise with such complex
behavior as language acquisition, concept formation, The development of relationships with signifi-
and memory. The work of James McClelland and cant others is one of the most important tasks that
David Rumelhart has been pioneering in this effort. an individual encounters in his or her lifetime.
Relationships, according to Robert Hinde, are ongo-
John W. Donahoe
ing patterns of interaction between two individuals
See also Behaviorism; Decision Making and Reward,
who acknowledge some connection with each other.
Computational Perspectives; Discrimination Learning, In the case of children and adolescents, the social
Training Methods; Distributed Cognition; Human partners with whom interaction is most frequently
Classification Learning; Memory, Neural Basis; experienced include parents, peers, and teach-
Natural Action Selection, Modeling ers. From Hindes perspective, individuals bring to
social exchanges reasonably stable social orienta-
Further Readings tions (temperament; personality) that dispose them
to be more or less sociable and a repertoire of social
Bliss, T. V., & Lom, T. (1973). Long-lasting potentiation
skills for understanding the thoughts, emotions, and
of synaptic transmission in the dentate area of the
intentions of others and for interpersonal problem
anaesthetized rabbit following stimulation of the
solving. Over the short term, a childs or adolescents
perforant path. Journal of Physiology, 232, 331356.
interactions with others will vary in form and func-
Donahoe, J. W. (2003). Selectionism. In K. A. Lattal &
P. N. Chase (Eds.), Behavior theory and philosophy
tion in response to fluctuations in the parameters
(pp. 103128). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic. of the social situation, such as the parents or peers
Donahoe, J. W., & Dorsel, V. P. (Eds.). (1997). Neural- characteristics, overtures, and responses. Often,
network models of cognition: Biobehavioral social interactions are embedded in longer term rela-
foundations. New York, NY: Elsevier Science Press. tionships and thus are influenced by past and antici-
Donahoe, J. W., & Palmer, D. C (2005). Learning and pated future interactions. For example, the nature
complex behavior (V. Dorsel, Ed.). Richmond, MA: of any given relationship is defined partly by the
Ledgetop. characteristics of its members and by its constituent
Gormezano, I., & Kehoe, E. J. (1981). Classical interactions. Over the long term, the kind of relation-
conditioning and the law of contiguity. In P. Harzem & ship that any two individuals form with one another
M. D. Zeiler (Eds.), Predictability, correlation, and depends largely on the history of their interactions
contiguity (pp. 145). New York, NY: Wiley. and relationships, not only with each other but also
Relationships, Development of 647
with other members of their personal social commu- unfamiliar environment when the caregiver is pres-
nity. Consequently, the first dyadic relationships that ent and how the child reacts to the departure and
children experience are embedded within a group subsequent return of the caregiver. Questionnaires,
the family. Significantly, families help define the type interviews, and other observational paradigms have
and range of relationships and interactions that are been developed to assess attachment in alternative
likely or permissible. settings and with older children and adults.
Many theories of human development (e.g., Secure attachments result from sensitive and
Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson) suggest that relation- responsive caregiving. The sensitive and responsive
ships with others are important to healthy social parent interprets signals correctly and responds
and emotional development. This entry reviews effectively and appropriately to the childs behaviors
the development of relationships with caregivers or and needs. Sensitive and responsive parents do not
parents, peers, friends, and romantic partners. The direct anger or hostility to their young children, even
central argument presented herein is that the earli- when they are feeling irritated or annoyed. In the
est relationships children form with their primary strange situation, infants who explore the environ-
caregivers help shape the formation of internalized, ment freely, engage with strangers while the care-
mental representations of relationships, which, in giver is present, and seek proximity to caregivers
turn, subsequently affect the development of other when under stress are classified as securely attached.
significant relationships. When the caregiver leaves, securely attached infants
are visibly upset, but on reunion, they are relieved to
see the caregiver and easily soothed. Secure infants
Attachment Relationships
become children who express their emotions to oth-
John Bowlby proposed that the attachment rela- ers and actively seek help when they are unable to
tionship between the child and his or her primary help themselves. These behaviors help them learn
caregiver (most often, the mother) derives from a to regulate their emotions, adapt to new challenges,
biologically rooted behavioral system that is marked and develop healthy relationships with others during
by the infants natural proximity seeking to caregiv- their lifetime.
ers for safety, security, and support. The attachment When parents are insensitive and unrespon-
system regulates both physical and psychological sive, their infants develop insecure attachments
safety in the context of close relationships. Perceived to them. There are three types of insecure attach-
danger, stress, and threats to the accessibility of ments: anxious-avoidant, anxious-ambivalent,
attachment figures activate attachment responses. and disorganized. In the strange situation, children
When children with secure attachments are threat- who do not seek caregivers in times of stress and/
ened, they tend to seek out those with whom they or ignore caregivers after separation are classified
have formed attachments, and in this way, these fig- as anxious-avoidant. Anxious-avoidant children
ures serve as safe havens. In novel environments, often have caregivers who ignore or reject them in
attachment figures also serve as secure bases from times of need. These children show limited affective
which children explore their environment. Herein engagement with caregivers, learning to inhibit their
we briefly review important concepts about attach- negative emotions and avoid emotional interactions.
ment and internal working models. Anxious-avoidant children have difficulty control-
Infant attachment to caregivers is typically ling their anger in social company and thus have
assessed through a laboratory paradigm developed difficulty developing positive peer relationships and
by Mary Ainsworth and colleagues. Ainsworths friendships.
strange situation comprises several episodes during Children who are unusually clingy with caregiv-
which caregivers and strangers enter and leave an ers in the strange situation and need more reassur-
unfamiliar room within which the child is present. ance than other infants, even in only mildly stressing
The task is designed to mimic how familiar and situations, are typically classified as anxious-ambiv-
unfamiliar adults flow in and out of a childs daily alent. These children have more difficulty separating
life. The quality of the attachment relationship is from parents, and during reunion they are more dif-
assessed by observing how the child explores the ficult to comfort. Anxious-ambivalent children have
648 Relationships, Development of
caregivers who are inconsistent in their availability become so deeply ingrained that they influence feel-
and sensitivity. Thus, these children display vigilance ings, thoughts, and behaviors with significant oth-
for caregiver actions and show inflated distress in ers at both the conscious and unconscious level. For
order to elicit caregiver attention. In social interac- example, if the caregiver is consistently responsive
tions, these children are easily frustrated, impulsive, to the childs needs, she or he will feel confident,
and overly anxious. They are less likely to explore in secure, and self-assured when introduced to novel
novel situations and have heightened personal fears. settings. In contrast, if the caregiver is unresponsive
With peers, some of these children may act aggres- to or rejecting of the child, she or he may develop
sively, whereas others act more passively and are an IWM about the self as being unworthy of care;
prone to social reticence and withdrawal. interpersonal relationships are expected to be reject-
Last, children who develop disorganized attach- ing or neglectful, and the social world is viewed as
ment relationships are likely to have parents who hostile and unwelcoming. Thus, early relationships
are emotionally or physically abusive. These children affect a childs felt security, a significant develop-
show no clear pattern of behavior in the strange mental phenomenon that provides the child with
situation. They are at greater risk than other attach- sufficient emotional and cognitive sustenance to
ment groups to be aggressive and are more likely to allow for the active exploration of the social envi-
develop oppositional defiant disorder, a persistent ronment.
pattern of uncooperative, hostile behavior that inter- In accord with their internalized expectations
feres with a childs basic functioning. about the social world, children act in ways that
Note that the cross-cultural universality of confirm these beliefs. For example, if a child has
attachment theory has been questioned. Critics negative expectations of peers, he or she is likely to
argue that attachment theory emphasizes autonomy, think that an ambiguously intended harmful event
independence, and individuation as defining com- was intentionally caused. The child is also more
petence, all of which are rooted in Western ideals. likely to choose to react in aggressive ways toward
They also emphasize that caregiver sensitivity may the perceived provocateur, increasing the likelihood
be culturally defined and thus differ among societies. that the peer will respond in a hostile manner in
Consequently, traditional measures of attachment, return. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, IWMs cause
such as the strange situation, may not be relevant in individuals to behave in ways in which others fulfill
all cultures. For instance, in Eastern cultures, such as their expectations, strengthening and reinforcing
Japan, dependence and accommodation are encour- their original schemas. Consequently, IWMs become
aged in children. Furthermore, babies in those cul- more difficult to modify with increasing age.
tures generally experience less separation from their
caregivers and subsequently may be more stressed Friendships
by the strange situation than American babies. Consistent with the assumption that IWMs are
These cultural differences may explain, in part, why carried forward from relationship to relationship,
Japanese babies are more likely to be classified as significant associations exist between security of
insecure-ambivalent than are babies from the United attachment in the parent-child relationships and
States. However, with the acknowledgment that the quality of childrens close dyadic friendships.
sensitive parenting, the secure base, and compe- Friendships typically comprise the first significant
tence may differ in expressed form across cultures, nonfamilial relationship that children develop with
attachment theory is still useful in understanding the others. Friendships may be defined as reciprocal,
power of parent-child relationships in later signifi- egalitarian relationships in which both partners
cant relationships. acknowledge the relationship and treat each other
as equals. Friendships are typically characterized
Internal Working Models
by companionship, a shared history, and mutual
Central to attachment theory is the proposition affection.
that early attachment relationships provide a basis Children with secure attachments to parents have
for representations of self and others in social rela- more friends and their friendships are of better qual-
tionships beyond the parent-child dyad. These inter- ity than those of insecurely attached children. Indeed,
nal working models (IWMs) are hypothesized to interactions between friendship dyads comprising
Relationships, Development of 649
two securely attached members are more positive, Thus, felt security provides the child with suffi-
fair, intimate, and responsive than interactions cient emotional and cognitive sustenance to allow
within dyads comprising only one securely attached the active exploration of the social environment.
member. Moreover, securely attached adolescents Exploration results in active and interactive play,
are viewed by their best friends as being more altru- which, in turn, leads to the development of social
istic and more conciliatory after conflict; also, they competence and interpersonal problem-solving
are more satisfied with their friendships than the skills. From this perspective, there is a clear asso-
friends of anxious-avoidant or anxious-ambivalent ciation between security of attachment in infancy
adolescents. While there generally are associations and the quality of childrens social skills and com-
between parent-child attachments and later peer petencies. Indeed, because they demonstrate socially
and friend relationships, a childs attachment rela- skilled behavior, securely attached children are gen-
tionship to parents is not absolutely deterministic of erally accepted and liked by their peers.
their later relationships with friends. There are chil- Alternatively, the development of an insecure
dren who are insecurely attached to parents and yet infant-parent attachment relationship appears to
form high-quality friendships. In this way, a good result in the childs developing an IWM that inter-
friendship may compensate for the childs insecure personal relationships are rejecting or neglectful. In
attachment to parents. turn, the social world is perceived as a battleground
Wyndol Furman has interviewed young ado- that must either be attacked or escaped from. For
lescents to explore their IWMs of friendship. the insecure and angry child, opportunities for
Adolescents classified as having secure working peer play and interaction are nullified by displays
models of friendship, or who recounted their rela- of hostility and aggression in the peer group. Such
tionships in a coherent way and reported that their behavior, in turn, results in the childs forced (by the
friendships were influential and valuable, reported peer group) lack of opportunities to benefit from
more warmth and support in their relationships. the communication, negotiation, and perspective-
Adolescents who were categorized as having dismiss- taking experiences that will typically lead to the
ing IWMs of friendship, or who had little interest development of a normal and adaptive childhood.
in caregiving and support seeking from friends, also For the insecure and wary or anxious child, oppor-
reported that their friendships were unsupportive tunities for peer play and interaction are nullified
and lacked warmth; individuals with preoccupied by the child herself or himself. Consequently, social
IWMs of friendship who described overconcern for and emotional fearfulness prevail to the point at
their friends problems and were vague, angry, or which the benefits of peer interaction are practically
passive in their descriptions of their friendships were impossible to obtain. Thus, because they demon-
more likely than the other groups to be in relation- strate socially unskilled aggressive or fearful behav-
ships that had power imbalances. ior, insecurely attached children are often rejected
Finally, the quality of early parent-child attach- by the peer group.
ment relationships predicts the quality of relation-
ships with friends; this association is stronger for Romantic Relationships
older children and adolescents than for younger Like friendship, romantic relationships are volun-
children who may still rely on parents as their pri- tary, reciprocal, and egalitarian associations that
mary attachment figures. As Ainsworth suggested, provide partners with companionship, intimacy, and
attachment working models seem to be more influ- support. Unique to romantic relationships, partners
ential for friendship development and maintenance are attracted to one another, share feelings of love,
as children enter adolescence, when intimacy and and engage in sexual behaviors. Romantic relation-
social support become more central features of ships also differ from friendships in that they become
friendship. more obligatory and exclusive over time, especially
if the relationship is publically formalized.
Peer Relationships
Empirical links between security of attachment
Given an IWM that the parent is available and in infancy and early childhood and subsequent
responsive, the young child feels confident, secure, romantic relationships are beginning to emerge.
and self-assured when introduced to novel settings. Preliminary evidence suggests that early secure
650 Religion and Psychiatry
and unhealthy functioning. Indeed, Sigmund Freud shows relationships between religious involvement
described religion as an obsessional neurosis and and positive emotions. Of the more than 350 studies
psychologist Albert Ellis suggested that the less reli- that have now examined relationships between well-
gious that people are the more emotionally healthy being or happiness and religious involvement, over
they will be. Other psychiatrists have emphasized three quarters report that the religious person expe-
that religion is incompatible with mental health, riences significantly more of these positive emotions
adversely affects self-esteem, self-actualization, and than the less religious or nonreligious person. With
mastery and disrupts healthy sexual functioning. regard to substance abuse, the results are similar. In
Such opinions, however, are not derived from sys- the over 375 studies that have now been done, over
tematic research but rather from personal experi- 80% indicate that the religious person is less likely
ences and clinical exposure to patients with mental to drink, use drugs, or smoke cigarettes. These stud-
illness who often express their religion in pathologi- ies have often been done in young persons whose
cal ways. entire lives are ahead of them. Better mental health
and healthier lifestyles translates into better physical
Recent Research health as well, which itself influences mental health.
Within the past two decades, however, systematic
research has begun to examine the relationship Explanations
between religious involvement and mental health Why is this so? How might religion enhance men-
in surveys of community populations and persons tal health? First, religion can provide a positive,
with physical rather than mental illness. It has been optimistic worldview that gives life meaning and
discovered that religion is often used to cope with purpose and provides hope. Second, religion often
stresses involving loss of health, loss of loved ones, provides rules and regulations to help guide behav-
or other traumatic losses. Harold Koenig and his col- ior. Third, religion may enhance social interactions
leagues have summarized this research in a number by its emphasis on forgiveness, thankfulness, grati-
of books and articles. These reviews have uncovered tude, generosity, and other attitudes and activities
over 1,000 studies that have examined relationships that foster healthy interpersonal relationships. As
between religion and both negative mental health a result, religion not only helps people to cope but
(depression, anxiety, etc.) and positive mental health may also reduce the amount of stress that they must
(happiness, well-being, hope, meaning and purpose, cope with.
etc.). Nearly two thirds of these studies have found
that the religious person on average experiences bet-
Not Always Positive
ter mental health, fewer negative emotions, greater
social support and is less likely to be engaged in Despite the many contributions that religion makes
substance abuse. Most of this research has come to mental health, this does not mean that the reli-
from the United States, but studies reporting simi- gious person will always be healthier and happier
lar findings have been conducted around the world, than the less religious or secular person. Religion
including Canada, South and Central America, the can be at times associated with excessive guilt, anx-
United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East, and ious ruminations, obsessions, prejudice, and can
other continents. While most of these studies are epi- therefore lead to a restricted and limited life, rather
demiological in design (cross-sectional or prospec- than a fuller and freer one. People with psychologi-
tive observational studies), a number of randomized cal problems often turn to religion for comfort, and
clinical trials have been conducted in patients with while religion helps them cope, it may not always
depression and anxiety disorders, finding that reli- eliminate the personality disturbances or the inher-
gious interventions often result in faster improve- ited genetic vulnerabilities to mental illness that con-
ment compared to traditional secular psychotherapy tinue to persist, although moderated to some extent
or no treatment. These studies include interven- by religion. Religion, then, can be used in neurotic
tions from a variety of faith perspectives, including or mentally unhealthy ways to justify actions, judge
Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist approaches. others, or become the object of ruminations and
Besides studies showing lower rates of depression, obsessions. Pastoral counselorsthat is, those who
faster recovery from depression, and faster response are counselors at the masters or PhD level who
to religious therapies, an even larger research base also have religious education (seminary, divinity
652 Representational Theory of Mind
expresses a belief, a desire, or whatever, depends on communicated to other units in the network, so
how it is processed by the mental mechanisms that pushing them toward a state of activation. In this
have access to it. Sentences that express beliefs are way, a typical connectionist network serves to
processed in the distinctive way that is characteristic transform patterns of activation at an input layer
of the belief relation and so on for all the other types of units into patterns of activation at an output
of propositional attitude relations. This idea is often layer. Because the patterns of activation represent
figuratively expressed by saying that when one has a things or states of affairs, the network, just like an
particular belief, one has a relevant sentence of LOT orthodox computer, processes information or solves
in ones belief box; that when one has a particular problems. Hence, connectionism can be viewed as
desire, one has the relevant sentence of LOT in ones a version of RTM, although many connectionists
desire box; and so on. would resist such a characterization as they are keen
Fodor supplements his theory about propo- to emphasize their opposition to traditional ver-
sitional attitudes with a theory about mental pro- sions of RTM such as Fodors. The representations
cesses. According to this theory, mental processing processed by a connectionist network do not typi-
involves the manipulation of symbols of LOT by cally have syntactic properties. Moreover, because
means of computation. Hence, the mind is a com- the networks knowledge is stored en masse over
puter. A computer, on Fodors conception, is a the connections between its constituent units, it
symbol manipulating system that takes syntactically does not store information by means of syntacti-
structured symbols as input and generates syntacti- cally structured symbols. For his part, Fodor has
cally structured symbols as output by means of the objected to this new version of RTM by arguing
application of symbol manipulating rules. Although that it cannot explain the systematicity of thought.
the symbols have semantic properties so that a
computers activity can be characterized in semantic The Chinese Room Argument
terms (as processing information or solving prob- One of the most widely discussed philosophical
lems), the computer will have no access to those objections to Fodors version of RTM is the Chinese
semantic properties. room argument devised by John Searle. Searle, who
Fodor argues that his version of RTM, unlike has no grasp of Chinese, imagines himself trapped
its competitors, explains several salient facts about in a room containing batches of sheets of paper
the mind. Prominent among these is that thought is with Chinese symbols written on them. The room
systematic in that anyone capable of believing that also contains a book written in English instructing
object a stands in relation R to object b (for exam- Searle how to correlate symbols of Chinese with
ple, that John loves Jill) is also capable of thinking symbols of Chinese. Further sheets with Chinese
that b stands in relation R to a (for example that Jill symbols written on them are posted into the room.
loves John). Fodor has also argued that his version Searle responds to this input by executing the English
of RTM has scientific support in that it underlies instructions that involve considering the syntactic
most mainstream work in cognitive science. This properties of the input symbols and correlating them
claim was perhaps true when first made by Fodor with symbols written on the batch of sheets. These
in the 1970s and reflects the fact that the theory can symbols are then copied onto blank sheets that are in
be extended (as it was by many cognitive scientists) turn posted out of the room. The input symbols are
to apply to mental states and processes not recog- actually questions written in Chinese and the output
nized by commonsense psychology, including those symbols are sensible answers to those questions so
that reside at the unconscious or subpersonal level. that Searles symbol processing behavior mimics that
However, the 1980s witnessed the rise of an alterna- of a competent speaker of Chinese. Searles point is
tive connectionist approach that is widely adopted that he does exactly what a computer does, yet he
within contemporary cognitive science. doesnt understand Chinese. Hence, he concludes, no
computer, however it is programmed, is capable of
The Connectionist Challenge
understanding Chinese or any other language, a con-
According to connectionism, mental processing is clusion that he generalizes to all cognitive capacities.
supported by the activity of neural networks con- Searles argument has been widely discussed but
sisting of simple units that are connected to one no general consensus as to its power has emerged.
another so that the activation of one unit can be A common response made on behalf of RTM is the
654 Representations, Development of
See also Atomism About Concepts; Concepts, Early Object and Event Concepts
Philosophical Issues; Concepts and Language;
Conscious Thinking; Folk Psychology; Realism and The traditional view of concept formation, that of
Instrumentalism; Thinking Jean Piaget, was that the first 1 years of life are
Representations, Development of 655
as these remain with us throughout life, even when in the way they are accustomed to think about them
sometimes contradicted by more detailed biological remain in adulthood.
knowledge.
The Developmental Course of Conceptual
Early Relational Concepts and Perceptual Representations
It is more difficult to differentiate early concepts of In the sense of developing appropriate expectations
spatial relations from perception of them. However, and actions vis--vis objects, young children typi-
extensive research on relations such as containment, cally know more about objects and events than they
support, and occlusion suggests that at least by 3 to can express, and this is only partly due to limited
4 months of age infants are beginning to conceptu- vocabulary. Although even young infants develop
ally interpret these relations. For example, 3-month- many expectations about how objects behave in
olds act as if they expect that when an object goes the world and also learn how to interact with them
behind a screen or other occluder it will be hidden; successfully, this does not necessarily imply con-
hence, they dishabituate (look longer) if there is a ceptual understanding of that behavior. This diver-
window in the occluder and the object comes into gence between growth of perceptual knowledge and
view as it passes the window. Similarly, infants this conceptualization is at least partly responsible for
age look longer at a wide object moving behind a what are known as U-shaped developmental curves,
thin occluder when it sticks out of either side than in which infants are successful at some tasks while
if it is completely hidden. It does not seem plausible toddlers fail and older children are once again suc-
that such expectations could be taught by perception cessful. For example, if infants are shown an object
alone but instead seem to require some interpreta- dropping to the floor and then a shelf is placed
tion of what is perceived. The conceptualization of between the object and the floor and a screen placed
spatial relations, like that of objects, begins in a gen- in front so they cannot see the actual landing place,
eral or global fashion and gradually becomes more they expect the object to remain on the shelf rather
detailed. For example, a concept of containment than continue down to the floor. However, in simi-
appears to begin without any quantitative under- lar situations 2-year-olds will search for the object
standing of the relationship between height or width on the floor rather than on the shelf. Prediction as
of a container and what it can contain. Such vari- a task requirement is a conceptual task, requiring
ables are gradually learned over the course of the activation of a conceptual representation of the
first year. physical world, which is different from perceptual
Spatial relational concepts are somewhat more expectations of how the objects behave in the world.
subject to linguistic restructuring than are object Discrepancies between the two kinds of representa-
concepts. Language helps differentiate global object tion often continue into adulthood, indicating that
concepts (e.g., children hear the words dog and cat these two forms of representation can exist through-
more often than animal, and car and truck more out life without one always influencing the other.
often than vehicle) but rarely restructures object
domains. In contrast, spatial relational concepts Jean M. Mandler
may be at least partially restructured by language.
See also Concepts, Development of; Event Memory,
For example, Korean distinguishes degree of fit
Development; Knowledge Acquisition in Development
(tight versus loose), whether the fit is of a contain-
ment or support relation; for example, the same
word is used to describe a ring on a finger as a finger Further Readings
in a ring. Thus, the Korean language carves up the Choi, S. (2006). Influence of language-specific input on
spatial domain in a somewhat different way than spatial cognition: Categories of containment. First
does English, and Korean-speaking children begin to Language, 26, 207232.
differ in their spatial categorizations from English- Hodges, J. R., Graham, N., & Patterson, K. (1995).
speaking children by the end of the second year. In Charting the progression of semantic dementia:
spite of the fact that both cultures have concepts of Implications for the organisation of semantic memory.
containment, support, and tight fit, these differences Memory, 3, 463495.
Representativeness Heuristic 657
Hood, B., Carey, S., & Prasada, S. (2000). Predicting the heuristics that exploit natural assessments. Natural
outcomes of physical events: Two-year-olds fail to reveal assessments benefit from naturally existing propensi-
knowledge of solidity and support. Child Development, ties of memory and perception that are conveniently
71, 15401554. available and easily assessed. These judgmental heu-
Luo, Y., & Baillargeon, R. (2005). When the ordinary ristics are often useful, but sometimes they lead to
seems unexpected: Evidence for incremental physical systematic and serious cognitive biases.
knowledge in young infants. Cognition, 95, 297328. In regard to confidence (probability) judgment,
Mandler, J. M. (2004). The foundations of mind: Origins the key notion has been variable substitution,
of conceptual thought. New York, NY: Oxford
according to which the complex judgment of prob-
University Press.
ability is substituted with a simpler natural assess-
Mandler, J. M., & McDonough, L. (1996). Drinking and
ment. Assessment of probability in the sense implied
driving dont mix: Inductive generalization in infancy.
by probability theory and statistics involves consid-
Cognition, 50, 307335.
McCloskey, M., & Kohl, D. (1983). Naive physics: The
eration of all possible outcomes and their frequen-
curvilinear impetus principle and its role in interactions
cies of occurrence. In the face of this complexity it
with moving objects. Journal of Experimental is proposed that people substitute probability with a
Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 9, subjective variable that is conveniently available and
146156. easier to assess. The representativeness heuristic sug-
Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in the child. gests that the degree to which an instance or event
New York, NY: International Universities Press. is representative of a category is used as a proxy for
Quinn, P. C., Eimas, P. D., & Rosenkrantz, S. L. (1993). the probability that the instance or event belongs to
Evidence for representations of perceptually similar the category, as when you assess the probability that
natural categories by 3-month-old and 4-month-old a person is a lawyer by assessing how similar he or
infants. Perception, 22, 463475. she is to your stereotype for a typical lawyer.
Rogers, T. T., & McClelland, J. L. (2004). Semantic Although representativeness is a useful guide to
cognition: A parallel distributed processing approach. probability in many real-life circumstances, because
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. it does not obey the rules of probability theory, use
Spelke, E. S., Breinlinger, K., Macomber, J., & Jacobson, K. of the heuristic is claimed to produce a number of
(1992). Origins of knowledge. Psychological Review, biases, or cognitive illusions, in probability judg-
99, 605632. ment. Two classical demonstrations of such biases
are base-rate neglect and the conjunction fallacy.
captivated by the representativeness of the evidence. It is clear that peoples probability judgments are
Likewise, even physicians tend to be too captivated often affected by perceived similarity relations and
by a positive result of a medical diagnosis test (e.g., that people robustly produce these and a number of
for HIV), neglecting the often low prevalence (base- other cognitive biases, relative to the rules of prob-
rate) of the disease in the population, thereby over- ability theory. However, throughout the years, the
estimating the probability that the patient actually heuristic has also been criticized, for instance, for
has the disease. being a too vague construct, and its exact role in
producing these judgment biases is still an area of
active research in psychology.
The Conjunction Fallacy
Peter Juslin
Another classic judgment bias that is claimed to
derive from use of the representativeness heuristic is See also Availability Heuristic; Belief and Judgment;
the conjunction fallacy. Consider the following per- Debiasing; Similarity
son description:
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very Further Readings
bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she
Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., & Kahneman, D. (2002).
was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination
Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive
and social justice and also participated in antinuclear
judgment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
demonstrations.
Kahneman, D., & Frederick, S. (2002). Representativeness
What is the probability of each of the following? revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment. In
T. Gilovich, D. W. Griffin, & D. Kahneman (Eds.),
1. Linda is a bank teller. Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the judgment (pp. 4981). New York, NY: Cambridge
feminist movement. University Press.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1983). Extensional versus
As noted by Tversky and Kahneman in 1983, most intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in
probability judgment. Psychological Review, 91,
people assess the conjunction that Linda is a bank
293315.
teller and a feminist (B&F) to be more likely than
one of its constituents, that Linda is a bank teller (B).
This violates a basic rule of logic and probability
theory, which states that a conjunction can never be RESENTMENT
more probable than one of its constituents. More
prosaically, it can never be more probable that a
This entry defines the emotion of resentment, con-
person is both a bank teller and a feminist than that
trasts it with envy and ressentiment, links it with
the person is a bank teller per se, because the former
research on relative deprivation, and discusses its
set (B&F) is a subset of the latter (B), and any person
consequences. Resentment is an emotion we feel
who is a member of the B&F is necessarily also a
when we suffer a perceived wrong. It can be a pow-
member of B, but the reverse does not hold. The
erful, motivating state, characterized by a blend of
account proposed by the representativeness heuristic
anger, bitterness, and indignation. The hallmark of
is that Linda is perceived as very unrepresentative of
resentment is that people feeling it believe that they
the category bank tellers and very representative of
have a justified moral complaint against another
the category feminists, while the conjunction is per-
person or general state of affairs. They believe they
ceived to be of intermediate representativeness.
have suffered undeservedly. Consequently, they feel
People will therefore assess a high probability that
resentment.
Linda is a feminist, a low probability that she is a
bank teller. The probability of the conjunction falls
Resentment Contrasted With Other Emotions
in between these two constituent probabilities, lead-
ing to a violation of probability theory, in essence It is useful to contrast resentment with envy. Envy
because similarity judgments do not obey the rules involves a painful awareness of another persons
of probability theory. desired advantage and the blend of discontent, ill
Resentment 659
will, and resentment that this awareness can pro- deprivation. However, unlike resentment, it is pas-
duce. Thus, some sense of resentment or sense of sive rather than active. Ressentiment, generally, leads
injustice seems to be a common ingredient of envy. to self-debilitating inaction as a means of numbing
However, scholars emphasize that the resentment the pain of inferiority. In contrast, resentment often
found in envy is highly subjective because it lacks leads to action to redress the perceived wrong.
social approval. Furthermore, it often results from
a need to rationalize the ill will associated with the
Relative Deprivation
emotion. In its purest form, resentment follows a
clearer-cut, seemingly objective, injustice and enjoys In social science research, resentment is closely
greater social approval. In some cases of objective linked with the broad topic of relative deprivation.
injustice, resentment can appear as moral outrage People feel relatively deprived when another person
or righteous indignation as was the case in the race (egoistic relative deprivation) or group (fraternalis-
riots of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. tic relative deprivation) enjoys a relative advantage,
Like envy, resentment can be fueled and exaggerated especially an advantage that prompts rising expecta-
by rationalization. The wrong may even be imag- tions for oneself or ones group. Resentment occurs
ined. In some cases, it may have originated from when people feel entitled to and deserving of this
envy. But compared to envy, it is less likely to spring advantage. An example of egoistic relative depriva-
from a questionable starting premise. tion would be resentment because a fellow employee
Another important distinguishing feature of receives a promotion to which one also feels entitled.
resentment is that, unlike envy, it need not arise An example of fraternalistic relative deprivation
from a social comparison. Much of the social sci- would be resentment because a member of another
ence research on resentment focuses on peoples racial group gains unfair admission into a profes-
reactions to disadvantage, but the range of situations sional program, thereby taking the place potentially
that cause resentment is actually much more than enjoyed by a member of ones own group. Research
disadvantage. We can resent being ignored when on relative deprivation, with resentment often being
we are entitled to have a say in a group decision, the signature response, has a long and rich history in
for example. We can resent an insult or injury. We psychology, sociology, politics, and economics.
can resent tax rates or university parking policies. In
other words, we can resent both unfair procedures
Consequences of Resentment
as well as unfair distributions. Envy, however, is
nonsensical without an explicit social comparison. Recent studies link deservingness with resentment
Finally, the action tendencies associated with and then to subsequent schadenfreude, or plea-
resentment are more evident than with envy. When sure derived from another persons suffering. For
people feel resentment, because they perceive that example, people find misfortunes suffered by high
they have been unfairly treated, they are liable to status individuals to be pleasing. This pleasure
take action to remedy the wrong. Examples of open seems largely explained by the initial resentment felt
political violence have been explained by noting because the high status is often perceived as unde-
the resentment caused by group members being served.
deprived of something to which they feel entitled Additional research links the resentment felt
and deserving. Envy can lead to actions, but because toward hypocrites and the special pleasure that
the emotion is socially repugnant and unsanctioned, arises when they are exposed for their hypocrisy. It
these actions are more likely to be covert. may be that hypocrites, by their moralizing state-
It is also useful to distinguish resentment from ments and holier than thou demeanor, amount
ressentiment, an emotion derived from Nietzschean to moral reproaches from the perspective of those
ideas and further developed by another German around them. This creates a penetrating form of
philosopher, Max Scheler, in the early 20th century. resentment because the moral core of the observ-
Ressentiment refers to a state of mind resulting from ers is threatened. By the same token, when hypo-
chronic impotence and inferiority. It entails a deval- crites suffer exposure, the moral table is turn upside
uing of what one secretly craves but cannot obtain. down. A self-threatening upward comparison is
It is like resentment in that it is a negative emotion transformed into a pleasing, self-boosting down-
often containing anger and frequently linked to ward comparison. Initial feelings of resentment in
660 Retrieval Practice (Testing) Effect
observers seem to enliven the subsequent schaden- of testing effect research followed by a discussion of
freude, even producing a sense of poetic justice. the generalizability of the effect, potential theoretical
Resentment is often intense and can lead to explanations, and factors that increase its efficacy.
extreme, sometimes violent actions. Because people
feeling resentment believe they have been unjustly History of Research on the Testing Effect
treated and wronged, they can correspondingly
feel justified in redressing the wrong. However, the The idea that retrieving information from mem-
possibility of biased, exaggerated, construals of the ory can increase retention has a long history.
wrong mean that the redressing actions are them- Philosophers and other scholars have long rec-
selves wrong. Spiraling retaliatory actions can then ognized the mnemonic benefits of retrieval prac-
ensue. Scholars speculate that many intergroup con- tice: Aristotle, Francis Galton, and William James,
flicts mirror this pattern. Clearly, resentment is an among others, all described how repeatedly recall-
important human emotion that deserves careful and ing information from memory improves its reten-
sustained study. tion. Some early studies in the 1900s confirmed their
pronouncements, but only recently have research-
Richard H. Smith and David Ryan Schurtz ers investigated this phenomenon systematically.
The early studies were conducted with students in
See also Emotion, Cultural Perspectives; Envy;
classroom settings and to demonstrate that testing
Intergroup Conflict; Jealousy
improved retention of course material. In the fol-
lowing decades, research on the testing effect was
Further Readings sporadic. Most studies during this period were part
Feather, N. T. (2006). Deservingness and emotions: of the verbal learning tradition and investigated the
Applying the structural model of deservingness to the memorial consequences of retrieval in laboratory
analysis of affective reactions to outcomes. European settings using discrete verbal materials, such as lists
Review of Social Psychology, 17, 3873. of individual words or word pairs. Since the start
Monin, B., Sawyer, P., & Marquez, M. (2008). The of the 21st century, a resurgence of interest in the
rejection of moral rebels: Resenting those who do the testing effect has arisen, leading to the publication
right thing. Journal of Personality and Social of many studies that explored various theoretical
Psychology, 95(1), 7693. explanations for the phenomenon as well as applica-
Walker, I., & Smith, H. J. (Eds.). (2002). Relative tions to educational contexts.
deprivation: Specification, development and integration.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Generalizability of the Testing Effect
The testing effect is a robust phenomenon: The basic
finding has been replicated over a hundred times and
RETRIEVAL PRACTICE (TESTING) its generalizability is well established. Retrieval prac-
EFFECT tice has been found to promote superior retention
of many different types of information, both verbal
The testing effect is a term used to describe the find- and nonverbal. These types of information include
ing that taking a test on previously studied mate- nonsense syllables, word lists, foreign language
rial leads to better long-term retention relative to vocabulary, general knowledge facts, scientific arti-
restudying the material or not taking a test. Testing cles, textbook chapters, pictures, maps, and Chinese
is often conceptualized as a neutral event in which characters (among others). In addition, many stud-
the contents of memory are examined but left ies have shown strong, positive effects of testing in
unchanged. However, the act of retrieving infor- a variety of real-world educational contexts, such
mation from memory actually alters the retrieved as after-school programs for elementary school chil-
memory by elaborating on the existing memory dren, middle school classes, college courses, and
trace and/or creating additional retrieval routes. One medical education of residents and nurses. Although
consequence of these changes is that the probability for practical reasons, most testing effect studies have
of successful retrieval in the future is increased, mak- used relatively short retention intervals (i.e., a few
ing testing a potent mechanism for enhancing long- minutes to a few days), a number of studies have
term retention. This entry provides a brief history shown that testing produces superior long-term
Retrieval Practice (Testing) Effect 661
retention using much longer retention intervals of up Factors That Increase the Efficacy
to six months. Overall, much evidence exists to sup- of Retrieval Practice
port the conclusion that retrieval practice promotes
The critical mechanism in learning from tests is suc-
long-term retention of many different types of mate-
cessful retrieval. However, two other factors can
rials across a variety of different contexts.
increase the efficacy of testing: feedback and repeti-
tion. Testing often produces better retention than
Potential Theoretical Explanations
restudying even when feedback is not provided (pro-
Several theoretical explanations have been proposed vided performance on the initial test is reasonably
to account for the testing effect. One of the first high). Nevertheless, feedback can enhance learning
proposed that taking a test after studying resulted from tests by enabling test takers to correct errors
in additional exposure to the material (i.e., relative and maintain low-confidence correct responses,
to a control condition in which no test was taken) thereby increasing the probability of successful
and this additional exposure produced the superior retrieval in the future. Repetition can also enhance
retention. However, this so-called total time hypoth- learning from tests: A single test confers a substan-
esis (also referred to as the amount-of-processing tial mnemonic benefit, but repeated testing leads to
hypothesis) was disproved by subsequent studies even better retention. Repeated testing is particularly
that showed that taking a test led to better retention effective if it is distributed or spaced out over time
relative to restudying the material for an equivalent rather than massed together. Generally speaking,
amount of time. Another possible explanation is spaced practice usually leads to superior long-term
that the effort involved in retrieval is responsible for retention relative to massed practice, a finding that
the testing effect. One piece of evidence that sup- has been termed the spacing effect.
ports the retrieval effort hypothesis is the finding
that production tests (e.g., cued recall, fill-in-the- Henry L. Roediger III and Andrew C. Butler
blank), which require greater retrieval effort, often
See also Desirable Difficulties Perspective on Learning;
produce better retention than recognition tests (e.g., Rehearsal and Memory; Spacing Effect; Spacing
multiple-choice, true or false). Yet another idea that Effect, Practical Applications
helps explain the testing effect is transfer-appropri-
ate processing, which holds that memory perfor-
mance is enhanced to the extent that the processes Further Readings
during encoding match the processes required dur-
Butler, A. C., & Roediger, H. L., III. (2008). Feedback
ing retrieval. Thus, retrieving information while tak-
enhances the positive effects and reduces the negative
ing an initial test may lead to better performance on
effects of multiple-choice testing. Memory & Cognition,
a subsequent test because the processes engaged on
36, 604616.
an initial test (i.e., retrieval practice) better match
Carrier, M., & Pashler, H. (1992). The influence of retrieval
the processes required by the final test (relative to on retention. Memory & Cognition, 20, 633642.
restudying or not taking a test). Finally, the idea Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L., III. (2008). The critical
of encoding variability provides one more possible importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 15,
explanation. Studying and taking a test represent 966968.
distinct encoding events, and thus testing after study- McDaniel, M. A., Roediger, H. L., III, & McDermott, K. B.
ing may increase encoding variability. Increased (2007). Generalizing test-enhanced learning from the
encoding variability should result in the elaboration laboratory to the classroom. Psychonomic Bulletin &
of the existing memory trace and/or the creation of Review, 14, 200206.
additional retrieval routes to that trace. Although no Roediger, H. L., III, & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). The power
single theory can explain all the extant findings, the of testing memory: Basic research and implications for
last four theories are not mutually exclusive and can educational practice. Perspectives on Psychological
be considered complementary. Science, 1, 181210.
S
The third category, disorganization symptoms, refers
SCHIZOPHRENIA to bizarre behavior, tangential and disorganized
speech, and illogical thought patterns. Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a severe, chronic, psychiatric syn- is commonly associated with a heterogeneous pre-
drome affecting about 1% of the worlds population. sentation, with individuals exhibiting different com-
In 1911, psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler first coined binations of these symptoms. In addition, a wide
the term, and since then, a large body of research has range of outcomes is observed. For example, some
been amassed. Research has primarily focused on individuals show improved functioning between epi-
better understanding the etiology and progression sodes of psychosis, whereas others display a more
of schizophrenia, while attempting to improve the chronic course, with the continued presence of one
lives of those with the disorder. As discussed in this or more of the above symptoms.
entry, contemporary views of schizophrenia involve
a syndrome with characteristic clusters of symptoms Neurodevelopmental Model of Schizophrenia
very similar to those first described by Bleuler and In its earliest clinical descriptions, schizophrenia
attributes those symptoms to a neurodevelopmental was considered a deteriorating brain disorder with
process, by which early and late risk factors con- a course similar to Alzheimers disease but an onset
tribute to the onset and expression of the disorder. in young adulthood. Thus, the neurodegenera-
The entry then examines cognitive and neurobehav- tive hypothesis of schizophrenia initially prevailed.
ioral impairments observed in the disorder as well as However, after nearly 3 decades of research, the
approaches to treatment. neurodevelopmental model of schizophrenia is now
prominent. This theoretical framework holds that
Clinical Symptomatology of Schizophrenia
the disorders neural origins arise primarily during
Characteristic clinical features of schizophrenia are early development, with full emergence of recog-
classified into positive, negative, and disorganized nizable symptoms typically occurring during late
symptoms. Positive symptoms include hallucina- adolescence or early adulthood. By identifying asso-
tions (e.g., hearing voices that others cannot) and ciations between prenatal and perinatal complica-
delusions (e.g., a persecutory delusion, involving tions and elevated risk for schizophrenia, studies
the belief that others intend to harm the individual). have implicated that adverse events during early life
Individuals with a diagnosis of schizophrenia also may contribute to the development of the disor-
exhibit negative symptoms, which are defined by der. Furthermore, longitudinal studies have found
profound disruption of emotional expression and/or that subtle deficits in cognition, emotional expres-
experience and motivation, often resulting in social sion, and behavior are present during early child-
withdrawal and a drop in day-to-day functioning. hood among individuals who ultimately develop
663
664 Schizophrenia
schizophrenia as adults. These findings suggest that compelling model to help us understand how abnor-
signs of brain compromise are present long before mal neurodevelopmental processes, which lead to
illness onset. Finally, the majority of postmortem brain dysfunction, can manifest in disturbances such
neuropathology studies have failed to detect evi- as the clinical symptoms associated with schizophre-
dence of a neuronal degenerative process in schizo- nia. Furthermore, it suggests that while schizophre-
phrenia. Although debate persists regarding the nia is a relatively common illness, it may represent
details of this aberrant neurodevelopmental course, the end product of a number of distinct developmen-
when taken together, these findings provide compel- tal pathways.
ling evidence that processes comprising neuronal While genetics are clearly a major risk factor,
development are fundamental to the pathophysiol- the fact that identical twins only show about 50%
ogy of schizophrenia. concordance for the illness (i.e., that both twins
have a diagnosis of schizophrenia) indicates that
environmental factors must also play a role. Prenatal
Early Risk Factors
and perinatal complications, particularly those
Schizophrenia is a highly heritable illness, with associated with fetal hypoxia, or transient oxygen
approximately 80% of an individuals likelihood deprivation, appear to be among the environmen-
of developing schizophrenia attributable to their tal factors most robustly associated with increased
genetic makeup. There are now numerous studies risk. Furthermore, fetal oxygen deprivation offers
demonstrating that unaffected biological relatives a plausible mechanism for much of the structural
of patients with schizophrenia display qualitatively brain pathologysuch as hippocampal volume
similar, but quantitatively milder, neuropsychologi- reductiondetected in neuroimaging studies of
cal and neuroanatomic deficits, relative to healthy adult patients with schizophrenia. Other forms of
controls. Such findings support the view that these pregnancy complications, such as prenatal viral
deficits reflect a genetic origin rather than second- exposure, also are associated with increased disease
ary effects of the disease process or chronic medi- risk but to a lesser extent.
cation use. Despite this strong genetic component,
however, efforts to identify the precise risk genes
Late Risk Factors
involved have been challenging. In fact, not only is
our understanding of which genes may be involved Nevertheless, if risk factors for schizophrenia are at
constantly being revised, so is our set of possible work during early brain development, why is it that
routes by which any given gene may result in pheno- the formal diagnostic symptoms and signs of the dis-
typic variation. order do not typically manifest until late adolescence
For instance, a major shift in our understanding and early adulthood? The remarkable consistency
of schizophrenia genetics comes from new studies in age-at-onset distributions for schizophrenia from
of chromosomal structural variation, which indi- around the world implicates late adolescence /early
cate that rare mutations (copy number variants, or adulthood as the peak period of risk. According
CNVs) may play a greater role in the etiology of to the neurodevelopmental hypothesis of schizo-
schizophrenia than previously realized. CNVs likely phrenia, the typical onset during late adolescence
comprise about 12% of the human genome and is likely related to widespread brain maturational
may be highly relevant for the expression of com- changes occurring during this time period. As the
plex diseases. One particularly compelling example typical brain matures through adolescence, there
is the 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22qDS), which is an increase in prefrontal cortical white matter,
represents the greatest known recurrent genetic which is crucial for efficient information transmis-
risk factor to date for the development of schizo- sion between brain regions. Concomitantly, there is
phrenia. The cause of 22qDS is a deletion of one a decrease in gray matter volume, likely as a result of
of an individuals two copies of a particular section synaptic pruning processes, which reduces the over-
of chromosome 22q11.2, a locus that encompasses all number of neurons in the brain, thereby retaining
approximately 40 genes, including some known to more efficient neural configurations.
play a key role in brain development. A well-defined Evidence from magnetic resonance imaging
neurogenetic syndrome like 22qDS can serve as a (MRI) studies suggests that those who go on to
Schizophrenia 665
develop psychosis show an exaggerated pattern of order to characterize the course of neurobiological
gray matter loss during this period. In comparison to change among those who develop full-blown psy-
those who do not develop a psychotic disorder, indi- chosis and to elucidate predictors of this outcome.
viduals who convert to psychosis show differential These studies offer the unique opportunity to iden-
volume decreases in superior temporal and prefron- tify risk markers most predictive of schizophrenia
tal regions, cortical regions important for high-order outcome and, by extension, to develop interventions
cognitive functions (e.g., planning, memory). that may be implemented prior to onset of the full-
While the reasons for this dysregulation of typical blown disorder.
brain maturation are still unknown, diathesis-stress Results to date from CHR studies have identi-
models of schizophrenia suggest that environmental fied several baseline clinical variables that appear to
stressors may interact with genetic vulnerability in be predictive of conversion to psychosis over and
triggering symptom onset. While life stress is believed above high-risk criteria alone. Approximately 30%
to exacerbate psychiatric symptoms across a variety of individuals considered at high risk for developing
of mental disorders, its role in precipitating illness psychosis develop a full-blown psychotic disorder
onset in schizophrenia is controversial. Given the within 1 to 2 years after ascertainment. In the larg-
role of hormones in mediating stress response and in est longitudinal study of CHR youth to date, poorer
adolescent brain maturation, one possible biological social functioning and a history of substance abuse
mechanism by which rising hormone levels in ado- increased ones likelihood of conversion to psycho-
lescence may trigger expression of a latent genetic sis. Neurocognitive studies have additionally identi-
predisposition to schizophrenia is through dysregu- fied verbal memory, processing speed, and working
lation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) memory deficits as significant predictors of psycho-
axis. However, longitudinal studies are needed to sis outcome.
determine causal relationships between early envi-
ronmental insults, gonadal hormone expression, and
Pathology of Schizophrenia
the effects of chronic stress on HPA axis functioning
and symptom expression in schizophrenia. Developmental changes in brain structure may con-
Neurobiological changes are likely to map onto tribute to cognitive deficits seen in patients with
behaviors that change during adolescence, such as established schizophrenia. Though subtle cognitive
social cognition. Social cognition, which broadly deficits are present long before the development of
refers to the mental processes used to recognize, overt psychotic symptoms, it is likely that additional
interpret, and respond to others social behavior, has cognitive decline occurs right before or at illness
been highlighted as one area of particular impor- onset. In schizophrenia patients, robust cognitive
tance in schizophrenia. Deficits in emotion process- deficits have been observed in a variety of domains,
ing, the capacity to identify or discriminate between including working and declarative memory, pro-
different emotions, and theory of mind (ToM), cessing speed, and language production. It has been
which refers to ones ability to comprehend the hypothesized that the wide array of observed cogni-
intentions of others, are present prior to illness onset tive impairments reflects global brain dysfunction or
and appear to be relatively stable across phases of dysconnectivity.
illness. Substantial evidence for cortical dysconnectivity
Because of the major changes that occur in ones in schizophrenia comes from electroencephalogra-
social environment during adolescence, it is likely phy (EEG), a means of examining the fluctuations
that the development of social cognition in at-risk in electrical field activity generated by synchronized
youth is detrimentally affected during this time. activity of thousands of neurons. Disrupted synchro-
Efforts to understand this hypothesis are currently nization of neurons results in abnormal electrical
underway, particularly given an increasing emphasis activity as well as disruption in the information-
on early identification and intervention for schizo- processing tasks associated with the observed brain
phrenia. The burgeoning area of clinical high risk activity. Decades of EEG research have demonstrated
(CHR) research aims to ascertain individuals initially that patients with schizophrenia process informa-
showing symptoms indicating high risk for immi- tion atypically, even when information-processing
nent onset of psychosis and follow them over time in demands are very rapid and patients overt behavior
666 Schizophrenia
does not appear to be abnormal. For example, mea- Early results indicate that cognitive-behavioral ther-
surement of the earliest electrical oscillations mea- apy, which focuses on learning to implement more
sureable within 200 milliseconds after visual stimuli adaptive behavioral responses to ones thoughts and
appear has shown that individuals with schizophre- emotions, has shown to reduce positive and nega-
nia show an impaired neural response selectively to tive symptoms of schizophrenia and prevent relapse.
low-contrast objects, despite normal performance Studies have also examined the effectiveness of
on a routine vision examination. A similar pattern of social skills training programs, which are designed
findings applies to rapid changes in auditory infor- to address the social cognition dysfunction seen in
mation, and dramatic abnormalities persist during schizophrenia. These studies have shown that after
the assessment of more complex cognitive tasks as participating in a social skills training program, indi-
well. These diverse, characteristic aberrations in the viduals with schizophrenia show improvements in
brains electrical activity are all thought to be signs their ability to recognize emotions and report having
that the coordinated activity within and between more social relationships. Many other psychosocial
neural circuits is disrupted. interventions, including vocational training and fam-
As is the case with behavioral and MRI-based ily psychoeducation, have been established and have
measures, there is rapid change in large-scale electri- demonstrated improved outcomes in schizophrenia.
cal brain activity right before and immediately after However, perhaps most important, research has
onset of full symptoms of schizophrenia, which then shown that these psychosocial interventions are only
remains relatively stable over the course of illness. effective when used in conjunction with medication
and that timing of both pharmacological and psy-
Treatment of Schizophrenia chosocial intervention is key, with reduced severity
Currently, the first line of treatment in schizophre- in the course of illness seen in earlier intervention.
nia is pharmacological intervention, which typically
involves administration of antipsychotic medica- Conclusions
tion. First-generation, or typical, antipsychotics
(e.g., chlorpromazine, haloperidol) were first intro- Schizophrenia is a chronic and highly debilitat-
duced in the 1950s. These drugs are thought to ing brain disorder. Currently, available treatments
work by blocking dopamine receptors, and they are palliative in nature; thus, there is an increasing
are effective in decreasing the severity of positive emphasis in the field on early identification and
psychotic symptoms, particularly hallucinations. early intervention. The case for involvement of early
However, first-generation antipsychotics carry sig- neurodevelopmental influences in the pathogenesis
nificant side effects, particularly extrapyramidal of schizophrenia is compelling, including evidence
motor symptoms (e.g., rigid body tremors). In the from human epidemiological studies, prospective
1990s, second-generation or atypical antipsy- studies of birth cohorts and at-risk populations, and
chotics (e.g., risperidone, ziprasidone, olanzapine) postmortem neuropathology studies. The case for
were introduced as an alternative; these medications involvement of later neurodevelopmental processes
were associated with fewer extrapyramidal symp- is still largely circumstantial, but abnormalities of
toms than the typical antipsychotics. However, it synaptic pruning processes during adolescence are
is controversial whether atypical antipsychotics are likely relevant for symptom onset. A better under-
actually safer; side effects associated with atypical standing of the developmental trajectory of neurobi-
antipsychotics include weight gain and increased ological processes in schizophrenia will inform early
risk for diabetes and stroke. Furthermore, although intervention strategies as to the most vulnerable
antipsychotic medications attenuate the presence brain structures and functions, as well as the stages
of positive symptoms, the negative symptoms and of the illness most amenable to treatment.
cognitive dysfunction associated with schizophrenia Maria Jalbrzikowski, Peter Bachman, and
often remain and continue to substantially impact Carrie E. Bearden
functioning.
Given these challenges, many psychosocial inter- See also Behavioral Therapy; Delusions; Emotion and
ventions have been developed for schizophrenia. Psychopathology; Social Cognition
Scientific Reasoning 667
includes the current state of knowledge, the goal In the early 2000s, cognitive neuroscientists
state (which may not be defined), and all knowledge began to explore the neural underpinnings of sci-
states in between, as well as the cognitive operators entific thinking, demonstrating the roles of the
that allow one to move from one knowledge state anterior cingulate and parahippocampal gyrus
to the next. Many researchers have adopted a more when students ignore evidence that disconfirms
detailed approach to the development of scientific their favored hypothesis, the role of the frontal poles
thinking and have moved away from Jean Piagets when generating scientific analogies, and the role of
stagelike view of the development of scientific think- the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and precuneus
ing skills to an investigation of scientific thinking in causal scientific thinking. This approach to the
strategies that can be taught in the classroom, such brain, education, and cognition has helped lead to
as designing experiments, formulating hypotheses, the development of the new field of educational neu-
and learning how to assess the adequacy of particu- roscience, in which educationally important ques-
lar experimental designs. tions are addressed using a variety of populations,
neuroimaging techniques, and educationally rich
Putting Science in Its Historical Context contexts to produce more effective teaching, robust
Another strand in research on scientific thinking learning, and in-depth understanding.
over the past 50 years has been to investigate the
historical context of particular scientific concepts.
A New Scientific Possibility: The
The genesis of this view of scientific thinking was
Hypothesis-Optional Experiment
undoubtedly Thomas Kuhns Structure of Scientific Around the same time as the development of edu-
Revolutions, in which Kuhn demonstrated that sci- cational neuroscience, major changes began to take
ence moves in ways reminiscent of a political revolu- place in the ways that scientists use hypotheses and
tion rather than by a steady accrual of knowledge. conduct experiments: Many biologists started con-
This realization that science is not the strict accumu- ducting massive, catchall projects in which millions
lation of logical facts, findings, and methods led to of experimentsessentially all possible experiments
many socially grounded theories of scientific think- that could be conducted within a particular prob-
ing. According to this approach, the adoption or lem spacecould be conducted in a short space of
abandonment of a scientific theory may be due to time by automating the process with robotics and
many factors and not just whether a theory explains supercomputers. These high throughput experi-
a set of facts. Consequently, many recent histori- ments (conducted by computational devices, robots,
cal analyses of scientific thinking have demonstrated and machines) are now routine in the pharmaceu-
that conceptual change and theory change in science tical and genetics industries, and many researchers
occur for a wide variety of both nonscientific and have argued that this approach obviates the need
scientific reasons. for hypotheses at all. If this approach endures, it
fundamentally changes the nature of scientific think-
Modern Approaches to Scientific Thinking ing. This radical shift in some of the basic assump-
Much research in science education and scientific tions of scientific thinking will be a central focus of
thinking has concentrated on the mechanisms of research for the next few decades as more of the high
conceptual change for specific scientific concepts. throughput technologies are used in all branches of
Research on scientific thinking has moved away science ranging from astrophysics to zoology. This
from domain-general experiments (studies that can shift will undoubtedly lead to the proposal of many
be applied to any number of different scientific dis- new types of scientific thinking and will change sci-
ciplines) on how people test simple hypotheses, to entific practice as much as Sir Francis Bacons intro-
more complex domains with complex histories such duction of inductive methods in the 1600s changed
as molecular biology, physics, evolution, and chem- the nature of science in the subsequent centuries.
istry. Researchers now routinely investigate the sci- Kevin N. Dunbar and Evelyn A. Forster
entific thinking strategies that scientists themselves
use in their own labs to understand both the cogni- See also Analogical Mapping and Reasoning; Deductive
tive and social factors involved in scientific thinking. Reasoning; Distributed Cognition
Self, Development of 669
positivity bias can be observed in children who are subjects (math and science) but dumb in others
chronically abused, since severe maltreatment is (English and social studies). Such evaluations may
often accompanied by parental messages that make be accompanied by self-affectsnamely, emotions
the child feel inadequate, incompetent, and unlov- about the self that emerge in later childhoodfor
able. Such children will also engage in all-or-none example, feeling proud of ones accomplishments
thinking but conclude that they are all bad.) but ashamed of ones perceived failures, as Susan
Harters work documents. The ability to consider
Middle to Later Childhood both positive and negative characteristics is a major
As the child grows older, the ability to make cognitive-developmental acquisition. Thus, begin-
higher order generalizations in evaluating his or her ning in middle to later childhood, these distinctions
abilities and attributes emerges. Thus, in addition to result in a profile of self-evaluations across domains.
describing his or her prowess at a particular activ- Contributing to this advance is the ability to
ity, the child will also observe that he or she is good engage in social comparison. Beginning in middle
at sports, in general. This inference can further be childhood one can utilize comparisons with others
justified in that the child can describe his or her tal- as a barometer of the skills and attributes of the self.
ent at several sports (e.g., good at soccer, basketball, In contrast, the young child cannot simultaneously
and baseball). Thus, the higher order generalization compare his or her attributes to the characteristics
represents a more developmentally advanced cogni- of another in order to detect similarities or differ-
tive construction in which an overarching evaluation ences that have implications for the self. Although
(e.g., I am good at sports) is defined in terms of the ability to utilize social comparison information
specific examples that justify this conclusion. Similar for the purpose of self-evaluation represents a cog-
processes allow the older child to conclude that he nitive-developmental advance, it also ushers in new,
or she is smart (e.g., does well in math, science, and potential liabilities. With the emergence of the abil-
history). The structure of a higher order generaliza- ity to rank order the performance of other children,
tion about being well behaved could include such all but the most capable children will necessarily fall
components as obeying parents, not getting into short of excellence. Thus, the very ability and pen-
trouble, and trying to do what is right. A general- chant to compare oneself with others makes the self
ization concerning ones popularity may subsume vulnerable, particularly if one does not measure up
accounts of having friends at school, making friends in domains that are highly valued. The more gen-
easily at camp, and developing friendships readily eral effects of social comparison can be observed in
when moving into a new neighborhood. The percep- findings revealing that domain-specific self-concepts
tion that one is good looking may be based on ones become more negative during middle and later child-
positive evaluation of ones face, hair, and body. hood compared to early childhood.
During middle childhood, all-or-none thinking
Adolescence
diminishes and the aura of positivity fades. Thus,
children do not typically think that they are all vir- For the adolescent, there are further cognitive-
tuous in every domain. The more common pattern developmental advances that alter the nature of
is for them to feel more adequate in some domains domain-specific self-evaluations. Adolescence brings
than others. For example, one child may feel that he with it the ability to create more abstract judgments
or she is good at schoolwork and is well behaved, about ones attributes and abilities. Thus, one no
whereas he or she is not that good at sports, does longer merely considers oneself to be good at sports
not think that he or she is good-looking, and reports but to be athletically talented. One is no longer
that it is hard to make friends. Another child may merely smart but views the self more generally as
report the opposite pattern. intelligent, where successful academic performance,
There are numerous combinations of positive and general problem-solving ability, and creativity might
negative evaluations across these domains that chil- all be subsumed under the abstraction of intelli-
dren can and do report. Moreover, they may report gence. Abstractions may be similarly constructed in
both positive and negative judgments within a given the other domains. For example, in the domain of
domainfor example, they are smart in some school behavioral conduct, there will be a shift from the
Self, Development of 671
perception that one is well behaved to a sense that that communicate to others that children are sure
one is a moral or principled person. In the domains of themselves reflect high self-esteem in early child-
of social competence and appearance, abstractions hood. In contrast, behavior indicative of lack of con-
may take the form of perceptions that one is popular fidence, mastery attempts, curiosity, or exploration,
and physically attractive. plus excessive dependence on others, reflects a con-
These illustrative examples all represent posi- stellation that is predictive of low self-esteem in oth-
tive self-evaluations. However, during adolescence ers eyes, such as teachers or parents.
(as well as in later childhood), judgments about At about the third grade, children begin to develop
ones attributes will also involve negative self- the concept that they like or dont like the kind of
evaluations. Thus, certain individuals may judge person they are, as the writings of Susan Harter and
the self to be unattractive, unpopular, unprincipled, Morris Rosenberg indicate. Thus, they can respond
and so forth. Of particular interest is the fact that to general items asking them to rate the extent to
when abstractions emerge, the adolescent typically which they are pleased with themselves, like who
does not have total control over these new acquisi- they are, and think they are fine as a person. Here,
tions, just as when one is acquiring a new athletic the shift reflects the emergence of an ability to con-
skill (e.g., swinging a bat, throwing a ball, maneu- struct a higher order generalization about the self.
vering skis), one lacks a certain level of control. In This type of concept can be built on perceptions that
the cognitive realm, such lack of control often leads one has a number of specific qualitiesfor example,
to overgeneralizations that can shift dramatically that one is competent, well behaved, attractive, and
across situations or time. For example, the adoles- so forth. Self-esteem can also be built on the obser-
cent may conclude at one point in time that he or vation that significant othersfor example, parents,
she is exceedingly popular but then, in the face of a peers, and teachersthink highly of themselves.
minor social rebuff, may conclude that he or she is This process is greatly influenced by advances in the
extremely unpopular. This typically leads to exasper- childs ability to take the perspective of significant
ation by parents and other adults in the adolescents others. During adolescence, ones evaluation of ones
life since they do not understand that such shifts are global worth as a person may be further elaborated,
inevitable and quite typical in our culture. The shifts drawing on more domains and sources of approval,
stem from new cognitive advances that also reflect and will also become more abstract. Thus, adoles-
liabilities. Plus, recent work reveals that immature cents can directly acknowledge that they have high
brain structures contribute, structures that preclude or low self-esteem as a general abstraction about the
the more integrated thought that helps control such self; that is, they understand the term self-esteem.
vacillations. Gradually, adolescents gain control
over these self-relevant abstractions so that they Individual Differences in Domain-Specific Self-
become capable of more balanced and accurate self- Concepts as Well as Global Self-Esteem
evaluations, as research by Fischer and by Harter Although there are predictable cognitively based
reveals. developmental changes in the nature of how most
children and adolescents describe and evaluate
Global Self-Esteem
themselves, there are striking individual differences
The ability to evaluate ones worth as a person in how positively or negatively the self is evaluated.
and to make inferences about ones self-esteem Moreover, one observes different profiles of chil-
also undergoes developmental change. The young drens perceptions of their competence or adequacy
child simply is incapable, cognitively, of developing across the various self-concept domains, in that chil-
the verbal concept of his or her value as a person. dren evaluate themselves differently across domains.
This ability emerges at the approximate age of 8. Consider two profiles exemplified by Child A
However, young children exude a sense of personal and Child B, neither of whom feels good about
worth in their behavior. The primary behavioral the self scholastically or athletically. They evaluate
manifestations involve displays of confidence, inde- themselves much more positively in the domains of
pendence, mastery attempts, and exploration, as social acceptance, conduct, and physical appear-
Susan Harters work documents. Thus, behaviors ance. In fact, their profiles are quite similar to each
672 Self, Development of
other across the five specific domains. However, successful. The findings reveal that high self-esteem
judgments of their self-esteem are extremely differ- individuals feel competent in domains they rate
ent. Child A has very high self-esteem whereas Child as important. Low self-esteem individuals report
B has very low self-esteem. This raises a puzzling that areas in which they are unsuccessful are still
question: How can two children look so similar with very important to them. Thus, Child A represents
regard to their domain-specific self-concepts but an example of an individual who feels that social
evaluate their global self-esteem so differently? We acceptance, conduct, and appearance, domains
turn to this issue next, in examining the causes of in which she evaluates herself positively, are very
global self-esteem. important but that the two domains where she is
less successful, scholastic competence and athletic
The Causes of Childrens competence, are not that important. In contrast,
Level of Self-Esteem Child B rates all domains as important, including
Our understanding of the antecedents of global self- the two domains where he is not successful, scho-
esteem has been greatly aided by the formulations lastic competence and athletic competence. Thus,
of two historical scholars of the self, William James the discrepancy between high importance coupled
and Charles Horton Cooley. Each suggested rather with perceptions of inadequacy contributes to low
different pathways to self-esteem, defined as an over- self-esteem.
all evaluation of ones worth as a person. William
Incorporation of the Opinions
James focused on how the individual assessed his or
of Significant Others
her competence in domains where one had aspira-
tions to succeed. Charles Horton Cooley focused on Another important factor influencing self-esteem
the salience of the opinions that others held about can be derived from the writings of Charles Horton
the self, opinions that one incorporated into ones Cooley, who metaphorically made reference to the
global sense of self. looking-glass self. According to this formulation,
significant others (e.g., parents and peers) are social
Competence/Adequacy in mirrors into which one gazes to determine their opin-
Domains of Importance ion of the self. Thus, in evaluating the self, one would
For William James, global self-esteem derived adopt what one felt were the judgments of these oth-
from the evaluations of ones sense of competence ers whose opinions are considered important. Thus,
or adequacy in the various domains of ones life the approval, support, or positive regard from sig-
relative to how important it was to be successful in nificant others becomes a critical source of ones own
these domains. Thus, if one feels one is successful sense of worth as a person. For example, children
in domains deemed important, high self-esteem will who receive approval from parents and peers will
result. Conversely, if one falls short of ones goal in report much higher self-esteem than children who
domains where one has aspirations to be successful, experience disapproval from parents and peers.
one will experience low self-esteem. One does not, Findings reveal that both of these factors, com-
therefore, have to be a superstar in every domain to petence in domains of importance and the perceived
have high self-esteem. Rather, one only needs to feel support of significant others, combine to influence
adequate or competent in those areas judged to be a childs or adolescents self-esteem. Those who
important to the self. Thus, children may evaluate feel competent in domains of importance and who
themselves as unathletic; however, if athletic prow- report high support rate themselves as having the
ess is not an aspiration, then self-esteem will not highest self-esteem. Those who feel inadequate in
be negatively affected. That is, the high self-esteem domains deemed important and who report low lev-
individual can discount the importance of areas in els of support rate themselves as having the lowest
which one does not feel successful. self-esteem. Other combinations fall in between.
This analysis can be applied to the profiles of
Conclusions
Child A and Child B. In fact, Susan Harter has
directly examined this explanation by asking chil- Two types of self-evaluations that can be observed
dren to rate how important it is for them to be in children and adolescents were distinguished:
Self-Consciousness 673
(a) evaluative judgments of competence or adequacy within the family. Susan Harters work delineates
in specific domains (domain-specific self-concepts) multiple strategies for promoting realistically high
and (b) the global evaluation of ones worth as a self-esteem. If evaluations are accurate, positive
personnamely, overall self-esteem. Each of these self-esteem is clearly a psychological commodity,
undergoes developmental change based on age- a resource that is important for us to foster in our
related cognitive advances. In addition, older chil- children and adolescents if we want them to lead
dren and adolescents vary tremendously with regard productive and happy lives.
to whether self-evaluations are positive or negative.
Susan Harter
Within a given individual, there will be a profile of
self-evaluations, some of which are more positive See also Concepts, Development of; Personal Identity,
and some that are more negative. More positive self- Development of; Relationships, Development of
concepts in domains considered important as well
as approval from significant others will lead to high
Further Readings
self-esteem. Conversely, negative self-concepts in
domains considered important coupled with lack of Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human nature and the social order.
approval from significant others will result in low New York, NY: Scribner.
self-esteem. Damon, W., & Hart, D. (1988). Self-understanding in
childhood and adolescence. New York, NY: Cambridge
Why Should We Care About University Press.
Fischer, K. W. (1980). A theory of cognitive development:
Self-Concepts and Self-Esteem?
The control and construction of hierarchies of skills.
Self-esteem is particularly important since it is Psychological Review, 87, 477531.
associated with very critical outcomes or conse- Harter, S. (1993). Causes and consequences of low
quences. Perhaps the most well-documented con- self-esteem in children and adolescents. In R. F.
sequence of low self-esteem is depression. Children Baumeister (Ed.), Self-esteem: The puzzle of low
and adolescents (as well as adults) who display the self-regard (pp. 87116). New York, NY: Plenum.
constellation of low perceived adequacy in domains Harter, S. (1999). The construction of the self:
of importance coupled with low approval support A developmental perspective. New York, NY: Guilford.
from significant others invariably report low self- Harter, S. (2011). The construction of the self:
esteem. Low self-esteem, in turn, is highly associated A developmental perspective (2nd ed.). New York, NY:
with perceived depression and hopelessness about Guilford.
the future. The most seriously depressed consider James, W. (1892). Psychology: The briefer course. New
suicide. Thus, it is critical that we intervene for York, NY: Henry Holt.
Oosterwegel, A., & Oppenheimer, L. (1993). The self-
those experiencing low self-esteem. Our model of
system: Developmental changes between and within
the causes of self-esteem suggests strategies that may
self-concepts. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
be fruitfulfor example, improving skills, helping
Piaget, J. (1960). The psychology of intelligence. Patterson,
individuals discount the importance of domains in
NJ: Littlefield-Adams.
which it is unlikely that they can improve, and pro-
Rosenberg, M. (1979). Conceiving the self. New York, NY:
viding support in the form of approval for who they Basic Books.
are as people. It is also clear that there are different
pathways to low and high self-esteem. For example,
for one child, the sense of inadequacy in particular
domains may be the pathway to low self-esteem. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
For another child, lack of support from parents or
peers may represent the primary cause. These dif- The term self-consciousness has several often con-
ferent pathways are important to identify because flated usages in the philosophy of mind and the
they have critical implications for intervention cognitive sciences. This entry distinguishes the three
efforts to enhance feelings of worth for those chil- major common usages and their general philosophi-
dren with low self-esteem in educational settings, cal and scientific contexts, with an emphasis on their
clinical settings, peer groups, the community, and place in cognitive neuroscience.
674 Self-Consciousness
Many authors cite experiences of complete basis for subjectivitythat is, essentially core
absorption during activities in which one seems to and introspective self-consciousness.
lose track of oneself as evidence that there can be
3. A third class of hypotheses considers self-
consciousness without any self-consciousness
consciousness as potentially multiply realizable.
whatsoever. Beyond the potential paradox of such
It would function like the implementation of an
a position, which seems to imply the possibility of
abstractly characterizable computational algo-
experiences (e.g., pain) with no owner or subject of
rithm capable of exploiting different brain regions
the experience, it seems generally to assume that
in an equipotent manner, similar to the way a com-
self-consciousness is to be taken in senses two or
puters virtual machine can flexibly occupy vari-
three. While it is true that one is not introspecting
able hardware resources.
all the time and that one ceases to think about
oneself as an autobiographical ego in times of Compatible with the second and third classes of
complete absorption, it also does not seem entirely hypotheses, neurological evidence supports the
implausible that animals, infants, and sufferers of idea that self-consciousness is an extremely robust,
degenerative disease could be self-conscious with- flexible, and resilient process. Neurological studies
out introspective capacity and without having suggest that, beyond coma caused by brain stem
much of an autobiographical self. and thalamic damage, self-consciousness may dis-
appear only when extensive bilateral damage
Neural Bases of Self-Consciousness affects most of the thalamocortical system. Even in
such circumstances, as in some persistent vegeta-
The study of the neural basis of self-consciousness tive state patients, there is evidence that residual
has grown over the past decade. Three classes of self-consciousness can be present. Moreover, while
hypotheses can be distinguished. genetic and environmental factors can result in
aberrant brain development, there is often a pres-
1. The first class refers to specific regions of the
ervation of basic mental abilities, including self-
brain as underlying self-consciousness or its com-
consciousness. Developmental cases suggest that
ponents, including the following: (a) the insular
extremely different brains across individuals can
cortexfor all forms of self-consciousness; (b) the
support similar forms of self-consciousness.
anterior cingulate cortexfor interoceptive and
Understanding the structure and mechanisms
emotional self-consciousness, the conscious moni-
underlying core self-consciousness will represent a
toring of conflict, and introspective self-conscious-
key theoretical and methodological challenge for the
ness; (c) the medial prefrontal cortexfor
cognitive sciences. Likewise, uncovering the neural
self-referential processing in general, and (d) the
implementation of self-consciousness will represent
brain stem, which has recently been hypothesized
a tremendous challenge if the multiple realizabil-
to be the neural basis for the primordial feelings
ity hypothesis turns out to be true, as the standard
of the living body.
anatomo-functional approach of cognitive neurosci-
2. The second class of hypotheses focus on ence would be of limited help.
more distributed and integrated networks, includ-
Kenneth Williford, David Rudrauf,
ing the following: (a) the default mode network
that has been hypothesized to constitute an essen- and Carissa L. Philippi
tial basis for introspection, the retrieval of autobi-
See also Anosognosia; Consciousness, Comparative
ographical memory, and the projection of the self Perspectives; Event Memory, Development;
into the future; (b) a network of subcortical-corti- Introspection; Self, Development of; Self-Knowledge
cal midline structures in which cortical midline
components subserve introspective self-conscious-
ness and core self-consciousness is implemented by Further Readings
subcortical components; (c) a posterior network Buckner, R. L., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Schacter, D.
relying on interactions between brain stem nuclei, (2008). The brains default network, anatomy, function,
the thalamus, and the posteromedial cortex, which and relevance to disease. Annals of the New York
has been hypothesized to constitute an integrative Academy of Sciences, 1124, 138.
676 Self-Knowledge
Craig, A. D. (2010). The sentient self. Brain Structure and they are transparent to their subjects; that is, if a sub-
Function, 214(56), 563577. ject has them, he is immediately aware of them and
Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body in a position to judge that he has them. Moreover,
and emotion in the making of consciousness. Orlando, a subject is authoritative with respect to themif
FL: Harvest Books. sincere, if he judges to be in a mental state M, he is.
Damasio, A. (2010). Self comes to mind: Constructing the The Cartesian model has been widely criticized.
conscious brain. New York, NY: Pantheon. First, since Sigmund Freuds discovery of the uncon-
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Boston, scious, the transparency of mental states has been
MA: Little, Brown.
questioned. Second, it has been noted that animals
Hofstadter, D. (2007). I am a strange loop. New York, NY:
and infants have mental states yet cant self-ascribe
Basic Books.
them. Third, the discovery of self-deception, whereby
Kriegel, U., & Williford, K. (Eds.). (2006). Self-representational
subjects self-ascribe mental states they dont actually
approaches to consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Northoff, G., & Bermpohl, F. (2004). Cortical midline
have, makes authority founder. Fourth, the Cartesian
structures and the self. Trends in Cognitive Science, 8,
model would introduce a cognitive facultynamely,
102107. introspectionmodeled after sight, which, however,
Owen, A., Schiff, N., & Laureys, S. (2009). The assessment of appears difficult to characterize in relation to mental
conscious awareness in the vegetative state. In S. Laureys states that arent physical entities. Finally, Ludwig
& G. Tononi (Eds.), The neurology of consciousness Wittgenstein pointed out how the Cartesian model
(pp. 163172). London, UK: Academic Press. would entail the view that psychological language is
Panksepp, J., & Northoff, G. (2009). The trans-species core private to each subject. On the one hand, one could
SELF: The emergence of active cultural and neuro- know only ones own mental states and may merely
ecological agents through self-related processing within surmise those of others. On the other, if only I can
subcortical-cortical midline networks. Consciousness know my current mental states, the reference of my
and Cognition, 18, 193215. psychological vocabulary will be known to myself
Rosenberg, M. (1965). Society and the adolescent self- only. Hence, whenever it will seem correct to me to
image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. apply a given term t to a current mental state M, my
Shewmon, D. A., Holmes, G. L., & Byrne, P. A. (1999). use of t will be correct. According to Wittgensteins
Consciousness in congenitally decorticate children: argument against the possibility of a private lan-
Developmental vegetative state as self-fulfilling guage (either in speech or in thought), this would
prophecy. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, entail that the distinction between correct and incor-
41, 364374. rect uses of t would collapse and, with it, the very
Varela, F. J., & Shear, J. (1999). First-person methodologies: idea that t could mean anything at all.
What, why, how? Journal of Consciousness Studies, David Armstrong has proposed a refined version
6, 114.
of the introspective model. In this view, through
the operation of an inner subpersonal mechanism,
subjects would become immediately aware of their
SELF-KNOWLEDGE mental states. Working reliably, such a mechanism
would also ensure that subjects be authoritative
Self-knowledge is the characteristically human abil- about them.
ity of knowing ones own mental statessuch as Armstrongs model has been criticized for con-
sensations, perceptions, emotions, and propositional sidering both transparency and authority to be the
attitudes. The following will survey the main philo- result of the correct operation of the inner subper-
sophical and psychological accounts of self-knowl- sonal mechanism. These characteristics should be
edge proposed in recent years. subject to perfectly acceptable exceptions in case
the mechanism broke down. Authority and trans-
parency, however, are traditionally considered con-
The Introspective Model
stitutive traits of self-knowledge and their failure
According to the Cartesian conception, all mental either implies a lack of conceptual competence or
states are like objects presented in ones own mental rationality or else is a sign that the mental state one
arena we are introspectively aware of. In particular, fails to have knowledge of is unconscious. Yetto
Self-Knowledge 677
contrast this view with how we usually think of Conditions C restrict the universal applicability of
subpersonal mechanismswe would never think of the thesis so as to counter the objections already
blind subjects, whose visual mechanism is impaired raised against the introspective account of transpar-
and cant therefore see objects presented to them, ency and authoritythat is, the arguments from
that they either lack the relevant concepts or are unconscious mental states, from the mental states of
being irrational or else are unconsciously seeing the animals and infants, and from self-deception. This
objects. restricted thesis holds only for subjects who are con-
ceptually endowed and for specific kinds of mental
The Inferential Model states, like conscious beliefs, desires, and intentions.
The inferential model, somewhat traceable to Moreover, according to Bilgrami, self-deceived sub-
behaviorism, has been proposed by the psycholo- jects do not make wrong self-ascriptions but rather
gist Alison Gopnik as part of her theory theory have two contrasting mental statesonly one of
conception of knowledge of the mind. Accordingly, which is conscious and correctly ascribedthat
subjects at the ages of 3 to 4 would know their explain their conflicting and irrational behavior.
own mental states in the same way as they know Hence, the authority over their self-ascriptions is
other peoplesnamely, by making inferences from compatible with their being self-deceived.
their overt behavior to their likely mental causes. Constitutive accounts have been criticized for fail-
Transparency and authority, therefore, arent con- ing to accommodate two intuitions: that first- and
stitutive features of self-knowledge but are mere second-order mental statesthat is, beliefs, desires
illusions. Authority is due to the fact that, being and intentions, on the one hand, and our own beliefs
continuously around ourselves, we become reliable about them, on the otherhave separate existence,
at recognizing our own mental states. The illusion of and that self-knowledge is due to some sort of cogni-
transparency, in contrast, can be explained by means tive accomplishment.
of an analogy: Just as trained physicists can immedi-
ately see electrons in a cloud chamber because they Recent Epistemic Accounts
have acquired a theory and can immediately and
reliably apply it, so human beings can self-ascribe Richard Moran and Christopher Peacocke have
mental states without going through explicit infer- claimed that self-knowledge consists in making judg-
ences because they quickly and reliably apply their ments about ones own beliefs, desires, and inten-
own theory of mind. tions on the basis of having them and for the reason
The theory theory account of self-knowledge has that one has them. Self-knowledge is thus a modest
been criticized on various grounds. Like Armstrongs yet genuinely cognitive accomplishment consisting
model, this account would turn transparency and in immediate, nonobservational judgment about
authority into contingent rather than constitutive ones own mental states, rationally grounded in their
features of self-knowledge. In addition, it would obtaining.
deny the intuitive asymmetry between knowledge of Epistemic accounts, however, are problematic.
our own and of other minds. In particular, awareness of ones beliefs, desires, and
intentions must avoid presupposing the very knowl-
Constitutive Accounts edge of them, which should be explained and yet
be such that their self-ascription be rationalthat
Constitutive accounts, developed by philosophers is to say, consciously motivated by the occurrence
such as Sydney Shoemaker, Crispin Wright, and of these mental states rather than simply caused by
Akeel Bilgrami, reject the view that self-knowledge them. As a matter of fact, however, it is very difficult
be based either on introspection or on inference. to see what conception of awareness of ones own
Furthermore, they consider transparency and mental states could serve this purpose. For, on the
authority to be constitutive features of self-knowl- one hand, so-called phenomenal awarenessthat is,
edge. They therefore turn them into two conceptual awareness of what it is like to have a given belief,
truths, captured by the following thesis: desire, or intentionwould arguably fail to pro-
Given conditions C, a subject believes/judges that he vide subjects with reasons for their self-ascriptions.
is in mental state M if and only if he is. Propositional (or higher order) awareness, on
678 Semantic Dementia
the other, would in fact presuppose self-knowledge On hearing some words (e.g., sheep), people with
as it would consist in judging of being in the relevant semantic dementia may ask what they mean, indi-
mental states. cating that the problem is not simply one of word
retrieval but a progressive loss in the persons knowl-
Annalisa Coliva
edge of vocabulary. Ultimately, only a few stereo-
See also Behaviorism; Belief and Judgment;
typed words or phrases remain. Nevertheless, people
Consciousness and the Unconscious; Folk Psychology; speak fluently and effortlessly within the confines of
Introspection their increasingly restricted vocabulary. There is no
effortful word search because words are no longer
available to be sought.
Further Readings
The conceptual loss is not limited to words but
Armstrong, D. (1968). A materialist theory of the mind. encompasses the persons fund of knowledge relat-
London, UK: Routledge. ing to all sensory modalities. It affects the ability to
Bilgrami, A. (2006). Self-knowledge and resentment. recognize objects, faces, nonverbal environmental
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. sounds, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory stimuli.
Gopnik, A. (1993). How we know our own minds: The Thus, people may no longer recognize fruits and
illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality. vegetables in the supermarket, understand the sig-
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16, 115, 90101. nificance of the sound of rain on the windowpane,
Moran, R. (2001). Authority and estrangement. Princeton, or recognize the smell of coffee or taste of a lemon.
NJ: Princeton University Press. These difficulties do not reflect a problem in sensory
Peacocke, C. (1999). Being known. Oxford, UK: Clarendon
perception: People perceive and discriminate sensory
Press.
stimuli entirely normally. The problem is in ascrib-
Shoemaker, S. (1996). The first person perspective and
ing meaning to those percepts. They have lost their
other essays. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
semantic associations. In contrast to the profound
Press.
breakdown in semantic memory, day-to-day auto-
biographical memory is relatively well preserved,
providing a striking contrast to the picture in classi-
SEMANTIC DEMENTIA cal amnesia.
A picture of a cup suggests a form of container that cannot remember things. Nevertheless, they tend
can be handled; a picture of a dog suggests an ani- to underplay difficulties and typically do not show
mal by virtue of the presence of legs, ears, and tail. the great frustration and distress sometimes seen
Nevertheless, dissociations have also been detected in aphasic patients with severe word finding diffi-
in the recognition of peoples faces and names; culties. People with semantic dementia are unable
people with more left temporal lobe atrophy have to appreciate the magnitude of what has been lost
more difficulty recognizing names than faces, and because they no longer have available their prior
those with more right temporal lobe degeneration world knowledge as a comparator.
have the reverse. Name-face dissociations are less
easy to explain in terms of inherent difficulty, a phe- Conclusion
nomenon that has been interpreted as evidence for People with semantic dementia inhabit a shrinking
different contributions to semantic knowledge from conceptual world. Their understanding becomes
the two cerebral hemispheres. progressively narrowed and personalized, limited to
the particular instances encountered in their daily
Frequency, Familiarity, Typicality
life. Semantic dementia provides important insights
The frequency of a word, the familiarity of into how concepts are represented and the relation-
objects, and the typicality of features in defining a ship between knowledge and experience.
category are strong predictors of performance. Thus,
people with semantic dementia are more likely to rec- Julie Snowden
ognize the common word dog than the uncommon
See also Aphasia; Memory, Neural Basis; Semantic
word antelope. They are more likely to recognize the Memory; Semantic Memory, Computational
typical feature legs as being an attribute of an animal Perspectives
than the atypical feature hump. Nevertheless, generic
measures of frequency, familiarity, and typicality are Further Readings
not sufficient to explain what a person knows. There
is also a strong effect of personal familiarity. People Hodges, J. R., & Patterson, K. (2007). Semantic dementia:
show better retention of concepts (words, objects, A unique clinicopathological syndrome. Lancet
ideas) relevant to their daily life experience than Neurology, 6, 10041014.
those that have no personal relevance. This find- Patterson, K., Nestor, P. J., & Rogers, T. T. (2007). Where
ing suggests a much closer relationship between a do you know what you know? The representation of
semantic knowledge in the human brain. Nature, 8,
persons semantic knowledge of the world and their
976987.
autobiographical (episodic) memory than is often
Snowden, J. S. (2005). Semantic dementia. In J. OBrien,
acknowledged. What the person experiences has a
D. Ames & A. Burns (Eds.), Dementia (3rd ed.,
strong influence on what that person knows.
pp. 702712). London, UK: Hodder Arnold.
Snowden, J. S., Kindell, J., & Neary, D. (2006). Diagnosing
Learning in Semantic Dementia
semantic dementia and managing communication
People with semantic dementia are able to learn. difficulties. In K. Bryan & J. Maxim (Eds.),
They can reacquire lost words and relearn the func- Communication disability in the dementias
tion of objects. However, that knowledge is tenuous (pp. 125146). Chichester, UK: Wiley.
and depends on constant rehearsal and applicabil-
ity to the persons daily life. Moreover, reacquired
knowledge (e.g., that a particular animal is a dog) SEMANTIC MEMORY
does not mean that the persons concept is normal.
There is poor generalization to other instances and Semantic memory refers to the reservoir of concepts
contexts (e.g., other dogs). and propositions that you know and that are not
tied to any particular time or place. So, for instance,
Awareness and Insight
you know that 2 + 2 = 4, or that carrots are orange,
People with semantic dementia are aware that there or that there are 50 states in the United States, but
is something wrong and typically complain that they you probably dont remember the specific occasion
680 Semantic Memory
on which you learned those facts. Similarly, there are node and note that the can fly proposition is con-
things that you probably dont know like the 43rd nected to the bird node, and then make a response.
element of the periodic table or the air speed velocity Researchers found that regardless of where the
of an unladen European swallowand when you concept was in the tree it took about the same
dont know something you can often determine that amount of time to go up a level and about the same
you dont know it very quickly. amount of time to access a propositioncompelling
Semantic knowledge can be divided into two evidence for the hierarchical structure of semantic
main kinds: concepts and propositions. A concept memory.
is a mental representation of somethinglike a dog, However, there is a critical problem. For false
or a book, or running, or the color red. Propositions statements that are explicitly encoded in semantic
link concepts in statements that are either true or memorythat ostriches dont fly, for instanceone
false, such as The dog was running, or The book can access the ostrich node, find the relevant propo-
is red. sition, and make a rapid response. However, many
During the 1960s and 1970s, a series of models false statements are unlikely to be encoded explicitly
were developed to explain how semantic memory in semantic memory. For instance, it is unlikely that
is organized. In this entry, the three most influen- you have ever had to think about the fact that cop-
tial of these modelsthe hierarchical model, the per is not an animal, so you would have no oppor-
feature overlap model, and the spreading activation tunity to encode that fact. The only way to deduce
modelwill be described. that statements like this are false is to search the tree
and discover that there is no animal concept above
the copper concept. That implies that verifying false
The Hierarchical Model
statements should, in general, be very slow, but this
According to the hierarchical model, concepts are is not the case.
organized into tree structures. So the class of ani-
mals is divided into birds, fish, and so forth. The
The Feature Overlap Model
bird concept is divided into canary, ostrich, and so
forth, and the fish concept into shark, salmon, and To address this and other problems, the feature
so forth. Propositions defining the characteristics of overlap model was proposed. According to this
a concept are stored with those concepts in such a account, concepts consist of collections of features.
way as to minimize duplication (a principle called So the concept of a robin might consist of the fea-
cognitive economy). For instance, the proposition tures, is biped, has wings, has red breast, and not
can sing would be stored at the canary node in the domesticated. When trying to verify statements like
tree structure but not at the ostrich node. The prop- a robin is a bird, the features of the concept robin
osition can fly, however, would be stored at the are compared to the features of the concept bird.
bird concept, because most birds can fly, so by stor- Because there is a lot of overlap, one can quickly
ing it further up the tree, one could avoid duplicating conclude that a robin is a bird. A robin is an ani-
the can fly proposition for all the individual birds. mal is verified a little more slowly because there
Of course, then there is a problem for the ostrich, are fewer features in common. Furthermore, if there
which cannot fly, and so the proposition cannot are very few features in common, people can make
fly must be stored with the ostrich. As there are a fast no response. So, the statement copper is an
very few birds that cannot fly, it is still more efficient animal is rejected quickly because copper and ani-
to store these exceptions separately than to duplicate mal do not share many features, whereas a tree is
the can fly proposition for all birds. an animal is rejected a little more slowly because
To access a memory, the model proposes that trees and animals are both living things.
people identify the critical concept (e.g., canary) and The feature overlap model proposes that fea-
then traverse the tree to find the concept or proposi- tures come in two typesdefining features that all
tion that they need. So, for instance, to verify that instances of a concept have and characteristic fea-
a canary can fly one would first locate the canary tures typical of the concept but which are not present
node, note that no flying proposition is connected in all cases. However, generating defining features
to that concept, traverse up the tree to the bird can be problematic. Try to name one feature that
Semantic Memory, Computational Perspectives 681
all games have and you will see the difficultythere Collins, A. M., & Quillian, M. R. (1969). Retrieval time
always seems to be an exception. from semantic memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and
Verbal Behavior, 8, 240247.
Rips, L. J., Shoben, E. J., & Smith, F. E. (1973). Semantic
The Spreading Activation Model distance and the verification of semantic relations.
The spreading activation model was designed to Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 14,
address the weaknesses of the earlier models. It is 665681.
similar to the hierarchical model in that it consists
of concepts connected together. However, in the
spreading activation model these concepts are not SEMANTIC MEMORY,
organized into a tree but rather any two concepts
that are related can be connected. Furthermore, COMPUTATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
rather than traversing the tree to find relevant infor-
mation, in the spreading activation model, activa- Semantic memory refers to factual or conceptual
tion spreads through all connections simultaneously. knowledge that is not related to any given personal
If two concepts are strongly related more activation episode. For instance, the fact that Ottawa is the
flows between them and if a concept has many con- capital of Canada is a piece of knowledge that you
nections emanating from it then the activation is may retain, without necessarily being able to identify
divided between these pathsas if activation were when and where you learned it. Similarly, you may
a liquid flowing through pipes of different sizes con- know that a poodle and a terrier are similar to each
nected in a web. other without ever having been told that they are
The spreading activation model was able to but rather by virtue of the fact that they fit together
account for fast false judgments and did not require in a conceptual representation of the world because
any distinction between defining and characteristic they are both small dogs.
features. Although thinking about semantic memory The examples given above illustrate the two main
today tends to focus on new computational algo- kinds of semantic informationconceptual and
rithms, the spreading activation model still plays a propositional. A concept is a mental representation
significant role in our understanding of the semantic of something. So one might have the concept of a
memory system. dog that becomes active when one sees a poodle,
In all the models discussed in this entry, it is left smells a Labrador, is licked by a terrier, or talks about
up to the theorist to determine the content of the greyhounds. Concepts can also include actions such
representations employed. Starting in the late 1980s, as running and properties such as red or quickly.
attention turned toward automatically constructing Propositions join concepts together into units of
representations from large text corpora using compu- mental representation that are capable of having a
tational methods. Today, these models play a role not truth-value. So the concept of a dog is neither true
only in theorizing but in real world applications such nor false. But the proposition that dogs have legs
as Internet searches and automatic essay grading. is typically true in our world, although one could
imagine a world of legless dogs in which it was not
Simon Dennis
true. Similarly, Ottawa is the capital of Canada, but
See also Categorization, Neural Basis; Categorization,
it is easy to imagine a world in which Toronto was
Psychological Perspectives; Classical Theory of instead.
Concepts; Concepts, Development of; Early models of semantic memory relied on rep-
Representations, Development of; Semantic Memory, resentations of conceptual and propositional knowl-
Computational Perspectives edge that were supplied by the theorists. Starting in
the late 1980s, however, attention turned to how
knowledge could be extracted automatically from
Further Readings exposure to a corpus representing human experience.
Collins, A. M., & Loftus, E. F. (1975). A spreading We will focus on these models starting with those
activation theory of semantic processing. Psychological that extract conceptual knowledge and then consid-
Review, 82, 407428. ering those that extract propositional knowledge.
682 Semantic Memory, Computational Perspectives
Conceptual Knowledge the advantage that they produce vectors with dimen-
sions that tend to be easily interpretable. As of yet,
The earliest and most prominent of the models
however, no single system addresses all the phenom-
that extract conceptual knowledge is latent seman-
ena of conceptual semantic memory.
tic analysis (LSA). Introduced by Scott Deerwester,
Susan Dumais, George Furnas, Thomas Landauer,
and Richard Harshman, LSA derives meaning using Networks of Concepts
statistical computations applied to a large corpus Concepts do not exist in isolation but rather are
of text. Semantically similar words tend to appear connected together in a web of relationships. Mark
in similar documents. By observing which words Steyvers and Joshua Tenenbaum showed that
appear in which documents in the corpus, LSA semantic networks (e.g., the network of associates
defines a set of mutual constraints. These constraints that people generate) have a small-world structure
can be solved using singular value decomposition characterized by sparse connectivity, short aver-
producing vector representations of both words and age path lengths between words, and strong local
documents. The similarity of these vectors is then clustering. Furthermore, most words have relatively
used to predict semantic similarity. few connections, while a few have high connectiv-
LSA has been shown to reflect human knowledge ity. These observations are important because they
in a variety of ways. For example, LSA measures provide constraints on the nature of the process by
correlate highly with humans scores on vocabulary which conceptual structures grow. A simple model
tests, mimic human category judgments, predict how in which new concepts are preferentially attached to
rapidly people are able to access words, and esti- already well-connected conceptsa rich-get-richer
mate passage coherence. In applied domains, LSA approachis sufficient to generate the kinds of
has been used to aid information retrieval, guide graphs observed in adult data.
discussion forums, provide feedback to pilots on
landing technique, diagnose mental disorders, select
Propositional Knowledge
candidates for jobs, and allow automated tutors to
understand the input they receive from students. What all automated models of conceptual structure
The most surprising and controversial application have in common is that they assume that documents
of LSA has been its use in automated essay grading. are bags of words. That is, they do not take into
Using the semantic vectors provided by LSA, it is account the order with which words appear and
possible to compare novel student essays to essays consequently cannot address the question of how
that have already been graded. If the new essay is propositional knowledge is extracted. Clearly, the
most similar to the A essays it is awarded an A, and sentence John loves Mary is not equivalent to
so forth. The accuracy of LSA at this task is remark- the sentence Mary loves John. In the first case,
able. It has been consistently shown to correlate with John is the lover and, in the second, Mary is. To cap-
human markers at rates equivalent to the agreement ture propositional knowledge, one must take into
between humans. account word order, particularly in languages like
While LSA is the best studied of statistical seman- English in which word order plays a pivotal role in
tics models, a number of other alternatives exist. determining who did what to whom.
These include the vector space model, hyperspace Constructing a proposition involves assigning
analogue to language (HAL) model, the topics semantic roles (like lover) to the entities described
model, and sparse nonnegative matrix factorization. in a sentence (like John). The problem has been
Each of these models has its strengths and weak- studied at least since Panini, an Indian scholar who
nesses. The topics model has been shown to provide worked around 500 BCE. Today, the majority of
a good account of human free association norms, effort in this area assumes that one has an existing
HAL does a good job of modeling deep dyslexia, set of semantic roles and access to a corpus in which
while the vector space model, sparse nonnegative the roles have been identified before attempting to
matrix factorization, and LSA perform best on label new sentences. What this does not explain,
document-similarity rating tasks. The topics model however, is how people are able to induce the set
and sparse nonnegative matrix factorization have of semantic roles in the first instance, or how they
Sequential Memory, Computational Perspectives 683
are able to learn when they are not provided with Safin based on the sentence Safin, Kafelnikov
labeled training data. surge toward hometown showdown, without
Simon Dennis provided an answer to this ques- any explicit knowledge that players can only surge
tion that revolves around the distinction between toward a showdown when they win. Rather, it relies
syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations. on the fact that the pattern of players that surge
Syntagmatic associations occur between words toward hometown showdowns overlaps with the
that appear together in utterances (e.g., run fast). pattern of players that win matches. This kind of
Paradigmatic associations occur between words that inference may be important in understanding how
appear in similar contexts but not necessarily in the people acquire the impressive stock of commonsense
same utterances (e.g., deep and shallow). To under- knowledge necessary for comprehending discourse.
stand the logic of the model, suppose we have the Efforts to create computational models of how
following corpus: propositional information is extracted from language
are in their infancy. What is clear, however, is that there
John loves Mary
is a great deal of information that can be extracted
Todd loves Sarah to create large-scale models of semantic memory.
Barack loves Michelle Advances in computing power coupled with the devel-
opment of more sophisticated statistical models are
Who loves Sarah? Todd
providing a deeper understanding of conceptual and
Who loves Michelle? Barack propositional structure and how it is acquired.
and then present it with the question Who loves Simon Dennis
Mary? xxx. The job of the model is to fill in the
xxx slot indicating that it understands that John is See also Category Learning, Computational Perspectives;
the lover. To begin with, the model uses syntagmatic Semantic Memory
associations to determine that words like Todd and
Barack could appear in the xxx slot. This pattern Further Readings
{Barack, Todd}represents the lover role. Note a
Dennis, S. (2005). A memory-based theory of verbal
similar pattern occurs in the John slot when the model
cognition. Cognitive Science, 29(2), 145193.
is processing the sentence John loves Mary. As a
Griffiths, T. L., Steyvers, M., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2007).
consequence, paradigmatic associations form between
Topics in semantic representation. Psychological Review,
the {Barack, Todd} pattern and John. The paradig- 114(2), 211244.
matic mechanism in itself, however, would not suffice Landauer, T. K., McNamara, D. S., Dennis, S., & Kintsch,
to predict John, as Barack and Todd are also associ- W. (Eds.). (2007). Handbook of latent semantic analysis.
ated with the lover pattern. Only John has an associa- Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
tive connection to Mary, however, and the additional Lund, K., & Burgess, C. (1996). Producing high-
support afforded by this connection favors John. dimensional semantic spaces from lexical co-occurrence.
The syntagmatic paradigmatic mechanism has Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, &
been shown to be capable of answering simple ques- Computers, 28(2), 203208.
tions about tennis matches. Taking naturally occur- Steyvers, M., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2005). The large-scale
ring text from the Association of Tennis Professionals structure of semantic networks: Statistical analyses and a
website, the model was able to complete questions model of semantic growth. Cognitive Science, 29, 4178.
of the form. Who won the match between Sampras
and Agassi? xxx. Particularly interesting was the
fact that the model takes advantage of the system- SEQUENTIAL MEMORY,
atic occurrence of words through the corpus that
occurs as a consequence of the causal relationships COMPUTATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
between events. As a consequence, it can determine
results even when they are not explicitly stated. Sequential memory, also called order memory, refers
For instance, the model answered the question to the process of remembering a sequence of letters,
Who won the match between Kiefer and Safin? words, digits, pictures, or sounds (here referred to
684 Sequential Memory, Computational Perspectives
as items) and reproducing these items in the same to the next item. Positional models are models in
order. Sequential memory differs from item memory which the items are encoded in a gradually changing
in that the latter is involved in remembering and context representation. This gradual change leads to
reproducing a list of items in any order. Sequential nearby items being encoded in similar context repre-
memory is involved in tasks such as reporting back a sentations. During retrieval, swaps between nearby
telephone number and learning to spell a new word. items are then possible. Ordinal models are models
Computational models of sequential memory tackle that assume a gradient over all the items, with the
two questions: How are sequences stored in mem- first item being encoded more strongly than the sec-
ory, and how are the items of a sequence selected for ond item, which is encoded more strongly than the
output? third, and so on. During retrieval of items, trans-
positions will occur for nearby items, as they have
Storing Sequences similar levels of memory strength.
The earliest view about how the mind stores arbi- Two types of errors provide support for the view
trary sequences of items is referred to as chaining. that the mind stores items relative to (sub)sequence
With chaining, each item is connected with a for- boundaries. When the above sequence is split in
ward link to the next item. When the sequence has two between the third and fourth item, transposi-
to be retrieved, only the very first item needs to be tions occur between items that occupy the same
retrieved and then by following the successive links, intragroup position: M V DQ S F. This error is
the whole sequence is reproduced. called an interposition. Similar errors occur across
Error patterns seen in data challenge the chaining sequences. When reporting the current sequence, an
hypothesis. When performing a task of sequential intrusion can occur with an item that was studied
memory, errors are made that provide insights into in the previous sequence. The intruding item tends
how sequences are stored. Imagine that M V F Q S to have been studied in that same position in the
D is the sequence of letters that needs to be remem- previous sequence. This error is called a protrusion.
bered by a person. Omissions are errors when the Computational models can produce these types of
person does not report all the items: M V F _ S D. errors by resetting the context representation at the
Transpositions are items reported in the wrong posi- beginning of each (sub)sequence.
tion: M V F S Q D. Intrusions are items that were
Reproducing Sequences
not presented in the original sequence: M V F P S D.
These examples illustrate a problem with the chain- One way of producing a sequence is by retriev-
ing hypothesis, the strong version of which assumes ing from memory one of the items and, if it is the
that the cue for the next item to be reported is the first item, reporting it. After this, the next item is
just-reported item. With an omission and intrusion, retrieved and output, using a direct (as assumed by
the relevant cue (in the example, Q) is absent and the chaining models) or indirect link (via the changing
person should not be able to report the subsequent context representation) between the first and second
items (continuing with S), but experiments show that item, and so on. The current dominant view is that
people do continue. As in chaining models, the Q is producing sequences follows a two-stage process.
linked to S, which is linked to D; after incorrectly For example, in typing, the time between two con-
reporting the S, the model would continue forward secutive key presses is much shorter than would be
with the D and not backward with the Q. However, expected by a scenario in which the next key press
experiments show that transpositions (reporting Q starts when the previous one has completed. Instead,
after incorrectly reporting S) are the most common the findings are consistent with a scenario in which
errors in serial recall. several fingers are moving toward the relevant keys,
Computational models that are able to capture and only one finger is allowed to complete the
the pattern of transposition errors are compound response. The simultaneous activation of responses
chaining, positional, and ordinal models. Compound (the first stage), together with the selection of one
chaining models are models that assume that storage response (the second stage), leads to smooth produc-
of a sequence involves adding the items to an amal- tion of the items (key presses); this two-stage process
gamation of previous items, which then gets chained has been called competitive queuing.
Serial Order Memory, Computational Perspectives 685
In computational models of sequential memory, of information and has been argued to be funda-
competitive queuing is central to sequence produc- mentally involved in learning the phonology of new
tion. The dynamics are such that after cues activate words. Reflecting this interest, a number of models
the target items, the item with the strongest sup- of serial recall have been developed to account for
port is selected and output. After output, this item serial recall performance. The theoretical develop-
is inhibited so that the next strongest item can be ment in this area has been impressive, with models
selected and output. As ordinal models have a rank accounting for a comprehensive set of data at a fine
ordering of items from strong to weak, these models level of detail. The key phenomena accounted for by
produce the items in the forward order. As positional these models include primacy and recency, whereby
models do not have a gradient that rank orders the memory accuracy declines across positions in the
items, the context signal is replayed and candidate sequence with the exception that the last one or
items activated. The strongest item is the most likely two items in a sequence are better remembered; the
item that was encoded in that position and will be locality effect, whereby an item recalled in an incor-
output (unless it was already output erroneously). rect position will nonetheless tend to be recalled in
a nearby position; and the phonological similarity
Eddy J. Davelaar
effect, where verbal materials that rhyme or share a
See also Natural Action Selection, Modeling; Serial
number of phonemes will be less well recalled, par-
Order Memory, Computational Perspectives ticularly because of worse memory for the ordering
of those materials in the sequence.
Further Readings Representing Order
Henson, R. N. A. (1998). Short-term memory for serial
One basic issue addressed by these models is how
order: The start-end model. Cognitive Psychology,
the order of elements in a sequence is represented.
36(2), 73137.
Figure 1 shows three general schemes of representa-
Houghton, G. (1990). The problem of serial order: A
tion of order in contemporary models of serial order.
neural network model of sequence learning and recall.
In R. Dale, C. Mellish, & M. Zock (Eds.), Current
In the top scheme, chaining, adjacent elements of a
research in natural language generation (pp. 287319). sequence are associated in memory. Once an item
London, UK: Academic Press. is recalled, the following item can be accessed by
Lashley, K. S. (1951). The problem of serial order in using the recalled item to cue the next item via the
behaviour. In L. A. Jeffress (Ed.), Cerebral mechanisms pair association. Although Stephan Lewandowsky
in behaviour: The Hixon Symposium (pp. 112136). and Bennet Murdock showed that the chaining
New York, NY: John Wiley. model could account for many of the key phenom-
ena described above, later work has challenged this
model. A particularly troublesome finding is that
alternating rhyming and nonrhyming items in a
SERIAL ORDER MEMORY, sequence does not harmand may even enhance
COMPUTATIONAL PERSPECTIVES recall of the dissimilar items. Chaining models pre-
dict that confusions of rhyming items should be
Serial recall requires people to accurately remem- followed by confusions of nonrhyming items: When
ber and recall the order of sequences of informa- a rhyming item is recalled in the wrong position, the
tion such as letters, digits, and spatial locations over following nonrhyming item should move with it and
short periods of time. This task is of interest as one thus be incorrectly ordered.
of a number of tasks used by both researchers and This led to the development of primacy gradient
clinicians to tap short-term memory abilities; when models, in which order is represented as a gradi-
combined with an interleaved processing task (e.g., ent of activation or encoding strength across items.
a choice reaction time task), the combination is a These models successfully account for many of the
good predictor of higher level cognitive abilities key phenomena and can allow nonrhyming items
such as reasoning. Serial recall is especially popu- to be protected from confusions between rhyming
lar given the specific focus on memory for the order items by assuming that phonological confusions
686 Serial Order Memory, Computational Perspectives
sequences. Journal of Memory and Language, 55, OO. Similarity can change systematically with tem-
627652. poral distance and physical distance, and there is a
Henson, R. N. A. (1999). Coding position in short-term growing body of evidence for consistent individual
memory. International Journal of Psychology, 34, differences in which kinds of features drive a per-
403409. sons similarity judgments. Judgments of similarity
Lewandowsky, S., & Farrell, S. (2008). Short-term memory: can increase with simple association. For example,
New data and a model. In B. H. Ross (Ed.), The coffee is judged to be similar to cream because it is
psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 49, contextually associated with cream. In the absence
pp. 148). London, UK: Elsevier.
of objective ways to measure psychological similar-
ity, researchers are left to rely on participants sub-
jective judgments of their own processing, which
SIMILARITY are potentially unreliable, or on data from tasks in
which similarity is proposed to play a role, leading
An enormous amount of ink has been spilled in the to conclusions that are potentially circular. Thus, it
psychology literature on the topic of similarity. There is possible that similarity is both the most essential
are two reasons that this seemingly intuitive and and the most problematic construct in cognitive
prosaic concept has been the subject of such intense science. This entry discusses some of the important
scrutiny. First, there is virtually no area of cognitive findings from the extensive literature on similarity
processing in which similarity does not seem to play and the ways in which psychologists have attempted
a role. William James observed in 1890 that this to address a topic so critical to our understanding of
sense of Sameness is the very keel and backbone the mind and yet so elusive.
of our thinking (p. 459). Ivan Pavlov first noted
that dogs would generalize their learned salivation Theories of Similarity
response to new sounds as a function of their simi-
larity to the original tone, and this pattern of gen- As one might expect given the importance of similar-
eralization appears to be ubiquitous across species ity for thinking, it is understandable that there have
and stimuli. People group things together based on been several attempts to formalize the process of
their similarity, both during visual processing and determining similarity. These formal accounts stipu-
categorization. Research suggests that memories late how similarity is to be empirically measured and
are retrieved when they involve similar features or provide theoretic accounts of how similarity should
similar processing to a current situation. Problem be conceptualized. The resulting models have had a
solutions are likely to be retrieved from similar prior large practical impact in knowledge representation,
problems, inductive inference is largely based on the automatic pattern recognition by machines, search
similarity between the known and unknown cases, engines, data mining, and marketing (e.g., online
and the list goes on and on. stores that recommend new products to you based
Psychology clearly has an enormous stake in sim- on your similarity to previous buyers). The entry
ilarity. In fact, the depth of this stake makes it that surveys four of the most prominent models of simi-
much more unsettling that similarity can be such larity: geometric, feature based, alignment based,
a slippery and temperamental construct. Perceived and transformational.
similarity can vary considerably with context. In
Geometric Models and Multidimensional Scaling
fact, the act of comparison itself can change peoples
representations, leading them to construe things Geometric models work under the premise that
as more comparable by reinterpreting the given what it means for two things to be similar is for them
features or even creating new features. Similarity to be close to one another in a psychological space.
ratings are often asymmetric; for instance, people These approaches are exemplified by the statistical
view North Korea to be more similar to China than modeling technique of multidimensional scaling
the reverse. Likewise, similarity and difference are (MDS). MDS models represent similarity relations
not always the inverse of one another. When given between entities as a geometric model that consists of
a choice between XX and OX, people choose XX a set of points embedded in a space. The input to MDS
as both more similar to and more different from routines may be similarity judgments, confusions
688 Similarity
between entities, patterns of co-occurrence in large geometric representation by positioning the birds
samples of text, or any other measure of pairwise in a two-dimensional space such that birds rated as
proximity. Most straightforwardly, participants may being highly similar are very close to each other.
be asked to judge how similar every object in a set is One practical limitation of MDS is that obtain-
to every other object. The output of an MDS routine ing all pairwise similarity ratings among a large set
is a geometric model of the set of objects with each of objects requires a substantial commitment of
object represented as a point in an n-dimensional time and effort. If similarity ratings are used as the
space. The similarity between a pair of objects is input to MDS, then standard N2 ratings are required
inversely related to the distance between the objects for N objects. This number is halved if one assumes
points in the space. In MDS, the distance between that the similarity of A to B is the same as the simi-
points i and j is typically computed by larity of B to A. Even with this halving, the num-
ber of ratings still becomes prohibitively large as
N increases. Fortunately, automated techniques for
[ ]
1
n r __
r
dissimilarity(i,j) = |Xik Xjk| analyzing large corpora of text can provide input
k=1
to MDS models instead of relying on manually
provided ratings. Using this method, latent seman-
where n is the number of dimensions, Xik is the value tic analysis is a computational approach to word
of dimension k for item i, and r is a parameter that meaning that has received considerable recent atten-
allows different spatial metrics to be used. With r = 2, tion. It bases word meanings solely on the patterns
as in standard Euclidean geometry, the distance of co-occurrence between a large number of words
between two points is the length of the straight line in an extremely large text corpus such as an ency-
connecting them. If r = 1, then distance involves a city- clopedia or thousands of email messages. It employs
block metric in which the distance between two points the mathematical analysis tool of singular value
is the sum of their distances on each dimension; decomposition (SVD) to create vector encodings of
short-cut diagonal paths are not allowed. words that efficiently capture their co-occurrences;
Empirically, the Euclidean distance measure typically these encodings represent each word by an ordered
fits human data better when the stimuli being com- set of numbersthat is, a vector. The similarities
pared consist of perceptual dimensions that are psy- between two words vectors efficiently capture their
chologically fused together. For example, brightness is co-occurrences. If two words, such as cocoon and
a subjective dimension related to the amount of lumi- butterfly, frequently co-occur or enter into similar
nance energy coming off of an object. Saturation is a patterns of co-occurrence with other words, their
subjective dimension related to the amount of mono- vector representations will be highly similar. The
chromatic light mixed into a color. Brightness and meaning of a word, its vector in a high dimensional
saturation are psychologically fused in the sense that space, is completely based on the contextual simi-
it is difficult to pay attention to brightness differences larities among words. Within this high dimensional
between objects without also being influenced by sat- space, Thomas Landauer and Susan Dumais con-
uration differences. For objects differing on saturation ceive of similarity as the cosine of the angle between
and brightness, their subjective similarity is best mea- two words rather than as their distance. By using
sured by a distance calculation that fully integrates these new techniques, it is possible to create geomet-
saturation and brightness differences together ric spaces with tens of thousands of words.
namely, r = 1. Conversely, if objects differ on bright-
ness and size, then their similarity is best measured by Featural Models
computing their distance on brightness and then add- In the 1970s, it was observed that subjective
ing this to their distance on sizenamely, r = 2. assessments of similarity do not always satisfy the
A classic example of MDS comes from Ed Smith, assumptions of geometric models of similarity:
Edward Shoben, and Lance Ripss study of animal
concepts. They asked participants to provide simi- Minimality: D(A,B) D(A,A) = 0
larity ratings on many pairs of birds or other ani- Symmetry: D(A,B) = D(B,A)
mals. Submitting these pair-wise similarity ratings
to MDS analysis, they obtained the results shown The Triangle Inequality: D(A,B)
in Figure 1. The MDS algorithm produced this + D(B,C) D(A,C)
Similarity 689
A B
goose duck
goat pig
chicken sheep
cow
Figure 1 Two multidimensional scaling (MDS) solutions for sets of birds (A) and animals (B)
Source: From Smith, E. E., Shoben, E. J., & Rips, L. J. (1974). Structure and process in semantic memory: A featural model
for semantic decisions. Psychological Review, 81, 214241.
Note: The distances between the animals in the space reflect their psychological dissimilarity. Once an MDS solution has
been made, psychological interpretations for the dimensions may be possible. In these solutions, the horizontal and vertical
dimensions may represent size and domesticity, respectively.
where D(A,B) is interpreted as the dissimilarity example, the local density of objects in a region to
between items A and B. Minimality captures the warp the calculation of distance/dissimilarity. More
simple ideas that no object should be more dissimilar radically, in 1977 Amos Tversky proposed to model
to itself than it is to another object and that the dis- similarity according to matching and mismatch-
similarity of an object to itself should be 0. Symmetry ing features rather than distance on psychological
captures the notion that the dissimilarity of Object A dimensions. In his model, entities are represented as
to B should be the same as the dissimilarity of Object a collection of features and similarity is computed by
B to A. Whatever Lady Gagas similarity is to
Madonna should be the same as Madonnas similar- S(A,B) = f(A B) f(A B) f(B A)
ity to Lady Gaga. The notion behind the triangle
inequality is that the length of the direct path from where S(A,B) is the similarity of Object A to Object
A to C should be no longer than the path from A to B and is expressed as a linear combination of the
B plus the path from B to C. For similarities, this measure of the common and distinctive features. The
means that if a red square (A) is fairly distant from term (A B) represents the features that Objects A
(dissimilar from) a blue circle (C) then the red and B have in common. (A B) represents the fea-
squares distance to a red circle (B) and the red cir- tures that A has but B does not. (B A) represents
cles distance to the blue circle cannot both be very the features of B that are not in A. And the , , and
short, otherwise the two-legged detour route from A are weights for the common and distinctive com-
to C going through B will be shorter than the direct ponents, reflecting how important each component
route from A to C. is for determining similarity. For example, in Figure
In fact, violations of all three assumptions have 2 we imagine comparing robots (A) to zombies (B).
been empirically obtained. In response to these vio- This would be accomplished by first determining all
lations of the geometric model of similarity, some the features of each of these two objects. Then, their
researchers have proposed fixes that allow, for similarity is calculated to be a positive function of
690 Similarity
their shared features and a negative function of the the extent that they play similar roles within their
features possessed by robots but not zombies (A B) entities. For example, a man wearing a black tie and
and of the features possessed by zombies but not a woman with black shoes both share the feature
robots (B A). black, but this matching feature may not increase
their similarity much because the mans tie does not
Alignment-Based Models correspond to the womans shoes. Drawing inspira-
MDS and featural models make different assump- tion from a structure-matching model of analogical
tions about similarity, but they also share a number reasoning by Dedre Gentner, in alignment-based
of similarities. An important commonality between models, matching features influence similarity more
geometric and featural representations is that both if they belong to parts that are in correspondence,
use relatively unstructured representations with and conversely, parts tend to be placed in correspon-
entities structured as sets of unrelated features or dence if they have many features in common.
dimensions. However, entities such as objects with
Transformational Models
parts, real-world scenes, words, sentences, stories,
scientific theories, and faces are not simply a grab A final approach to similarity maintains that
bag of attributes. A dog biting a man is not the the similarity of two objects is directly related to
same thing as a man biting a dog, even though they the number of transformations required to turn
both feature a dog, a man, and biting. How these one object into the other. An important step for
elements are related matters. Partly in response to these models is to specify what transformations are
the problems that geometric and featural models possible.
have with structured descriptions, a number of Researchers in artificial intelligence have claimed
researchers have developed alignment-based mod- that objects are recognized by being aligned with
els of similarity. In these models, comparison does memorized pictorial descriptions. An unknown
not just involve matching features but also involves object will be placed in the category that contains
determining how elements correspond to, or align the candidate model with which it best aligns. The
with, one another. Matching features are aligned to alignment operations rotate, scale, translate, and
topographically warp object descriptions.
According to Ulrike Hahn, Nick Chater, and
Lucy Richardson, the similarity between two enti-
ties is based on how complex the sequence of trans-
formations is that changes one entity to the other.
Have cams
Scary The simpler the transformation sequence, the more
Brain ingesting
similar the entities are assumed to be. For example,
Can clean floors Relentless
the transformational complexity connecting 1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 and 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 is small because
A-B AB B-A the simple instruction add 1 to each digit suf-
Lacking conscious
experience Undead
fices to transform one into the other. Experiments
demonstrate that once reasonable vocabularies of
Technologically
advanced
Inhuman transformation are postulated, transformational
Dawn of the
Dead stars complexity does indeed predict subjective similarity
ratings. Furthermore, when a new transformation is
A: Robots B: Zombies learned that turns Object A into Object B, A is seen
as more similar to B.
Figure 2 A Venn diagram showing some of the features
of robots and zombies Conclusions
Note: Featural models take the similarity of robots to It might be argued that all four of the above
zombies to be a positive function of the features shared by approaches err on the side of treating similarity as
both and negative functions of the features possessed by one a unitary phenomenon. It could well turn out that
but not the other. calculating similarity is fundamentally different for
Skill Learning, Enhancement of 691
different kinds of entities. Taken to an extreme, this Hahn, U., Chater, N., & Richardson, L. B. (2003).
notion raises the possibility that similarity is not a Similarity as transformation. Cognition, 87, 132.
coherent notion at all. Like the terms bug or family Holyoak, K. J., & Thagard, P. (1995). Mental leaps:
values, similarity may not pick out a consolidated Analogy in creative thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT
or principled set of things. Consistent with this pos- Press.
sibility, it may be that much of the real theoretical James, W. (1950). The principles of psychology. New York,
work in the future will be achieved by determin- NY: Dover. (Original work published 1890)
ing what counts as the features and relations that Landauer, T. K., & Dumais, S. T. (1997). A solution to
Platos problem: The latent semantic analysis theory of
underlie similarity assessments for different kinds of
the acquisition, induction, and representation of
entities and in different situations. Nonetheless, one
knowledge. Psychological Review, 104, 211240.
justification for pursuing general theories of similar-
Medin, D. L., Goldstone, R. L., & Gentner, D. (1993).
ity is that if they do exist, a large payoff results. Even
Respects for similarity. Psychological Review, 100,
if similarity is not a monolithic entity, there probably 254278.
will be common cognitive processes involved in dif- Shepard, R. N. (1962). The analysis of proximities:
ferent kinds of comparisons. Multidimensional scaling with an unknown distance
Some philosophers have attacked the very notion function. Part I. Psychometrika, 27, 125140.
of similarity as being empty or circular. They have Smith, E. E., Shoben, E. J., & Rips, L. J. (1974). Structure
pointed out that the claim that entities A and B are and process in semantic memory: A featural model for
similar is vague and ill defined unless one specifies semantic decisions. Psychological Review, 81, 214241.
the aspects under consideration when making the Tenenbaum, J. B., & Griffiths, T. L. (2001). Generalization,
claim. However, part of the power of the notion similarity, and Bayesian inference. Behavioral & Brain
of similarity is that it integrates over many aspects Sciences, 24, 629640.
of entities. All four of the models of similarity can Tversky, A. (1977). Features of similarity. Psychological
be interpreted as proposals for how the process of Review, 84, 327352.
integrating across aspects proceeds. By integrating
over many aspects, similarity is a powerful tool for
cognition because it does not require the cognizer to
fully understand exactly what makes entities behave
SKILL LEARNING, ENHANCEMENT OF
as they do. It only requires that the world is a suf-
ficiently orderly place that similar objects and events Skill learning involves experience that leads to
tend to behave similarly. This fact of the world is not improvements in performance. This concept must be
just a fortunate coincidence. It is because objects are distinguished from the similar concept of knowledge
similar that they tend to behave similarly in most acquisition. For skill learning, performance requires
respects. attaining procedures, whereas for knowledge acqui-
sition, it requires attaining facts. However, most, if
Robert L. Goldstone and Samuel B. Day not all, activities involve both procedural informa-
tion (skill) and declarative information (facts).
See also Analogical Mapping and Reasoning; To enhance skill learning, three different aspects
Categorization, Psychological Perspectives; Category
of the process should be strengthened: acquisition,
Learning, Computational perspectives; Concepts,
retention, and transfer. First, training of the skills
Development of; Concepts, Philosophical Issues;
Semantic Memory; Semantic Memory, Computational should be accomplished quickly and efficiently to
Perspectives reduce costs and save time and effort. Second, the
skills should be made as durable as possible so that
following training they can still be available at a
Further Readings high level even when they have not been used for a
Gentner, D. (1983). Structure-mapping: A theoretical long period of time. Third, the skills should be made
framework for analogy. Cognitive Science, 7, 155170. as flexible as possible so that they can be applied in
Goldstone, R. L. (1994). Similarity, interactive activation, different contexts and their use is not restricted to
and mapping. Journal of Experimental Psychology: the particular situations encountered during train-
Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 328. ing. Research in experimental psychology has led to
692 Skill Learning, Enhancement of
several principles of training that can enhance the poor retention but robust transfer and procedural
efficiency, durability, and flexibility of skill learning. information shows strong retention but limited
transfer.
Principles of Training Evidence supporting this principle comes from
experiments showing a high degree of specificity of
Deliberate Practice skill learning. For example, students learned how to
Skill learning usually occurs gradually, with use a computer mouse to move a screen cursor from
individuals improving their response speed fol- a central location to targets along the screen periph-
lowing what is known as the power law of prac- ery. The task was made more difficult by changing
tice. According to this law, practice helps most at the relationship between the mouse and the cursor.
the beginning, but even after many trials, practice In one situation the cursor moved left whenever the
continues to make individuals faster. There is also mouse moved right and vice versa, but the up-down
a complementary power law of forgetting, which relationship between mouse and cursor movements
accounts for a gradual decline in performance with were intact. Students were able to acquire this skill
the passage of time when there is no opportunity to rapidly and retained it well over a long delay, but in
refresh the acquired skills. many cases they could not transfer the skill involv-
Even though the acquisition and retention of skills ing one mouse-cursor relationship to that involving
are well described by these power laws, learning and another; in fact, sometimes there was interference
memory of skills vary depending on multiple factors. from learning the first relationship to learning the
One such factor is type of practice. Not all practice is second. Other experiments show that skills are spe-
equal in promoting skill learning. Deliberate practice, cific to the context in which they are learned. For
which requires a high degree of focus and motiva- instance, students learned how to produce time inter-
tion, is required for achieving expert levels of perfor- vals based on arbitrary units. They were not told how
mance, even among individuals who seem to show a long a given unit was, but they received feedback on
natural talent or aptitude for a particular skill. their productions, allowing them to become increas-
ingly more accurate. These time intervals were pro-
Procedural Reinstatement duced in the context of various background tasks,
such as the difficult task of repeating the alphabet
Although acquired knowledge is forgotten very backward by threes. The difficult tasks lowered per-
rapidly, learned skills are usually very well retained formance on time production, but after learning to
across periods of disuse. For example, learning a produce time intervals with one background task,
telephone number from a phone book might not participants could not generalize their skill to pro-
survive the 30 seconds it takes to walk from the ducing time intervals with another background task,
book to the telephone and dial the number. In con- even when they changed from a difficult background
trast, learning how to use a hula hoop might survive task to no background task at all.
years in which no hoop is available so that an indi-
vidual who learned how to use a hula hoop as a
Variability of Practice
child might be able to use the hoop again perfectly
well as an adult, even if there was no intervening Especially given the lack of transfer found for
practice with the hoop since childhood. However, skill learning, it is important to consider whether
skill learning is usually not very flexible whereas there are training methods that can be employed to
knowledge acquired in one situation can be easily help promote skill transfer. One such method that
applied to many other situations. Thus, to continue has proven to be effective is based on variability of
with the examples, the learned hula hoop skill might practice. Training with a variety of tasks usually
not help performance with a hoop that is not the leads to better transfer performance than training
same size as the ones used during childhood, but the with a single, constant task. This benefit for vari-
knowledge of acquired telephone numbers can be able training is sometimes found even when the
used in many different contexts, including the learn- task used in testing differs from those used during
ing of new sequences of numbers. These observa- variable practice and is the same as that used during
tions form the procedural reinstatement principle, constant practice. For example, practice that varied
according to which declarative information shows the target distance at which bean bags were tossed
Skill Learning, Enhancement of 693
by children (2 or 4 feet) led to better accuracy at test Another related question concerns the order in
on an intermediate target distance (3 feet) than did which to train tasks that vary in difficulty. According
practice that was restricted to the same intermediate to one line of research, errorless learning should be
target distance. This variability of practice principle encouraged. With errorless learning of a motor skill,
has been found to apply to both discrete and con- trainees start with the easiest task and then gradu-
tinuous motor tasks as well as to various cognitive ally progress to more difficult tasks. For example,
tasks such as learning new concepts or understand- in learning how to putt a golf ball, the trainee might
ing passages of text. start with the shortest putting distance and then
gradually increase the distance. This arrangement of
Contextual Interference practice trials should be likely to reduce the num-
Most teachers try to make learning as easy as ber of errors made by the trainees relative to other
possible for their students. Indeed students will learn arrangements. It has been argued that when more
more rapidly under easy conditions than under dif- errors are made during skill learning, performance
ficult conditions, and tests of performance immedi- requires more attention-demanding resources than
ately after learning will often be better for students when errors are minimized, so that distractions and
who learned under easy conditions than under dif- stress cause less performance disruption follow-
ficult conditions. However, when testing the same ing errorless learning than following learning that
students after a delay or in a new situation, it is often occurs with frequent errors.
found that performance is better for students who
Focus of Attention
learned under difficult than under easy conditions.
In fact, introducing desirable sources of difficulty or The demands of attention are also relevant to
interference during training has been shown to be another training principle that specifically involves
an effective way to promote retention and transfer, the focus of attention. It has been shown for a vari-
following the principle of contextual interference. ety of sport skills, again including golf shots, that an
The most common way to study contextual inter- external focus of attention leads to better retention
ference has been to compare mixed and blocked than does an internal focus of attention. With an
practice schedules. In blocked practice schedules, external focus, attention is given to the results of a
practice with a given task or with a given set of movement (e.g., where the ball lands) whereas, with
materials occurs together in the same block of trials, an internal focus, attention is given to the move-
whereas in mixed practice schedules, practice occurs ments of the body (e.g., how the arms move during
on each task or with each set of materials in every the swing). The claim has been made that an internal
block. Mixing tasks or materials during training focus requires conscious attention to motor move-
produces interference and, thus, retards initial skill ments and such attention impairs automatic mecha-
learning but often enhances ultimate skill use. nisms in the body underlying skilled performance.
equivalent improvements in typing skill. When prac- See also Desirable Difficulties Perspective on Learning;
tice involved a key configuration different from that Motor Learning, Practical Aspects; Rehearsal and
at testing, participants who used physical practice Memory; Spacing Effect; Spacing Effect, Practical
but not those who used mental practice suffered Applications
from interference. These results suggest that mental
practice supports a more abstract representation of Further Readings
the skill than does physical practice. Battig, W. F. (1979). The flexibility of human memory. In
L. S. Cermak & F. I. M. Craik (Eds.), Levels of processing
Cognitive Antidote in human memory (pp. 2344). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Although practice usually leads to improvements Cepeda, N., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer,
in skill performance, sometimes performance on D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks:
a task deteriorates with prolonged work on that A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological
Bulletin, 132, 354380.
task. In fact, for the routine data entry skill, lengthy
Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Rmer, C. (1993).
practice led to both improvement and deteriora-
The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert
tion, depending on the measure used to assess skill
performance. Psychological Review, 100, 363406.
performance. For response speed, performance got
Healy, A. F. (2007). Transfer: Specificity and generality. In
better and better with practice, but for accuracy,
H. L. Roediger, III, Y. Dudai, & S. M. Fitzpatrick (Eds.),
performance got worse and worse. This pattern illus- Science of memory: Concepts (pp. 271275). New York,
trates an increasing trade-off of accuracy for speed. NY: Oxford University Press.
The faster speed is easily understood in terms of the Kole, J. A., Healy, A. F., & Bourne, L. E., Jr. (2008).
principles already discussed, whereas the decline in Cognitive complications moderate the speed-accuracy
accuracy can be explained in terms of increasing tradeoff in data entry: A cognitive antidote to inhibition.
fatigue, boredom, and task disengagement. The drop Applied Cognitive Psychology, 22, 917937.
in accuracy can be overcome, though, by providing Maxwell, J. P., Masters, R. S. W., Kerr, E., & Weedon, E.
feedback about errors, thus increasing motivation. In (2001). The implicit benefit of learning without errors.
addition, accuracy can be enhanced and the decline Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human
in accuracy eliminated by requiring an extra cogni- Experimental Psychology, 54A, 10491068.
tive task, such as ending the typing response for each Schmidt, R. A., & Bjork, R. A. (1992). New
number by hitting either a + key or a key, with the conceptualizations of practice: Common principles in
two keys alternating across trials. This cognitive anti- three paradigms suggest new concepts for training.
dote serves to eliminate the speed-accuracy trade-off Psychological Science, 3, 207217.
otherwise observed as a result of prolonged work. Wixted, J. T., & Carpenter, S. K. (2007). The Wickelgren
power law and the Ebbinghaus savings function.
Conclusions Psychological Science, 18, 133134.
Wohldmann, E. L., Healy, A. F., & Bourne, L. E., Jr.
In summary, skill learning can be done efficiently with (2008). A mental practice superiority effect: Less
improved skill performance occurring even following retroactive interference and more transfer than physical
a long delay after practice is completed. However, practice. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
transferring the skill to new situations is often dif- Memory and Cognition, 34, 823833.
ficult but can be promoted by following a number Wulf, G. (2007). Attention and motor skill learning.
of training principles, which recommend employ- Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
ing deliberate practice, increasing the variability of
practice, adding sources of contextual interference,
using a mixed practice schedule, distributing prac- SLEEP AND DREAMS
tice in time, eliminating errors, and using an external
focus of attention. Mental practice can substitute for
Within a day, all animals and humans show recur-
physical practice, and boredom can be overcome by
ring periods of immobility, usually in a character-
adding a cognitive antidote to routine tasks.
istic posture and environment, and associated with
Alice F. Healy an apparent loss of responsiveness to environmental
Sleep and Dreams 695
inputthey sleep. In contrast to a comatose state, many features of neuronal behavior with wakeful-
some sensory discrimination is preserved and sleep is ness but still represents a sleeping state with high
reversible when strong stimulation is applied. arousal thresholds.
Historically, the views that sleep is simply rest and
that dreams convey a special meaning has prevailed Electrophysiological Sleep Recordings
in most cultures. Dream contents were assigned a REM and non-REM (NREM) sleep stages can
mystical dimensionthey were seen as messages be differentiated based on recorded EEG, eye move-
sent by a god or as representing states unavailable to ment (electrooculographic [EOG]), and muscle
waking consciousness and foretelling future events, activity (electromyographic [EMG]) criteria. Waking
an attitude still popular. Contrary to these subjective and consciousness rely on activity of neurons in
interpretations, but instead based on measurable the formatio reticularis (reticular formation) of the
changes of brain activity and information processing brain stem, forming the ascending reticular activat-
mechanisms, research activities in the past decades ing system projecting to the thalamus and cortex.
have clarified different states within sleep, have Waking EEG recordings are dominated by fast fre-
unraveled many active processes within sleep, and quency activity in the beta (1530 Hertz [Hz]) and
have highlighted neurobiological processes underly- gamma range (3080 Hz). The electrophysiological
ing a multitude of sleep-related phenomena in ani- signs of NREM sleepsynchronized low-frequency
mals and in humans. Until now, several functions oscillations with high amplitudes in the EEG record-
of sleep have been proposed, ranging from energy ingsseem to confirm the early notion of NREM
conservation, thermoregulation, and detoxification sleep as a state of rest with cessation of intense corti-
to brain plasticity processes resulting in functional cal activity.
or structural changes. Current knowledge substanti- In contrast to NREM sleep, REM sleep shares
ates that neuronal assemblies are active, reactivated, many signs with wakefulness such as fast-frequency
or even modified during sleep. and low-voltage cortical EEG, including gamma
This entry reviews the classic and more recently oscillations. Whereas slow-wave sleep depends on
applied methods to study sleep and sleep-related thalamocortical synchronization, specialized cells in
phenomena. These approaches allow us to describe the brain stem called REM sleep-on cells initiate and
the substantial changes in the brains capacities to generate signs of REM sleep. From an evolutionary
process external information and brain activation point of view, REM sleep is exclusively found in
patterns across the different stages of sleep and to birds and mammalsthat is, it is unique to endo-
investigate the neuronal basis of dream mentation. therm animals with well-developed brains that also
express slow-wave activity, with the exception, for
example, of dolphins. During ontogenesis (develop-
Methods
ment of the individual), REM sleep is found in rela-
The current understanding of cortical activity across tively high amounts during early development, and
the different stages of waking and sleep mainly a link to brain maturation in phylo- and ontogenesis
derives from surface electroencephalographic (EEG) was proposed. Because of circadian modulation,
recordings reflecting cerebral synaptic activity. As a REM sleep episodes are longest and REM density is
consequence, EEG criteria are generally used to dif- strongest at the time of minimal body temperature,
ferentiate the increasing depth of sleep on slowing of usually in the early morning hours. The concurrent
the EEG rhythms. The formerly held belief of sleep inhibition of spinal motoneurons led to the depiction
as a cessation of brain activity and annihilation of of REM sleep as a highly activated brain in a para-
consciousness was finally overthrown in 1953 when lyzed body, also lacking proper input processing.
Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman first Embedded in circadian and ultradian (occurring
described an active brain state recurring in regular more than once in 24 hours) rhythms paced by a
intervals within sleep. This state is accompanied by circadian clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus,
a loss of voluntary muscle control and by rapid eye the sleep stages appear in alternating cycles lasting
movements. It is therefore called rapid eye move- about 90 minutes in adults, with a predominance
ment (REM) sleep or paradoxical sleep, as it shares of slow-wave sleep in the first and of REM sleep
696 Sleep and Dreams
in the second half of the night. About 80% of the methods of functional magnetic resonance imag-
sleeping time of adult humans is spent in NREM ing (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and
sleep, characterized also by general slowing of body high-density EEG recordings provide maps with
functions. For clinical purposes, sleep recordings are localization of neuronal activity. These methods
usually extended to polysomnographic recordings highlight the regional specificity of changes in neu-
with additional measurements of functions such as ronal assemblies linked to sleep-related phenomena.
heart rate, breathing parameters, activity of specific
muscle groups, and so forth. Behavioral Assessment and Subjective Reports
The amount of slow-wave activity as measured Measuring cognitive and neuropsychological
by EEG spectral analysis is popular as a measure aspects in relation to sleep such as pre- and post-
of NREM sleep intensity, which is sensitive to sleep performance allows for a more comprehensive
increased sleep pressure (homeostatic upregulation) understanding of sleep-related functions. Next to
after sleep deprivation. Intensity of REM sleep can objective measures, information on subjective expe-
be quantified in percentage and duration of REM riences plays a crucial role, especially when studying
sleep episodes and in REM density as a measure of dreams, which cannot be directly observed. Data
relative amount of, for example, rapid eye move- can be collected via questionnaires, structured or
ment activity within REM periods. Quantification semistructured interviews, or diaries. Apart from
of EEG data further encompasses a calculation of collecting spontaneous memories of dream contents,
coherence between electrode positions as a sign of some sleep laboratory studies provoke awakenings
correlated activity or methods for source localiza- of the participant from specific sleep stages and
tion of the electrical activity recorded at the brain immediately obtain information on ongoing men-
surface. tation. This procedure can decrease forgetting, but
issues such as self-censorship or difficulties with ver-
Event-Related Potentials
bal description may still be present.
In addition to these traditional methods of quan-
tifying sleep, mechanisms of information processing Information Processing During Sleep
can be studied using event-related potentials (ERPs) Missing reactions to environmental changes are
on stimulation. Here, surface EEG recordings are a prominent hallmark of sleep. To stay asleep, an
separated into individual segments and then aver- organism needs to ignore the disturbing environ-
aged time-locked to specific stimulus onset times. mental influence. Reactivity decreases during fall-
The averaging process decreases noisy components ing asleep and, finally, no reactions can be elicited,
and highlights stimulus-locked electrophysiological which has made sleep appear as an entirely passive
responses in the range of milliseconds to seconds. state. These changes are paralleled by a fading of
The components are described by the polarity consciousness. Thus, the first measurements of sleep
(positive-negative) and by the latency (amount of depth were based on missing reactions to acoustic
time elapsed from the onset) of the local maximum stimuli of different loudness. On the contrary, the
amplitude. Fast components (up to 50 milliseconds ability to discriminate stimuli of personal relevance
[ms]) reflect early signal transduction pathways pre- is still preserved, which is very obvious in mothers
ceding higher cortical involvement and show longer sleep, when parents awake to even the slightest
latencies throughout sleep. Later potentials (e.g., at sounds of their infants. Not only is sensory process-
300 ms) reflect higher cortical levels of signal pro- ing altered during sleep, but sensory information can
cessing and display specific alterations during differ- also alter the stages of sleep, resulting in a reciprocal
ent sleep stages. interaction of sensory input and vigilance.
Information processing in sleep can be studied
Imaging Methods
using single cell studies in animals or by analyzing
In the recent years, major advances in imaging EEG, evoked potentials, or imaging data in humans.
methods have enabled new insights into brain pro- The main areas of research have been altered reactions
cesses during sleep. Positron emission tomography during sleep and, more recently, changes in memory
(PET) using radioactive tracers and the noninvasive or problem-solving capacities following sleep.
Sleep and Dreams 697
Wake
Hypnogram
REM
1
2
NREM 3
4
EEG
EOG
EMG NREM REM
EEG slow oscillations (delta activity) fast activity (beta, gamma activity)
KCs were first described in 1938 by Alfred Loomis; on stimulus characteristicsrare or strongly deviant
the name K-complex is derived from to knock, stimuli induce K-complexeswhereas frequent or
as an example of an external acoustic stimulation. repetitive stimuli lead to a strong decrease or abol-
KCs are a complex of several inhibitory and excit- ishment of most evoked potentials. To conclude,
atory evoked potentials, and have been discussed to most components typical of information processing
reflect sleep-protective mechanisms. Finally, during in wakefulness are absent in NREM sleep, but the
slow-wave sleep, the slow oscillations go along with altered mechanisms of processing during sleep still
a strongly reduced excitability of cortical neurons. allow for two processes: the detection of strongly
Thus, even if sensory information is conveyed to the deviant stimuli or stimuli of personal relevance, as
corresponding cortical area, it cannot be properly shown in responses to ones own name during sleep.
processed during the long states of hyperpolariza- During REM sleep, cortical evoked potentials
tion reflecting neuronal silence. bear more resemblance to wakefulness than to deep
In contrast to the above described gradual loss NREM sleep. Most late cortical potentials typical
of reactivity in NREM sleep, the ability to discrimi- for wakefulness reappear in REM sleep, such as a
nate complex stimuli is restored during REM sleep. P300 component, an expectancy-related CNV, or
Suppression of information processing is not medi- the MMN component. This suggests complex pro-
ated via thalamocortical inhibition in REM sleep but cessing mechanisms, including reactivation of infor-
was suggested to lack reasonable integration because mation stored in long-term memory. Usually these
of altered activity in frontal, associative, and limbic potentials appear with longer latencies than they
cortex. Arousal thresholds appear higher during have in wakefulness, reflecting delayed processing. In
phasic REM periods when bursts of rapid eye move- addition, the P300 component shifts toward a more
ments appear. External stimuli can be kept in REM parietal origin than during wakefulness, lacking
sleep mentation up to 15 minutes after presentation. contributions from frontal areas. However, stimuli
do not consistently evoke responses in REM sleep,
Event-Related Potential and Imaging Studies but intermittently during bursts of phasic activity,
By averaging electrophysiological responses, hardly induce any cortical reaction. Adolfo Llinas
evoked potential studies consistently reveal a and Denis Par have put forward the notion of the
decrease of negative and increase of positive cortical brain acting as a closed loop during REM sleep.
potentials as the organism moves from wakefulness In general, regional metabolic or blood flow activ-
to NREM sleep stages, interpreted as reflecting inhib- ity decreases in cortical areas during NREM sleep,
itory action and loss of attentive processes. A very starting at thalamic levels, and with a further promi-
prominent ERP component during wakefulness is nent focus in frontal areas reflecting the predomi-
the P300, expressed most strongly over parietal areas nance of slow EEG oscillations over frontocentral
and linked to the detection of deviant or relevant regions. In contrast, REM sleep is associated with
stimuli. With the first signs of sleep oscillationsthe regional increased metabolic or blood flow activ-
theta rhythmappearing in the EEG, cortical sig- ity in deeper brain structures such as brain stem or
nal processing is reduced, which is reflected in the thalamus, and in cingulate, limbic, and some cortical
discontinuation of cortical potentials. Some authors areas. Prefrontal and parietal areas display decreased
assume that the cortical P300 component is replaced activity throughout all sleep stages. Decreased reac-
by a P450 with longer latency, appearing as a sleep- tivity to external stimulation is reflected in decreased
typical component following rare stimuli in NREM activity of the corresponding processing centers dur-
sleep. Similarly, cortical components such as the ing sleep, or even by a transient decrease in wider
mismatch negativity (MMN), related to comparing brain areas that may serve sleep-protective functions.
new sensory stimuli to information in the sensory
Dream Mentation
buffer, are also absent in NREM sleep. Deep, slow-
wave sleep is furthermore associated with a lack Whereas previous theories of dreaming such as
of a contingent negative variation (CNV), which those outlined by Sigmund Freud or Carl Gustav
expresses learned expectancy of a second stimulus Jung have focused on the interpretation and inten-
following a previous cue. Reactivity in sleep depends tion of reported dream contents, a more recent focus
Sleep and Dreams 699
lies on formal, neuropsychological aspects and the his activation-synthesis model, the physiological
neurobiological mechanisms underlying the physiol- brain stemderived activation is synthesized to the
ogy of dreaming, questions that can actually be tar- bizarredream mentation by sporadically activated
geted with hypothesis-based, scientific approaches. higher brain centers in REM sleep. This important
The proposal of Freud and psychoanalysts that neurobiological theory of dream mentation and the
dreams represent the fulfillment of wishes is chal- ensuing focus on formal properties of dreams con-
lenged by the neurobiological-based conclusion of tests the so far prevailing interpretation of dream
Allan Hobson, which argues that dream mentation contents as found in psychoanalytical approaches.
results from brain stemdriven activation during The vivid imagery of REM sleep-associated dreams
REM sleep. Francis Crick proposed the hypothesis is supposedly associated with increased activity in
that we dream to forget to avoid information (secondary) visual cortex. Similarly, the intense emo-
overload. Following the notion that dream men- tions during dreams probably derive from activity in
tation is not completely random but is modulated emotional centers of the brain, whereas the decreased
by waking experiences, hypotheses of dreaming as dorsolateral prefrontal activity is held responsible for
stabilization of emotional memory, simulation of the bizarreness and incongruities of dream content.
threatening events, or individualization by genetic The precise role of frontal/prefrontal mechanisms
programming have been proposed, but clear empiri- and of neuropharmacology underlying dream men-
cal support is mainly lacking. Formal and content tations is still a matter of investigation. As activa-
aspects of dreams are still a focus of research, which tion during dreams is not independent of activation
frequently tries to establish a link to personality during wakefulness, damage to specific brain regions
traits of the dreamer. affects the respective characteristics of dreams.
Dream contents are usually forgotten unless
sleepers wake up soon afterward. It can be assumed Nightmares
that dream contents remembered on awakening The experience of nightmares, frightening dreams
represent only a limited fraction of the REM menta- from which the person usually wakes up with recol-
tions in the overall sleep period. lection of the alarming dream content, is associated
with increased heart rate and breathing frequency.
NREM Sleep Mentation Nightmares derive from REM sleep, whereas the
Sleepers, if asked whether anything was going similar night terrors occur without dream memories
on in their mind rather than if they had been out of NREM sleep. Both are more frequent in early
dreaming will report some mental activity in about life. The high activity of the limbic system, espe-
50% of awakenings from NREM sleep. However, cially the amygdala, during REM sleep is believed
these mentations appear rather vague, representing to induce the intense emotions associated with
rather a static scene or feeling, and usually lack the nightmares.
vividness found in classic dreams. Most research
Lucid Dreams
therefore has focused on REM sleep mentation.
Becoming aware of dreaming while dreaming is
REM Sleep Mentation called lucid dreaming. During ordinary dreams, the
Sleepers report vivid dreams around 60% to 90% sequence of events just happens, whereas in lucid
of the time if woken out of REM sleep. These dream dreams the dreamer can gain control of the course
mentations usually include actors, incidents, and of dreams and can decide on actions. Persons expe-
a storyline. They often contain color and auditory rienced with lucid dreams can signal lucidity by voli-
imagery with hyperreal or hallucinatory qualities, tional eye movements, enabling investigations of this
whereas touch and taste sensations are rare, pain or state.
smell sensations hardly ever occur, and gravity can Renate Wehrle
sometimes be abolished. Voluntary control and self-
awareness in dreams are reduced. See also Attention and Consciousness;
Hobson declared this state to be an enigmatic Electrophysiological Studies of Mind; Neural
third state of consciousness in which, following Correlates of Consciousness
700 Smell, Philosophical Perspectives
would seem that nothing in the olfactory experience object-involving content. To see the difference
itself says coffee. between these two views, consider the visual experi-
There are further considerations against such a ence you have when you look at an orange on the
viewones that avoid the controversial suggestion counter. According to the existentially quantified
that kind properties (e.g., coffee) are eligible for rep- account (from here on, the abstract account), your
resentation in experience and that set aside issues experience has the following content: There is some
of a perceivers capacity for identification. Many object x at location L and x is orange, oval, and so
philosophers have held that object perception and, on. According to abstract theorists, it is possible that
based on that, the ability for thought about individ- experiences of two qualitatively identical, yet dis-
ual objects, requires a robust form of spatial differ- tinct, oranges might be phenomenally indistinguish-
entiation of the properties presentedfor example, a able. Indeed, a perceiver might hallucinate an orange
figure-ground distinction. Vision achieves this; olfac- before her and yet have that experience be phenome-
tory experience does not. Consider the experience nally indistinguishable from a veridical experience of
you have when you indulge yourself in the smell of an orange. To preserve this possibility, the abstract
the breakfast cooking. (Note that smell denotes an theorist proposes that the content of each is content
olfactory property.) You are able to distinguish the into which no particular object enters. The object-
coffee smell and the bacon smell, but your experi- involving theorist, on the other hand, claims that
ence does not allow you to discriminate the par- such a view ignores the particularity of visual experi-
ticular objects that bear these propertieswhether ence. Its not that some object appears to be orange,
these are ordinary objects or odors (or both). Unlike oval, and so on. This one does! The very orange
visual experience, smells are not packaged together before you, then, must be a part of the content of
in space in such a way that these packages can be your experience. Letting o name the actual orange
distinguished from one other and from a common before you, the object-involving account claims that
ground. At any instant, it seems as if the smells are your experience has the content: o is orange, oval,
simply here. This not only puts pressure on the and so on . . . and at L.
view that olfactory experience represents ordinary This entry will not consider the solution to this
objects but also on the view that it represents indi- debate about visual experience. The debate itself,
vidual odors. however, draws attention to the moderate view of
Compared to the wealth of detail afforded by olfactory content. Given its phenomenology, an
visual experience, then, olfactory experience seems object-involving account is unsuitable for olfactory
a mere smudge. This smudgy feature of olfac- experience. Unlike visual experience, olfactory expe-
tory experience has prompted some philosophers rience does not seem to present particular things. As
to suggest that olfactory experience has no repre- a result, olfactory experience cannot live up to the
sentational content. Subjectivist views of perceptual particularity that such a view demands of experi-
experience maintain that experiences are not world ence. However, the abstract account, which requires
directedthat is, they have no objective purport. no such particularity, seems like a natural fit. A ver-
Subjectivist views are also characterized as the view sion of it can respect that smells are experienced as
that perceptual experiences are raw feels or mere external to a perceiver and that olfactory experience
sensations. Although discussions of olfaction in does not present us with the individual objects that
the philosophical literature are rare, the subjectivist instantiate those smells. Drawing on the consider-
view is held up as the prima facie view of the nature ations of spatial presentation discussed above, the
of olfactory experience. moderate view posits that olfactory experience only
But a subjectivist view is not inevitable. There ever represents that a single something or other
is a moderate representational view available that is smelly and here. On this view, the following
honors the phenomenology of olfactory experience schema specifies the content of any olfactory experi-
and yet maintains that it is world directed. Recently, ence: There is some x here that is F, G, and so on. If
discussions of the representational content of visual there is nothing in the vicinity that is F and G, then
experience have focused on a debate between the the experience is nonveridical.
view that visual experience has existentially quanti- There are several reasons to think that any world-
fied, or abstract, content and the view that it has directed view is preferable to a subjectivist one.
702 Smell, Philosophical Perspectives
Despite their difference in phenomenology, we still then your experience must be nonveridical. The rub-
think of the senses as informational systems. Using bish is not anywhere near you; it is downstairs and
the senses, we are able to gather information about outside. The problem with Proposal 1 arises because
the world. Although we might think their phenom- this kind of circumstance is not rare. If olfactory
enology is impoverished, our olfactory experiences objects are things like piles of rubbish, many of our
still function to guide behavior and action. If some- olfactory experiences will turn out to be nonveridi-
one smells smoke in the building, they flee. As guides cal. And this is a view that we ought to avoid.
of behavior and grounds of belief, the experiences of Proposal 2 has it that olfactory objects are col-
the sense modalities form a common kind. A shared lections of airborne molecules given off by the
world directedness provides a way of accounting for rubbishthat is, odors. On this proposal, the expe-
this commonality. rience you have when you smell the rubbish through
the window is a veridical one. The rubbish gives off
an odor, that odor is at you (indeed, it has gone
Olfactory Objects
up your nose), and your experience reports it as
If we accept the abstract view, the next question is, such. This is a more plausible result. Experiences we
given that some olfactory experiences are veridical, intuitively count as veridical turn out to be so.
what objects have the properties those experiences Nevertheless, we might feel drawn to the view
present? That is, what are the olfactory objects? that the rubbish also has the stinky property. After
As we have seen already, there are several options: all, the rubbish gives off or emits the odor. If we
Olfactory objects are (1) source objects, (2) odors, feel the pull of such a view, there are two ways that
or (3) both odors and source objects. we can accommodate it. First, we might hold that
Given the traditional, visuocentric, approach to the rubbish has the stinky property but that olfac-
theorizing about perception, we might feel tempted tory experience does not present that object (i.e., it
to say that the properties of which we are aware in presents the rubbish odor only). The second option
olfactory experience are qualities had by regular old is more controversial. We do think of ourselves as
objectslilac blooms, skunks, and pots of coffee. smelling the rubbish by smelling the odor it emits.
Although olfactory experience is not discriminating If we take this proposal seriously, as denoting some-
enough to report that there are particular objects, on thing about the content of olfactory experience, then
Proposal 1 the bearers of the properties presented we arrive at Proposal 3: Olfactory objects are both
in olfactory experience are in fact ordinary objects. odors and source objects.
We certainly think of lilacs, skunks, and portions of Lycans multilayered view of representational
coffee as the sources of smells. But we also speak content, noted above, is a version of Proposal 3. Both
of them as having a good or bad smell. Consider odors and ordinary objects are olfactory objects,
how, when rooting around in the fridge for the rot- each definitive of successive levels of representation.
ten food, you say of the uncovered cabbage, Its According to Lycan, insofar as we might think that
this that stinks. What you direct our attention to there is something both correct and incorrect about
is the head of cabbage. Or to take a more pleas- a situation in which a rose odor is present when no
ant example, we take pride in the roses in our gar- rose is, his view respects our judgments. On one
den, not only because they look beautiful but also level, ones experience is veridical; on another, it is
because they have wonderful smells. We attribute a nonveridical.
propertynamely, a smellto the rose. The same is But the view that olfactory objects are (also)
true of the cabbage. It has a very bad smell, we say. things like roses faces a challenge. If ordinary objects
This might seem a common view, but it is also are among the olfactory objects, then content can-
subject to question. Consider how you can have an not be determined by phenomenology alone. As we
olfactory experience even though the object that you have seen, the phenomenological notion of content
think of as responsible for the smell is far away. For and, in particular, the abstract view applies nicely
example, you might smell the rubbish from your to Lycans first level of representation (where the
apartment window even though it is outside in the represented objects are odors); it does not, how-
bin. If my olfactory experience represents that prop- ever, fit the second (where the represented objects
erties are instantiated by something or other here are ordinary objects). Advocates of such a view,
Smell, Philosophical Perspectives 703
like Lycan, owe us an account of an additional kind are not properties of things in the world. In claiming
of content and an argument for why we ought to that smells are properties of experiences, projectiv-
think that olfactory experiences have that kind of ism is a form of eliminativism.
content. One candidate view is the teleological view Because it renders all olfactory experience illu-
of content advocated by both Ruth Millikan and sory, eliminativism is often regarded as a last resort,
Fred Dretskein short, the view that the content a kind of view rendered plausible by the failure of
of an experience depends on its function within the any realist view. Realism, then, is the default position
system, or organism, of which it is a part. This, it for any view of the secondary qualities. All realist
would seem, is just the approach that Lycan takes positions fall into one of two camps: relationalism
although he endorses it not only for the second level and nonrelationalism. According to relationalism,
of representation but also for the first. smells are constituted by relations between objects
and perceivers. Dispositionalism is one such view.
Nonrelationalism, on the other hand, maintains that
Olfactory Properties
smells are properties independent of the perceiver
A final issue to consider is the nature of the smells or mind. A natural nonrelationalist position is that
themselves. Although very little has been written smells are molecular properties (also known as
about olfaction in the philosophical literature, the physicalism).
little that there is reveals a contrast in the views There can be significant intersubjective differ-
favored for the cases of smell and color. For many ences between the ways that perceivers smell certain
philosophers, the view that colors can be explained odorants to be and, on these grounds, relational-
in purely physical terms has seemed very appealing. ists can argue against nonrelationalism as follows:
In the case of smell, this kind of view has seemed Significant intersubjective differences in perceived
less appealing. Those who have discussed olfaction smell exist. If smells are nonrelational properties of
have favored either dispositionalism or projectiv- odors, then the smell of an odor does not in any way
ism. According to dispositionalism, smells are dis- depend on the experiences that perceivers have when
positions to cause certain kinds of experiences in they come into contact with it. So there ought to
perceivers. Dispositionalists do not deny that smells be a unique smell that an odor has and, as a result,
are properties of objects (we will assume, for the a reason to favor one group of perceivers over any
sake of discussion, that these objects are odors), but otherthat is, those whose experiences present the
they do maintain that the nature of these proper- smell of the odor. But there is no reason to favor one
ties cannot be specified without reference to experi- set of perceivers over another. Because it cannot live
ence. According to dispositionalists, the lilac smell, up to its own demands, nonrelationalism is false.
for example, is the disposition to cause a distinctive As it turns out, the issue is not as simple as
kind of experience in suitable perceivers. Unlike dis- this argument might make it initially appear.
positionalists, projectivists argue that the lilac smell Nonrelationalism is threatened only if these intersub-
is a mental property and that something internal jective differences involve major shifts in perceived
to the perceiver (e.g., a sense datum, experience, or quality. If the differences involve minor shifts in per-
portion of the olfactory field) has that property. ceived quality then the threat is little to none. All
Projectivists argue that these properties are then sensory systems have limits of resolution. And when
projected onto objects in the external world. a system is pushed to the limits of its resolution, it is
Although dispositionalism and projectivism each bound to make minor mistakes. If shifts in perceived
take into account the felt character of olfactory quality are the result of just such a mistake then we
experience, they fall on two sides of one debate over do have a reason to favor one group of perceivers
the nature of what John Locke called the secondary over another. One group is simply mistakenthat
qualitiescolors, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels. is, their experiences are nonveridical.
This is the debate between realism and eliminativ- One opportunity for future research on the
ism. Olfactory realism claims that things in the nature of smells, then, involves determining whether
world have the property ascribed to them by olfac- the shifts in perceived quality are major or minor.
tory experience. Dispositionalism is just such a view. But we are yet to have a structured quality space
Eliminativism, on the other hand, claims that smells for smell and, as a result, lack a model by which
704 Social Cognition
to evaluate differences in perceived quality. Many that arguably is the largest and most dominant area
systems have been proposed; none has been found within social psychology. But this was not always so,
satisfactory. Given the breadth of our olfactory dis- and it is instructive to trace social cognition research
crimination, each system has been accused of over- back to its beginnings in the late 1970s. At that time,
simplifying olfactory experience. Obviously some social cognition was a label referring to research con-
sort of consensus is necessary before we can evalu- ducted by a small group of social psychologists who
ate claims of perceptual variation. What we can be were interested in how people form impressions of
sure of at this point is that future philosophical work others, or person memory. Although social psy-
on the olfactory properties will progress with further chologists had long been interested in how people
developments in olfactory psychophysics. form impressions of others, they tended not to focus
explicitly on cognitive processes such as how infor-
Clare Batty
mation is encoded, stored, and retrieved from mem-
See also Disjunctive Theory of Perception; Hearing,
ory. The original social cognition researchers had
Philosophical Perspectives; Intentionality of Bodily this explicit focus, thereby distinguishing themselves
Sensation; Realism and Instrumentalism; Taste, from other social psychologists, including those who
Philosophical Perspectives also were interested in impressions of others. The
explicit focus on cognitive processes resulted in the
Further Readings development of detailed person memory models that
made specific predictions. Additional successes fol-
Amoore, J. E. (1971). Chemical senses. New York, NY: lowed, and social cognition became an important
Springer-Verlag.
area of social psychology.
Batty, C. (2009). Whats that smell? Southern Journal of
Philosophy, 47, 321348.
Batty, C. (2010). A representational account of olfactory Person Memory: The Original
experience. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 40, 511538. Social Cognition
Beauchamp, G. K., & Bartoshuk, L. (1997). Tasting and
smelling. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Imagine an observer who notices the behaviors of
Harper, R., Bate-Smith, E. C., & Lad, D. G. (1968). Odour the person who is the target of her observations (i.e.,
description and odour classification: A multidisciplinary the target person). In addition, suppose the observer
examination. London, UK: Churchill. has a prior expectancy about the target person and
Lycan, W. (1996). Peacockes arguments. In Consciousness and subsequently observes the target persons behaviors
experience (pp. 143160). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. that are congruent or incongruent with that prior
Lycan, W. (2000). The slighting of smell. In N. Bhushan & expectancy. How will the target persons behav-
S. Rosenfeld (Ed.), Of minds and molecules (pp. 273290). iors become represented in the observers memory?
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. The dominant cognitive view was embodied in the
Perkins, M. (1983). Sensing the world. Indianapolis, IN: notion of a schema, which is a cognitive structure
Hackett. that tends to preserve information consistent with
Reid, Thomas. (1764/2000). On smelling. In D. Brookes the schema and bias recall and judgments in that
(Ed.), An inquiry into the human mind and the direction. If prior expectancies act as schemas, then
principles of common sense (pp. 2545). Edinburgh, the schema should preserve information that is con-
UK: Edinburgh University Press. gruent with it in memory and later recall of the target
Wilson, D. A., & Stevenson, R. J. (2006). Learning to persons behaviors should be biased in the direction
smell. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. of the schema. For example, if the observer had a
prior expectancy that the target person is kind, then
the target persons kind behaviors should be bet-
SOCIAL COGNITION ter recalled than her unkind ones. In contrast, early
social cognition researchers suggested that perhaps
Although researchers in many different sciences use incongruent information is more informative than
social cognition to refer to a wide range of phenom- congruent information, and so people form more
ena, the present entry uses the term to refer to an associations concerning incongruent behaviors than
enormous body of theoretical and empirical work congruent ones. The data supported this reasoning.
Social Cognition 705
consider person memory to be a dead area, its even if the passage of time renders none of them to
historical importance should be appreciated. Person be at the top of the bin, there nevertheless remains a
memory gave social cognition its initial impetus, and reasonable probability that one of the category rep-
there is no way to know whether social cognition resentations will be used for making judgments.
would exist at all, or in what form, had the early An alternative account invoked the concept of
researchers chosen to study something else. decay of excitation. The more frequently a concept
has been primed, the slower the rate of decay of its
excitation, which is another way of saying that the
Category Accessibility: The Other
concept retains much of its ability to influence judg-
Early Social Cognition Area
ments over time. As a matter of history, although
Imagine you had been told about a person named neither of these general theories is particularly
Donald who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a sail- influential today, the notion of category accessibility
boat. Would you judge Donald to be adventur- and the empirical technique of employing priming
ous or reckless? Early social cognition theorists manipulations have been incorporated by almost
suggested that much would depend on what other every subarea within social cognition. It is probably
information was accessible to you. If the category not an exaggeration to say that category accessibility
of adventurous happened to be accessible then and priming are so ingrained into the social cogni-
you might be likely to encode the behavior as an tion lore that they currently are considered as givens.
exemplar of that category, thereby implying that it
was adventurous, but if the category of reckless Social Cognition, Amalgamation,
happened to be accessible then you would probably and Contemporary Themes
encode the behavior as an exemplar of recklessness,
leading you to the judgment that it was reckless. In Throughout the 1980s, the person memory and cat-
fact, early research demonstrated that manipulating egory accessibility domains gained in popularity and
the categories accessible to participants in experi- academic acclaim. Researchers in other domains
ments (i.e., priming these categories) caused them began to associate themselves with the increasingly
to make judgments in the direction of whatever cat- trendy area of social cognition, and areas of social
egory was primed. psychology that were not considered originally to be
The notion of priming categories to influence within the social cognition domain became so cat-
judgments expanded in the 1980s in two impor- egorized. For example, although attribution theories
tant directions. Specifically, it became clear that had been cognitive from their beginnings, it was not
categories could be primed more or less recently until the mid-1980s that they were considered to be
(just prior to judgments or well before judgments) part of social cognition. Likewise, the area of atti-
or more or less frequently (many times or fewer tudes became associated with social cognition. This
times prior to judgment). The impact of recently expansion of social cognition applied eventually to
(and nonfrequently) primed categories tends to be almost every area of social psychology, to the point
strong immediately and decrease rapidly over time, where it would be difficult to find a social psychol-
whereas the impact of frequently primed categories ogy area that has not been influenced by social cog-
tends to decrease more slowly over time. Two sorts nition theories, methodologies, or both. In addition,
of theories account for the effects. According to the this expansion has resulted in theories that assume
bin model, information is accessed depending both two processes (dual-process theories) that can be
on the number of times it is represented in the bin distinguished from theories that do not assume two
and where it is represented in the bin. Thus, in the processes.
case of a single recent prime, this information is sit-
Dual-Process Approaches
ting at the top of the bin and has a large probability
of influencing judgments. But as time goes by, other In contemporary research, there has been a great
information is placed on top of it, and so its like- deal of emphasis on the distinction between mental
lihood of influencing judgments decreases rapidly. processes that are automatic versus controlled, to
But if the category had been primed frequently and the point where the vast majority of 21st-century
many representations of it are stored in the bin then, social cognition theories are dual-process theories.
Social Cognition 707
Put simply, these theories posit an automatic process dichotomous automatic versus controlled groupings
that does not use up cognitive resources and does would not make sense.
not involve conscious volition and a controlled pro-
cess that uses cognitive resources and does involve
Other Social Cognition Approaches
conscious volition. Examples of dual-process theo-
ries include that persuasion happens via a peripheral A substantial amount of social cognition work
(automatic) or a central (controlled) route, or that does not use dual-process theories. An example is the
behaviors result from habitual (automatic) or non- work of cross-cultural psychologists who have dis-
habitual (controlled) processes, or that the forma- tinguished between people in individualist cultures
tion of plans for implementing behavioral intentions who emphasize private self-cognitions (i.e., their
makes automatic the intentional process that other- traits and states), as opposed to people in collectiv-
wise would be controlled, and so on. ist cultures who emphasize collective self-cognitions
New methodological paradigms have been devel- (i.e., their group memberships). Social cognition
oped to exploit the distinction between automatic thinking suggested two opposing ways in which
and controlled processes featured in these theories. self-cognitions might be organized. One possibility
Researchers often collect reaction time data, under is that there is only one self-concept but that culture
the assumption that if two cognitions are associated, influences the relative proportions of different types
priming one of them should increase the speed with of cognitions associated with it; individualists have
which the other will be accessed. Thus, in a study more private self-cognitions than do collectivists and
on prejudice, participants might be primed on some collectivists have more collective self-cognitions than
trials with a word toward which they have a positive do individualists. A second possibility is that there
attitude and some words toward which they have are different cognitive structures for storing different
a negative attitude. Either way, after being primed, kinds of self-cognitions; private self-cognitions are
the participants are asked to respond to the names stored in the private self and collective self-cogni-
of black or white persons. Those participants who tions are stored in the collective self. If so, culture
are prejudiced against black people should respond would influence the relative accessibility of these
more quickly to a positive prime followed by the two cognitive structures.
name of a white person or to a negative prime fol- The different possibilities make opposing predic-
lowed by the name of a black person, than to posi- tions that can be tested empirically. According to the
tive-black or negative-white combinations. two-selves theory, priming the private self should
Another widely used social cognition paradigm increase the retrieval of private self-cognitions,
is subliminal priming. The idea is as follows. If a whereas priming the collective self should increase
hypothesized social cognition process is automatic the retrieval of collective self-cognitions. But if there
and conscious volition is not required then relevant is only one self-concept with no internal organiza-
behaviors can be influenced outside of conscious- tion (if there is internal organization, then this turns
ness with subliminal priming. For example, priming into a multiple self-theory), priming to differentially
people at a subliminal level with pictures of elderly influence the retrieval of private versus collective
people caused them to walk more slowly than those self-cognitions should make no difference. A second
who had not been so primed. prediction concerns the order in which self-cogni-
Notwithstanding the popularity of dual-process tions are retrieved. The two-selves theory indicates
approaches, they are not touted by everyone. that private self-cognitions are associated with each
Although different cognitive processes may use up other but not with collective ones, and collective
different pools of resources and be automatic with self-cognitions are associated with each other but
respect to each other, some would argue that few (if not with private ones. If so, then the retrieval of pri-
any) of the cognitive processes of interest to social vate self-cognitions should be likely to be preceded
psychologists use up exactly zero resources. If so, by the recall of private ones, and the recall of collec-
there would be very few (if any) absolutely auto- tive self-cognitions should be likely to be preceded
matic processes; on the contrary, one would expect a by the recall of collective ones. But if the one self-
continuum of resource utilization, and so the notion theory is true, retrieval should be random. Findings
of separating social psychology phenomena into concerning both predictions came out in favor of
708 Social Loafing
the theory that there are at least two self-concepts. Further Readings
More recent research has expanded this theorizing Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996).
to assert that priming different self-concepts influ- Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait
ences the process of thinking as well as the content construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of
of the thoughts. Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230244.
Social cognition also has been used to test for the Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K.
internal structure of attitudeswhether attitudes (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit
have both cognitive and affective components. cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of
In one experiment, participants wrote down their Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 14641480.
attitudinal beliefs, and blind coders rated them as Hastie, R., & Kumar, P. A. (1979). Person memory:
mostly cognitive or mostly affective. The research- Personality traits as organizing principles in memory for
ers hypothesized that during the process of form- behaviors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
ing an attitude, cognitive beliefs are compared to 37, 2538.
each other to form the cognitive component, and Higgins, E. T., Bargh, J. A., & Lombardi, W. (1985). The
affective beliefs are compared to each other to form nature of priming effects on categorization. Journal of
the affective component, but there is little reason Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
for participants to compare cognitive and affective Cognition, 11, 5969.
beliefs. Consequently, the attitude formation process Srull, T. K., Lichtenstein, M., & Rothbart, M. (1985).
should cause stored associations between cognitive Associative storage and retrieval processes in person
beliefs and other cognitive beliefs, between affective memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition, 11, 316345.
beliefs and other affective beliefs, but not between
Srull, T. K., & Wyer, R. S. (1979). The role of category
cognitive and affective beliefs. During retrieval,
accessibility in the interpretation of information about
participants should have been able to traverse
persons: Some determinants and implications. Journal of
associative pathways between cognitive beliefs and
Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 16601672.
other cognitive beliefs, between affective beliefs and
Trafimow, D., & Sheeran, P. (1998). Some tests of the
other affective beliefs, but not between cognitive distinction between cognitive and affective beliefs.
and affective beliefs. This led to a prediction that Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 34,
retrieval would be clustered by belief type (cogni- 378397.
tive beliefs retrieved adjacently to each other and Trafimow, D., Triandis, H. C., & Goto, S. G. (1991). Some
affective beliefs retrieved adjacently to each other). tests of the distinction between the private self and the
Experimental confirmation of this prediction sup- collective self. Journal of Personality and Social
ported the hypothesis that attitudes have separate Psychology, 60, 649655.
cognitive and affective components.
Social loafing is a broad construct that includes loaf. In both cases, reaching (or not reaching) the
the free rider effect and the sucker effect. The free quota is irrelevant to the mans individual efforts.
rider effect refers to the decline in contributions Research documenting the role of effort expectancy
observed when people perceive their contributions in social loafing comes from studies that manipulate
as redundant with the contributions of others. The the redundancy of individual efforts. These studies
sucker effect is the tendency for people to withhold show that people are more likely to loaf when they
contributions when they perceive or anticipate that perceive their efforts to be redundant with the con-
other people are loafing at their expense. That is, tributions of other group members than when they
people sometimes contribute less to avoid being perceive their efforts as unique.
exploited by others who are loafing. Social loafing Regarding performance expectancy, people are
is distinct from these other effects in that social loaf- more likely to loaf if they perceive that the qual-
ing is a broader term referring to any reduction in ity or quantity of the groups performance is unre-
effort or motivation when contributions are pooled. lated to the outcome. For example, if the factory
The free rider effect and the sucker effect are nar- worker believes that his work group will receive
rower terms that refer to specific causes of social the same bonus regardless of whether the group
loafing. meets the production quota, he will loaf. Similarly,
Researchers have documented social loafing in if the worker believes that his work group will
a variety of tasks, including clapping and cheering, receive no bonus (and no punishment) regardless of
swimming in a relay race, solving mazes, wrapping whether the group meets the quota, he will loaf. In
gum, pulling a tug-of-war rope, and generating short, people in a group will work hard when they
uses for objects. In a typical study, groups of par- believe rewards and punishments are linked to the
ticipants receive instructions to generate uses for an groups performance and will loaf when they per-
object (e.g., uses for a knife) and believe that their ceive no such link. Evidence linking social loafing
individual contributions are or are not identifi- to the performance expectancy comes from studies
able. Participants reliably generate more uses when showing that people loaf when they perceive that
they believe the number of uses they generate can there is a low likelihood that a good group perfor-
be identified by the experimenter than when they mance will be rewarded. In addition, the finding
believe the uses cannot be identified. that people loaf when group member contributions
cannot be identified supports the role of the perfor-
mance stage in social loafing. When contributions
Causes of Social Loafing
cannot be identified, group members receive no
Group performance tasks can be regarded as hav- personal reward for working hard or punishment
ing three components: (a) an effort expectancy for loafing.
component (i.e., expectations regarding the contri- Regarding outcome, people are likely to loaf
butions group members make), (b) a performance to the extent that the value of a good group per-
expectancy component (i.e., expectations regard- formance is low. Value is low when there is no
ing the product of those contributions), and (c) an reward for achieving a good group performance,
outcome value component (the consequences such when the reward is not valued, or when there are
as the reward or punishment that result from the overriding costs. For example, the factory worker
performance). Research links social loafing to each may perceive that the bonus for making the days
component. Regarding effort expectancy, people are production quota is too small to justify working
more likely to loaf if they perceive that their indi- hard. That is, the cost of working hard exceeds the
vidual contributions are irrelevant to achieve a good benefits. Research on outcome value demonstrates
group performance. For example, if a man assem- that offering powerful incentives for a good group
bling widgets in a factory believes that he and his performance reduces social loafing. For example,
coworkers will meet the days production quota one study showed that participants wrapping
regardless of whether he personally works hard or gum in groups wrapped more if they believe the
loafs, he is likely to loaf. Similarly, if the man believes gum they wrapped would be donated to a worthy
that the group will not meet the days quota regard- cause (an intrinsic benefit) than if they believed it
less of how hard he works, then he also is likely to would not.
710 Spacing Effect
Reducing Social Loafing in his study of the learning of serially ordered lists of
words. He found that the massing of study on a sin-
According to theorists, effort expectancy, perfor-
gle day resulted in poor performance when attempt-
mance expectancy, and outcome value must all be
ing to relearn items as compared to faster relearning
high or people will loaf. That is, if any one of these
when the study of the word lists was distributed over
factors is low then people will reduce their contribu-
a 3-day period. This entry briefly describes the spac-
tions to the group. Yet social loafing is not inevitable.
ing effect and discusses three types of theories that
People who depend on groups to accomplish tasks
attempt to explain it.
as well as the group members themselves can reduce
social loafing by making sure three conditions are
met. First, group members must perceive that a good Features of the Spacing Effect
group performance depends on their individual con-
The spacing effect is well established in memory-
tribution. That is, group members must perceive
dependent learning tasks and has been demonstrated
that if they personally withhold contributions, the
most frequently using paired-associate and free-recall
group performance will suffer. Second, group mem-
memory tasks. In a paired-associate spacing-effect
bers must perceive that a good group performance
experiment, pairs of words or other stimuli are asso-
will be rewarded and that a poor group perfor-
ciated over repeated practices that are spaced in time
mance will not. The surest way to create this condi-
by practicing other item pairs during spacing inter-
tion is to make individual contributions identifiable.
vals. Recall in paired-associate memory tasks may
Third, there must be an adequate reward or incen-
be tested at the conclusion of practice by prompting
tive for achieving a good group performance, one
with one member of each pair to cue recall of the
that exceeds the cost of contributing.
other pair member, but many experiments include
James A. Shepperd and Darya Melnyk a buffer task or a short-term or long-term interval
(typically at least a day) between learning and reten-
See also Collective Action; Group Decision Making tion, since a paired-associate spacing effect seems
to require a significant retention interval to become
Further Readings apparent.
In a free-recall task, participants learn a word
Karau, S. J., & Williams, K. D. (1993). Social loafing: list in which some of the words repeat, again with
A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. Journal spacing defined by the number of intervening items
of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 681706.
between repetitions. The effect of spaced practice of
Shepperd, J. A. (1993). Productivity loss in groups: A
items in a list is determined with testing after the
motivation analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 113, 6781.
conclusion of practice, either immediately or with
some retention delay interval. Spacing effects in free-
recall lists are often apparent without the need for a
SPACING EFFECT significant retention interval.
While the spacing effect has been most thoroughly
Practice that is distributed over time rather than studied in memory tasks and might be expected to
massed together within a shorter period has been occur in any task with a memory component, it has
shown to have a stronger effect on later performance. also been reported in motor skill tasks. However,
This spacing effect is an improvement in future mem- there has been much less research on the spacing
ory retrieval performance caused by more widely effect in motor skill tasks, and it is still unclear to
spaced practice (where repeated learning events are what extent spacing effects are universal to all types
distributed temporally rather than massed at a sin- of learning. In fact, many researchers have proposed
gle time). Research has shown that this effect is very multiple mechanisms for spacing effects, and it is
robust for the learning of factual information such as possible that spacing effects occur because of differ-
words, images, definitions, or artificial stimuli such ent mechanisms depending on the task.
as random letter strings and that this benefit persists The spacing effect often shows strong interac-
over delays as long as several years. The spacing tions with the amount of practice and the duration
effect was first recognized by Hermann Ebbinghaus of the retention interval. The practice by spacing
Spacing Effect 711
interaction is characterized by an increasing benefit learning when the repetitions are narrowly spaced.
from spacing as practices accumulate. This interac- Earlier versions of accessibility theories described
tion means that additional spaced practices beyond how priming or habituation from narrow spacing
the second trial will continue to contribute more might block learning; these explanations are similar
learning if the practices are widely spaced. The spac- to the idea of desirable difficulty popularized by
ing by retention interval interaction, which can only Robert Bjork because wider spacing increases dif-
be detected using experiments with multiple reten- ficulty by reducing accessibility. Later versions of
tion intervals, is a tendency for much more rapid accessibility theories have elaborated this theory by
forgetting following practice that is narrowly spaced describing how increased accessibility at repetition
(i.e., the effect of spacing is greater after longer may lead to learning that is forgotten more quickly
retention intervals). as opposed to learned more slowly. Like fluctuation
theories, the newer accessibility theories explain
Theories of the Spacing Effect the spacing by retention-interval interaction (the
The history of spacing-effect research is rich with increased benefit from spacing after long retention
suggested explanations for the effect. intervals), which older accessibility theories did not
attempt to explain. These newer accessibility theo-
Fluctuation Theories ries map well to neurophysiology research, which
shows that neurons exhibit this same tendency to
Fluctuation theories propose that each repetition show reduced long-term effects from narrowly
of an item to be memorized results in a sample of spaced stimulation. Similar to accessibility theory,
the item and its context features (stimulus com- the study phase retrieval theory of spacing effects
ponents) being committed to memory. Learning says that when a narrow repetition occurs before the
occurs through the accumulation of these samples, previous repetition has left working memory, learn-
and retrieval is determined by how well the compo- ing will be very poor.
nents of a later cue match the stimulus components
learned. In a fluctuation theory, the stimulus com- Strategic Theories
ponents are supposed to fluctuate with the passage
of time. Because of this fluctuation, more widely Though paired-associate spacing effects are
spaced practice may create an overall encoding that usually explained with one of the theories above,
includes a broader share of the possible stimulus strategic processes such as differential rehearsal
components, while narrow spacing results in a rather (rehearsing spaced items more) and rehearsal orga-
redundant encoding because very little fluctuation nization (rehearsing clusters of items) have also been
of the available components can happen between shown to produce spacing effects in free-recall list-
repetitions. Two main varieties of fluctuation theory learning experiments. Strategic explanations are typ-
have been proposed: contextual variability, which ically proposed only for list-learning spacing results.
focuses on the importance of the entire context in Philip I. Pavlik Jr.
building a broad representation, and encoding vari-
ability, which focuses on the central importance of See also Desirable Difficulties Perspective on Learning;
fluctuations in the sampling of the items rather than Rehearsal and Memory; Skill Learning, Enhancement
the broader context. of; Spacing Effect, Practical Applications; Working
Memory
Accessibility Theories
Typically considered as an alternative to fluctua- Further Readings
tion theories, another class of theory focuses on how Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer,
the current memory accessibility at the time of rep- D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks:
etition results in different effects for each repetition. A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological
These accessibility theories describe how narrow Bulletin, 132(3), 354380.
spacing results in memories that are more accessible Glenberg, A. M. (1979). Component-levels theory of the
at the time of repetition, but they propose that it effects of spacing of repetitions on recall and
is this accessibility at repetition that reduces further recognition. Memory & Cognition, 7(2), 95112.
712 Spacing Effect, Practical Applications
Hintzman, D. L. (1974). Theoretical implications of the too little spacing between study sessions is quite
spacing effect. In R. L. Solso (Ed.), Theories in cognitive harmful to retention while too much spacing only
psychology: The Loyola symposium (pp. 7799). leads to small decreases in later recall. An optimal
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. level of spacing can more than double later recall.
Pavlik, P. I., Jr., & Anderson, J. R. (2005). Practice and The use of cumulative exams is perhaps the
forgetting effects on vocabulary memory: An activation- simplest technique teachers can implement in their
based model of the spacing effect. Cognitive Science, classroom if they wish to promote durable memory
29(4), 559586. for the material being taught. Cumulative exams
encourage students to learn the same set of mate-
rial on at least two separate occasions, providing
SPACING EFFECT, PRACTICAL the essential temporal gap between each learning
APPLICATIONS episode. Other useful instructional design choices
include systematic quizzes on previous topics, use
of classroom time to review key curriculum content,
Placing a temporal gap between study sessions
and homework assignments that emphasize the pri-
increases the amount of information remembered in
mary points to be learned. Homework assignments
the future, a phenomenon called the spacing effect.
and quizzes that mix, shuffle, or interleave different
The spacing effect allows students and teachers to
topics, such as addition and subtraction, have been
efficiently allocate a fixed amount of study time to
shown to improve later performance.
maximize later retention of a set of facts or a new
Because testing with feedback is more beneficial
skill. Educational environments that may benefit
than restudy alone, students should learn using flash-
from spacing include completion of homework
cards rather than merely by (re)reading textbook
assignments, learning within a classroom setting,
chapters. When testing with feedback is used during
studying for exams, business training courses, com-
study sessions rather than restudy alone, benefit from
puter-aided learning, and language-learning courses.
study episode spacing is substantially increased. After
Real-world tutors that implement spaced study
an exam, teachers should provide delayed feedback
include SuperMemo, the Mnemosyne project, and
about the correct answers, which provides a form of
the Pimsleur language learning system.
spaced learning. Ideally, this should involve sequen-
Since the spacing effect was first described in 1885
tially presenting a frequently missed test item, asking
by Hermann Ebbinghaus, hundreds of studies have
students to generate an answer to that item, and then
examined its effects using materials with classroom
providing feedback about the correct answer. Unless
and real-life utility. Related to school curriculum,
feedback is provided, students are quite unlikely to fix
this includes vocabulary, fact, and prose memoriza-
misconceptions about the correct answer. Tests and
tion; related to work and leisure activities, it includes
exams should emphasize key points rather than minor
typing, tossing balls, and playing video games. From
details so that students retain the most important mate-
these studies, a set of concrete recommendations for
rial being taught. More key material will be remem-
applying the spacing effect to real-world learning
bered if fewer superfluous details are presented within
can be made.
textbook chapters and during classroom lectures. This
Practical Techniques instructional design choice allows educators to devote
more time to spaced restudy of key points.
In general, a long temporal gap between learning
sessions increases the level of future recall. While
very long gaps of at least a month are necessary to Areas Needing Further Study
produce long-lasting benefits to retention for both While spacing effects are robust for most forms of
verbal materials and motor tasks, relearning on a verbal and skill learning, using both recall and recog-
daily basis is more effective if the learner cares solely nition memory measures, such effects have not been
about performance on an upcoming exam or perfor- found consistently for all types of learning. Category
mance. Taking a few minutes break between each induction, such as learning to identify whether a novel
study session is always preferable to learning mate- skin lesion is benign or cancerous, showed spacing
rial within a single, massed study period. In general, benefits in one study while another study failed to
Spatial Cognition, Development of 713
and maturation all combine to produce an individu- as cues such as the shape of the environment provide
als developmental trajectory. a collection of pieces of information that when com-
bined specify the desired location. This complex use
of multiple sources of external information is called
The Spatial Coding System
place learning.
The development of spatial cognition starts out with These four systems have different starting points
a set of primitive responses that rapidly become the and developmental trajectories in humans. In general,
complex system that makes a toddler able to help infants were long thought to move from an egocentric
us find our keys in the morning. Spatial coding has (viewer centered) frame to an allocentric (external)
two possible frames of reference, both of which are frame. This view, first espoused by Jean Piaget, has
important to solving our everyday spatial tasks. the infant start out with response learning (if I look to
Within each of these two frames of reference there my left when I hear door open I can see who is coming
are two available spatial systems, one simple and into my room), then moves to cue learning (if I look
the other complex. The first frame of reference is at the door when I hear the door open I can see who is
viewer centered. In this format the individual is the coming). Cue learning is more accurate because it can
focus and their task is about remembering how to do account for any rolling around in the crib.
somethingthat is, which movements in space will Research since Piaget has found this shift from
achieve the goal. The simplest use of a viewer-cen- the viewer-referenced systems to externally refer-
tered spatial ability is called response learning. This enced systems to be less absolute than previously
is the system that is functioning when you reach for thoughtthat is, younger infants can show the
your coffee cup on the desk while you are writing. externally referenced systems under supportive con-
The cup is in the same place every day and you do ditions far earlier than an absolute shift could be
not need to do more than execute a movement of the seen. These data indicate that the externally based
arm and hand to achieve the goal. Response learning spatial systems may be available much earlier than
is powerful and successful when the position of the previously supposed. That they are not used under
viewer has not changed; however, it cannot account strenuous conditions may be related to the effort
for movement. If my chair has been moved 6 inches necessary to use them early in development or the
to the right, my reach does not encounter the coffee weighting of the different systems across situations.
cup anymore. A more complex use of the viewer- The adaptive combination model offers an
centered system is called dead reckoning or inertial account that can accommodate the finding of early
navigation. In this system the location and direction capability. According to adaptive combination
of the viewer movement is tracked in spatial memory, models, the four sources of spatial information are
providing a continuously updating sense of location weighted such that the requirements of the situa-
and direction. This system can be best seen when we tion can dictate which of the spatial abilities is most
are navigating in the dark. The weakness in this sys- advantageous. In this way of looking at spatial
tem is that it is susceptible to small errors in calcula- cognition, the use of response learning to get cof-
tion that are compounded over time. A misjudgment fee while typing requires minimal interruption of the
of distance or turn angle is updated and used in all concurrent task and thus is the best choice for the
subsequent estimations. This accumulation of error task at hand.
leads to larger and larger inaccuracies over time. In development, the adaptive combination
The other reference system is an external frame- model allows for the idea that there may be some
work. There is a simple and complex way to use spatial abilities that are available but not used by
external information. The simple system, called cue the infant or young child because it is the weight-
learning, is the kind of navigation that allows us to ing and reweighting of the spatial systems that is
use a landmark as a beacon to guide our search for responsible for much of the developmental change
the goal location. In this case, the landmark has to be through infancy and childhood. By this approach,
at the desired locationfor example, the keys are in infants have the ability to use several different spa-
the bowl. This system runs into difficulty when the tial strategies from early on, and the task of infancy,
landmark is not directly marking the desired loca- instead of the shift from viewer-referenced to exter-
tion. In many cases, a number of landmarks as well nally referenced systems, would be figuring out the
Spatial Cognition, Development of 715
advantageous weighting of the available systems. several sequences of hiding at Location A, hiding the
The weighting of navigation systems changes dra- object at Location B in full view of the infant leads to
matically when the child begins to locomote inde- another search at Location A. The A not B error has
pendently. The advent of crawling is associated been intensively researched, and research indicates
with large cognitive change in several areas, includ- that the error can be seen earlier and later when delay
ing spatial cognition. The infants ability to move between hiding at Location B and search is manipu-
around space provides a new form of feedback, lated. At 16 months, children show a categorical bias
which changes the weighting of the spatial coding in their estimates of location in a continuous space,
systems by providing new information about which particularly when their estimations are uncertain. At
system reliably gets the infant to a goal location. 21 months, infants show evidence of place learning,
In addition to the spatial systems available to the the most complex of the spatial systems.
child and the weighting of those systems, there is also Early childhood is a time of leaps in spatial abil-
a developmental progression in the sophistication ity. Young children become able to use basic spatial
of the use and subdivision of otherwise unmarked language early in the preschool years. Children also
spaces. Adults divide up unmarked spaces into a show that they are beginning to understand repre-
grid that allows them to search for a lost object in sentations of spatial information, such as simple
a smaller area. In effect, instead of remembering models and maps, and gradually they extend the
the car keys are on the football field, we divide the number of situations in which they can use symbolic
field into categories (between the goal line and the representations of spatial information. By the end
10-yard line), which allows a smaller search area of the preschool years, children show spatial per-
than if we did not divide the field. The hierarchical spective taking as long as they do not need to shift
coding model indicates that estimations of spatial frames of reference. A child can now understand
location are influenced by categorical spatial infor- that the layout of the table will look different from
mation as well as by a fine-grained estimation of someone elses seat as long as they can maintain the
location. Adults divide space into categories that, same reference points.
over a series of estimations, increase their accuracy Search patterns in children become more sophis-
by systematically biasing them toward the center of ticated through middle childhood. While 5-year-olds
the category, thus allowing adult estimates of loca- have difficulty with tasks that require them to use
tion to cluster in smaller subareas of a large space, landmarks to accurately find a distal object (place
instead of the whole space (e.g., between the 10-yard learning) this ability improves through middle child-
line and the goal line instead of the whole football hood. In a place learning task that allowed children
field). This bias works with the adults tendency to search a large-scale space presented on a desktop
to subdivide spaces into small categories to result computer, 5-year-olds searches were very inefficient,
in overall accuracy. This categorical bias increases generally relying on distance from the wall of the
when the fine-grained estimate is uncertain. space, but the 6-year-olds used a single landmark.
Neither of these strategies is very successful, but
the addition of one landmark is a step toward the
Developmental Change in Spatial Ability
triangulation using multiple landmarks that is the
Infants are sensitive to a large amount of spatial hallmark of sophisticated place learning. As they
information very early in development. Infants as move toward the end of middle childhood, children
young as 3 months are sensitive to some spatial stim- became more and more sophisticated in their land-
uli. They evidence longer looking times to objects mark use with 8- and 9-year-olds using two distal
that move from one spatial category to another. Five- landmarks to guide their search for an object that
month-old infants are sensitive to changes in object was distal from all the available landmarks. By the
location but not to changes in shape or color of an age of 12, the children use spatial strategies very
object that remains stationary. At 9 months, infants similar to those seen in adults.
show the A not B error. This occurs in an experimen- Map use also becomes more sophisticated during
tal paradigm in which the infant sees an object hidden middle childhood, with children becoming able to
in Location A and, usually after a short delay, is per- understand mapping conventions and perspectives
mitted to search Location A several times. Following as well as dealing with more and more complex
716 Speech Perception
characterized thousands of human languages in vowel, consonant, syllable, and word will poten-
terms of the vowels and consonants that each uses. tially be different each time it is produced. Many
Across all human languages, about 100 different factors influence such variation, including the partic-
such phonemes have been identified. Each language ular individual who is speaking, the rate of speech,
uses a subset of these, with some variation in the the semantic context, and so forth. Thus, there is no
number across languages. English is a fairly typical simple template that can be used that will consis-
language from this perspective, with about 42 differ- tently match the input.
ent phonemes. An additional complication is that each word
It has proven useful to think about each phoneme blends directly into the next word. That is, unlike
as being made up of a set of phonetic features. For this text, there are no blank spaces to separate
example, it is possible to characterize each of the con- words in speech. Any gaps in the speech stream
sonants in English in terms of three features: voicing, are more likely to be due to producing a particular
place of articulation, and manner of articulation. sound like a stop consonant than to breaks between
Voicing specifies whether or not the vocal cords are words. This creates the segmentation problem
active during the consonants productionthey are how does the listener know that a speaker said two
active when producing a sound like /z/ but not when lips rather than tulips?
producing /s/. The place of articulation is based on
where in the vocal tract the airflow is most con- Possible Solutions to the Difficulties
stricted. For example, the air is completely stopped
by the lips when saying /b/, whereas the restriction is The coarticulation problem is quite fundamental,
in the middle of the mouth when saying /d/. Manner and some solutions to it are similarly fundamen-
of articulation refers to how the air flow is restricted: tal. For example, in some theories listeners are not
For sounds like /b/ and /d/ (called stops) the air is assumed to extract individual phonemes (which
fully stopped momentarily, whereas for sounds like undergo the most extreme coarticulation). Instead,
/s/ and /z/ the air is only mostly restricted, with a bit the basic recognition units are larger, such as com-
slipping through; the noisy sound of the air escaping binations of consonants and vowels, or even whole
is called frication, and the manner is fricative. syllables. These larger units are generally more
The results of many experiments can most clearly constant in their form than the smaller pieces that
be explained by considering the featural properties make them up. There is also considerable evidence
of the speech sounds. For example, if syllables are for compensation for coarticulation: If coarticula-
played to listeners under noisy conditions, and the tion shifts the acoustics of a phoneme in a particular
listeners are asked to write down what they hear, direction, then listeners essentially shift perception
the more features that two sounds share the more back in the opposite direction, compensating for the
likely it is that one will be erroneously reported for coarticulation-induced changes.
the other. The more general problem of phonetic variation
seems to require a number of perceptual responses.
The most general solution has been to use various
Factors That Make Speech
normalization routines to make the (varying) input
Perception Difficult
a better match to stored representations (phonetic
A number of factors complicate speech perception. prototypes or perceptual magnets). A second
One problem is a result of the way that consonants solution is to store all previously heard tokens of
and vowels are produced. The position of the articu- a given word. In such episodic models, a word can
lators for an intended vowel or consonant will be potentially be matched to hundreds or thousands of
affected by the sounds that precede or follow that stored versions, increasing the chances of a success-
sound. This results in coarticulationthe acoustic ful match. Recently, a third approach has generated
properties of each vowel or consonant will not be a good deal of research. Work on perceptual learn-
the same each time, because the surrounding sounds ing or recalibration has shown that, when listeners
are different. hear a variant of a speech sound that is far from the
The coarticulation problem is just one version normal pronunciation, there is a tendency to expand
of the general problem of phonetic variation: Each the speech sounds category to encompass such
718 Speech Perception
variation. For example, if a listener hears alpha- strongest for stop consonants, somewhat weaker for
bet with a /b/ that is acoustically rather like a /d/, other consonants (e.g., fricatives), and weaker still
then the /b/ category expands to include more /d/- for vowels.
like sounds than before. This same ordering was found in dichotic listen-
Listeners use several different methods to solve ing experiments, studies in which headphones were
the segmentation problem. For example, certain used to play one speech sound to the right ear and
sounds are produced differently at the beginning of a different speech sound to the left ear. Listeners
a word than in the middle of a word; hearing such showed a reporting advantage for speech played to
a variant provides an allophonic clue for the listener the right ear; as noted, the strength of this advantage
to a word onset. In some languages, the stress pat- mirrored the ordering in categorical perception stud-
tern of a word provides a clue for segmentation. ies. Since the right ear has stronger connections to
For example, in English, about 80% of the time, a the left hemisphere of the brain and language is gen-
multisyllable word will begin with a stressed syllable erally processed on the left side, the right ear advan-
(e.g., donkey) rather than with an unstressed syllable tage was taken as an index of specialized language
(e.g., delay). Listeners can also use word recognition processing.
itself to help segmentation: Recognizing a word in Another phenomenon that was discovered rela-
the speech stream provides segmentation informa- tively early was phonemic restoration. To produce
tion (i.e., there is a word break just before and just this effect, a small piece of speech (typically, one
after this recognized word). Recent studies have phoneme) was cut out of a word, and a sound,
shown that under good listening conditions, this such as a cough or white noise, replaced the miss-
lexically based segmentation strategy plays a major ing speech. Listeners consistently fail to notice that
role, whereas some of the lower level cues are more speech is missingthey seem to perceptually restore
important under noisier listening conditions. the missing speech. Similar effects have also been
reported for other complex sounds, such as music.
These effects suggest that the perceptual system can
Notable Speech Phenomena
use higher order information to help repair degraded
Research on speech perception has revealed a num- speech input, a valuable adaptation in the noisy
ber of interesting phenomena. When scientists first world in which speech must be heard.
began to study speech using relatively modern tech- When the speech input is ambiguous, listen-
niques, they observed two apparently related phe- ers have a strong bias to interpret it in a way that
nomena: categorical perception and the right-ear yields real words rather than nonwords. Consider,
advantage. Researchers created sets of syllables in for example, a sound that has been designed to
which a particular acoustic parameter was varied in be acoustically intermediate between /d/ and /t/. If
such a way that the syllable at one end of the con- this ambiguous sound is followed by ask, listen-
tinuum was heard in one way (e.g., /ba/), and the ers generally report hearing task (a real word)
syllable at the other end in a different way (e.g., rather than dask. If the same sound is followed
/pa/). For simple nonspeech stimuli, varying a param- by ash, listeners instead hear the sound as /d/ in
eter this way leads to relatively continuous changes dash. This lexical bias is called the Ganong effect.
in perception. For example, if one end of the con- A final widely known speech phenomenon is the
tinuum is a 100-hertz (Hz) tone and the other end is McGurk effect, which is generated using audiovi-
a 200-Hz tone, with the intermediate items chang- sual presentation. The procedure involves showing
ing in frequency in a systematic way (e.g., 120 Hz, a headshot of someone producing a short utterance;
140 Hz, 160 Hz, 180 Hz), listeners typically hear a the audio track is dubbed to create a mismatch
gradual change across the continuum; each tone is between what the video shows and the sound that is
a bit higher pitch than the one before it. For many presented. For example, a video of the face produc-
speech continua, in contrast, perception seemed cat- ing /ga/ can be paired with an audio recording of /ba/.
egorical: Listeners heard a few items as one category Under these circumstances, listeners often hear /da/, a
(e.g., /ba/), and then things abruptly changed, with kind of compromise between the visual and auditory
the remaining items heard as the other category (e.g., input streams. Many studies have explored how these
/pa/). This categorical tendency in perception was two sources of speech information get combined.
Stereopsis 719
result that corroborates the proposed dissociation of stimuli so as to overcome interference with what is
coarse and fine disparity processing. relevant. How might we study the phenomenon of
interference, which so clearly influences our ability
Conclusion to process the world around us?
Since Wheatstones discovery of the link between At the dawn of psychology, James McKeen Cattell
retinal disparity and depth perception, much prog- documented that we are considerably slower to name
ress has been made in our understanding of human objects or their properties than to read the correspond-
stereopsis, and, in particular, its neural substrate. ing words: Saying table to a picture or yellow to
Many questions remain, including the role of distinct a color patch is slower than reading table or yellow
dorsal and ventral processing streams in stereopsis, aloud. Cattell saw this difference as evidence that
the extent of neural plasticity in disparity selective word reading becomes automatic via extensive prac-
neurons, and how complex 3-D surfaces and struc- tice. Half a century later, John Ridley Stroop combined
tures are encoded. Answers to these and other open colors and words into a single task. When the task was
questions will require multidisciplinary approaches to read the word aloud, ignoring the color, people had
that combine rigorous psychophysical methods with no difficulty compared to reading words in standard
brain scanning and electrophysiological techniques. black ink. But when the task was to name the ink
color aloud, ignoring the word, people had great diffi-
Laurie M. Wilcox and Debi Stransky culty compared to naming the colors of color patches.
In line with Cattell, word reading is taken to be so
See also Depth Perception; Optic Flow; Perceptual practiced that it has become automated, and hence
Constancy words cannot be ignoredeven when they should
be. This indicates that we do not have absolute con-
Further Readings trol over our attention: Attention can be attracted
DeAngelis, G. C., Cumming, B. G., & Newsome, W. T.
by the world (exogenous control), not just directed
(1998). Cortical area MT and the perception of
by oneself (endogenous control). The Stroop effect is
stereoscopic depth. Nature, 394, 677680. the best-known evidence of this fact: It is one of the
Howard, I. P., & Rogers, B. J. (2002). Seeing in depth most robust phenomena in all of psychology and the
(Vol. 2). Toronto, Ontario, Canada: I. Porteous Press. basis of thousands of published studies.
Julesz, B. (2006). Foundations of cyclopean perception.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original work published What Causes Interference?
1971) For 40 years, Stroop interference was explained as a
Sacks, O. (2006, June 19). Stereo Sue. The New Yorker, 6473. kind of horse race with the wrong horse (the word)
Von Noorden, G., & Campos, E. (2002). Binocular vision
beating the right one (the color) to the stage where a
and ocular motility. St. Louis, MO: Mosby.
response was prepareda serial/sequential process-
ing explanation. Thirty to 40 years ago, investigators
began to suggest that interference results from per-
STROOP EFFECT forming a controlled process (color naming) simulta-
neously with an automatic process (word reading)a
The Stroop effect (also called Stroop interference) parallel processing explanation. Then, about 20 years
is the phenomenon in which people are slow and ago, with the advent of neural network (connection-
error prone in naming the print colors of incompat- ist) models, emphasis shifted to the idea that learning
ible color words (e.g., when seeing the word yellow occurred via changes in stimulus-response connection
printed in red ink, people are to say red). Have strength. In the last 10 years, theories have integrated
you ever tried to remember the title of one song the Stroop effect into larger scale models of percep-
while another song is playing on the radio? You can- tual processing or language processing, situating
not seem to ignore the song on the radio, and so it interference in broader cognitive perspective. These
interferes. Such interference is the bane of attention. increasingly sophisticated models successfully encom-
Indeed, successfully attending in a world full of stim- pass the many published results that constitute the
ulation requires that we constantly ignore irrelevant empirical database for the Stroop effect.
Subliminal Perception 723
recent trends related to subliminal perception are was a marketing stunt with the intent of increasing
presented. the number of movie goers. However, the report
spawned the worry that it might be possible to
Definition and Overview influence human behavior without their aware-
The term subliminal perception refers to ones ability ness, a worry reinforced by subsequent books
to perceive stimulation below the limen. The limen such as Wilson Bryan Keys Subliminal Seduction;
refers to the amount of intensity at which the stimu- Ad Medias Manipulation of a Not So Innocent
lus can be noticed half the time. That is, our sensory America.
systems are not capable of detecting all the stimu-
lation present in the environment. The stimulation The Scientific Debate
has to reach some intensity before it can be noticed. Given the public interest, psychological research-
Subliminal stimulation refers to situations in which a ers began attempts to scientifically document, or
stimulus is presented at an intensity below the limen; refute, the existence of subliminal perception. Some
hence, the stimulus is seldom, if ever, perceived with argued there was clear evidence for subliminal per-
awareness. ception, but critics countered that the methodolo-
The American Heritage Dictionary provides gies employed were insufficiently rigorous to sustain
two definitions for perceive. The first is to become such claims. The crux of these disagreements cen-
aware of directly through any of the senses, espe- tered on the procedure that was used to document
cially sight or hearing. The second is to achieve subliminal perception.
understanding of; apprehend. The implication is To demonstrate perception of a stimulus presented
that when sensory information is perceived, one may at energy levels low enough to preclude awareness,
become aware of the stimulus provoking perception one must first devise a scientific way of measuring
(i.e., supraliminal perception), or one may gain some awareness and then find an energy level at which
understanding of the stimulus even in the absence of this measure indicates null sensitivity. Once estab-
awareness (i.e., subliminal perception). This latter lished, if some other measure indicates the stimulus
possibility has intrigued researchers for over a cen- is being processed, then subliminal perception has
tury: Is it possible for one to perceive information been demonstrated. This methodological approach
that somehow alters our understanding of the world is termed the dissociation paradigm, as the goal is
without our awareness of said perception occurring? to dissociate some general measure of perception
from a more specific measure of perception lead-
Brief History
ing to awareness. The study by Pierce and Jastrow
This question of whether stimuli presented in a sub- highlighted previously provides such an example
liminal manner can be perceived despite the absence in the sense that participants claims were used to
of awareness was the focus of the first published arti- indicate awareness, and their guessing performance
cle from a psychology laboratory in North America. provided the more general measure of perception.
In 1884, Charles Pierce and Joseph Jastrow asked When guessing performance remained above chance
participants to guess whether cards contained letters despite claimed unawareness, the general measure
or digits after first establishing a presentation dis- of perception was dissociated from the specific mea-
tance wherein participants claimed to be unaware of sure of perception resulting in awareness.
what was on the cards. Guessing performance was The controversy with respect to subliminal per-
above chance, which the authors attributed to some ception centers primarily on the extent to which
entity other than the primary waking self, percep- researchers accept certain definitions and measure-
tion in the absence of awareness. ments of awareness. If one allows the participant to
This issue became of interest to the general pub- indicate when they are and are not aware of some
lic in 1957 when an unemployed market researcher stimulus (a subjective index of awareness), then
named James Vicary claimed to have subliminally it is relatively easy to demonstrate the perception of
presented the words Drink Coca Cola, and Eat a stimulus that participants claim to be unaware of
popcorn, during a movie, resulting in an increase it. However, if one insists on an objective index
of product sales. Later, Vicary admitted his study of awareness and further insists that this measure
Synesthesia 725
indicate true null sensitivity, the evidence is less awareness is likely stronger under less-degraded
compelling. conditions, with the lack of awareness for strong
An objective index of awareness is one that does stimuli prevented by factors like divided attention or
not rely on the subject telling the researcher what mental load.
they are and are not aware of but, rather, indexes
Steve Joordens
awareness through a behavioral result. For example,
Tony Marcel described a two-part experiment. In See also Attention and Consciousness; Consciousness
the first part, each trial consisted of either a stimulus and the Unconscious; Perceptual Consciousness and
or nothing being briefly presented prior to a visual Attention; Unconscious Perception
mask (e.g., a set of random letters). Subjects were
asked to say whether they thought a stimulus had or
Further Readings
had not been presented, and a stimulus duration was
found at which their performance was roughly at Cohen, J. D., & Schooler, J. W. (Eds.). (1997). Scientific
chance levels. Thus presence/absence discrimination approaches to consciousness. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
was used as an index of awareness, suggesting a lack Dixon, N. F. (1971). Subliminal perception: The nature of a
of awareness when performance was at chance lev- controversy. London, UK: McGraw-Hill.
els; this provided an objective approach to defining Key, W. B. (1973). Subliminal seduction: Ad medias
and nullifying awareness. Once this duration was manipulation of a not so innocent America. New York,
established, Marcel demonstrated that stimuli pre- NY: Prentice Hall Trade.
sented at this duration speeded subsequent decisions Marcel, A. (1983). Conscious and unconscious perception:
to stimuli that were semantically related (i.e., a sub- Experiments on visual masking and word recognition.
Cognitive Psychology, 15, 197237.
liminally presented WOLF could prime a decision
Merikle, P. M., & Joordens, S. (1997). Parallels between
to DOG, such as whether or not it constitutes a cor-
perception without attention and perception without
rectly spelled word).
awareness. Consciousness & Cognition, 6, 219236.
This type of finding seemed to provide strong
Pierce, C. S., & Jastrow, J. (1884). On small differences in
evidence for subliminal perception. However, crit- sensation. Memoirs of the National Academy of Science,
ics countered these findings as well because Marcel 3, 7583.
defined chance performance as 60% accuracy,
leaving open the possibility that the observed prim-
ing was due to a small amount of residual awareness.
Given the difficulties inherent in both objectively
SYNESTHESIA
measuring awareness and identifying conditions
in which no residual awareness is possible, studies Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which
relying on the dissociation paradigm have remained stimulation of one sensory modality or cognitive
controversial. pathway leads to automatic, conscious experiences
in a second, unstimulated pathway. For example,
in music color synesthesia, auditory inputs cause
Current Trends Related to synesthetes to see colors, which typically include
Subliminal Perception movement and texture. In one of the most exten-
Although some researchers have suggested more sively studied forms of synesthesia, grapheme
complex versions of the dissociation paradigm to color synesthesia, letters and numbers are experi-
provide clearer evidence of subliminal perception, enced with a colored overlay. Synesthesia research
most subsequent work has relied on methodolo- has expanded dramatically in the past 20 years. This
gies focused on the more general question of how research has demonstrated that synesthesia is a real
unconscious and conscious perceptual processes phenomenon, explored its neural basis, and begun
interact. There is general agreement that subliminal to uncover the genetic mechanisms that might lead
perception is possible, although it remains unclear to synesthesia. Studies of synesthesia are relevant not
how much of a behavioral effect such perception only to understanding how individual differences in
could produce given the extent of stimulus degrada- neural structure lead to unique perceptual experi-
tion employed. The influence of perception without ences but also to understanding universal processes
726 Synesthesia
which themselves combine to form higher order higher than the latter. Nevertheless, when hierarchi-
constituent units (e.g., the prepositional phrase com- cal height is kept constant as in disjunctive construc-
bines the preposition and the noun phrase). The tions (e.g., The boy or the girls), interference is
treelike representation is illustrated in Figure 1. strongest with the element linearly closer to the verb,
In the marking and morphing model of agreement showing that linear proximity may also play a role.
developed by Kathleen Eberhard and colleagues,
interference arises as features from the intervening
Fine-Grained Syntactic Modulation
element are incorrectly transmitted onto the agree-
of Interference
ment target during the morphing stage. The pro-
cess of feature transmission is assumed to operate Evidence for the role of more fine-grained aspects
at a stage of language production where elements of the hierarchical structure in interference comes
are organized hierarchically. A first line of evidence from the observation that the interference occurs
comes from the cross-linguistic observation that in the absence of any intervention in agreement in
elements situated higher in the hierarchy intervene the surface word order. For example, interference
more than those situated lower. For example, when was reported with prepositional phrase modifiers
two elements intervene in the surface order between in interrogative sentences involving verb move-
the agreement controller and target, the element sit- ment (e.g., *Are-P the helicopter-S for the flights-P
uated higher interferes with agreement (programs in safe?) and with objects in cleft or relative construc-
*The computer with the programs for the experi- tions involving object movement in French (e.g.,
ment are broken), not the element situated lower *John speaks to the patients-P who(m) the med-
(experiments in The computer with the program icine-S cure-P). In such sentences, the object has
for the experiments is broken), although the latter moved from its postverbal position to a frontal posi-
is linearly closer to the verb. Interference was also tion, which does not intervene between the subject
found to be stronger with prepositional phrase mod- and the verb on the surface. These effects contrast
ifiers (e.g., The editor of the history books) than with the absence of interference found in construc-
with relative clauses (e.g., The editor who rejected tions that have exactly the same surface orders but
the books), the former being situated hierarchically different underlying hierarchical structures (free
Sentence
731
732 Taste, Philosophical Perspectives
aromas can make substances taste creamier. The aware of different stages, thereby missing much of
colors liquids have can influence the perception the detail. In this way, how we taste affects what we
of flavor. The high-frequency sound of our own taste. When assessing food and drink there is room
crunching, when boosted, can make stale potato for individual variation, not only because people dif-
chips taste fresher. Low temperatures can accen- fer in what they like and dislike but because they
tuate bitterness as we notice when coffee goes cold. may have different experiences as a result of the dif-
The greater a liquids viscosity the greater its per- ferent thresholds they have for the basic taste quali-
ceived sweetness. Should we treat such cross-modal ties of sweet, salt, sour, bitter, savory, and metallic.
effects as illusions or just routine aspects of human So-called supertasters have heightened sensitivity to
tasting experiences? (Notice that cross-modal effects some of these qualities and frequently find unpleas-
leave a trace in our language, such as when we ant what the rest of us enjoy.
describe vanilla as sweet-smelling even though
sweet is detected only by taste receptors and vanilla The Subjectivity and Objectivity of Tasting
is not itself sweet.)
How does this newly revealed complexity in our tast-
Aftertastes provide further evidence of the con-
ing experiences bear on the issue of whether tastes
flation of taste and smell. We experience aftertastes
are subjective or objective? At first, it appears to put
as being in the mouth even though they are retro-
pressure on the subjectivist view of taste. The subjec-
nasally sensed odors. Purely olfactory stimuli can
tivist supposes that tastes are personal experiences
be experienced as tastes and not smells, as is easily
had by individuals in response to what they ingest
demonstrated by putting a tasteless aqueous jelly
or imbibe and immediately knowable on the basis of
with olfactory properties into the mouth, which
gustatory sensations alone. The initial appeal of this
will cause subjects to report that they are having
view is due to the failure to recognize the underly-
sensations of taste on the tongue even when the
ing complexity of our tasting experiences. But how
experimental conditions are known to them. Such
do matters stand for the objectivist about taste? The
cases illustrate what is known as the location illu-
objectivist can point out that there is more to what
sion, where we relocate or refer olfactory sensations
is call taste than we notice at first. We can miss or
to the mouth. The retronasal detection of odors,
be in error about features of our experience, thus
when accompanied by sensations of touch from the
showing that in the domain of tasting, how things
tongue, leads to the referral of sensations of smell to
appear to us is not always how they are. This gap
the mouth where they are interpreted as tastes.
between appearance and reality opens up space for
a more objectivist view of tastes and the experience
The Temporal Dimension of Tasting
of tasting.
A further dimension to flavor experience is its However, the subjectivist can reply that the gap
dynamic time course. Tasting is not a simple occur- just exposed is between experience and how we
rence but an unfolding process with a separate series think about it, not between our experience of tasting
of stages. Different flavors are detected at differ- and what it is experience of. The reply is telling for
ent places in the mouth, thus tasting experiences both parties. On the one hand, the concession about
dynamic time course affects what we can pick out the often unnoticed gap between our experience and
when. Sensory characteristics will change across the immediate assumptions we make about it seems
time depending on where they are experienced. to undermine the subjectivists unproblematic enti-
This complex sequence allows us to build up a pro- tlement to the materials she relies on to make out
file of the food we consume by attaching different her case. On the other hand, the objectivist needs
hedonic responses to the different aspects discerned to do more to show that foods and wines genuinely
and to the experience as a whole. It is an activity by possess the flavors that we are better able to recog-
which we assess the things we eat and drink. Expert nize by improving our perceptual acuity.
wine tasters, for example, pay particular attention The objectivist can point out that since overall fla-
to what happens at each stage, which gives them vor perception depends on touch, itself a perceptual
clues about the qualities of a wine. Novices, by con- sense, flavor perception must be a perceptual sense.
trast, taste in a different way and are unlikely to be Subjectivists may reply that while the products of
734 Taste, Philosophical Perspectives
touch accompany the products of taste (and smell), tasters and whether we have vastly different thresh-
they are not part of what we call taste. This reply olds for certain compounds. Thus, variation may be
would be unconvincing since tactile experiences do due to something other than that individuals simply
seem to make an essential contribution to our tasting have different responses to the same tastes.
foods. We describe 2-day-old potato chips as tasting
stale, when the only difference in flavor between the Flavor Perception: One Sense or Many?
fresh and the stale crisps is a difference in texture.
Texture appears to play a constitutive role in flavor Why suppose that the unified experience of tasting
perception. misleads us about its multisensory nature? It could
be argued that what we call taste is a single sense and
Is Flavor a Psychological Construct? that the complexity revealed by neuroscience simply
concerns neural mechanisms that subserve given sen-
But what of the flavors perceived? Are they really sory modalities. This view would incorporate retro-
aspects of the external environment or just psycho- nasal olfaction into taste, even though it makes use
logical constructs? The latter view amounts to a sci- of the same olfactory receptors as smell, thus divid-
entifically informed version of subjectivism about ing it from orthonasal olfaction, which would now
taste. Flavors could be an amalgam of sensations be taken to exhaust the sense of smell. This strategy
produced by different sense modalities united into faces many problems. Not least, it fails to capture
a single percept. Such a view is still wedded to the generalizations about the interaction between taste
idea that all we recognize are properties of our own and smell. Why, for instance, do individuals with a
sensory experiences. However, the texture properties poor sense of smell have a poor sense of taste? And
of foods we describe as creamy, crunchy, or viscous why do people who lose their sense of smell report
are not properties of our sensations but properties of losing their ability to taste? Finally, what explanation
the foods in our mouths. can be given of the sweetness enhancement effects?
The objectivist about taste can point out that A very different approach is to ask whether there
flavors are not traditional secondary qualities, like is a single flavor sense, over and above its compo-
sounds or colors, which can only be detected by one nent senses. This approach treats the sense of flavor
sense. It takes at least three senses to pick out flavors. as a perceptual system that guides successful food
This does not make them common sensibles, like selection by picking out flavors as multidimensional
shape, detectable by more than one sense, since none properties of things in our environment.
of the contributing senses detects flavors on its own.
A frequent objection to objectivism about taste is Conclusion
the individual variation in subjects judgments about
foods and wines. However, care is needed in press- Tasting may yet prove one of the most illuminating
ing this objection. First, the complexity of tasting experiences for philosophers of perception to work
experiences provides the objectivist with reasons to on, revealing as it does a hidden complexity to our
expect, and the resources to explain, the variety of experience. Work in this area will require knowledge
reactions. Second, talk of variation is often exag- of the empirical findings of sensory scientists and an
gerated. Milk that has soured tastes disgusting to account of how information from separate sensory
all, and a banana could not taste like an orange to streams are integrated into a single, unified percept.
some people without there being something wrong It is an important area of interdisciplinary research
with such people or with the banana. Disagreements and more work is needed.
about how things taste usually concern complex Barry C. Smith
flavors. Third, we must distinguish between how
something tastes and whether it is to someones taste. See also Smell, Philosophical Perspectives
Individual preferences may vary a lot but it does not
follow that the particular flavors people like or dis-
like vary similarly. Of course, we cannot rule out Further Readings
that the wine you like and that I dislike tastes dif- Auvray, M., & Spence, C. (2008). The multisensory
ferently to you and to me. But this may be due to a perception of flavor. Consciousness and Cognition,
number of factors, including how skilled we are as 17(3), 10161031.
Teleology 735
Korsmeyer, C. (2002). Making sense of taste: Food and desire for a beer) rather than by citing some goal
philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. state toward which her behavior was directed.
Korsmeyer, C. (Ed.). (2005). The taste culture reader:
Experiencing food and drink (sensory formations). The Causalist View
London, UK: Berg.
Smith, B. C. (2007). Questions of taste: The philosophy of There is an active dispute among philosophers of
wine. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. mind concerning the nature of these different forms
Stevenson, R. J. (2009). The psychology of flavor. Oxford, of explanation of human action, and the dispute can
UK: Oxford University Press. serve as the dividing wedge between very different
views of mind and agency. On the one side are the
causalists, who maintain that explanation of action
in terms of reasons is a species of causal explana-
TELEOLOGY tion. Thus, when we say that Kristen went to the
kitchen because she wanted a beer, we are saying
Teleology is the study of purposes, goals, or ends; that Kristens desire for beer caused her behav-
a teleological explanation explains a process or ior of going to the kitchen. The causal account of
behavior by stating the goal toward which it was action explanation then becomes the cornerstone of
directed. This is especially relevant to the study of broadly reductionist accounts of mind, according to
mind, because part of what it is to be a creature with which facts about the mind are ultimately reducible
a mind is to act for purposes, goals, or reasons. To to physical facts.
act for reasons is to exhibit goal-directed behavior; it The causalist position is generally dominant
is to have ones behavior be teleologically explicable. within contemporary philosophy of mind, but it is
This entry explores the role of teleology in the expla- less obvious than it might appear. For starters, even
nation of human behavior, contrasting teleological if we say that the agent went to the kitchen because
and causal accounts of action explanation and clos- she wanted beer, this does not by itself imply that
ing with a discussion of attempts to reduce teleologi- the explanation is causal. Other uses of the word
cal explanation to other forms of explanation. because are clearly not causalfor example, the
argument does not work because it equivocates on
Explaining Human Action the key term. In this example, the point is that we
are justified in saying that the argument does not
Typical teleological explanations take forms like the work on the basis of the fact that there is an equivo-
following: cation; we are not claiming that the equivocation
A did B in order to G. is a cause of invalidity in the way that germs are
a cause of disease. So analogously, from the fact
A did B for the sake of G. that we might say that Kristen went to the kitchen
A did B for the purpose of achieving G. because she wanted a beer, we should not automati-
A did B to G.
cally conclude that her desire for beer is being cited
as a cause of her behavior, at least not if cause is
So, for example, we might say that Kristen went to being used in the normal sense associated with the
the kitchen in order to get a beer; this means that the physical sciences.
agent (Kristen) directed her behavior (her going to Moreover, other commonsense explanations
the kitchen) toward the state of affairs in which she of behavior are in explicitly teleological form; for
has a beer. example, Kristen went to the kitchen in order to get
When we explain the behavior of persons by citing a beer, and such explanations do not even cite an
their reasons, our explanations are often in explicitly antecedent mental state at all. The causalist must say
teleological form. However, we also sometimes give that such teleological explanations are nonetheless
reason-based explanations where the explanations best construed as or reduce to causal explanations.
are not in this form. For example, if we say, Kristen However, there have been persistent problems in get-
went to the kitchen because she wanted a beer, ting any such causalist reduction to work, and it is
then it appears that we have explained the behavior by no means clear that the problems here are merely
by citing an antecedently existing mental state (her technical. This will be further discussed below.
736 Teleology
The Teleological View just been told that there is beer in the kitchen, and
Opposing the causalists are those who take she says, Oh, good, just what I want, then it is
teleological explanations of action to be basic and clear that her subsequent behavior of going to the
irreducible to other forms of explanation. In the kitchen would be appropriate for obtaining a beer,
teleological view, goal direction is an ineliminable and it is clear enough that having a beer would have
phenomenon. On this view, explanations such as, value from Kristens perspective. Of course, things
Kristen went to the kitchen because she wanted a might not be so simple. If an annoying relative just
beer, are construed as teleological explanations. entered the room, then Kristens real goal might have
The reference to her desire for beer serves to specify been to avoid the relative, and the beer could be just
the goalnamely, that of getting a beer in the way an excuse. Or perhaps her behavior was genuinely
she desires. We need not deny that Kristens behavior directed toward both states of affairsgetting a beer
had a cause, and it seems exceedingly probable that and getting away from the relative. Further data
the causal chain leading to her behavior crucially about her behavior, including what she says and
involved various states of her brain. However, on thinks to herself, will help us in making the most
the teleological account, our commonsense, reason- rational sense of the behavior.
based explanation is not aiming to identify the cause On this approach to teleology, there is an irre-
of the behavior. The teleological explanation is sim- ducibly normative element that makes teleological
ply answering a different question: not What was explanation quite different from causal explana-
the antecedent cause of the behavior? but Toward tion. When investigating the motions of a rock or
what end was Kristen directing her behavior? Both of a planet, we are not constrained by the norma-
of these questions might be put in the words, Why tive requirement that we make the planet or rocks
did Kristen go to the kitchen? but the questions are behavior be as rational as possible. Or to put it the
nonetheless distinct. other way around, if we were to try to make ratio-
Moreover, these distinct questions likewise argu- nal sense of a planets behavior, we would fail. We
ably involve distinct methods of inquiry. When might say that the planet had the goal of following
answering the teleological question about an agents the laws of physics, and then its behaviors would
purpose in acting, we take a broadly interpretive be appropriate for the goal, but it would be hard to
approach. We attempt to make as much sense of see why following the laws of physics would have
the person as we can. We try for a theory of the value for a planet or anything else. In a teleological
agent on which she is, broadly speaking, as ratio- account, being an agent requires a complex set of
nal as possible, meaning that she believes what goals or a life. We cannot successfully attribute any-
she ought to believe and values what she ought to thing of the sort to the planet. So we conclude that
value. Accordingly, ascertaining the goal toward the planet is not an agent at all, and no teleological
which the behavior was directed, we seek candidate explanation of its behavior will be true.
explanations on which two things are true: First, the
hypothesized goal is such that the agents behavior Reductive Accounts of Teleology
is appropriate for achieving that goal, and second, The teleological account of action explanation is
the hypothesized goal is of comprehensible value quite contentious. Some philosophers claim that
for the agent. When making these judgments, we teleological explanations can be reduced to causal
naturally take into account facts about the agents explanations. For example, one might suggest that A
circumstances and epistemic situation. For example, did B in order to G is true if and only if
it might be that there is no beer to be found in the
A had a desire for G and a belief that by Bing she
kitchen, and thus Kristens behavior of walking to
could G, and this belief and desire caused As Ging.
the kitchen is bound to fail at the supposed goal
of getting a beer. However, her behavior can still However, this analysis appears to be inadequate. To
be appropriate for that goal if Kristen reasonably borrow an example from Alfred Mele, a nervous
believed that there was beer in the kitchen. philosopher at a conference desires to distract her
In routine cases, it is often quite obvious which commentator and believes that she could distract the
goal to cite in teleological explanation. If Kristen has commentator by knocking over the pitcher of water
Theory of Appearing 737
on the table. The very fact that she finds herself with selected because of their tendency to lead to greater
this desire and belief unnerves her to the point that differential reproduction of genes, whereas it is not
her hand shakes uncontrollably and her shaking the case that all rational goals that are of conceivable
hand knocks over the pitcher of water. Here, it seems value come down to this one aim. Rational animals
that the belief and desire play the causal role required can do all sorts of perfectly reasonable things that do
in the analysis above, but we would not in fact con- not benefit the reproduction of our genes. Indeed,
clude that she actually knocked over the water in some seemingly quite rational actions are inimical to
order to distract her commentator; the behavior was that endfor example, using birth control.
involuntary and not directed at anything. There can The debate concerning teleology in mind is still
and have been ingenious attempts to patch up the quite active, and there is no consensus on whether
causal analysis, but these attempts themselves seem teleological explanations can be reduced to more
to run into similar problems. naturalistic causal or selectional explanations. If the
Other philosophers try to reduce teleological nonreductionists are right, then within the realm of
explanations, not in a straightforward causal way creatures with rational minds, purpose is an inelim-
but by noting their similarity to evolutionary or inable feature of the world, and facts about mind
selectional explanations. Many biological explana- will not reduce to physical facts.
tions appear to be in teleological form:
Scott Sehon
Birds have wings in order to fly.
See also Action and Bodily Movement; Explanation of
Pandas have a thumb in order to strip the leaves
Action; Mental Causation; Philosophy of Action
off of bamboo.
In cases like this, the form of explanation is species Further Readings
K has trait T for purpose G. Behind such an expla-
nation lies an evolutionary story: Creatures of spe- Davidson, D. (1963). Actions, reasons and causes. Journal
of Philosophy, 60, 685699.
cies K had ancestors who developed trait T through
Mele, A. (1992). Springs of action: Understanding intentional
mutation, and this trait allowed those ancestors to
behavior. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
accomplish G, which in turn led to higher differen-
Millikan, R. G. (1984). Language, thought, and other
tial reproduction by members of the species with
biological categories: New foundations for realism.
trait T. Thus T came to dominate the population. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
One can put this by saying that Ks have T in order Okrent, M. (2007). Rational animals: The teleological roots
to G, but the teleological form is clearly shorthand of intentionality. Athens: Ohio University Press.
for the evolutionary story. Clearly, there need be no Schueler, G. F. (2003). Reasons and purposes: Human
agent involved, and this is not a case of irreducible rationality and the teleological explanation of action.
teleology. One might then try to see teleological Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
explanation of human action along similar reductive Sehon, S. (2005). Teleological realism: Mind, agency, and
lines. explanation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
There will, however, be substantial obstacles to Wilson, G. (1989). The intentionality of human action.
this sort of reduction of teleology. First, the explana- Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
tory pattern above concerns the relative frequency of Wright, L. (1976). Teleological explanations: An etiological
traits, and the reductionist would need to apply this analysis of goals and functions. Berkeley: University of
model in some way to individual items of behavior. California Press.
Presumably, one can give evolutionary explanations
for dispositions to behave certain ways in certain
circumstancesfor example a cats disposition to
arch its back in the presence of perceived threats. THEORY OF APPEARING
However, there will be obstacles to a complete
reductive account of rational behavior along these When we open our eyes or employ any of our other
lines. The basic problem is that all evolutionary senses, physical objects in the world appear to us.
explanations come back to items being naturally The theory of appearing is a theory of what it is
738 Theory of Appearing
for a physical object to appear to a conscious sub- theory of appearing, all there is to a physical object
ject. Preliminarily, we may say that when a physical appearing to a conscious subject is the object caus-
object appears to a conscious subject, it is related to ing the subject to have a certain kind of experience.
that subject in a certain way, so we can speak here The experience itself is merely a state of the subject;
of the appearing relation. The theory of appearing the subject is related to the physical object only in
holds that the appearing relation is a unique relation, that the physical object causes the subject to have
a relation fundamentally different from all other the experience.
kinds of relations. Consequently, it is committed to
the view that the appearing relation is not a causal The Theory of Appearing: Response
relation. The theory of appearing is controversial The advocate of the theory of appearing opposes the
because one might think that the appearing rela- causal theory of appearing because she opposes the
tion has to be a causal relation. This entry describes idea that experiences are merely states of conscious
and motivates both the theory of appearing and subjects. According to the theory of appearing, these
the opposing theory that the appearing relation is a experiences are themselves relations between physi-
causal relation, the causal theory of appearing. cal objects and conscious subjects, and it is these
experiential relations that constitute the appearance
The Causal Theory of Appearing
relations. On this view, there are relations other than
One might think that there are only a limited num- spatial, temporal, and causal relations. What moti-
ber of ways in which distinct entities can be related vates the advocate of the theory of appearing is the
to each other: They can stand in spatial relations to commonsense idea that our experiences encompass
each other, temporal relations, and/or causal rela- the physical objects we perceive. Here I am, looking
tions. Consider now the appearing relation. Suppose at the tomato that appears red to me and having a
I open my eyes and see a tomato; in virtue of see- visual experience. As noted earlier, the visual experi-
ing the tomato, the tomato visually appears to me. ence is characterized in part by redness. Part of what
A tomato cannot appear to me unless it exists at the is involved in my having this visual experience is my
same time as myself and is situated within my field being aware in some sense of this redness. But this
of vision. But surely to say that the tomato appears redness, although an element of my experience, also
to me is to say more than that the tomato is tempo- strikes me as being a feature of the tomato itself; the
rally and spatially related to me in a certain appro- tomato itself seems to be included in my experience
priate way. So the appearing relation must be at least (this is the commonsense idea to which I previously
in part a causal relation. According to the causal referred). The tomato is appearing to me in virtue of
theory of appearing, what it is for a physical object the fact that one of its features is present in my con-
to appear to a conscious subject is for the physical sciousness. Specifically, the tomato is appearing to
object to cause the conscious subject to undergo a me in virtue of appearing red to me, and it is appear-
certain kind of conscious state: a perceptual experi- ing red to me in virtue of its redness being present
ence. Consider again the tomato that is appearing to in my consciousness. I am related to the tomato via
me. Note that the tomato does not merely appear to its redness; the redness of which I am aware is itself
me in some general manner; it appears to me in vir- a relation between the tomato and myself, and it is
tue of appearing to me in particular ways: It appears this relation that constitutes the appearance relation
red to me, for example. According to the causal between the tomato and myself. Some will find it
theory of appearing, the tomato appearing red to strange to speak of redness as a relation; surely there
me is a matter of the tomato causing me to have a are no color relations in the same sense as there are
certain kind of visual experience, a visual experience spatial relations. But note that a physical object can-
somehow characterized by redness. Science gives us not appear red without appearing red to a subject;
many details about the nature of this causal pro- for a physical object to appear red is for it to be
cess (the tomato reflects light into my eyes, the light related in a certain way to a subject. And the the-
stimulates receptor neurons in my retinas, etc.), but ory of appearing holds that all there is to a physical
we need not be concerned with these details here. object appearing red is its presenting its redness in a
What is relevant here is that according to the causal subjects consciousness, so this redness itself must be
Thinking 739
of such a nature as to relate the physical object to a this field. These insights are discussed with reference
conscious subject. to a major paradigm that has been deployed over
We can now characterize the theory of appear- several decades in researching thinking processes:
ing more generally as the view that what it is for a the four-card selection task developed in the 1960s
physical object to appear to a conscious subject is by Peter Wason. The entry concludes by considering
for the physical object to present one or more of its some important trends in current thinking research.
sensory features in the subjects consciousness. The
challenge for the theory of appearing is to show that Historical Antecedents to Contemporary
it is compatible with a scientifically informed picture Thinking Research
of the world. This challenge is taken up in the read- The study of thinking extends back over 2,000 years
ings listed below. to Aristotle, who believed that it was the conscious
Harold Langsam activity of the mind, with thoughts being composed
of images. Aristotle also pioneered the method of
See also Disjunctive Theory of Perception introspection to study thinking, a technique that was
dominant in philosophy and psychology until the
Further Readings late 19th century. Aristotles view that images are
the foundation of thinking was central to the asso-
Alston, W. (1999). Back to the theory of appearing. In J. ciationist accounts of the British Empiricist School
Tomberlin (Ed.), Philosophical Perspectives: Vol. 13. of philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. This
Epistemology (pp. 181203). Malden, MA: Blackwell. view only became discredited when psychologists at
Langsam, H. (1997). The theory of appearing defended.
the University of Wurzburg in the early 20th cen-
Philosophical Studies, 87, 3359.
tury demonstrated that image-based thoughts did
Martin, M. G. F. (2004). The limits of self-awareness.
not characterize the thinking of many participants,
Philosophical Studies, 120, 3789.
with some describing no discernible thoughts at all
and others claiming their thoughts were indescrib-
able and seemingly nonconscious.
THINKING Research in the 20th century further under-
mined the notion that thinking relates to conscious
Thinking refers to the process of reasoning in order processing. Freudian theory advanced the idea of
to reach a goal. In humans, this process typically unconscious thinking as an essential determinant of
involves combining externally derived information behavior, while behaviorists such as J. B. Watson and
and prior knowledge so as to formulate and evalu- B. F. Skinner contended that all behavior, including
ate implications that may provide an answer to a thought, could be explained in terms of individu-
question or a solution to a problem. It is the goal- als learning to associate particular responses with
directed nature of thinking that sets it apart from particular stimuli when a reward was present that
mere associative processing, where one idea links reinforced such links. From a behaviorist perspec-
to another in a nonpurposive manner akin to what tive, analyzing the conscious, mentalistic corre-
takes place when daydreaming. Thinking is a core lates of thinking was an irrelevance, with thinking
topic of empirical inquiry and theoretical analysis in instead being described as reflecting acquired habits
cognitive science and subsumes a multitude of inter- and conditioned responses operating at a tacit level.
related concepts, including reasoning, categoriza- In the 1960s, the field of cognitive psychology
tion, judgment, decision making, hypothesis testing, emerged, with its basis in a new computational
problem solving, and creativity. Of all these inter- metaphor for the mind and a resurgence of interest
connected concepts, however, reasoning is arguably in the mental processes underpinning thinking
most central to understanding what thinking entails. an interest that continues unabated. Although the
This entry begins by summarizing key historical cognitive revolution meant that the study of think-
antecedents to research on thinking and reasoning ing was back on the agenda as a legitimate area
and then progresses to consider important theoreti- of inquiry, this approach made no commitment to
cal insights deriving from contemporary research in the view that thinking is necessarily conscious and
740 Thinking
available for introspective access. Indeed, there has studying thinking, including a stated goal and a need
long been recognition amongst cognitive psycholo- for hypothesis testing, deductive inference, and deci-
gists that implicit processes may dominate thinking, sion making. In its standard, abstract form (Figure
with only surface features emerging in the stream of 1) the task involves presenting participants with four
consciousness. The cognitive perspective on thinking cards that are described as each having a letter on
additionally avoids limiting such activity to humans, one side and a number on the other side. The pre-
such that certain machines (e.g., artificial intelligence sented cards display the facing sides A, J, 3, and 7.
systems) can be viewed as engaging in thinking, as Participants are also given a conditional sentence,
can certain animal species (e.g., higher order pri- If there is an A on one side of a card, then there is a
mates). Cognitive researchers have also tended to 3 on the other side, and are asked to decide which
avoid treating human thinking as synonymous with card or cards need to be turned over to determine
notions of rationality, given abundant evidence that the truth or falsity of the sentence. Common choices
thinking often appears to be irrational and subop- are A or A and 3. The logically correct choice (which
timal. Finally, the cognitive approach brought with few participants make) is A and 7, since only a card
it a renewed interest in the mental representations with an A on one side that does not have a 3 on
underpinning thinking. Although the concept of the other side would disprove the sentence; hence,
images has featured in cognitive theorizing, a rather selecting the A and the 7 is necessary to reveal such a
different concept has burgeoned over the past 30 potentially falsifying combination.
years, which is the idea espoused by Philip Johnson- Pioneering research by Jonathan Evans estab-
Laird that thinking is based on the construction and lished that responses on this task primarily reflect a
manipulation of abstract mental models of pos- matching bias, a tendency to select cards named in
sible situations. the presented sentence. This was corroborated using
sentences involving negated terms (e.g., If there is
Thinking: An Example Paradigm not an A on one side of a card, then there is not a
and Findings 3 on the other side). Although negations change
the logic of the task, thereby altering the cards that
The previous definition of thinking describes it as should be selected, participants still tend to select A
involving goal-directed reasoning. Reasoning, or and 3, in line with matching. These selection task
inference, has a long tradition in philosophy in the results are curious since they suggest that human
fields of logic and probability and emphasizes the thinking may be rather superficial in nature, showing
process of drawing implications or conclusions from limited sensitivity to logical principles of sound infer-
given information (premises). A valid deductive ence. Evans proposes that matching bias dominates
inference is one that produces a conclusion that must our intuitive reasoning on the selection task by
be true given the truth of its premises. Deduction is directing attention in a highly selective way toward
closely related to formal logic, which provides a nor- aspects of the presented information. However,
mative model against which deductive thought can Evans and Linden Ball also present evidence
be assessed. While deductive reasoning is truth pre-
serving, inductive reasoning is not, instead providing
only plausible conclusions that may or may not be
You are given four cards, as shown below, each with a single
true. The strength of induction resides in its capac- letter on one side and a single number on the other side, and
ity to enable the formulation of conjectures that the following statement: If there is an A on one side of a card,
go beyond the available information, allowing, for then there is a 3 on the other side.
example, the generation of generalizations or laws
based on repeated observations of events. A J 3 7
The Wason Selection Task
The four-card selection task developed by Peter Your task is to decide which card or cards need to be turned
over to determine whether the statement is true or false.
Wason in 1966 is certainly the most investigated
paradigm in the history of thinking research, perhaps
because it has all the hallmarks of a useful task for Figure 1 An abstract form of the Wason selection task
Thinking 741
indicating that more conscious, analytic processes off the reflective mind. Indeed, most people will have
are still engaged on the task but primarily function previously encountered something similar to the
to enable people to find good reasons to justify the drinking-age rule and will know from experience
selection of cards cued through intuitive processes. that rule breakers are those who drink alcohol when
The influence of matching bias on the selection task underage. As such, little thought is required to select
is so powerful that few participants (typically less the correct cards, which is why individuals of higher
that 10% of undergraduates) are able to overcome intelligence have no advantage over those with lower
it so as to choose the logically correct cards. Those ability on this version.
individuals who do choose correctly have superior
intelligence and an apparent ability to override intui- Current Trends in Thinking Research
tive processing by the application of what Evans Research on thinking and reasoning has produced
refers to as the reflective mindthat is, the capac- considerable evidence for so-called dual-process the-
ity to think in an abstract and hypothetical manner ories, such as the one sketched out above in relation
that is not merely dominated by the specific content to the abstract selection task, where implicit, intui-
and context of the task at hand. tive processes interact with explicit, reflective pro-
Keith Stanovich has presented his own concept of cesses in controlling responding. Evans describes his
the reflective mind, which is different in important own dual-process theory as the two minds hypoth-
ways from the notion discussed by Evans. Stanovich esis. He conjectures that the intuitive mind is old
views the reflective mind as being the disposition in evolutionary terms, sharing features with animal
to engage in explicit, analytic reasoningthat is, a cognition, whereas the reflective mind is recently
persons preference for careful, analytic deliberation evolved and distinctly human. The intuitive mind is
over quick, intuitive judgment. Furthermore, he also claimed to be the source of emotions and intu-
views the disposition to engage in analytic thinking itions, capturing adaptive behaviors acquired over
as being distinct from the actual capacity to exe- evolutionary history as well as habits acquired expe-
cute analytic thinking in an effective manner, what rientially. In contrast, the reflective mind enables
he refers to as the algorithmic mind. Presumably abstract thinking so as to facilitate reasoning about
then, the high level of intelligence needed to reason hypothetical possibilities.
logically on the abstract selection task is a manifesta- Critically, dual-process theorists propose that
tion of the joint activity of both the reflective and intuitive and reflective processes will frequently
algorithmic minds. come into conflict, and when this happens it is the
The selection task can be made much easier intuitive mind that often wins out, with the reflec-
if it is recast in a real-world format. One variant tive mind seemingly rationalizing the conflict such
(Figure 2) involves giving people a social rule, If a that people appear to be unaware of the fact that
person is drinking beer then he or she must be over their intuitions are dominating their thinking. This
18 years of age, and presenting cards representing phenomenon is not only seen in the abstract selec-
four drinkers. One side of each card depicts what tion task but in many other thinking and reasoning
the person is drinking; the other side depicts that
persons age. The presented cards have facing sides
showing Beer, Coke, 22 years of age and 16 years of Imagine yourself in the role of a police officer checking whether
age. Participants have to decide which card or cards people who are drinking in a bar are obeying the following rule:
need to be turned over to discover whether the rule If a person is drinking beer, then they must be over 18 years of
age. The cards below represent four drinkers. Each card shows
has been violated. The majority correctly chooses the what a person is drinking on one side and their age on the
person drinking beer and the person under the age other side.
of 18. Intriguingly, success on this version has little
22 yrs 16 yrs
association with intellectual ability. Evans argues Beer Coke
of age of age
that on the standard selection task the intuitive mind
is prompting the wrong answer and hindering the Your task is to decide which card or cards need to be turned
efforts of the reflective mind to apply logical reason- over to determine whether the rule is being violated.
temporal regularity is fundamental in most activities these scientists was whether time perception shared
for organisms evolving in a changing environment. common features with perception of other dimen-
Classical Pavlovian conditioning experiments as well sions, such as visual perception or auditory percep-
as later experiments on animal timing demonstrated tion. Even though time perception cannot be related
that pigeons, rats, and many other nonhuman spe- to a specific sensory system like visual or auditory
cies adapt remarkably to temporal contingencies perception, some principles indeed seem to apply to
of the environment, displaying highly developed time perception as well as to perception of visual or
abilities in interval timing and revealing a key role auditory features of stimuli. One major principle is
of temporal associations in learning. Things that are Webers law, which states that the just noticeable
judged to be close in time tend to be associated, and difference (jnd) between two stimulus values (e.g.,
this link constitutes the basis of learning in humans line length, light brightness, or tone duration) is a
and other animals. Estimating time and process- constant proportion of the smaller of the two val-
ing temporal order are also essential in performing ues. It will be easier to notice the 1-second (s) differ-
complex activities requiring coordination in move- ence between 1 s and 2 s than the same difference
ments or action, anticipation of times of occurrence between 50 s and 51 s. Although the jnd appeared
in a dynamic environment, or remembering ordered to be an increasing function of the smaller duration
elements like digits in phone numbers or words in values, in more recent studies on time perception
sentences. In addition to being intimately related to the relationship is not exactly linear over all values
most common activities involving planning, coordi- (especially when shorter than .25 s or longer than
nation, and memory, the ability to estimate time is 2 s) and is better described by a generalized form of
also essential in rhythmic activities such as playing Webers law.
music or dancing. Differences between judgments of very short and
A stopwatch is an efficient mechanism for esti- longer intervals (e.g., shorter than .25 s and longer
mating duration: It starts and ends at distinct than 2 s) suggest that different mechanisms may
moments, and the amount of temporal information be responsible for estimating intervals of various
accumulated between these two points constitutes ranges. Perception of short time intervals is influ-
an objective assessment of the interval bounded by enced by their sensory content. One example is the
the two points. Humans can quite accurately per- filled-duration illusion: A filled interval is usually
form that kind of interval timing without any exter- perceived as longer than the same empty interval.
nal time-keeping device. Interval timing is flexible For example, a .25 s tone will be judged longer than
in that it can start and stop any time in response a silent .25 s interval between two brief markers.
to the demands of the environment, in contrast There are also some differences in judgments of
to rhythmic timing, such as in circadian rhythms, short stimuli of different modalities. One differ-
which is often determined by rather rigid constraints ence is that people judge an auditory stimulus to be
and shows relatively small variability. The phenom- longer than a visual stimulus of the same duration.
ena, methods, and models described below mostly However, although judgments of short durations are
concern human interval timing in the few hundred influenced by the sensory systems used in the timing
milliseconds to minutes range. task, most current models of time perception assume
that a common mechanism underlies time percep-
tion in the various modalities.
Interval Timing in Humans:
Judgments of longer durationsthat is, longer
The Main Phenomena
than about 1 srequire storing temporal informa-
Our subjective experience of time does not corre- tion relative to the ongoing duration in working
spond necessarily to objective time, as measured by memory. Attention is another cognitive process
an accurate clock. The first experimental studies on involved in judgments of longer durations. The
the relationship between perceived and objective influence of attention is especially obvious in inter-
time were performed in the 19th century by psycho- ference studies, which reveal that when people are
physicists such as Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, estimating the duration of a time interval, perform-
and Ernst Weber. One issue considered important by ing some attention-demanding task at the same time
744 Time Perception
perturbs considerably the precision of their estimate. internal-clock models, on which this section
The interference usually results in a shortening of mostly focuses, this relationship is explained by
the perceived duration, and the longer or the more assuming the existence of a mechanism similar to
attention-demanding the concurrent task, the shorter an interval timer in humans and other animals.
the perceived duration. A related finding is that the Like a clock, this mechanism would emit tempo-
mere expectation of a signal interferes with timing. ral units (often named pulses) that are related to
As with concurrent tasks, the longer the duration of real time in an orderly way. The scalar expectancy
expectancy, the shorter the perceived duration. The theory (SET) is an influential internal-clock model
interference effect is generally attributed to the fact of time estimation that includes three categories of
that precise timing requires continuous attention, so processes related respectively to the clock, memory,
if a distracting activity is performed while timing, and decision. Although initially developed from
then some temporal information is lost, resulting in experiments with rats and pigeons, this model
shorter perceived duration. appears to be very useful in interpreting results of
experiments with humans. In this model, the clock
Methods and Paradigms level includes a pacemaker emitting pulses that
The main methods used in human time perception are stored in an accumulator if a switch is closed,
studies are duration comparison or discrimination, permitting accumulation. The content of the accu-
production or reproduction of time intervals, and mulator is transferred to working memory if the
verbal estimation. Duration discrimination involves task requires a memory representation of the cur-
posing a relative judgmentfor example, deciding rent time. The current time value is compared with
which is the longer of two tones. In time produc- a remembered criterion time sampled from a ref-
tion or reproduction, a participant may be asked to erence memory in order to evaluate whether the
reproduce the duration of a tone by pressing a key ratio between the current and remembered values
for a duration equal to the presented duration. Most is small enough to decide that they correspond. The
methods can be used in two general paradigms, decision rule varies according to the particular task
retrospective and prospective. In the retrospective requirements. Some experiments in animal timing
paradigm, people estimate in retrospect the dura- suggest that the switch permitting accumulation of
tion of a past temporal interval; this paradigm may temporal information may be attention controlled,
be required if during the stimulus presentation they which would also explain that distracting activities
were not aware that an estimate of its duration would shorten perceived time in humans by preventing
have to be provided. In the prospective paradigm, accumulation of temporal information. Attention
people estimate the duration of a stimulus during is also central in other internal-clock models of
its presentation. Different factors seem to affect per- human time estimation, in which the amount of
formance in the two paradigms: Retrospective judg- temporal information accumulated is positively
ments are more dependent on the memory of the related to the amount of attention devoted to tem-
number of events or perceived changes taking place poral processing.
during the elapsed duration; prospective judgments In the first internal-clock models, pulses emitted
are strongly influenced by the amount of attention by the pacemaker were assumed to be the basis of
devoted to time during the ongoing duration. This temporal information in humans, but it has been
difference corresponds to the paradoxical observa- suggested more recently that oscillatory processes
tion that a past period of time may seem long in constitute this basis. Periodicities related to oscil-
retrospect when many things happened during that latory processesfor example, electrical cortical
period but that time flies when we are busy or hav- oscillationsare present in the bodies of humans
ing fun. Different models thus attempt to explain and other animals. These processes present regular
experimental data obtained in the retrospective and phases and would provide the basic information of
prospective paradigms, respectively. the internal clock.
Humans and other animals may also use
their own behavior to estimate time (finger tap-
Models of Prospective Timing
ping in humans, wheel running before pressing a
Prospective temporal estimates in humans are lever for rats). Some behavioral models of timing
approximately related to objective clock time. In assume that behavior supports time estimation
Two System Models of Reasoning 745
Table 1 Properties conventionally used to distinguish other researchers have compared probabilistic rea-
the two systems soning using a task that involves both intuition and
Intuitive System Deliberative System deliberation with a deductive reasoning task that
relies more heavily on deliberation and found that
Product is conscious, Agent is aware of both both activate the medial frontal region bilaterally
process is not product and process as well as the cerebellum. Probabilistic reasoning
Automatic Effortful and volitional activated the left dorsolateral frontal regions more
Driven by similarity and Driven by more and deductive reasoning activated right occipital
association structured, relational and parietal regions more.
knowledge
Fast and parallel Slower and sequential Decision Making
Unrelated to general Related to general People differ in which system they habitually use
intelligence and working intelligence and working to make decisions. Some people are more likely than
memory capacity memory capacity others to inhibit incorrect intuitive responses in order
to make more deliberative decisions. Such people
tend to make choices that map more closely onto the
expected value of options. In gambles that promise
entry provides an overview of the evidence for this gains, they are more risk seeking than less deliber-
characterization. ate people, and in gambles that promise losses, they
are more risk averse. But deliberative reasoning can
Characterizing the Systems sometimes lead to worse decisions. Because of the
Deductive Reasoning limited capacity of working memory, deliberation is
only able to consider a few attributes of each option.
The distinction between intuition and delibera-
Therefore, intuition is better equipped to make deci-
tion helps characterize how people think in almost
sions when there are many relevant attributes and is
every area of cognition that has been studied. To
better at accommodating attributes that are difficult
illustrate, deductive inferences such as determining
to verbalize or quantify. Some believe that intuition
what follows from if p then q and p is true,
is closely related to affect, although little evidence
can be made either way. Deliberation leads to more
supports this claim.
correct judgments of logical validity, but correct
inferences require more processing time and more
Categorization
attention than intuitive inferences. They are thus less
likely in the face of attention-demanding secondary Categorization can be either rule based or simi-
tasks. Even without distractions, people are biased larity based. Rule-based categorization classifies
when judging the validity of arguments in favor of based on no more than a few dimensions, is easily
conclusions they believe to be true; their intuitive applied to novel stimuli, and is learned and used
beliefs inhibit their ability to analyze whether a con- explicitly. Similarity-based categorization aggre-
clusion follows logically from an arguments prem- gates over many dimensions, generalizes only with
ises. People are sensitive to instructions; for instance, a measure of uncertainty, and cannot be verbalized.
requests to respond deductively versus inductively People are more likely to use rule-based processes
change which system dominates, but people do not when they need to explain or justify their responses.
seem able to rely exclusively on deliberation while Using different methodologies, several brain-
ignoring their intuitions. imaging studies have found distinct activation pat-
Studies using functional imaging demon- terns for the two types of categorization, though the
strate that different brain areas become activated activated regions corresponding to rule- and similar-
depending on whether a task demands associative ity-based processing have varied. A study using arti-
responses or rule use. Some studies of deductive ficial visual stimuli found activation in the medial
inference have suggested that a left temporal path- temporal lobe for rule-based category learning and
way corresponds to one reasoning system while a in the basal ganglia for similarity-based category
bilateral parietal pathway underlies the other. But learning. Another study used meaningful category
Two System Models of Reasoning 747
labels and found increased activation in frontal areas moral judgments tend to conform to the principle
for rule-based categorization but not for similarity that harm intended as a means is worse than harm
judgments. A study using novel animal-like stimuli foreseen as a side effect, but people are not able to
showed increased activation in left inferior frontal articulate that principle. This suggests that some
cortex and anterior cingulate when explicit rules moral judgments are made on the basis of intuition,
rather than similarity to prototypes were used for although people have access to a system sometimes
classification. capable of generating justifications. Joshua Greene
and his colleagues have given people a variety of
Problem Solving moral dilemmas while imaging their brain activa-
tion using fMRI. Some dilemmas were solved based
People solve problems in two ways, using intu-
on simple rules, others based on feelings that people
ition (the a-ha experience) or deliberately and
could not justify. The former were associated with
analytically. People can predict how long a prob-
areas of the brain usually associated with working
lem will take to solve but only when it lends itself
memory, the latter with areas usually associated
to analytic and not intuitive processing. Some types
with emotion and social cognition.
of problems, such as math problems, are inherently
symbolic and appropriate for rule-based analytic Planning
processing. Greater working memory capacity helps
solve such problems. Sian Beilock and her colleagues In research on planning and action, the two sys-
have shown that pressure to perform can impede tems are evident in the difference between novel
performance, especially for individuals with more and routine action plans. Sometimes we break
working memory resources. goals down into subgoals, a deliberate process that
is verbally accessible and working memory inten-
Judgment sive. In contrast, actions that lead to a familiar
goal, such as brushing your teeth, involve acting
Several phenomena of judgment provide evi- out learned schema. This can happen with very
dence for and help to characterize dual systems little awareness or cognitive effort while engaged
of thinking. The most prominent example is the in a parallel task. Such intuitive planning can result
conjunction fallacy of probability judgment, the in errors. A stimulus in the environment can evoke
observation that an event (e.g., that a flood will a familiar action but one that does not achieve the
devastate Manhattan sometime this century) is current goal (e.g., eating another cashew when you
sometimes judged less probable than a conjunction intended to stop). Such action slips are common in
that includes that event (e.g., that global warming certain frontal lobe patients and occur in healthy
will cause glaciers to melt and a flood will devastate individuals when working memory is occupied by
Manhattan sometime this century) even though this another taskfor example, when deliberation is
contradicts the prescriptions of probability theory. unable to intervene.
This exemplifies simultaneous contradictory belief,
a phenomenon in which we are predisposed to
Factors Governing System Choice
believe that the conjunction is more likely even after
we have discovered that it is not logically possible. The deliberative system is more resource intensive
People with lower IQs are more likely to commit than the intuitive system, so intuition dominates
the conjunction fallacy as are people engaged in when resources are scarce. Increases in time pressure
a secondary task, again suggesting that working or working memory demands increase the propor-
memory capacity must be available to engage in tion of intuitive responses. Decreasing physiological
deliberation. resources such as sugar has the same effect. After
Moral judgments also have at least two bases, an energy-depleting task, people who drank lem-
a deliberative one and a more intuitive one. People onade with sugar made more rule-based decisions
are only able to justify some of their moral judg- than those who drank lemonade with an artificial
ments (e.g., committing a bad act is worse than sweetener.
not acting even if the outcome is the same). Other Mood also influences which system guides behav-
justifications cannot be articulated. For example, ior. When people are sad, they deliberate more and
748 Two System Models of Reasoning
make more consistent decisions. When people are theory of the neuroanatomy underlying deliberation
happy, they integrate more general knowledge into or intuition.
their thinking, are more risk-averse when choosing One open question concerns the relation between
gambles, and make better intuitive judgments, all intuition and emotion. Another concerns how the
suggesting greater intuitive processing. systems interact. Jonathan Evans has distinguished
Work by Danny Oppenheimer and his colleagues several models of their interaction. Most of the evi-
has shown that disfluency, the sense that a task is dif- dence favors the parallel-competitive model, which
ficult, increases the degree of deliberative processing proposes that the intuitive and deliberative systems
on that task. Disfluency is a metacognitive signal that process information in parallel and any conflict
a difficult problem requires deliberation. However, is resolved after both processes generate potential
it increases deliberative processing even when inci- responses. But there is also reason to believe the
dentalfor instance, when a reasoning problem is default-interventionist model, which states that the
printed in a blurry font or participants are asked to intuitive system always operates first, followed by
furrow their brows (suggesting cognitive effort). an optional deliberative intervention and override or
elaboration of the intuitive response. Of course, both
Conclusion models might be partially correct because cognitive
The distinction between deliberative and intuitive processing can involve many cycles of interaction.
thinking has helped explain phenomena from a vast Steven Sloman and Adam Darlow
assortment of cognitive domains. All these expla-
nations refer to a deliberative system that requires See also Automaticity; Categorization, Neural Basis;
effort and working memory, which is selective in Decision Making, Neural Underpinnings; Deductive
the information it uses but can abstract away from Reasoning; Mental Effort; Representativeness
specific content, and that provides conscious access Heuristic; Thinking; Working Memory
to the process in addition to the result of a com-
putation. These explanations also refer to an intui- Further Readings
tive system that is automatic and unhampered by
concurrent tasks, that integrates information associ- Beilock, S. L., & DeCaro, M. S. (2007). From poor
ated with specific content, and that provides only performance to success under stress: Working memory,
the result of a computation to conscious awareness. strategy selection, and mathematical problem solving
Some theorists argue that rather than two distinct under pressure. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
systems, reasoning varies on a continuum between Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(6), 983998.
De Neys, W. (2006). Dual processing in reasoning: Two
intuitive and analytic processes. Others argue that
systems but one reasoner. Psychological Science, 17,
the many distinctions made between two forms of
428433.
reasoning do not map onto the same two systems.
Evans, J. (2007). Hypothetical thinking: Dual processes in
Magda Osman and Ruth Stavy show that chil-
reasoning and judgment. London, UK: Psychology Press.
dren use some rules without deliberation or effort in Greene, J., Nystrom, L. E., Engell, A. D., Darley, J. M., &
ways that conflict with other rules. The rule-based Cohen, J. D. (2004). The neural bases of cognitive
system is not constituted by a consistent logical conflict and control in moral judgment. Neuron, 44,
system. Rather, different rules emerge depending 389400.
on how problems are framed, what the focus of the Rips, L. J. (1989). Similarity, typicality, and categorization.
question is, and what is most available to the prob- In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and
lem solver. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that analogical reasoning (pp. 2159). New York, NY:
there is a single deliberative system. Whether there is Cambridge University Press.
a single intuitive system or a class of loosely related Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of
intuitive processes is not so clear. reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 322.
Imaging data suggests that distinct brain mecha- Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2000). Individual
nisms can be engaged by varying instructions, but differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality
the evidence does not clearly support any specific debate. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 645726.
U
Historical Background
UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS,
Historically, interest in the limits of emotional self-
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES understanding and the relation of emotion to con-
sciousness dates back to Sigmund Freud and several
How do you feel right now? Do you feel happy, sad, of his contemporaries. Freud speculated that peo-
disgusted, fearful, excited, disappointed, or angry? If ple can sometimes be mistaken about what triggers
so, to what extent? Further, if you indicated that you their emotion. For example, a woman may believe
are indeed in an emotional state, what is the cause of that she is attracted to a man because of his pro-
it? What specific event brought it about? Questions fessional achievements, but in fact she likes the
like these are being asked in hundreds of psychologi- mans similarity to her father. Freud also speculated
cal studies conducted all over the world. They are about the possibility of confusion about the nature
also being asked in a similar form by economists and of ones own emotional state. For example, a man
sociologists who assess life satisfaction, doctors who may believe that he feels angry at his partner for
assess patient pain level or the presence of a psychi- being late, whereas in fact he feels jealousa feeling
atric condition, marketing researchers who assess he either cannot identify, name, or perhaps admit.
customer satisfaction, and many other professionals. Finally, Freud wondered whether some emotions
Though the process by which people answer these are sometimes kept from consciousnesses, such as
questions may appear straightforward, it presumes sons sexual feelings toward his mother or his homi-
that people actually know (a) that they feel an emo- cidal anger toward his father.
tion, (b) what specific emotion they feel, and (c) why
they feel it. In contrast, research in psychology
Modern Research
reveals that, under some circumstances, people can
be wrong about their emotions. Specifically, people Modern psychology has largely rejected Freuds
can be in an emotional state without having any con- vision of psyche and his dramatic speculations.
scious awareness of being in that state. People can be However, interest in those issues remains high, and
wrong about the state they are in. And finally, they empirical research, now armed with tools of psy-
can be wrong and even unconscious about the causes chology and neuroscience, shows that emotion,
of their emotional state. In short, the topic of uncon- consciousness, and understanding can dissociate
scious emotion deals with the fundamental ques- but usually in much less dramatic forms, as shown
tion of conscious access to and self-understanding next. Note, however, that some of the following
of ones own emotional life. The remainder of this examples involve mild, undifferentiated emotional
entry covers the historical background of this idea states (e.g., moods and changes in general positivity/
and gives several examples from modern research. negativity).
749
750 Unconscious Emotions, Psychological Perspectives
Mistaken Beliefs About Causes without awareness and how strong and durable are
and Nature of Ones Emotion reactions elicited by such stimuli.
Modern research shows that if a newly encoun-
Fully Unconscious Emotion
tered person is similar to the participants significant
other (e.g., sibling, parent, close friend), the partici- Perhaps the greatest controversy in psychology
pant will partially transfer (generalize) the traits of regarding unconscious emotion surrounds the pos-
the significant other to the new person, without real- sibility that people may sometimes not even realize
izing that he or she is doing so. Several classic studies that they are in an emotional state. There is some lit-
found that mood or arousal because of one source erature on dissociations between emotion and con-
can transfer (spill over) to an irrelevant object. For sciousness in hypnotic states. Some dramatic cases
example, participants aroused from riding an exer- have been reported of people engaging in strong
cise bike rate pictures of members of the opposite emotional acts while in a state characterized by lack
sex as more attractive. Men who have just viewed of full consciousness (e.g., cases of sleep murder,
an erotic picture rate a completely unrelated finan- sleep intercourse). Empirically, however, this kind
cial gamble as more profitable. In another example, of fully unconscious emotion has been a difficult
participants called on a sunny day, and thus feeling topic to study because of the impossibility of com-
happy, give higher ratings on a variety of judgments, pletely excluding that a person did not feel some-
including life satisfaction. thing or wasnt somehow aware. There are also
limits on generalizing from cases that may involve
Emotional States Induced Without Awareness psychopathology. Still, there are some intriguing
It is possible to elicit mild emotional states by results from a series of studies on typical college
presenting stimuli completely without awareness. participants. Those studies unobtrusively exposed
This is often done using subliminal presentations participants to several happy or angry subliminal
in which stimuli are presented in a way that pre- emotional facial expressions. After that emotional
vents awareness. The method can involve flashing induction, participants were asked to perform some
the stimuli very briefly (e.g., 5 milliseconds [ms]), emotion-related behavior (e.g., drinking a novel
presenting them outside the focus of attention (e.g., beverage, making a gamble). Participants were also
as flashes in the corner of the computer screen), asked to report their emotional state. The emotion
masking (covering) the stimulus with another, more state was also monitored using psychophysiology.
salient object, or typically, a combination of these Interestingly, in those studies the ratings of con-
methods. For example, participants who were sub- scious feelings were unaffected by subliminal faces.
liminally flashed a large number of emotion-related Yet participants showed changes in their emotional
words reported changes in a generalized mood state, behavior. For example, they consumed more of the
without realizing what brought on that change. beverage after happy rather than after angry faces.
Further, repeated subliminal presentation of simple They gambled more after happy than after angry
geometric figures (polygons) has been shown to lead faces. Further, the psychophysiological measures
to subtle mood enhancement, presumably because indicated that the emotional faces elicited emotion-
repeated stimuli elicit a warm feeling of familiar- appropriate changes in the bodily state (e.g., more
ity. Another study showed that negative mood can smiling and less startling to loud noises, etc.). As
be enhanced by subliminally presenting images of such, these results suggest that, at least in some
snakes and spiders to phobic individuals. Finally, circumstances, one can induce an emotional state
many studies showed that very briefly presented that drives a persons physiology and overt behavior
emotional stimuli (e.g., faces) can lead to physi- without that state giving rise to conscious, report-
ological and judgmental manifestations of emotion able feelings. In short, there may indeed be fully
(e.g., as reflected in the activation of emotional brain unconscious emotion.
systems and their bodily concomitants). Of course, Piotr Winkielman
with all these examples, it is important to remem-
ber that the stimuli used are very simple. This is See also Consciousness and the Unconscious; Emotions
important because there is a debate in psychology to and Consciousness; Subliminal Perception;
what extent novel, complex stimuli can be processed Unconscious Perception
Unconscious Perception 751
condition that precludes conscious perception (e.g., meaning. Perception organizes and interprets sensory
blindsight, discussed below). information, making it possible to understand the
By definition, subliminal phenomena are restricted meaning of objects and events. A compelling distinc-
to stimuli that are either extremely degraded or pre- tion between sensation and perception (and between
sented so briefly that nothing meaningful can be per- conscious and unconscious perception) can be illus-
ceived. For example, a word flashed on a computer trated by the case of a rare neurological syndrome,
screen for 1 millisecond (ms) is experienced as no prosopagnosia (sometimes referred to as face
more than a flash of light; although there is a sen- blindness). A person with prosopagnosia can have
sation, neither word nor even letters are perceived. perfect perception of individual facial features (e.g.,
Nevertheless, even such stimuli can be shown to eyes, nose, lips), but cannot synthesize those details
have been processed (perceived) subconsciously. appropriately to accurately recognize a well-known
How can a stimulus be unconscious? It cannot, of friend or spouse. It is unclear whether individuals
course. But a person can be unaware of a stimulus with prosopagnosia have unconscious perception of
or at least unaware of its identity. For example, in familiar faces or whether such perception is simply
one typical experiment by John Seamon, Richard neurally disconnected. (Once a familiar but visu-
Marsh, and Nathan Brody (published in 1984), ally unrecognized person speaks, that person can be
irregular 8-sided polygons were presented for 2, 8, identified immediately.) Foreign language provides
12, 24, or 28 ms. Polygons presented for 2 to 8 ms another example: The spoken phrase tudo azul can
were indeed processed, as evidenced by subsequent be heard (sensed) by any normal listener as human
correct affective judgments: Compared to nonpre- speech but only perceived as a meaningful phrase by
sented items, previously presented items were liked someone who speaks Portuguese.
better. In contrast, conscious recognition (i.e., Memory also affects perception, even (or per-
subjects had to determine which polygons had been haps especially) when such memory is unconscious
presented previously) required presentations of at (known as implicit memory). For example, even
least 12 ms to achieve above-chance levels of perfor- though subjects could not consciously remember
mance. These findings demonstrate two principles: pictures they had seen 17 years previously (some
(a) Very briefly presented stimuli are (or at least can could not even remember having participated in the
be) processed unconsciously, but (b) conscious access experiment!), David Mitchell found that implicit
is available only for stimuli presented for somewhat memory enabled perception of the corresponding
longer intervals. (In this study, the threshold was 17-year-old picture fragments. In our everyday expe-
presumably somewhere between 812 ms.) riences, sensation, perception, and memory blend
into a seamless process. However, the remainder of
Sensation, Perception, and Memory this entry focuses on events in the observers current
Although cognitive psychology allots these three perceptual field.
processes to separate pigeonholes, of course they
A Brief History of the Unconscious
are all related. Indeed, the three phenomena nor-
mally function seamlessly and often subconsciously. Within experimental psychology, unconscious
Sensation can be defined as the raw input of exter- perception is one of the most venerable topics.
nal stimuli and involves processes by which sensory Its primordial status can be traced to 1884, when
receptors and the nervous system receive and rep- C. S. Pierce and J. Jastrow published the first
resent environmental stimulus energies. Although empirical report on small differences in sensation
we are typically aware of sensory inputs, elementary (without awareness). The concept of unconscious
sensation can occur without awareness. For exam- perception, however, predates empirical research.
ple, the pupil of the eye can respond to light, and For example, in 1867 Hermann von Helmholtz
galvanic skin responses or event-related potentials in theorized that that perception was dependent on
the brain can be recorded independent of concomi- unconscious inference.
tant awareness. Unconscious perception has been one of the most
In contrast, perceptionin its quintessential controversial topics in experimental psychology
definitiontypically requires some cognizance of (a checkered past, in John Kihlstroms words).
Unconscious Perception 753
Skepticism surrounding its existence (and accompa- (popular books by Wilson Bryan Key in the 1970s,
nying methodology) has contributed to its contro- 1980s, and 1990s, and by August Bullock in 2004).
versial nature. Interest in unconscious phenomena In spite of the negative publicity, however, legitimate
has waxed and waned for over a century, both research on unconscious phenomena in cognitive
among scientists and the hoi polloi. The waning of and social psychology finally picked up.
empirical research on subliminal perception in par-
ticular may be traced to a famous but highly con-
Empirical Evidence and Recent
troversial movie theater study by James Vicary in
Research Topics
1957, in which he claimed that popcorn and Coca-
Cola sales were increased by subliminal ads. Indeed, Hundreds of studies (nearly 1,300 since 1990 alone)
the 1960s saw only 8% of the studies in this area, have revealedaccording to most researchers
but the number of studies picked up in the last three unambiguous evidence for unconscious perception.
decades (71% of all subliminal studies). In contrast, As John Kihlstrom put it in 2008, the evidence sat-
the number of studies dealing with the more general isfies all but the most determined critics (p. 587).
concept of unconscious perception (including both Thanks to rigorous methodological developments,
cognitive and social processes) has shown a steady even the critics have come around, with only some
rise, with the count nearly doubling since 2000. particular phenomena excepted. For example,
Indeed, research in unconscious perception has Anthony Greenwald and his colleagues demon-
mushroomed recently, and a 2005 volume by Ran strated conclusively that subliminal message self-
Hassin, James Uleman, and John Bargh proclaimed help audio media do nothing for consumers beyond
the current era as the new unconscious. standard expectancy (placebo) effects. For example,
while products claiming to promote weight loss or
Controversy to improve memory or self-esteem produced no
What made the topic of unconscious perception such effects, audiotapes that were systematically
controversial? In spite of earlier empirical research mislabeled did affect consumers perceptions solely
documenting the phenomenon, the publicity sur- according to what was printed on the label. In a series
rounding Vicarys hoax coupled with some failures of studies, John Vokey and Don Read investigated
to replicate, along with the behaviorists demoni- claims about backmaskingbackward speech
zation of mentalism, made subliminal perception presumably embedded in rock music intended to
scientifically improper. Even following the cogni- promote evil behaviorsand found no evidence that
tive revolution spurred by Ulric Neissers 1976 subjects could process backward speech at any level.
Cognition and Realitywhere mental phenomena (Note that backmasking has no relation to back-
were restored to scientific legitimacy and intellectual ward masking, a rigorous experimental technique
respectabilitythe emphasis in cognitive psychology for eliminating conscious perception in visual tasks.)
remained grounded in conscious experience, and the In any case, the predominant current view is that
unconscious remained taboo. The zeitgeist subse- unconscious perception is a viable, replicable, and
quently shifted, due in part to John Kihlstroms 1987 scientifically respectable phenomenon. According
Cognitive Unconscious article in Science, which to Sid Kouider and Stanislas Dehaene, the only
restored the respectability of this field. Namely, the controversy remaining has to do with the depth of
unconscious was no longer restricted to Freudian processing of invisible stimuli. In other words, are
concepts or to pseudoscientific claims about sublim- unconsciously perceived stimuli processed only at a
inal advertising. physical level (shapes, letters, or partial components
In addition to the controversial (pseudoscientific, of words) or at a complete and meaningful semantic
cargo cult status) and methodological issues sur- level? The jury is not yet in on this question; evi-
rounding subliminal perception in particular, were dence exists for both scenarios.
fears foisted on the public by nonscientists claiming
Stimuli That Are Not Consciously Perceived
that advertising agencies were using subliminal tech-
niques to effectively alter consumer behavior and Evidence that stimuli blocked from con-
endanger the American culture via sexual imagery scious awareness can be perceived comes from
754 Unconscious Perception
process-dissociation procedures, neurological cor- with damage to the striate cortex in the brain can-
relates, evaluative and affective effects, semantic not consciously see objects; however, they can point
priming effects, social judgments, perception under toward or grasp these objects accurately when
surgical anesthesia, behavior, and neuropsycho- encouraged to reach out. A similar dissociation
logical dissociations, just to name a few. Work by between conscious perception of facial features
Anthony Marcel in the 1980s set the standard for without corresponding recognition of a familiar per-
rigorous laboratory demonstrations of unconscious son occurs in prosopagnosia.
perception in word recognition paradigms. Marcel
used the technique of pattern masking, in which a Unconscious Processes
mask presented immediately after a briefly presented In very recent research, Ap Dijksterhuis and his
word prevented observers from seeing the word. colleagues have discovered many advantages of
Nonetheless, subsequently presented words that unconscious processes. Complex decisions (e.g.,
were semantically related to the unperceived primes choosing an apartment, playing chess, predicting
were facilitated. More recent work has employed soccer matches, clinical diagnoses) can be made
sandwich masking, in which patterns are pre- faster and even more accurately unconsciously than
sented both before and after a brief stimulus, mak- consciously. Dijksterhuis argues that unconscious
ing the possibility of conscious perception extremely thought is faster because it is not constrained by the
unlikely. The mere exposure effect championed capacity limitations of conscious processes. Some
by R. B. Zajonc includes affective preferences for investigators have concluded that the brain does
stimuli experienced without awarenesseven not care whether representations are conscious
prenatallyeven though the same stimuli cannot be or notthat is, the representation is just there.
consciously recognized. Such processes have also been found to influence
Although most of the research on unconscious unconscious behaviors such as walking speed. For
perception has involved vision, recent work has example, John Bargh and his colleagues have found
included unconscious perception in the realms that people walked more slowly after being exposed
of olfaction and audition. Unconscious auditory to words related to elderly concepts implying
perception has been investigated not only in the slowness.
laboratory, but also in patients under general anes-
thesia. In the latter studies, the stimuli are presented
Applications and Conclusions
at an audible level (typically via headphones), but
the perceiver is unconscious during input. After an Regarding advertising, recent work has focused
early study by B. W. Levinson in 1965, this field on using and abusing subliminal stimulation in
was quiet, but with the advent of work on implicit this field, showing that under very specific circum-
memory, research picked up in the 1990s. In 2007, stances, it is possible to influence consumer choices.
Jackie Andrade and Catherine Deeprose found at For example, Dijksterhuis and his colleagues found
least two-dozen studies that included the Bispectral that subjects can be stimulated to increase their sub-
Index, a rigorous indicator of the depth of anes- jective ratings of hunger and thirst, can be made
thesia (i.e., is the patient actually unconscious?). to actually eat or drink more, and that even brand
They concludedwith careful emphasis on studies choices can be influenced. Some investigators argue
that had controlled for undetected awareness on that the evidence is strong enough to say that com-
the part of patients undergoing surgerythat some mercial applications of subliminal stimulation can
degree of unconscious perception occurs during work in principle and that such phenomena should
anesthesia. That perception (measured by implicit not be treated as a myth unworthy of investiga-
memory) can occur when patients are unconscious is tion. On the other hand, there has been abuse of
so accepted that a recent article explored the possi- popular belief in subliminal stimulation by market-
bility of sex differences in memory formation dur- ing self-help audio media (I feel fantastic, Lets
ing general anesthesia (none were found). stay away from pizza, etc.); research has repeatedly
Regarding neuropsychological conditions, blind- failed to find any benefit. However, some research
sight (first reported by Lawrence Weiskrantz in suggests that visual subliminal perception may be
1986) involves a phenomenon wherein individuals more effective than auditory subliminal perception.
Unconscious Perception 755
If true, a probable explanation is that information Hassin, R. R., Uleman, J. S., & Bargh, J. A. (Eds.). (2005).
processing capacity is magnitudes greater for visual The new unconscious. New York, NY: Oxford
than the auditory modality. However, subliminal University Press.
auditory stimuli can be processedeven across to Kihlstrom, J. F. (2008). The psychological unconscious.
the visual modalitybut backward speech cannot In O. P. John, R. W. Robins, & L. A. Pervin (Eds.),
be perceived at any level. Handbook of personality: Theory and research
In conclusion, there are a number of good reasons (pp. 583602). New York, NY: Guilford.
for continuing to investigate unconscious perception, Kouider, S., & Dehaene, S. (2007). Levels of processing
during non-conscious perception: A critical review of
beyond the purely scientific interest of knowledge
visual masking. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
for its own sake. There may be potential beneficial
Society, 362, 857875.
use (improving health), and it may be important to
Merikle, P. M., & Cheesman, J. (1986). Consciousness is a
know when there is potential for consumer abuse.
subjective state. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 9, 42.
David B. Mitchell Merikle, P. M., Smilek, D., & Eastwood, J. D. (2001).
Perception without awareness: Perspectives from
Authors Note: Research for and writing of this entry was cognitive psychology. Cognition, 79, 115134.
facilitated by grants from the Foley Family Foundation Mitchell, D. B. (2006). Nonconscious priming after 17
and the WellStar Foundation. years: Invulnerable implicit memory? Psychological
Science, 17, 925929.
See also Anesthesia and Awareness; Attention and gmen, H., & Breitmeyer, B. G. (Eds.). (2006). The first
Consciousness; Blindsight; Consciousness and the half second: The microgenesis and temporal dynamics of
Unconscious; Implicit Memory; Neural Correlates of unconscious and conscious visual processes. Cambridge,
Consciousness; Perceptual Consciousness and MA: MIT Press.
Attention; Subliminal Perception Seamon, J. G., Marsh, R. L., & Brody, N. (1984). Critical
importance of exposure duration for affective
discrimination of stimuli that are not recognized.
Further Readings
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Andrade, J., & Deeprose, C. (2007). Unconscious memory Memory, and Cognition, 10, 465469.
formation during anaesthesia. Best Practice & Research Vokey, J. R., & Read, J. D. (1985). Subliminal messages:
Clinical Anaesthesiology, 21, 385401. Between the devil and the media. American
Bargh, J. A., & Morsella, E. (2008). The unconscious mind. Psychologist, 40, 12311239.
Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 7379. Weiskrantz, L. (2000). Blindsight: Implications for the
Dijksterhuis, A., & Aarts, H. (2010). Goals, attention, and conscious experience of emotion. In R. D. Lane &
(un)consciousness. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, L. Nadel (Eds.), Cognitive neuroscience of emotion
467490. (pp. 277295). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Goodale, M. A., & Milner, A. D. (2004). Sight unseen: An Zajonc, R. B. (2001). Mere exposure: A gateway to the
exploration of conscious and unconscious vision. New subliminal. Current Directions in Psychological Science,
York, NY: Oxford University Press. 10, 224228.
V
have been common at least since Shakespeares time
VISUAL IMAGERY (e.g., Hamlet, Act 1, Scene ii). It is noteworthy that
people feel these terms are apt; this is a strong indi-
Visual imagery refers to the processes through cation that the conscious experience of having an
which people create mental pictures that they can image does resemble the experience of seeing. More
inspect with their minds eye. These mental rep- specifically, the imaged object or scene seems to be
resentations resemble actual depictions both subjec- viewed from some particular vantage point and is
tively and functionally and play an important role in typically seen against some background; objects
remembering and problem solving. More broadly, in the image have colors, shapes, and surface tex-
they can, by virtue of their content, powerfully guide tures that are immediately visible and so on.
the flow of thought.
Experimental Studies of Visual Images
The Subjective Qualities of Visual Images
Here as elsewhere, though, researchers are cautious
Visual images can be (and usually are) created in the in how they interpret these self-reports on conscious
absence of an actual visual stimulusand so one experience. However, the self-reports can be corrob-
can create an image of (or visualize) an elephant orated via the appropriate experiments, and the data
even if none is nearby. One can also create images make it plain that visual images do share many func-
that alter things that are in view (and so one could, tional properties with actual sights, as one would
for example, imagine this page with all the words expect based on the self-report. For example, par-
printed in green ink). More ambitiously, one can ticipants in one study were first asked to memorize
create images of things that do not exist at all (e.g., a map of an island, including the location of sev-
an image of a unicorn). In some cases, images are eral landmarks on the island. With this done, par-
created deliberately (and so someone can, if they ticipants were asked to create a mental image of the
choose, call up an image of a beautiful sunset); in map and then to scan their image from one land-
other cases, the images arise spontaneously (perhaps mark named by the experimenter to another. When
triggered by someone elses mention of a sunset). these scanning times were carefully recorded, they
Visual images are not hallucinationsthe person showed a strong linear relationship between the time
experiencing the image can tell that the image is in needed for each scan and the distance between the
their head, and not a real sight. Nonetheless, there relevant pair of landmarks on the original map. This
is a strong subjective resemblance between visual result confirms that the image accurately represents
images and actual sights. This is reflected in the way all the spatial relations on the mapand so points
people commonly talk about their visual images, close together on the map are functionally close on
and references to mental pictures or the minds eye the image; points further apart on the map are far
757
758 Visual Imagery
apart on the image. In this fashion, the image seems experimental data were revealing the properties of
truly to depict the layout (and thus all the shapes this medium.
and patterns) in the scene that is being represented. The narrow concern about experimental demand
Experiments also indicate that images function as was easily dealt with by appropriate experimental
though they have an identifiable view point, just controls, and indeed, the response-time patterns
as an actual visual scene would. This is evident, for remain the same when these controls are in place.
example, in the fact that aspects of the image that The larger issue, an explanation in terms of simu-
depict larger objects or objects that are at the front lation versus one in terms of an imagery medium,
of the imaged scene are more rapidly accessible. required a different type of analysis, and although
Likewise, participants need time to zoom in on some scholars regard the issue as still open, most
an image to inspect small details or to zoom out researchers believe that the data reviewed in the next
to survey the larger scene, suggesting that again, just section argue powerfully for the notion of an imag-
like actual scenes, images are inspected from a par- ery medium.
ticular viewing distance.
Visual images also respect spatial layout in Neuroscience Studies of Imagery
another regardin the pattern of transformations
What brain mechanisms might lie behind the behav-
in the image. In many studies, for example, partici-
ior data described so far? In the view of many
pants have been shown two forms and asked if the
researchers, the various parallels between visual
forms are the same shape but viewed from differ-
imagery and actual vision invite the hypothesis that
ent vantage points, or actually different shapes. In
these two activities rely on similar brain circuits,
these studies, participants seem to imagine one of
and several lines of evidence confirm this claim.
the forms rotating into alignment with the other
Neuroimaging results indicate an enormous over-
and then make their decision only after this imag-
lap between the brain sites activated during visual
ined rotation. The imagined rotation itself seems
imagery and sites activated during ordinary vision.
to take place at a constant velocity, and so the time
Likewise, brain damage often has parallel effects on
needed for these judgments is a linear function of the
imagery and vision. Thus, patients who (because of
angular distance between the initial orientations of
stroke) have lost the ability to perceive color often
the two forms being compared.
seem to lose the ability to imagine scenes in color.
Similarly, if as a result of occipital damage patients
The Imagery Debate have a blind spot in a particular region of visual
space or some restriction of the extent of visual
Across the 1970s and 1980s, there was heated
space, they are likely to have a corresponding limit
debate about the results just described. In part,
on their visual imagery.
the argument hinged on a methodological point
Further confirmation comes from studies that
namely, the notion that these response-time findings
use transcranial magnetic stimulation to produce
might be attributable to the demand character of
temporary lesions in visual cortex. Not surpris-
the experiments (i.e., cues within the experimental
ingly, this procedure causes a disruption of vision,
setting that signaled to the participants how they
but crucially, it also causes a parallel disruption in
were supposed to behave). More broadly, there
visual imagery.
was debate about the meaning of the experimental
results. Thinkers such as Zenon Pylyshyn argued
Differences Between Visual
that the data were the result of experimental par-
Imagery and Vision
ticipants seeking to simulate the relevant activi-
ties, more or less as a mime might seek to simulate Even acknowledging these important parallels,
some action; this simulation, Pylyshyn argued, was however, there are also differences between visual
guided by participants tacit knowledge about imagery and vision and between mental pictures
the relevant events in the world (rotation, straight- and actual pictures. For example, some discoveries
line movement, etc.). In response, Stephen Kosslyn that are easily made from a picture (the reinterpreta-
and others argued that mental imagery relied on a tion of an ambiguous drawing) are enormously dif-
specialized representation medium, and that the ficult if the participant is relying on a mental image
Visual Imagery 759
of that picture. According to some authors, this is suggest that these individual differences need to be
because the imageas a mental representation assessed separately for visual and spatial imagery
is accompanied by a perceptual reference frame (especially since self-report measures of imagery are
that organizes the depiction, specifying the figure/ powerfully shaped by someones strengths in visual
ground organization, how the form is parsed, where imagery, while the paper and pencil measures often
the forms top is located, and so on. This reference reflect someones ability in spatial imagery).
frame guides how the image is interpreted and so
can place obstacles on image reinterpretation (or
The Role of Visual Imagery in Cognition
image-based problem solving of any sort). Pictures
do not on their own have this sort of reference frame Finally, what is imagerys role within the broader
(the frame must be created by the perceiver), and so context of mental processing? The answer has many
pictures (unorganized depictions) are more readily elements. For some purposes, imagery is essential for
reinterpreted than images (organized depictions). remembering. (Imagine someone trying to describe
A further distinction between images and pictures a previously viewed face; that person may have
is suggested by cases in which brain damage has dis- no choice but to call up an image of the face and
rupted someones vision but spared their ability to attempt to describe the contents of that image.) For
perform imagery tasks; the reverse pattern (disrupted other purposes, imagery may not be essential for
imagery but intact vision) has also been observed. In memory but is nonetheless enormously helpful. We
addition, studies have often documented normal or know, for example, that easily imaged words are eas-
near-normal performance on various imagery tasks ier to remember, and that deliberate attempts to form
from individuals who have been blind since birth images of the to-be-remembered material usually aid
individuals who are unlikely to be relying on a pic- memory. (Indeed, the use of imagery is a frequent
turelike mode of representation. Findings like these component of many deliberate mnemonic strategies.)
have led several researchers to propose a difference Imagery also seems to play a role in autobiographical
between visual imagery and spatial imagery. The memory, and memories of past episodes often take
former type of imagery yields a representation that the form of images of those previous episodes.
bears a closer resemblance to a picture (and so visual In addition, imagery can play a role in problem
images, but not spatial images, depict an objects solving. This is plainly the case when the problem
color or surface texture), and the processes needed involves spatial arrangement. (Imagine trying to
to create visual images rely heavily on brain sites decide whether a sofa, viewed in a store, will fit well
ordinarily used for actual vision. Spatial imagery, in in your living room. Most people would try to solve
contrast, relies more heavily on brain sites ordinar- this problem by visualizing the sofa in place to see
ily used for guiding movements through space (both how it looks.) However, imagery also plays a role in
overt bodily movement and covert movements of other sorts of problems, including a variety of math-
attention). Presumably, individuals blind since birth ematical word problems. Moreover, casting any
rely on spatial imagery, not visual, and likewise, spa- problems elements in terms of a visual image can
tial imagery is what allows patients with disrupted shape the sequence of thoughts that come to mind in
vision (because of brain damage) to perform nor- thinking through the problem. For example, think-
mally on many imagery tasks. ing about your pet cat in terms of an image will make
The distinction between visual and spatial the cats appearance prominent for you, and this can
imagery is also valuable in explaining a different call to mind other animals with a similar appear-
pointnamely, the ways in which (neurologically ance. If you had thought about the cat without an
intact, sighted) individuals differ from one another image, the appearance might have been much less
in their imagery abilities. Both self-report and behav- prominent so that some other set of ideas would be
ioral testing indicate that this variation is consider- likely to come to mind. In this way, the mere step of
able: Some people report rich, vivid, visual images; casting the problem in terms of an image can guide
some report no visual images at all. Some people the selection of available ideas, and this may have
perform well on paper-and-pencil tests requiring important consequences for the flow of thought.
them to imagine folding pieces of paper or spinning It should be mentioned, though, that there are
forms; others perform much less well. Recent studies contexts in which imagery can be an impediment
760 Visual Masking
to problem solving. These include cases in which a classification of different masking types and illus-
someone is better served by drawing an overt sketch trates their use in the study of vision and cognition.
rather than relying on an image (in part because
this helps the person set aside the images reference Typology of Masking
frame) and also cases in which someone is better Typically, the target and the mask are briefly pre-
served by relying on some more abstract, perhaps sented (e.g., 10 milliseconds [ms]) and three types
algebraic, mode of representation. Visual images can of masking occur according to their temporal order.
powerfully shape the flow of thought, but this does Let us denote by stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA)
not mean that images reliably enhance or improve the time delay between the onset of the target and
the flow of thought. the onset of the mask. When the target is presented
Daniel Reisberg before the mask (by convention negative SOAs),
we have forward masking, and when the opposite
See also Visual Working Memory; Visuospatial holds, we have backward masking. The case when
Reasoning the target and mask are presented with SOA = 0 is
called simultaneous masking.
Further Readings The most basic form of visual masking, called
masking by light, occurs when the mask stimu-
Heuer, F., & Reisberg, D. (2005). Visuospatial imagery. In lus is a spatially extended uniform field of light.
A. Miyake & P. Shah (Eds.), Handbook of visuospatial
Depending on the type of the target, masking by
thinking (pp. 3580). New York, NY: Cambridge
light can be divided into two subtypes: masking of
University Press.
light by light (the target is, like the mask, a spatially
Kosslyn, S. M. (1994). Image and brain: The resolution of
uniform stimulus but with much smaller spatial size)
the imagery debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mellet, E., Tzourio-Mazoyer, N., Bricogne, S., Mazoyer, B.,
and masking of pattern by light (the target is a pat-
Kosslyn, S. M., & Denis, M. (2000). Functional
terned stimulus such as an alphanumeric character).
anatomy of high-resolution visual mental imagery. The more interesting types of visual masking occur
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12, 98109. in visual pattern masking, when a patterned target
Pylyshyn, Z. (2003). Seeing and visualizing: Its not what stimulus is masked by a patterned mask stimulus.
you think. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. From a methodological point of view, one can distin-
Reisberg, D. (2009). Cognition: Exploring the science of guish between three types of pattern masking: When
the mind (4th ed.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. the target and the mask do not overlap spatially,
Shepard, R. N., & Cooper, L. A. (1982). Mental images forward pattern masking is called paracontrast, and
and their transformations. Cambridge, MA: MIT backward pattern masking is called metacontrast.
Press. When target and mask overlap spatially, if the mask
Thompson, W. L., & Kosslyn, S. M. (2000). Neural does not contain any structural characteristics of the
systems activated during visual mental imagery: A target, one has pattern masking by noise. On the
review and meta-analyses. In A. W. Toga & J. Mazziotta other hand, when the mask has structural similari-
(Eds.), Brain mapping II: The systems (pp. 536560). ties to the target, one has pattern masking by struc-
San Diego, CA: Academic Press. ture. Figure 1 provides examples of different types of
visual pattern masking.
MASK
v
TARGET
Figure 1 Types of masking according to spatial and informational content of the stimuli. Left: paracontrast and
metacontrast; middle: masking by noise; right: masking by structure.
Type A Type B
(monotonic) (nonmonotonic)
Target visibility
0 SOA 0 SOA
Figure 2 Left: Type A forward and backward masking functions. Maximum suppression of target visibility occurs at
SOA = 0, that is, when the target and the mask are presented simultaneously. Right: Type B forward and backward
masking functions. Here maximum suppression of target visibility occurs at SOA values different than zero.
Target visibility
0 0 SOA
SOA SOA
Figure 3 Nonmonotonic masking functions can also exhibit more than one SOA value where target visibility reaches a
local minimum. On the left, forward and backward masking functions with two local minima each. These are called bimodal
masking functions. When there are more than two local minima, the masking function is multimodal, or oscillatory, as shown
on the right.
762 Visual Search
problems pertaining to the temporal aspects of visual The selectivity of the mask has been used to infer
processes but also those related to conscious and relative timing of different processes. For example,
unconscious information processing. Furthermore, by comparing metacontrast masking functions
a large amount of research is devoted to reveal the obtained by contour and surface-brightness judg-
mechanisms of visual masking, and several models ments, Bruno Breitmeyer and colleagues suggested
and theories have been proposed in the literature. that processes computing surface brightness are
Research in visual masking is voluminous, and the delayed with respect to those computing boundar-
monographs referenced below provide an in-depth ies. Visual masking is also a powerful technique
review of relevant literature and findings. In the fol- to investigate conscious and unconscious informa-
lowing, a few examples will be presented to illus- tion processing. The mask can render the target
trate different uses of visual masking. completely invisible, thereby eliminating it from
As mentioned above, one critical parameter in the visual awareness of the observer. However, as
masking is SOA. The function that plots a measure mentioned above, this does not mean that all target-
of target visibility (e.g., brightness, edge complete- related processes are extinguished; instead, the pro-
ness, shape, identity) as a function of SOA is called cessing of several attributes of the target continues to
the masking function. The shape of the masking take place at unconscious levels. By measuring the
function depends on stimulus parameters as well effects of the unconscious target stimulus on other
as on the task of the observer. Nevertheless, mask- stimuli, recent research has shown that a variety of
ing functions can be categorized under two generic stimulus characteristics, such as form and emotional
types: monotonic (also called Type A) and non- content, are processed at unconscious levels.
monotonic (also called Type B) functions, as illus-
Haluk gmen and Bruno G. Breitmeyer
trated in Figure 2. Furthermore, the nonmonotonic
functions can be classified as unimodal, bimodal, or See also Auditory masking; Consciousness and the
multimodal (oscillatory) types (Figure 3). Unconscious; Subliminal Perception; Unconscious
While a complete understanding of neural pro- Perception
cesses underlying these masking functions remains
a fundamental research question, the morphologies
Further Readings
of these functions provide valuable insights into the
temporal aspects of visual processes. For example, Bachmann, T. (1994). The psychophysiology of visual
in Type A masking functions, one can interpret the masking: The fine structure of conscious experience.
SOA interval where masking effects occur as the Commack, NY: Nova Science.
broad temporal window, during which the pro- Breitmeyer, B. G., Kafalgnl, H., gmen, H., Mardon, L.,
cessing of the target and the mask occurs. Todd, S., & Ziegler, R. (2006). Meta- and paracontrast
From a practical viewpoint, many researchers reveal differences between contour- and brightness-
use masks as basic components of their experimen- processing mechanisms. Vision Research, 46,
tal design to control the duration or effectiveness 26452658.
of the processes generated by their stimuli: Neural Breitmeyer, B. G., & gmen, H. (2006). Visual masking:
Time slices through conscious and unconscious vision.
responses to a brief stimulus presented in isolation
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
may persist hundreds of milliseconds and generate
ceiling effects in performance. If this brief stimulus
is followed by an appropriate mask, the mask-
generated activity will interfere with the processing VISUAL SEARCH
of the target, thereby reducing the effective dura-
tion and performance to a desired level. Let us note, Visual search is the act of looking for an item. The
however, that the effect of the mask is not a total target of ones search can be defined as an object
stopping of the target activity; instead, the mask (such as a person), a feature (such as a color), or an
typically interferes in a selective way with the target. event (such as the sudden appearance of something).
For example, the mask may render the contours of Visual search has two roles in the study of the mind:
the target invisible, yet observers can report the loca- first, as a phenomenon to be understood, and sec-
tion of this invisible target without any difficulty. ond, as a method for revealing how other aspects of
Visual Search 763
the mind work. The entry describes a typical visual- the participant to look for the target and to press one
search experiment and how it is analyzed, reviews button if it is present and another if it is absent; half
aspects of visual search that are of interest in them- of the trials would have a target and half would not.
selves, and discusses the application of visual search The items would generally appear to the participant
to the study of cognition and the mind. and remain visible until the response. The speed (or
Visual search takes time because more visual reaction time) and the accuracy of the search would
information is hitting the retina at any given moment be recorded for each trial.
than one can process. Attention is a fundamental The data are summarized commonly in a plot of
cognitive mechanism that enhances the processing reaction time as a function of the number of items
of some information at the expense of momentarily displayed. Other variables, such as presence or
irrelevant information. One way to attend to some absence of the target, are plotted as different func-
items is through overt attentionthat is, eye move- tions or groupings of data points in the graph. Each
ments. However, one can attend to a subset of a group of data points can be summarized by a slope
visual scene with covert attention as well, most com- and intercept of the linear function that fits those
monly referred to as seeing out of the corner of the points. The slope provides information about the
eye. Researches on visual search and attention thus rate of visual search, and the intercept summarizes
provide insights about each other. the amount of time required for all other aspects of
the search task (such as the motor preparation for
Method and Analysis the response).
Visual search is a common activity in daily life and Most analyses of the reaction time in a visual-
in many cognitive activities: looking for a word on search task assume that accuracy has not been traded
a page while reading, trying to find a friend in a off to achieve the speed found. (A speed-accuracy
crowded room, examining an X-ray for anatomi- trade-off is common and occurs when speed is
cal abnormalities in a hospital, or searching the increased but accuracy is low and compromised
ground for fossils and artifacts. The scientific study for speed, or when speed is decreased and accuracy
of visual search often examines much simpler tasks is high and improved due to the slower reaction
that afford greater experimental control. Of primary time.) Most reaction time analyses in visual search
interest for many scientists interested in visual search require high levels of accuracy in all conditions so
is why some search tasks are fast and efficient and that a speed-accuracy trade-off does not confound
others are slow and inefficient. the results. Of course, some scientists examine the
Figure 1 displays an example of the sort of task effects on accuracy rather than on reaction time, per-
a participant in a visual-search study would com- haps with a manipulation of how long the display
monly see. Here the target is the letter T among non- is shown to the participants. Yet others manipulate
target letter Fs. A typical experiment would require both speed and accuracy as an analytical method.
such as finding the large, white T in Figure 1. As the horizontal). However, any search task can be made
slope increases, then the task is considered inefficient more or less efficient by manipulating the similarity
because the number of items in the display slows the of the target and nontarget items, independent of the
search task with each additional item; an example number of features that define the target.
would be finding the black T in Figure 1. Several models have been developed to describe
A number of variations of the task can be made the mechanisms responsible for the efficiency of a
to observe the effects on speed and accuracy. visual-search task. Anne Treisman, in her feature
Common variables that are manipulated include the integration theory, proposed that items are first pro-
following: (a) the set sizethat is, the number of cessed simultaneously in a preattentive stage as basic
items to search through including the target (Figure features (such as color and orientation). If the target
1 displays a set size of 48), (b) the defining feature of is defined as a single feature, then its presence can be
the target (the letter T in Figure 1), (c) the reported detected at this stage. However, if a target is defined
feature of the target (typically, whether it is present as a conjunction of features, then each item must
or absent in the display; participants could also be be attended to have its features bound together and
asked to make a judgment about it, such as what identified, with each item processed successively.
color it is or what the orientation of the target is), Each item is attended in a random order until the
and (d) the degree of similarity between the target target is found or until all items have been attended.
and the nontargets and amongst the nontargets (a T Feature integration theory is still highly influential
might be more difficult to find amongst Fs than Os, even though some details of this theory came into
for example). question after some experiments found that a tar-
A common distinction in many search tasks is get defined by a conjunction of features can, under
whether the defining feature of the target is a single some conditions, be found just as efficiently as a
feature (such as a single color, like red) or a con- target defined by a single feature. Jeremy Wolfe later
junction of features (e.g., a combination of color and proposed a model that is similar to the feature inte-
orientation, such as a red and vertical target among gration theory, called guided search. With guided
vertical nontargets that are another color, such as search, Wolfe accounts for these exceptions by not
green, and red nontargets at the other orientation, having items attended in a random order but rather
1400
1200
1000
Reaction Time (ms)
800
Inefficient Search
600
Efficient Search
400
200
0
5 15 25
Set Size
Figure 2 Typical (but invented) data for a visual-search experiment; reaction time (in milliseconds) is plotted as a function
of set size.
Visual Working Memory 765
in order of prioritization based upon the match derived from reaction time as a function of set size,
between the features of the items and the features provides some indication of whether items can be
for which the participant is searching. visually processed in serial (i.e., successively) or in
parallel (i.e., simultaneously). Many mathemati-
Applications: Visual Search as a cal models of parallel processing can mimic serial
Window to Cognition models, however, so visual-search rates provide only
Visual search is a common method used to under- partial, converging evidence for this issue.
stand the mechanisms of attention. For visual search Although these fundamental issues of the mind
to be efficient, some information must be more eas- can use visual search as a tool, so can many applied
ily prioritized than other information. Bottom-up tasks. Visual search has been examined in reading,
and top-down mechanisms guide attention to items driving, and X-ray examination, just to name a few
of interest. Top-down mechanisms guide attention tasks that depend on fast, accurate visual search. As
based on the information that the observer is look- more is discovered about the basic mechanisms of
ing for, such as the color or orientation of the target. visual search, the design and training for these real-
Bottom-up mechanisms guide attention based on the world tasks can be improved to better suit how the
information in the scene and the manner in which it mind processes visual information.
is processed in the early visual system of the brain. Michael J. Proulx
Unique itemsrendered salient due to a contrast in
color or orientation when compared to surround- See also Attention, Neuroimaging Studies of; Inhibition of
ing itemsprovide strong bottom-up guidance for Return; Neurodynamics of Visual Search; Reaction Time
attention and under some conditions even capture
attention. The bottom-up salience of the items and Further Readings
the top-down, target-defining information that the
participant uses combine to create an attentional pri- Desimone, R., & Duncan, J. (1995). Neural mechanisms of
selective visual attention. Annual Review of
ority map that indexes the locations of items that are
Neuroscience, 18, 193222.
likely to be the target. By manipulating the features
Duncan, J., & Humphreys, G. W. (1989). Visual search and
of the target and nontarget items and the number
stimulus similarity. Psychological Review, 96, 433458.
of items, among other variables, visual search can
Egeth, H. E., & Yantis, S. (1997). Visual attention: Control,
reveal the mechanisms of attention and the priori- representation, and time course. Annual Review of
tization of information for further processing, such Psychology, 48, 269297.
as object identification and memory consolidation. Pashler, H. (1998). The psychology of attention.
Many studies have examined this both in terms of Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
covert attention (where the eyes remain motionless, Treisman, A., & Gelade, G. (1980). A feature-integration
fixated at the center of the screen) and overt atten- theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12, 97136.
tion (where eye movements to different items are Wolfe, J. M. (1994). Guided Search 2.0: A revised model
monitored and analyzed). of visual search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1,
Visual search not only reveals how some infor- 202238.
mation is prioritized but also how momentarily Wolfe, J. M., & Horowitz, T. S. (2004). What attributes
irrelevant information is inhibited. For example, in guide the deployment of visual attention and how do
searching for a T in Figure 1, it would not be useful they do it? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5, 17.
to check each nontarget F location more than once.
Research in visual search provides converging evi-
dence for a mechanism that suppresses attention to
previously processed locations (inhibition of return). VISUAL WORKING MEMORY
Visual search thus serves as a model task for how
information is prioritized and processed by the mind. To understand visual working memory, it is helpful
Also of key interest in the study of information to consider human memory more generally. Human
processing is that of serial versus parallel mecha- memory is not a single mental faculty or cogni-
nisms. The search rate, as revealed by the slope tive system; rather, the cognitive processes that we
766 Visual Working Memory
collectively call memory are composed of a num- memory. This entry considers the scientific evidence
ber of independent and specialized cognitive systems for visual memory codes and the organization and
that encode and store information in different for- capacity limitation of visual working memory.
mats. The various taxonomies of human memory
agree on two main distinctions: First, memory may
The Evidence for Visual Memory Codes
be explicit, or declarative, in the sense that per-
sonal knowledge and previous experiences are con- The idea of visual representations or memory codes
sciously recollected or recognized, or memory may has been challenged by researchers who favor a
be implicit, or nondeclarative, in the sense of being unitary verbal memory system. There is, however,
expressed indirectly in behavior without accompa- mounting evidence that verbal and visual informa-
nying conscious recollections of previous learning tion is handled in separate cognitive and neural
episodes. Second, a distinction is drawn between systems.
short-term memory, called immediate memory by Perhaps the strongest evidence for separate visual
early memory researchers, which has been proposed and verbal memory representations comes from so-
as the seat of consciousness and active processing called dual-task experiments. In these experiments,
and which is able to store limited quantities of infor- subjects are required to carry out two tasks simul-
mation for limited periods of timein the range of taneously. For example, they have to remember a
seconds rather than minutesand long-term mem- previously presented visual pattern while counting
ory, which stores unlimited amounts of information backward or making a spatial judgment. The results
for unlimited periods of time. These distinctions are of such experimental manipulations show that the
not completely orthogonal, since short-term mem- performance on visual working memory tasks is not
ory is coupled to explicit memory. impaired by a parallel verbal task, but it is impaired
The theory of working memory was proposed 35 by a parallel visual task. Thus, concurrent visual
years ago by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch and processing tasks compete for processing resources,
later developed in a very influential book by Alan whereas verbal and visual tasks are processed inde-
Baddeley, Working Memory, published in 1986. pendently. A complementary interference pattern
According to this theory, short-term memory is not is found for verbal working memory. This pattern
a simple mechanism for passive storage of informa- of interference strongly suggests the existence of
tion; rather, it is a coordinated set of mechanisms separate, parallel, limited-capacity visual and verbal
that combines incoming information from sensory working memory systems.
systems with information retrieved from long-term Further evidence that the brain stores informa-
memory and consists of a central executive operat- tion in terms of visual representations comes from
ing with the assistance of domain-specific verbal, the study of brain-injured patients. In the neuropsy-
and visual support systems. Broadly speaking, the chological syndrome of visual agnosia the patient
concept of visual working memory refers to the sees, but the visual world is meaningless. There
short-term memory system, which stores informa- may be nothing wrong with the perceptual process,
tion that enters the brain through the eye and is per se, and the person navigates safely in the geo-
maintained and manipulated by the support system graphic environment and may even copy diagrams
referred to as the visual-spatial sketchpad. The defi- and drawings. However, there is no visual recogni-
nition may be too broad, however, because visual tion and no visual memory, although other forms of
information, such as written words or pictures of working memory (and long-term memory) may be
naturalistic scenes, is easily recoded and stored in completely intact.
verbal-memory systems. A more restricted definition Modern brain-imaging techniques, such as func-
of visual working memory is the maintenance and tional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that allow
manipulation of information represented as visual fairly local and precise brain activity patterns to be
codes. Since performance with complex, meaningful mapped during the execution of cognitive tasks,
visual stimuli may be supported by both visual and would appear to offer a unique possibility of isolat-
verbal working memory systems operating in con- ing the visual versus verbal components of working
cert, much of the research in visual working memory memory. But isolation of specialized memory sys-
has aimed at isolating the visual component of tems is not a simple and straightforward procedure,
Visual Working Memory 767
both because cognitive tasks activate many cogni- and that visual imagery recruits many of the brain
tive and brain systems concerned with perceptual, regions involved in online perception, even includ-
attentional, and memory processing, and because ing some of the earliest brain regions in the visual
most neural networks in the brain probably perform process. This process is quite similar to task of the
many processing tasks in parallel. Even if the per- visual-spatial sketchpad. However, whereas visual
formance on a specific visual memory task is not imagery is conceived as conscious process of image
assisted by verbal memory, the simple fact that we generation, maintenance in visual working mem-
identify a recognizable pattern that can be verbally ory is not conceived as a conscious process in the
classified and later remembered implies activation of same sense. Differences between the visual imagery
verbal memory processes. However, imaging stud- and the visual-spatial sketchpad are also suggested
ies have demonstrated distinct areas localized to the by the finding that visual imagery is disrupted by
occipital and temporal lobes of the brain, specialized task-irrelevant visual noise whereas maintenance in
for processing particular classes of stimuli such as visual working memory is not disrupted by visual
objects and human faces. These regions are activated noise. Thus, despite similarities, visual imagery and
in visual memory tasks with these classes of stimuli the visual-spatial sketchpad are not identical.
but not in verbal memory tasks, suggesting that at
least certain kinds of information are represented as
Fractionation of Visual Working Memory
visual codes. There is also evidence that some visual
memory tasks recruit visual-processing regions in Recent dual-task experiments indicate that visual
the early stages of the processing hierarchy, which working memory may be composed of additional
indicate a close relationship between visual percep- subsystems. It is now claimed that there is one
tion and visual memory. subsystem that is partly specialized for processing
objects and object properties such as color, orien-
tation, and shape and a second system that is spe-
The Visual-Spatial Sketchpad
cialized for processing the spatial characteristics
The theory of working memory includes two sup- of visual displays. For example, it has been shown
port systems for manipulation and maintenance of that when subjects have to remember information
sensory information. The verbal support system, about object color while simultaneously performing
referred to as the phonological loop, is easily under- a mental task that requires shape recognition, there
stood; it may be thought of as the process of repeat- is substantial interference between the two tasks,
ing information in silent (subvocal) speech. The whereas no interference is observed between a task
second support system, the visual-spatial sketchpad, requiring memory for spatial position and a second,
is less intuitively understood. It is not a purely visual shape recognition task.
processing mechanism but thought to combine Evidence for a possible third component of visual
information from visual, tactile, and haptic sensory working memory comes from a parallel line of
channels. To a first approximation the visual-spatial research, on so-called perceptual memory. In clas-
sketchpad may be thought of as largely equivalent to sical visual working memory tasks, participants are
the phenomenon of visual imagery. Visual imagery is required to consciously remember the stimuli to
the ability to produce inner images of previously be compared, and the difference between the pat-
seen persons, objects, and geographical scenes and terns is easily detected in simultaneous displays. For
to produce images of scenes that are simply imag- example, in a typical experiment, one object in the
ined. Visual mental imagery tasks require subjects to display may change in color, orientation, or shape,
retrieve information from long-term memory or to and what is varied is the number of objects in the
maintain visual information that is recently viewed display and/or the number of object features that
and to perform cognitive operations on or make are changed. This approach is governed by what
judgments of this information. The purely visual some cognitive psychologists call a storehouse meta-
nature of visual imagery is supported by experiments phorhow much is retained in memory? Perceptual
showing that cognitive operations on visual men- memory research, on the other hand, is governed by
tal images are governed by the same laws as simi- a correspondence metaphor, investigating the fidelity
lar operations performed on online visual images, of memory. How well are the details of the original
768 Visual Working Memory
display retained, and what distortions of color, tex- Experiments investigating the object property
ture, and orientation are observed? In these experi- aspect of visual working memory suggest that
ments, the memory of elementary attributes of visual visual-object working memory is a unitary mecha-
imagessize, orientation, movementis measured nism, with a capacity limitation that is fairly inde-
using psychophysical discrimination tasks where pendent of object properties and complexity. To a
participants are requested to decide, or guess, if a test first approximation, visual working memory may be
pattern has a higher or lower value than a previously conceived of as storing integrated objects, thus when
shown reference pattern on the stimulus dimen- remembering objects and their properties, it does not
sion in question, and a discrimination threshold is matter if they have different colors and orientations
determined, representing the value of 75% correct or if they share color and orientation. The capac-
guessing. The results from these experiments show, ity limitation is four objects; when the number of
somewhat surprisingly, that information about such objects exceeds this limit, memory suffers. This does
elementary attributes is not degraded or distorted not mean that the visual working memory capacity
but maintained with the fidelity of the sensory image is completely independent of complexity. While the
during intervals up to two or three minutes. The magical number four pops up in most experiments,
storage is impaired by a concurrent processing task it is clear that several stimulus and encoding param-
along the same dimension but not by a concurrent eters determine the capacity of the visual working
task along another dimension, and there is evidence memory. Thus, if object complexity is high and
that at least three stimulus dimensions may be stored encoding time is low, the estimated visual working
in parallel. Thus, the pattern of interference mimics memory capacity decreases, but if object complexity
the interference pattern observed in the more tradi- is low and there is unlimited encoding time, capacity
tional visual working memory tasks. However, the increases but never exceeds the magical number four.
performance on this task does not require conscious In summary, visual working memory consists of
recollection or recognition; it turns up in forced a set of limited-capacity, short-term memory mecha-
choice tasks and may be more implicit in nature. It nisms handling information transmitted through the
is an open question whether this low-level memory eyes, operating in concert with other working memory
system is part of the visual working memory system systems. Because visually transmitted information may
or a parallel memory system associated with implicit be coded in both verbal and visual representations, it
memory. is likely that few everyday visual short-term memory
tasks will be solely reliant on visual working memory.
Capacity Limitation of Visual
Svein Magnussen
Working Memory
The capacity of visual working memory depends See also Divided Attention and Memory; Memory,
upon several factors, such as the type of informa- Neural Basis; Visual Imagery; Visuospatial Reasoning;
tion tested, the test procedure employed, the time Working Memory; Working Memory, Evolution of
allowed for memory encoding, and the discrim-
inability of the items in the visual display. There are Further Readings
individual differences in working memory capacity, Baddeley, A. (2001). Is working memory still working?
and there are age effects. Visual working memory American Psychologist, 56, 849864.
performance in the adult population starts to decline Cornoldi, C., & Vecci, T. (2003). Visuo-spatial working
around 60 years of age and decreases steadily toward memory and individual differences. Hove, UK:
older age, a trend observed for most memory tasks Psychology Press.
involving explicit but not implicit memory. Logie, R. H. (1995). Visuo-spatial working memory. Hove,
Until quite recently, most research on visual UK: Erlbaum.
working memory has been concerned with the Magnussen, S., Greenlee, M. W., Baumann, O., &
spatial aspect of visual displays, and comparatively Endestad, T. (2009). Visual perceptual memory. In
little was known about memory for the properties of L. Bckman & L. Nyberg (Eds.), Memory, aging and
visual objects and visual scenes, such as their color, the brain: A festschrift in honour of Lars-Gran Nilsson
texture, and orientation. (pp. 5875). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Visuospatial Reasoning 769
Woodman, G. E., & Vogel, E. K. (2008). Selective storage properties of the objects they represented, such
and maintenance of an objects features in visual as size, shape, distance, orientation, and color. In
working memory. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, that spirit, some studies have shown that the time
15, 223229. to mentally detect or compare those properties in
Zimmer, H. D., Magnussen, S., Rudner, M., & Rnnberg, J. images reflects actual differences in size, distance,
(2007). Visuospatial thinking, imagination and or orientation. Other studies have shown that judg-
remembering. In S. Magnussen & T. Helstrup (Eds.), ments of imagined shape or color yield the same
Everyday memory (pp. 2756). Hove, UK: Psychology similarity spaces as judgments of perceived shape or
Press.
color. This approach views imagery as internalized
perception. That is, having an image is like having
a percept, and performing mental transformations
VISUOSPATIAL REASONING on an image is like perceiving changes in the world.
Impressive support for the psychological reality of
Visuospatial reasoning is essential for survival. If visual images and the transformations performed on
we couldnt find our way home or get food into our them has come from brain studies that have shown
mouths, life would be nearly impossible. Visuospatial that visual imagery relies on some of the same areas
reasoning occurs whenever we go beyond the infor- of the brain involved in visual perception.
mation given to make inferences about what we see
or where we are, as when we recognize a friend from Mental Transformations
a glimpse of her face or see a face in the moon or It is common in analyses of cognition to distinguish
recognize a neighborhood from the architecture. mental representations of aspects of the world from
Visuospatial reasoning is involved in more than mental transformations of those representations, a dis-
recognizing things and places, it also is involved in tinction analogous to data and operations performed
imagining things and places and mental transforma- on data. One of the more remarkable visuospatial
tions on things and places. Mundane activities, such mental transformations demonstrated is mental rota-
as catching a fly ball and packing a suitcase, as well tion: the time to judge whether a pair of figures at dif-
as sophisticated ones, such as refining a model of ferent orientations, such as a configuration of boxes
plate tectonics or designing a museum, rely on visuo- or an asymmetric letter of the alphabet, is the same
spatial reasoning. More surprising, visuospatial rea- or whether mirror images increase linearly with the
soning underlies abstract thought, such as deciding degree of tilt, as if the mind were rotating the figures
whether a giraffe is more intelligent than a tiger or into congruence at a steady rate. Mental rotation has
whether a conclusion follows logically from its prem- a real-life role in identifying and imagining objects that
ises. Visuospatial reasoning allows inferences about are not upright. Mental size and shape transforma-
motion in space as well as inferences about things tions also seem to be in the service of object recogni-
in space. Even small children can distinguish motion tion and, like mental rotation, can be appropriated for
paths caused by actions of animate agents from the kind of creative thought that serves rearranging
motion paths caused by inanimate agents. Because furniture, understanding how molecules fit together,
visuospatial reasoning is mental and therefore not or designing a building. These are mental transfor-
directly observable, research began only after the mations of objects in space. Another major class of
behaviorist grip on scientific psychology loosened visuospatial mental transformation is imagining reori-
and the cognitive revolution of the 1960s began. It entations of ones own body in space, a set of skills
began with work on images, visual mental represen- that plays roles in tasks such as navigating a crowd or
tations, and mental transformations and then broad- a new neighborhood, dancing, and playing Frisbee.
ened to explore spatial mental transformations and The two major classes of spatial mental trans-
created spaces. This entry follows that history. formations, mental transformations of things in the
world and mental transformations of our bodies in
Visual Images
the world, are rooted in everyday perceptual experi-
Demonstrating the psychological reality of images ence of the world, consistent with the imagery-as-
entailed showing that they preserved visual internalized-perception approach. Interestingly, both
770 Visuospatial Reasoning
classes of mental transformations appear to involve people. Spatial mental representations of the world
motor as well as spatial reasoning. When partici- reflect both perceptions of the world and actions in
pants are engaged in mental rotation while turning the world. Thus, they differ for the different kinds of
a wheel, the fluency of mental rotation is enhanced spaces that people inhabit. The spaces important for
by turning the wheel in the direction of rotation human behavior and interactions are the space of
and hindered by turning the wheel in the opposite the body, the space around the body, and the space
direction. Another example comes from recognition of navigation.
of bodies in motion. The stimuli for these studies As mental representations, images have been
come from films of participants dressed in black characterized by fidelity to visual attributes of the
with lights attached to their joints, moving in vari- world. In contrast, mental spatial representations
ous ways. Although all that is visible in the films is reflect behavioral and hence functional aspects of the
the movements of the lights, these movements are world as well as visual aspects. The visual features
readily perceived by human observers as walking, do not always align with the spatial and behavioral
dancing, or skipping. People can readily distin- aspects, in ways that will be revealed below.
guish men from women and friends from strang-
ers. Surprisingly, recognition of bodies in motion is Space of the Body
better for our own bodies than for those of friends, In order to accomplish daily or extraordinary
even though we have little visual experience of our tasks, the body moves in the world. For the body, we
own bodies in motion. The fact that people recog- have both insider and outsidervisualknowledge.
nize themselves better than they recognize friends Proprioceptive feedback from our own movements
suggests close interactions between motoric and per- and the responses of the environment is crucial to
ceptual processes, interactions thought to underlie coordinated movements but also seems to play a
speech understanding, motor learning, empathy, and role in recognizing movement as well as movers, as
other processes as well. Observing human move- was seen in the studies using point-light movers. In
ment is thought to resonate in the observers motor other research, people were shown pictures of bodies
system; that is, the observer may mentally simulate with parts highlighted and asked to verify whether
the movements while watching them. Observers the highlighted part is the same as a named part.
seem to recognize when the simulated pattern is The more functional, important partsfor exam-
similar to the pattern evoked by their own move- ple, head and hand, are relatively small. However,
ment. Conversely, motor movements affect visual people verify the small, functionally important body
recognition; for example, recognition of graspable parts faster than the large ones, in sharp contrast to
objects like cups is facilitated when the hand is held research on imagery.
in the appropriate grasping movement.
Space Around the Body
Spatial Mental Representations
The space around the body is the three-dimen-
Visual images are one kind of mental representation, sional space surrounding the body in reach of hand
but there are other kinds of visuospatial mental rep- or eye. As peopleand ratsgo about the world,
resentations. Imagery for action has also been dis- they keep track of the changing positions of the
cussed and can be used for mental practice of playing objects around them relative to their own bodies,
the piano or gymnastics. There is also imagery forming and updating egocentric mental represen-
reflecting other senses, such as sound, touch, smell, tations. Perceptual and behavioral aspects of the
and taste as well as imagery not based in a particular body and the world affect the organization of those
sense, such as imagery for emotion or space. Spatial representations. The body has three axes: an asym-
mental representations are typically more abstract metric axis from head to feet, an asymmetric front-
than a specific sensory system. Congenitally blind back axis, and a more-or-less symmetric left-right
people can form rich and full spatial mental repre- axis. The encompassing world also has three axes,
sentations from other sensory information, espe- only one of which is asymmetric, the up-down axis
cially kinesthetic and auditory. These senses also play of gravity. These aspects of the body and the world
a role in spatial mental representations of sighted have implications for perception and behavior. Both
Visuospatial Reasoning 771
perception and action are primarily directed for- and reference frames, a process that distorts judg-
ward as the front/back axis separates the world that ment and memory so that geographic bodies are
can be seen and manipulated from the world that is remembered as more aligned with each other and
difficult to perceive and manipulate. Gravity affects with their reference frames than they actually are.
where we are, hence what we see, and how we can Consequently, people erroneously think that Rome
move in and manipulate the world. It also affects is south of Philadelphia and that Berkeley, in the
how objects in the world look, change, and can be east bay, is east of Stanford, which is west of the bay
interacted with. but east of Berkeley. Actual navigation is situated
These properties of the body and the world shape in the world, which corrects at least some of these
the mental representations of the space around them misconceptions.
that people form and update. In one research pro-
gram, people read descriptions of you in an opera Created Spaces
house or museum. The descriptions placed objects
around youabove, below, front, back, left, and Describing Space
rightafter which a computer repeatedly reori- Great literature, such as novels and poetry, and
ented you to face different objects and queried small literature, such as tourist guides and instruc-
the participant for the current positions of all the tion manuals, all rely on the power of language
objects. In particular, when the character (you) to create mental spaces. The studies of the space
was upright, objects located above and below the around the body showed exactly that: From descrip-
bodythat is, at head and feetwere easiest to tions, people form spatial mental models that can
retrieve because of the double asymmetries of the be mentally transformed, allowing inferences and
body and the world. Objects in front and back information retrieval. From verbal directions,
were next easiest because of the strong body asym- people can imagine a battle scene, arrive at their
metry, and objects to right and left were most dif- desired destinations, or put together a piece of fur-
ficult, because those body asymmetries are weakest. niture. Spatial descriptions require a perspective. In
Variations of the experiment established the spatial describing space, people spontaneously adopt either
mental representations from models, diagrams, or a route (egocentric or intrinsic) perspective, where
real life, yet the consequent mental representations landmarks are described relative to a traveler from
were essentially the same. the travelers right, left, front, or back, or a survey
perspective, where landmarks are described relative
Space of Navigation to each other using an allocentric reference frame
People (and rats) not only build mental represen- such as north, south, east, west. Just as frequently,
tations of where things are relative to their bodies, people mix perspectives, often midsentence and usu-
they also build representations of where the objects ally without warning. When people learn limited
are relative to each other and the world at large, environments from either of these perspectives, they
allocentric mental representations. Allocentric rep- form mental representations that are perspective
resentations are needed for navigating the larger freethat is, that allow answering questions from
world from many different directions. These, too, either perspective equally quickly and accurately.
are biased, a consequence of the way spatial scenes
Space of Graphics
are encoded and represented.
Mental representations of large spaces, or cogni- People have long used their extraordinary visuo-
tive maps, are an amazing feat of the mind. Three- spatial capacities to create cognitive tools, such as
dimensional spaces that are too large to be seen diagrams, pictures, maps, and graphs that increase
from any particular viewpoint can be assembled the power of the mind by augment memory, infor-
from navigation with a view from within, from mation processing, and communication. These
descriptions, and from external maps and then graphics reflect the spatial metaphors that support
mentally shrunk and turned into a two-dimensional abstract thought. For example, proximity in space
representation with a view from above. Assembling represents proximity on abstract dimensions, as in
the pieces depends on coordinating common objects graphs and in expressions such as, Weve grown
772 Voluntary Action, Illusion of
apart. Direction in space also has meaning, espe- pressibility, the skeletal muscle system, ideomotor
cially up and down, going against or with gravity. processing, and the sense of authorship.
Going up, against gravity, reflects strength, good-
ness, and other positive qualities, which are typically Suppressibility
plotted upward. These biases are evident in gesture It has been proposed by Richard Passingham that
and speech as well in reasoning: Give me a high 5, unlike involuntary actions (e.g., reflexes, automa-
Shes at the top of the heap, and Hes fallen into tisms during seizures, and unconscious actions dur-
a depression. And with that, we end: Onward and ing pathological states), voluntary actions are special
upward! in that they can be suppressed. Though involuntary
Barbara Tversky actions may be counteracted, as when the patellar
(knee-jerk) reflex is counteracted by contracting the
See also Common Coding; Mirror Neurons; Spatial leg muscles, such indirect control is different from
Cognition, Development of; Thinking; Visual Imagery; the kind of direct suppression that occurs during
Visual Working Memory; Working Memory, voluntary action, as when one refrains from making
Evolution of a comment or dropping a hot dish. Hence, suppress-
ibility serves as a useful behavioral index of volun-
Further Readings tary action in humans and other species.
Farah, M. J. (2004). Visual agnosia (2nd ed.). Cambridge,
Sense of Agency and Ideomotor Processing
MA: MIT Press.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2006). How we reason. Oxford, UK: With respect to ones subjective experience, how-
Oxford University Press. ever, voluntary and involuntary action could not
Kosslyn, S. M., Thompson, W. L., & Ganis, G. (2006). The feel more different from each other. As researched
case for mental imagery. New York, NY: Oxford extensively by Daniel Wegner and colleagues, the
University Press. subjective sense of agency associated with volun-
Shepard, R. N., & Podgorny, P. (1978). Cognitive processes tary action is based on several high-level cognitive
that resemble perceptual processes. In W. K. Estes (Ed.), processes, including the perception of a lawful cor-
Handbook of learning and cognitive processes (Vol. 5, respondence between action intentions and action
pp. 189237). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. outcomes. If one intends to flex ones index finger
Tversky, B. (2005). Visuospatial reasoning. In K. Holyoak and then it happens to flex, one is likely to believe
& R. Morrison (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of that the movement was voluntary. One is uncon-
thinking and reasoning (pp. 209240). Cambridge, MA:
scious of the sophisticated motor programs giving
Cambridge University Press.
rise to the action outcome but is often aware of the
perceptual consequences (e.g., perceiving flexing a
finger). William James and contemporary ideomo-
VOLUNTARY ACTION, ILLUSION OF tor theorists such as Wolfgang Prinz propose that,
for voluntary action, the conscious mind then uses
What distinguishes a voluntary action from an such perceptual-like representations to later influ-
involuntary one? That the former may be expressed ence the generation of motor efference (the signals
at will does little to answer the question, because to the muscle fibers), which itself is an unconscious
wills are difficult to observe in others or other process. From this standpoint, when one deliber-
species. For instance, whether a monkey looks right- ately performs an action, one aims to reproduce the
ward voluntarily or reflexively is indistinguishable to same sensations that occurred when a similar action
an observer. (The former may occur when a monkey was done in the past. To effect a desired efference
is trained to look away from an attention-grabbing to the muscles, all the conscious mind has to do is
flash in the anti-saccade task; the latter may occur pay a certain kind of attention to such perceptual-
during the visual grasp reflex.) Thus, drawing a prin- like representations. Then, following some sort
cipled distinction between actions that are voluntary of go signal and if not curbed or controlled by
and involuntary is less than straightforward. This Jamess acts of express fiat (i.e., exercise of veto),
entry explains from a cognitive science perspective unconscious motor programs take care of the rest
how voluntary action is intimately related to sup- by meticulously activating the right muscle fibers at
Voluntary Action, Illusion of 773
the right time, thus giving rise to the action. John urge to perform the action. Although the consciously
Barghs classic research demonstrates that inciden- reported urge to move came about 200 milliseconds
tal stimuli, such as ambient objects in ones environ- (ms) prior to the movement, detectable neural events
ment (e.g., a dartboard) can unconsciously activate began approximately 550 ms before the movement
processes that then influence ones behavioral dispo- and, importantly, 350 ms before the reported urge
sitions (e.g., making one more competitive). to move. In short, unconscious neural activity pre-
Matching intentions to outcomes also under- ceded the onset of the conscious urge in a predict-
lies the sense of agency in the mental realm. If one able manner. More recently, the research group led
intends to imagine the Mona Lisa and then happens by John-Dylan Haynes discovered that the outcome
to experience the relevant imagery, one is likely to of a willed decision can be predicted by unconscious
believe that the imagery arose voluntarily, even when brain activity occurring up to 10 seconds before the
the percept may have been caused by an experimen- decision is made.
tal trick, as in the Perky effect. (In the Perky effect,
experimental subjects are fooled into believing that Skeletal (Voluntary) Muscle
they are imagining an image that is actually pre-
Another feature of voluntary action is that it is lim-
sented physically on a screen.) In such a way, experi-
ited to skeletal muscle effectors. Other effectors
ments on authorship processing by Wegner and
(e.g., smooth muscle) cannot be influenced by it, at
colleagues have demonstrated that subjects can be
least not directly. It has been proposed that skeletal
fooled into believing that they caused actions that
muscles are voluntary muscles because they are
were in fact caused by someone else. Together, the
directed by actional systems in the brain that, in
findings indicate that we experience agency when
order to influence skeletomotor action collectively,
our intentions satisfy the causal principles of con-
require conscious states to crosstalk with each other.
sistency, priority, and exclusivity: Our intentions
Thus, consciousness is intimately related to volun-
should be consistent with, and be experienced at an
tary action. Unlike involuntary actions (e.g., reflex-
appropriate interval prior to, the relevant action,
ive inhaling, the pain-withdrawal reflex), voluntary
and there should be no other available explanation
actions can be construed as a form of integrated
for the action. It has been shown that experimentally
action, which occurs when multiple action plans
manipulating these three factors leads to systematic
that could normally influence behavior on their own
distortions in the sense of agency.
(when thus activated) are coactivated and trying to
influence the same skeletomotor effector, such as
Intentional Binding when one holds ones breath, refrains from drop-
In intentional binding, investigated by Patrick ping a hot dish, or makes oneself breathe faster. As
Haggard and colleagues, the perceived elapsed time Richard Passingham noted, suppression is an arche-
between voluntary actions (pressing a button) and typal integrated action.
their consequences (hearing a tone) is shorter than In conclusion, the experience (or illusion) of
the actual time elapsed. The action is perceived as voluntary action can be indexed by suppressibility
occurring later than it did and the outcome as occur- and characterized by its temporal properties (e.g.,
ring earlier than it did, as if the two events were tem- intentional binding), its link to the skeletal muscle
porally attracted to each other. In this way, one also effector system, the nature of the representations
binds the actions and outcomes performed by others. directing it (the conscious perceptual-like repre-
Beyond findings showing the illusory and mal- sentations described in ideomotor theories), and
leable nature of the sense of agency, there are good the causal principles that furnish it with a sense of
arguments a priori that there should be no such authorship.
thing as an undetermined free will, homunculus, or Ezequiel Morsella, Margaret T. Lynn,
ghost in the machine: The premise in science is that and Travis A. Riddle
there cannot be a thing (e.g., a will) that is unde-
termined by past events. The classic research by See also Access Consciousness; Action Slips;
Benjamin Libet corroborates this deterministic view. Automaticity; Common Coding; Freedom of Action;
Libet instructed subjects to move their hand at will Phenomenology of Action; Philosophy of Action;
and to indicate when they experienced the conscious Preconscious Free Will
774 Voluntary Action, Illusion of
775
776 Wisdom of Crowds Effect
reduced gray matter with abnormal neuronal lay- how having a syndrome like WS alters the environ-
ering, orientation, density, and size. Where normal ment in which a child develops and thus to study dis-
brains become increasingly lateralized (hemispheri- orders within the full context of their developmental
cally specialized) over time, the WS adult brain con- trajectories. Cross-syndrome studies will help iden-
tinues to process stimuli bilaterally, also revealing tify which traits are truly syndrome specific. Williams
abnormal connectivity between the orbitofrontal syndrome provides an ideal model for the develop-
cortex and the amygdala. Note that our knowledge mental study of how gene expression, brain, cogni-
of the WS brain results from research on adults and tion, and environment are integrated to give rise to
not on the developing WS brain, which would be both the typical and atypical human mind.
informative regarding how differences compound or
Hayley C. Leonard and
are compensated for by other networks over devel-
opmental time. Annette Karmiloff-Smith
Conclusion
What, then, can be learned from the study of Williams WISDOM OF CROWDS EFFECT
syndrome? Not that WS will be a model of direct-
gene behavior or cognition-brain region mappings. Psychologists have historically conceived of crowds
Rather, WS illustrates the complexities of the human as suppressing individuality. Recently, an alterna-
mind/brain. While significant advances have been tive vision of crowds has emerged: Each person
made in the genetic, brain, and cognitive domains, potentially brings unique insights, which if com-
it will be critical to bring these complementary levels bined properly can make the crowd a better deci-
of analysis together. It is also essential to understand sion maker than most individuals. This entry will
Wisdom of Crowds Effect 777
discuss the conditions under which crowds are wise, groupwhen people have different experiences,
whether individuals acting alone can mimic the training, and judgment modelsand through pro-
effects of a crowd, as well as psychological biases cesswhen ideas are formed and expressed inde-
that may prevent people from taking full advantage pendently from the ideas of others. The importance
of what crowds have to offer. of process is illustrated by a result in the brainstorm-
Published demonstrations of the wisdom of ing literature. In the classic approach to brainstorm-
crowds effect go back to the early 20th century. In ing, people generate ideas face-to-face, and build
one early study from the 1920s, students estimated on one anothers ideas. However, these interacting
the temperature in a classroom. When the estimates groups perform less wellin quality and quantity of
were averaged together, the resulting group answer alternativesthan noninteracting groups. Although
was more accurate than the estimate of a typical exposure to others perspectives benefits individuals,
member. Although early authors attributed the result over time it can lead people to think more alike, and
to some mysterious group property, the statistical diversity of perspective is lost.
underpinning of the effect is now generally under-
stood: A large sample of imperfect estimates tends to Can a Person Be a Crowd?
cancel out extreme errors and converge on the truth. An intriguing recent area of research has extended
Subsequent research demonstrated that simple algo- the logic of the wisdom of crowds to individuals. It
rithms that weight people equally, such as averag- turns out that people can achieve some of the benefit
ing, often compare favorably to more sophisticated of a crowd by digging deeper into their own minds.
statistical methods of combination. The literature The key insight is that people typically rely on only
on aggregation was reviewed by Robert Clemen a sample of the evidence available to them at any
in a 1989 paper in the International Journal of given time. But what if people had a reset button,
Forecasting and more recently by J. Scott Armstrong so that they could retrieve facts from memory anew
in his 2001 book Principles of Forecasting. The or handle the same facts in a new way? Simply ask-
power and simplicity of averaging was also featured ing people to answer again does not work; people
in James Surowieckis 2004 best-selling book The will inevitably anchor on their initial opinions.
Wisdom of Crowds. The logic of tapping diverse There are at least two effective ways to break this
perspectives extends to many tasks, including iden- anchoring effect, both illustrated in recent papers in
tifying decision objectives, generating alternatives, Psychological Science. First, Edward Vul and Hal
and choosing among alternatives. Pashler showed that people can be freed from their
original answer by delaying a second answer. With
Conditions for Crowd Wisdom the time delay people may forget their initial per-
To take full advantage of collective wisdom, groups spectives and think about the problem differently.
should be composed of people with topic-relevant The second approach, developed by Stefan Herzog
knowledge or expertise. As important, the group and Ralph Hertwig, is to ask people to assume that
needs to hold diverse perspectives and bring different their first answer was wrong and to answer the ques-
knowledge to bear on a topic. Diversity helps because tion again. Overall, averaging two opinions from
any given perspective is likely to be wrong. People the same person using either time delay or assume
who share a perspective will all be wrong in the same youre wrong and answer again improves perfor-
way (e.g., numerical estimates that all over- or under- mance by about half as much as averaging across
estimate the truth), in which case there is little benefit two people.
gained from a crowd. For numerical estimates, the
Psychological Obstacles to Crowd Wisdom
benefit comes when errors bracket the truth and
cancel out. Interestingly, diversity is so valuable that Given that crowds are often wise (including the
one can still benefit from averaging when individuals crowd in the mind), an important question for
differ greatly in accuracy. In short, knowledge and psychology is whether people make the best use
diversity are the reasons that crowds are often wise. of knowledge that is distributed across perspec-
Differences in perspective (and bracketing) tives. In general, one can conceive of people using
are created both through who is included in the advice from others in three stages: People first collect
778 Word Learning
mail, coined in the 1980s, was quickly reduced to How Children Learn Words
e-mail, which has since spawned analogous terms
Vocabulary Development in Childhood
such as e-commerce. Adults can rapidly understand
such words despite their novelty. This illustrates The course of word learning in young children is
how we can, throughout life, add new elements somewhat predictable. The first 50 to 75 words are
(words) to our lexicon. In so doing we establish new, acquired slowly, typically by 18 to 24 months of age.
systematic connections (of sound, meaning, syntax, These words include proper names (Mama), nouns
and usage) to other words and other linguistic and (bottle), a few verbs (give), descriptive terms (down,
conceptual knowledge. Although words are arbi- more), and social routine words (bye). Words like
trary in form (e.g., nothing about the sound dog is nothing or think are absent. The largest subset of
inherently doglike), the lexicon is nonetheless some- early words is nouns, though it has been argued that
what principled. For example, words are hierarchi- this is not true of all languages.
cal in meaning (e.g., animal refers to a category that Although first words are acquired slowly, even
includes all referents of dog) and in structure (e.g., infants recognize a few words: Their own name
an -ed verb ending denotes the real or hypotheti- sounds familiar by 4 months and by 10 to 12
cal completion of an act or state). Also, words are months they tend to look selectively at an object
combined in particular ways to express more pre- when they hear its name (truck!). Many infants
cise meanings (e.g., fire truck and truck fire have say a few words around 12 months (infants who
different meanings). The lexicon is both social and are learning signed languages gesture their first
normative (e.g., only our cultural knowledge makes words around 9 months). Then around 18 to 24
e-commerce understandable) and internalized (e.g., months, toddlers start learning words faster. In Indo-
we use words to facilitate cognitive processes such as European languages (e.g., English, Italian, Dutch),
explicit memory). infants start learning nouns faster, until their total
Word learning can be called symbol learning receptive vocabulary (i.e., the words they under-
because it encompasses not only spoken words but stand) includes 150 to 200 items. Subsequently, the
signed words and even pictorial symbols (e.g., brand proportion of new verbs and adjectives increases
logos). Several nonhuman species (i.e., apes, parrots, relatively faster. This suggests that children learn
dolphins) can learn small numbers of abstract names nouns until they can and must express more diverse
and symbols for objects, properties, or actions. and specific relations between nouns (e.g., The
There is no evidence that nonhuman animals use man petted the dog, vs. The man fed the dog).
the full human range of word meanings (e.g., not, This requires verbs. Fittingly, toddlers start produc-
think, silly, maybe), word variants (go, gone, went, ing two- and three-word sentences around 18 to 24
had gone), or word functions (e.g., puns, meta- months. These protosentences are telegraphic: They
phors, novel compounds such as climbing wall). lack articles, prepositions, and inflections. Only after
Yet children as young as 2 to 4 years old flexibly children understand 200 to 400 words (23 years)
adopt such a wide range of forms, meanings, and do they add many such function morphemes to their
uses: They can learn words defined by tone varia- sentences.
tions (e.g., Mandarin; Yoruba), percussive click From 3 to 5 years of age, vocabulary grows sub-
or ingestive noises (Sindhi, Xhosa, Zulu), or gestures stantially. Although total vocabulary size becomes
(American Sign Language). They learn words that harder to measure, English-speaking first graders
take complex inflections (i.e., changes to the forms might know an average of 3,000 root words (i.e.,
of a word, such as run, ran, running). Such varia- uninflected terms such as house, run), and many
tions are extensive and complex in languages like more inflected or compound words (e.g., running,
Turkish and Hungarian. Children also can integrate houseboat). These large gains have spurred folk
word meanings with cultural and conceptual knowl- beliefs that children are uncannily precocious word
edge (e.g., American children know that Pokmon learners. However, this claim lacks specificity or
refers to fictional characters, toys, playing cards, a verification, and adults in controlled tests learn new
game, a TV program, DVDs, and a video game, but words faster than preschoolers. Thus, acceleration
Pokmon Diamond only refers to the last of these). in word learning around 18 to 24 months and large
How do children learn all of this? vocabulary gains from 2 to 5 years do not prove
780 Word Learning
that word learning is a specialized childhood learn- is unknown how much fast mapping happens in
ing ability. common, everyday situations. Even in moderately
complex experimental tasks, young children require
Individual Differences in Childrens Vocabulary many repetitions to learn a word. A correlation has
Throughout childhood there is great variability been found between how much parents speak to
in individual vocabulary size. According to parental infants (i.e., variety of words and total words) and
report data, average English-learning 24-month-olds the infants vocabularies several years later. Thus,
use about 300 words. However, children in the low- although repetition is not all determining, it usually
est 10% use only about 50, and those in the highest promotes learning.
10% use about 500: a 10-fold difference. Adults Children learn words even when adults are not
have similar large differences in vocabulary. At the providing ostensive naming or speaking to them at
lower extremes, virtually all children with cognitive all. In many cultures, adults speak to infants infre-
or language disorders have some sort of restricted quently or not at all. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no
vocabulary. evidence that those infants learn language slower or
Among children with language impairment but have smaller lexicons than infants who are spoken
no other cognitive deficits, a common problem is to. Thus, the correlation between amount of speech
that the auditory system (i.e., brain network that to infants and later vocabulary does not rely on
processes sound information) is slow to process the direct speech to infants. Infants must learn a lot by
sound information in speech. This will inevitably overhearing other people talking. Experiments show
impair word learning because, for example, it is that toddlers may learn words as effectively from
harder to separate individual words in continuous overhearing as from direct ostension.
speech. It now seems that this problem leads to later
problems in decoding words while reading. The Progress of Word Learning: Errors
Childrens knowledge of a word does not sim-
The Setting for Childrens Word Learning
ply fit into one of two binary states, learned or
How do children learn words, and what factors unlearned. Children, like adults, can know a little
influence childrens success in word learning? As about a word (e.g., It sounds familiar . . . maybe
to how, the simplest answer could be that chil- its a kind of food . . .) or a lot (e.g., can recognize,
dren hear words while attending to the referent and define, and use it correctly), or anything in between.
form an association between the two. However, However, children show a lag from comprehension
this explanation is inadequate. There are so many to production. That is, they typically understand a
possible associations that a more specific theory of word before they will say it. This is partly because
learning processes is necessary. A traditional asso- of slow development of the fine motor skills for
ciationist account holds that learning requires words speech production. Nonetheless, children do speak,
and referents to be paired (a) close in time and and this can reveal what they know or do not know
(b) frequently. Both assumptions are only partly sup- about a words meaning. Childrens characteristic
ported. First, in some situations, toddlers associate a errors include overextending words (e.g., calling any
novel word with something they saw a few minutes medium-sized mammal kitty). These errors some-
ago, not the last thing they saw. Second, frequency of times reflect real confusion about a words mean-
input does not precisely predict learning. Preschool ing (e.g., kitty = any cute, fuzzy pet) and sometimes
children sometimes sensibly guess a words meaning reflect pragmatic accommodations to their small
from hearing it only one to two times. Even infants, vocabulary. If your only animal words are kitty,
after hearing a new word only a few times, might horsey, and birdy, your best option for labeling a
remember something of that words sound for days. rabbit or squirrel is kitty.
However, such fast mapping has been documented How do children correct errors like these?
in simple, unambiguous experimental contexts, Occasionally children seek information (e.g., What
where adults use ostension (i.e., naming while show- dat?), but children often do not seem to realize
ing the child a referent). Ostension is used by parents they are making errors. However, parents some-
in specific situations, like picture-book reading. It times correct childrens overt errors of meaning or
Word Learning 781
word choice. They also use less direct strategies, like they begin to assume that novel object words gener-
expanding and elaborating on their toddlers tele- alize to categories of same-shape objects. However,
graphic statements. A 20-month-old might point this is a learned bias, and it is contingent on other
to a pond and say duck! The parent might then properties (e.g., is the object an animal or artifact?).
expand, Yes, the duck is swimming, isnt it? This Thus, conceptual biases are not freestanding: They
expansion might teach the child not only about rest on other experiences and learned patterns. For
swimming but also confirm the correct usage of this reason, it is no surprise that childrens language
duck and implicate a semantic relation between constrains the specific concepts that they learn and
duck and swim (i.e., ducks are a sort of thing that name. Cross-linguistic studies confirm that mean-
swims). Or if the parent elaborates, Yes, ducks ing biases are affected by language experience. For
are pretty birds! this provides semantic informa- example, English and Korean prepositions denote
tion about the class-inclusion relation between the different spatial relations: English in and on do not
categories duck and bird. Regarding the individual have exact analogs in Korean. Korean 1-year-olds
differences noted above, parents who speak more are sensitive to spatial relations denoted by different
to their infants (who will later have larger vocabu- Korean words, but English-learning 1-year-olds do
laries) also tend to elaborate. Parents expansions not discriminate those relations. Thus, toddlers lexi-
might therefore provide important input to toddlers cons influence their sensitivity to specific meanings
about word forms, meanings, and uses. and patterns in the world.
Children also have social biases that affect how
Childrens Readiness to Interpret Words they learn meaning. By 18 months of age, toddlers
monitor where adults are looking, so that when
Young children are not equal opportunity the adult says a novel word, the toddler associates
learners, assigning any plausible meaning to a new it with whatever referent the adult was looking at.
word. Children have certain biases. Some are based This prevents the infants from spuriously associating
on perceptual processes. In general, objects that are words with whatever they are attending to, if the
novel, bright, and prominent will be associated with toddler and adults are attending to different things.
a novel word. Also, infants tend to associate a new Other biases for inferring word meanings are
word with an object if the object is moved in rhythm ambiguous. One claim is that children believe that
and synchrony with repetitions of the word. Finally, each nameable category only has one labela
children tend to map novel words for objects onto mutual exclusivity bias. For example, if the child
whole objects, as opposed to specific parts, colors, sees a horse and a tapir, they will assume that an
or textures. However, more specific information unfamiliar word (tapir) refers to the unfamiliar ani-
about the word can cause children to override their mal. However, evidence does not support that this is
bias and associate the word with another property. childrens true bias. They do preferentially associate
Other biases in interpreting words seem to reflect a novel word with a novel rather than familiar ref-
human conceptual knowledge and ignorance. erent, but there are many possible explanations for
For example, children seem to assume that words this. This exemplifies a general pattern: Although
refer to categories of objects, events, or properties, children have many biases for interpreting new
rather than to individuals. A child hearing lemur words, it is not clear which, if any, of these biases are
will associate it with a category of similar animals. specific to word learning per se.
Although some of toddlers first words may be nar-
rowly context specific, this seems to be the exception
Words on the Brain
rather than the rule. Even by their first birthdays,
infants tend to generalize new words to classes of To understand word learning requires understand-
similar referents. Also, children, like adults, tend ing how sound patterns of words are processed by
to generalize words for objects at a basic level of the brain and represented by brain networks so that
abstraction; that is, an intermediate-breadth cat- subsequent brain states (caused by, e.g., the sound of
egory (e.g., car) rather than a very specific one the word) will reactivate that word representation.
(Mazda 626) or a very general one (vehicle). More Activation of lexical knowledge involves widely dis-
specifically, once toddlers know 50 to 100 words tributed networks in the cortex, but in most healthy
782 Word Learning
See also Concepts, Development of; Dyslexia, conceptual development (pp. 132158). Cambridge,
Developmental; Language Development; Language UK: Cambridge University Press.
Development, Overregulation in; Representations, Werker, J. F., Cohen, L. B., Lloyd, V. L., Casasola, M., &
Development of; Speech Perception; Word Stager, C. L. (1998). Acquisition of wordobject
Recognition, Auditory; Word Recognition, Visual
associations by 14-month-old infants. Developmental
Psychology, 34, 12891309.
Further Readings
Anglin, J. M. (1993). Vocabulary development:
A morphological analysis. Monographs of the WORD RECOGNITION, AUDITORY
Society for Research in Child Development, 58(10),
1165. Language provides humans with the remarkable
Bates, E., & Goodman, J. C. (1999). On the emergence of capacity to express their thoughts through a physical
grammar from the lexicon. In B. MacWhinney (Ed.), medium to share with others. To do so, we com-
The emergence of language (pp. 2979). Mahwah, NJ: bine elements, words, whose form has been conven-
Erlbaum. tionalized within a particular language community.
Benson, D. F. (1988). Anomia in aphasia. Aphasiology, 2, Thus a critical step in the process of retrieving a talk-
229235. ers message consists of identifying these elements
Choi, S., McDonough, L., Bowerman, M., & Mandler, J.
in his or her speech. This entry discusses how our
(1999). Early sensitivity to language-specific spatial
knowledge of the auditory forms that words take
categories in English and Korean. Cognitive
may be represented in memory, and how listeners
Development, 14, 241268.
decide, based on the auditory stimulus, which words
Clark, E. V. (1997). Contextual perspective and lexical
choice in acquisition. Cognition, 64, 137.
they heard, out of all possible word combinations
Deacon, T. (1997). The symbolic species. Cambridge, MA:
the talker may have spoken.
Harvard University Press.
What Does Our Knowledge
Dek, G. O. (2000). Chasing the fox of word learning:
Why constraints fail to capture it. Developmental
of Words Look Like?
Review, 20, 2980. When we listen to someone talk, words seem to pop
Fenson, L., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., Bates, E., Thal, D. J., & out of his or her speech effortlessly. This impression
Pethick, S. J. (1994). Variability in early communicative is misleading, however. Words are not neatly seg-
development. Monographs of the Society for Research in regated from one another in speech as they are in
Child Development, 59(5). print. How many words the utterance contains, and
Hart, B., & Risley, T. (1995). Meaningful differences in the where they begin and end in the speech stream, are
everyday experiences of young children. Baltimore, MD: properties that the listener must establish. Moreover,
Paul H. Brookes. the way spoken words sound varies considerably
Jusczyk, P. W. (1997). The discovery of spoken language.
across contextsfor example, when produced by a
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
man or a woman, in the clear speech used in lec-
Mills, D. L., Coffey-Corina, S., & Neville, H. J. (1997).
ture halls, or in the casual speech characteristic of
Language comprehension and cerebral specialization
informal conversation. Our knowledge of the form
from 13 to 20 months. Developmental
Neuropsychology, 13, 397445.
of words must accommodate this variability. Two
Naigles, L. (1990). Children use syntax to learn verb
approaches to this issue can be contrasted.
meanings. Journal of Child Language, 17, 357374. First, listeners may represent the form of a word
Smith, L. B., Colunga, E., & Yoshida, H. (2003). Making as a compilation of the memory traces that cor-
an ontology: Cross-linguistic evidence. In D. Rakison & respond to all past exposure with the word. Each
L. Oakes (Eds.), Early category and concept instance retains the acoustic properties resulting
development (pp. 275302). Oxford, UK: Oxford from the context in which the word was uttered.
University Press. Such a representation is sometimes described as
Tomasello, M. (2001). Perceiving intentions and learning a cluster of observations in a multidimensional
words in the second year of life. In M. Bowerman & space. A more compact representation may also be
S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Language acquisition and postulated, such as one that represents the central
784 Word Recognition, Auditory
tendency derived from past instances of a word, its words. However, phoneme recognition itself has
prototype. These views assume ever-changing word proven difficult because the acoustic realization
representations because new instances of words are of a given phoneme varies greatly across contexts.
constantly added to the cluster or the set of instances Furthermore, listeners can successfully retrieve which
that contribute to the central tendency. of the phonemically identical strings (such as two lips
These exemplar and prototype views are rooted in and tulips) the talker said because they make use of
cognitive theories of categorization and contrast with subtle acoustic differences between the strings. This
a second, linguistically grounded, approach where finding is difficult to explain if the speech signal was
words are represented by the features that distinguish first translated into its phonemic subcomponents.
them from other words. The acoustic properties of a
spoken word, such as the voice quality of the talker Word Recognition as a Perceptual Choice
that utters it, are considered irrelevant to this distinc- In contrast to the question of how the form of words
tion and consequently not part of the representation is represented, the process by which the perceptual
of the words form. This approach assumes abstract, stimulus is compared to these representations is rela-
context-independent, and immutable representations. tively well understood and uncontroversial. Spoken
Normalization algorithms transform information words become available to the listener over time.
extracted from the speech to neutralize the influence of Because speech is a complex, transient, and rapidly
contextual variability, in effect treating it as noise, or to changing signal, and, because sensory memory is
model the variation and factor out its influence. limited, speech must be evaluated and interpreted
Distinguishing between the two approaches has incrementally rather than word by word. But the
proven difficult. For instance, some have taken early portion of a spoken word (e.g., cap . . .) is
the fact that people recognize words uttered by often compatible with many different words (e.g.,
familiar talkers more readily than the same words cap, captive, capital, captain). Dominant views posit
from unfamiliar talkers as evidence supporting the that all possible interpretations of the spoken word
instance-based approach because it demonstrates can be simultaneously considered. For example, in
that nondistinctive properties of spoken stimuli are William Marslen-Wilsons cohort theory, the first
maintained in memory and contribute to recogni- sounds of a spoken word determine a cohort of
tion. However, the finding is also compatible with hypotheses compatible with this early information.
the abstractionist approach if one assumes that the Subsequent information serves to prune the hypoth-
normalization algorithms can be optimized to reflect eses no longer supported by the signal. Although
past experience with a given talker. the propose-then-dispose aspect of the theory has
since been falsified by evidence that words can be
Does Recognizing a Word Require successfully recognized even when their first sounds
Recognizing Its Parts First? are distorted, the privileged role of the early portion
of a word has been maintained by assuming a form
Another widely discussed issue concerns the inter-
of competition among simultaneously considered
nal structure of words. Phonological theories
hypotheses. The more evidence has accumulated in
describe words as built out of elements, the pho-
favor of a given hypothesis, the less likely its alterna-
nemes, grouped into larger units, such as syllables.
tives. This mechanism, in effect, favors words that
Words internal structure is known (albeit implicitly)
match the early portion of the spoken stimulus over
to language users because changes that word forms
those that match a later portion, because the latter
undergo under the influence of morphology or other
will have been largely discounted before the stimulus
linguistic constraints have regularities that depend on
supports them as possible contenders. Importantly,
the decomposition of word forms into such a struc-
competition is modulated by the likelihood of
ture. The critical question here is whether people,
encountering each hypothesis, which can be esti-
when analyzing speech, decompose the signal into
mated by how often it has been encountered before.
individual elements to establish which word matches
Frequent words are recognized more accurately and
the structure best. Recognizing phonemes or other
faster than rarer words, and frequent hypotheses
units first, as opposed to analyzing the spoken word
interfere with the recognition of rare words.
as a whole, may offer an advantage because there
are fewer phonemes to discriminate than there are Delphine Dahan
Word Recognition, Visual 785
See also Cohort Model of Auditory Word Recognition; that words are recognized in a hierarchical manner
Frequency Effects in Word Recognition; Speech on the basis of their components. Information from
Perception the printed stimulus maps onto stored knowledge
about the visual features that make up letters (e.g.,
Further Readings horizontal bar, left-opening curve), and informa-
tion from this level then proceeds onto a system of
Dahan, D., & Magnuson, J. S. (2006). Spoken-word
stored abstract letter representations that code letter
recognition. In M. J. Traxler & M. A. Gernsbacher
(Eds.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (2nd ed.,
identity as well as letter position (so that anagrams
pp. 249283). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier. like top, pot, and opt can be distinguished). These
Marslen-Wilson, W. (1987). Functional parallelism in letter representations are abstract in the sense that
spoken word-recognition. Cognition, 25, 71102. they can be activated irrespective of surface char-
McClelland, J. L., & Elman, J. L. (1986). The TRACE model acteristics such as case, size, font, and retinal loca-
of speech perception. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 186. tion. Information at the letter level of representation
then proceeds onto an orthographic lexicon (a body
of stored knowledge about the written forms of
whole words). Units in the orthographic lexicon
WORD RECOGNITION, VISUAL can then activate information about the meanings
and/or sounds of words. Visual word recognition
Reading is one of the most remarkable of our cog- is thought to be achieved when a unit in the ortho-
nitive abilities. Skilled readers are able to recognize graphic lexicon reaches some critical threshold of
printed words and compute their associated mean- activation.
ings with astonishing speed and with a great deal There is widespread agreement that each unit
of accuracy. This level of performance arises despite in the orthographic lexicon is coded in terms of an
the fact that letters frequently appear in an unfamil- individuals experience with that word. Precisely
iar form (e.g., in new fonts) and constitute a limited how lexical experience is best conceptualized is
array that renders individual words highly confus- a matter of some debate, however. Until recently,
able (e.g., salt, slat). most theories argued that orthographic units are
This entry provides an overview of some of the coded in terms of the frequency with which a word
key theoretical claims about the cognitive architec- occurs in the language, and indeed, word frequency
tures and processing mechanisms that underlie visual is known to be the most powerful determinant of
word recognition. These claims were first instanti- the time taken to recognize a word (i.e., its latency).
ated in the interactive activation model developed by However, recent research has suggested that the age
James McClelland and David Rumelhart in 1981, at which words are acquired, or perhaps the cumu-
from which many of the more recent theories in the lative frequency with which an individual encoun-
field have been developed. They are supported by ters words over his or her lifetime, may provide a
evidence from a variety of experimental methods, better means of conceptualizing lexical experience.
including observation of word recognition perfor- Both age of acquisition and cumulative frequency
mance in skilled readers (e.g., measuring the time have also been shown to influence word recognition
taken to read a word aloud), investigation of the latencies, though because age of acquisition, cumu-
reading behavior of people with acquired or devel- lative frequency, and word frequency are naturally
opmental language impairments (e.g., dyslexia, pure correlated, it is not yet known which variable pro-
alexia), and computational modeling (e.g., testing vides the optimal index.
theories of visual word recognition through com-
puter simulations of human performance).
Processing Dynamics in Visual
Word Recognition
The Architecture of the Visual
Information is thought to flow through feature, letter,
Word Recognition System
and whole-word orthographic levels of representa-
Though the earliest theories of visual word recogni- tion in an interactive manner, such that information
tion claimed that words are recognized as wholes on at higher levels of representation can influence pro-
the basis of their shapes, modern theories suggest cessing at lower levels of representation. The finding
786 Working Memory
that provided the initial support for interactive pro- visual word recognition and reading aloud.
cessing is the word superiority effect. Participants are Psychological Review, 108, 204256.
better able to decide which of two letters (e.g., D or Davis, C. J., & Bowers, J. S. (2006). Contrasting five
K) is in a briefly presented target masked by another theories of letter position coding. Journal of
stimulus (e.g., immediately followed by hash marks) Experimental Psychology: Human Perception &
when that target is a word (e.g., WORK) than when Performance, 32, 535557.
it is a nonword (e.g., OWRK). This finding supports Grainger, J., & Jacobs, A. M. (1996). Orthographic
the notion of interactive processing because it sug- processing in visual word recognition: A multiple read-
out model. Psychological Review, 103, 518565.
gests that a decision based on activation at the letter
Rastle, K. (2007). Visual word recognition. In
level is influenced by higher level information from
M. G. Gaskell (Ed.), Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics
the orthographic lexicon. More recent research has
(pp. 7189). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
shown that tests of visual word recognition such as
speeded lexical decision (i.e., deciding as quickly as
possible whether a stimulus is a known word) show
top-down influences of semantic variables such as WORKING MEMORY
imageability, number of semantic features, and num-
ber of meanings. Similarly, substantial evidence also Working memory is the term used to describe the
suggests that the recognition of printed letter strings information one is thinking about at any particu-
is influenced at its earliest stages by information lar moment. That information keeps changing, and
about the sounds of words. the amount one holds in mind in this way at any
It is generally thought that printed letter strings moment is quite small compared to the vast amount
activate multiple candidates in the orthographic lexi- of information in ones permanent memory stor-
con (e.g., the stimulus cat activates units for cat, cab, age system in the brain. The concept of working
rat, mat, car, cut, etc.). The activation of multiple memory has become one of the most important and
units thus raises the question of how the target unit often-used concepts in the field of psychology, as it
is ultimately selected. Though theories are divided helps a great deal in explaining what tasks are easy
on this issue, one popular mechanism is competi- or hard for individuals to carry out. There are con-
tion. Inhibitory connections between units in the sequently thousands of articles on various aspects of
orthographic lexicon enable the most active unit working memory.
(usually the one corresponding to the target) to drive The term working memory was suggested in
down activation of multiple alternative candidates. 1960 in a book by George Miller and his colleagues,
One key piece of evidence for competitive process- and the concept was made popular 14 years later
ing is that presentation of a high-frequency, masked in a book chapter by Alan Baddeley and Graham
stimulus (e.g., able) tends to inhibit recognition of Hitch. The idea behind the term is that there are
an orthographically related target (e.g., axle). There various kinds of mental work such as thinking,
is also mounting evidence for a processing cost problem solving, reasoning, language comprehen-
involved in the recognition of words with higher sion and production, and keeping track of changing
frequency orthographic neighbors (i.e., orthographi- events (i.e., while watching a baseball game). To do
cally similar words), though further research is these kinds of mental work, one must hold in mind
needed to establish this finding conclusively. certain information relevant to the situation. One
might need to hold in mind data such as, in baseball,
Kathleen Rastle
which team is at bat and how many outs there are in
the inning or, when doing addition in ones head, the
See also Compound Words, Processing of; Dyslexia,
Acquired; Eye Movements During Reading; Frequency carried digits. One might also need to hold in mind
Effects in Word Recognition; Word Recognition, plans such as, when solving an arithmetic problem,
Auditory the steps to follow or, when running errands, the
order in which errands are to be accomplished. The
key point is that the amount of information that can
Further Readings be held in working memory is limited. This fact in
Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & turn puts limits on how well humans can solve prob-
Ziegler, J. (2001). DRC: A dual route cascaded model of lems, formulate plans in their heads, and so on.
Working Memory 787
Working memory appears to have various com- your ability to carry out a math problem. If you fin-
ponents, but they operate together as an integrated ish the math problem and then turn attention to the
system. For example, there appears to be cross talk sound that has just finished, you may still be able to
such that, if the goals are too complex, one can for- experience that sound through memory (though you
get not only goals but data; conversely, if there are will have missed much of the immediately preced-
many data to be kept in mind, one can forget not ing part of the symphony). If the memory for sound
only data, but goals. and the math problem activity are indeed separate
This entry will include a discussion of many from one another in your mental processes then they
important aspects of working memory, including should not both be considered part of a common
a comparison with similar concepts and terms, the limited-capacity system.
kinds of studies demonstrating working memory, The math problem is the kind of activity more
limits on working memory, theories of working often considered dependent on a limited-capacity
memory, individual and group differences in work- system; it requires attentive thought. Passively
ing memory, and some possible neural and evolu- remembering a few tones, words, or images, on the
tionary reasons why working memory capacity is other hand, is generally considered to be partly out-
limited. side of that limited-capacity system because some
such memory continues for a short time even when
Similar Concepts and Terms your attention is elsewhere. Yet both the active,
attentive and the passive, inattentive types of mental
One of the most common questions asked of processing typically contribute to performance on
researchers of working memory is how it differs tasks considered to be working memory tasks.
from certain other types of memory. Usually, there is
a lot of overlap between the different types of mem- Immediate Memory
ory in question. Here are some of these overlap-
ping concepts and how they subtly differ from the Immediate memory is memory for a list or array
term working memory. This discussion is meant to of items that was just presented. There is no delay
resolve some of the confusion that inevitably comes between the stimulus and the time at which you are
about when so many terms are used. supposed to try to recall that stimulus, so it is called
immediate. Tasks using immediate memory proce-
Limited-Capacity System dures are probably the most common types of task
used to study working memory.
In some of the early work on working memory,
a single term was sometimes used for many differ-
Short-Term Memory
ent types of things that were limited in the mind.
We can only attend to a limited number of objects This term is used in different ways by different
in the visual field at once. We can only keep in folks. When many people say Im having trouble
mind a small number of randomly arranged let- with my short-term memory they are saying that
ters, numbers, or words at once. We can only fully they cannot recall things that they did within the last
comprehend one talker at a time. We can only solve day or so, such as where they parked their car in the
math problems in our heads if they are sufficiently morning. That kind of memory clearly cannot be
simple. A term often used to describe these limits is the same as the information currently held in mind,
a limited-capacity system. Capacity is the ability to unless one spends the entire day trying to bear in
carry out tasks, and this capacity is limited in vari- mind where the car was parked.
ous ways just described. When psychologists use the term short-term
Are all these limitations based on the same, single, memory, they are contrasting it with the term long-
limited-capacity part of the human mind and brain? term memory, the vast amount of information that
It may be, but it would be difficult to prove, and no we have learned over a lifetime. In this sense, short-
such proof has emerged as of yet. There are short- term memory is the same thing as working memory.
comings of that way of thinking. For example, your One difference is that some researchers use the term
memory for just how the final note of a symphony short-term memory to describe only the passive,
sounded, just after the end of the symphony, may lin- effortless storage of information for a few seconds.
ger at most a few seconds, without interfering with Some of them reserve the term working memory
788 Working Memory
effect). If they are allowed to recall the items in any remember the series IBMCIAFBI, if one notices that
order, they do very well also for items at the end of it is composed of three chunks, each a meaningful
the list (called the recency effect). acronym: IBM, CIA, and FBI. Some individuals have
Individuals tend to use strategies to remember learned to repeat back lists of up to 80 digits, but
lists as well as possible, such as trying to group they do so by having already memorized many series
words together or repeating them silently (which is of digits that make up athletic records (like a run-
called covert verbal rehearsal). Such strategies can ning time for the mile of 3.86 minutes) and using
be prevented by requiring that the individual recite that information as a chunk when that sequence
a meaningless word (such as the, the, the) while the happens to come up in the list. You probably cannot
items to be recalled are presented. This typically recall such long strings of digits, but everyone uses
interferes most with memory for items at the begin- chunking a great deal. You could probably recall
ning of the list. Some researchers are most interested many, many words if they make up the words of the
in the best memory, strategies and all, but other first verse of Mary Had a Little Lamb followed by
researchers are more interested in understanding the first verse of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.
how much can be retained even without the use of A great deal of researchfor example, that sum-
such strategies. marized by Nelson Cowan and his colleagues
Instead of lists, other studies have used arrays shows that adults generally can remember only three
of characters presented all at once on the computer of four chunks of information. Sometimes each
screen. The results are similar, although rehearsal chunk includes a lot of information, but it is held
may be more difficult for arrays than for lists. by a very limited working memory mechanism. This
Some studies are designed to find out how well limit may have to do with how much information
people are able to save information while it is being can be attended at one time.
used. The studies may present lists that require both
saving information and using it, at the same time. Time Limits
These procedures will not necessarily look the same Baddeley and Hitch showed that chunks are not
as tasks in the real world (such as problem solv- the only things important for retaining information
ing or language comprehension), because in the in working memory. They found that lists of long
real world it is not easy to find out how much the words cannot be remembered as well as lists of the
task depends on working memory and how much it same number of short words, even if the long words
depends on other abilities. In some working mem- are equally familiar. This difference has to do with
ory tests, therefore, the storage and processing parts the ability to use covert verbal rehearsal to keep
of the task are interleaved rather than integrated. words active in memory. It takes longer to rehearse
The research participant may have to answer a long words and, while some words are being
math problem, memorize a word, answer another rehearsed, other words in the list can be forgotten.
math problem, memorize a second word, and so Pierre Barrouillet and his colleagues have found
on. The number of words that can be remembered that what is important for retaining items in work-
and repeated back, despite the interleaved math, is ing memory is having enough time to use attention
known as operation span. between items. Attention, and not just covert verbal
rehearsal, may be used to reactivate items in mem-
Limits on Working Memory ory before they can be forgotten. What appears to
Chunk Limits be important for working memory is the ratio of free
time to time occupied by distractions. The more free
Humans are, of course, impressive thinkers who time, the better.
often come up with ways around their limitations. It
appears that the main limit on the ability to remem-
Theories of Working Memory
ber information is how many meaningful units
must be remembered. These meaningful units are The theories of working memory are theories of
called chunks. Most people would have great dif- what can and cannot be remembered and why. If
ficulty in committing to memory a nine-letter series we had a complete understanding of what can and
such as BIMICASUA. It is much easier, however, to cannot be remembered, we probably would know
790 Working Memory
which theory is correct. There are many subtleties, how a spoken digit would look in print). We know
though, and researchers still are investigating this that stimuli that are similar in their codes interfere
issue. with one another in working memory. For example,
it is difficult to remember the printed letter series c,
Central Storage Theory d, v, p, t, z, b because the letters tend to be mentally
According to the central storage theory, working recoded into a speech form and they sound similar.
memory requires attention (a process that is central This shows how difficult it will be to determine with
in the mind, not specific to one type of stimulus or great certainty whether there is a central store.
another). If you add one working memory task, it
Hybrid Theories
will interfere with other working memory tasks and
with other kinds of effortful thinking. There is some Today many researchers believe some sort of
truth to this inasmuch as simply having to remem- hybrid model that includes both (a) a central store
ber a series of about seven digitswhat is called a that is closely tied to attention and accepts a variety
memory loadcan impair ones concurrent ability of types of information and (b) some other forms
to reason out problems logically and make good of storage that are more passive and automatic
decisions. (Similar to memory load, one reason that and may be designed to accept only certain specific
too much alcohol results in bad decisions is that it kinds of information. For example, for attention-
impairs working memory.) related memory, Cowan thinks of the focus of atten-
J. Scott Saults and Cowan carried out research tion as a central storage device in the mind, and
on memory for both visual and auditory memory Baddeley talks of an episodic buffer that contains
arrays together (colored spots on the screen and spo- links between information of different sorts (like an
ken digits in different voices from four loudspeakers association between a face and a spoken name). In
at once). They found that participants could remem- both theoretical views, there is also a central execu-
ber a maximum of about four items. If they were tive component that represents the attention-driven
allowed to pay attention only to the colored spots, control of information as it is transferred from one
they were able remember about four of those. If they state or store to another but that presumably does
were required to pay attention to both modalities, not itself store information.
they were able to remember still about four items For passive storage devices, Cowan talks of
total: about three colored spots and one spoken various sorts of activated elements from long-term
digit. This suggests that a central storage mechanism memory, and Baddeley talks of visual and phonolog-
exists, though it certainly does not show that this ical storage buffers as separate modules. One differ-
central storage is the only kind. For one thing, sen- ence between these models is that Cowan is unsure
sory memory had to be eliminated using a meaning- whether the types of activated long-term memory
less audiovisual pattern, or mask, after the arrays in are few enough or simple enough to be considered
order for this fixed capacity of about four items to modules, or whether there are instead just a myriad
be observed. of different kinds of activated memory for different
kinds of features of the stimuli (color, spatial loca-
Modular-Stores Theory tion, sound quality, semantic meaning, geographic
Some other theorists, such as Robert Logie, arrangement, and so on).
believe that there is no central memory, only sepa-
Individual and Group Differences
rate memories for items stored in visual form and
in Working Memory
items stored in verbal form, examples of specialized
subsystems or modules. These theorists attempt to Individuals with lower scores on working memory
explain results such as the ones using visual and tests have been shown to do worse on many different
auditory stimuli together by saying that items are kinds of cognitive tests. They remember fewer items in
thought of in a different way or recoded. One can working memory, find it more difficult to inhibit irrel-
make up a verbal code for a visual stimulus (like evant thoughts, and find it more difficult to remem-
naming a colored spot), or one can make up a visual ber the goal of an activity than do individuals with
code to go with an acoustic stimulus (like envisioning a larger working memory span. Therefore, working
Working Memory, Evolution of 791
memory is of great practical significance. Recent work Baddeley, A. D., & Logie, R. H. (1999). Working memory:
has suggested that the attention-related part of work- The multiple-component model. In A. Miyake &
ing memory can be improved through training, and P. Shah (Eds.), Models of working memory: Mechanisms
that it improves cognition and helps in the treatment of active maintenance and executive control
of attention deficit disorder and dementia. If that (pp. 2861). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
information holds up, it will be exciting indeed. Barrouillet, P., Bernardin, S., & Camos, V. (2004). Time
constraints and resource sharing in adults working
memory spans. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Why Is There a Limit in Working General, 133, 83100.
Memory Capacity? Cowan, N. (2005). Working memory capacity. Hove, UK:
Various kinds of explanation have been given for the Psychology Press.
working memory limit. Saving information in work- Cowan, N. (2009). Working memory from the trailing edge
ing memory seems to depend on areas in the parietal of consciousness to neurons. Neuron, 62, 1316.
lobes in the brain, and deciding what information Jonides, J., Lewis, R. L., Nee, D. E., Lustig, C. A., Berman,
M. G., & Moore, K. S. (2008). The mind and brain of
to save and how to use it seems to depend on areas
short-term memory. Annual Review of Psychology, 59,
in the frontal lobes. The coding of a stimulus seems
193224.
to depend on different areas that code different fea-
Klingberg, T. (2009). The overflowing brain: Information
tures all firing at once. For example, the represen-
overload and the limits of working memory
tation of a blue circle would include neurons that (N. Betteridge Trans.). New York, NY: Oxford
represent blueness and neurons that represent circles University Press.
firing at the same time. When several items have to Miller, G. A., Galanter, E., & Pribram, K. H. (1960). Plans
be represented at once, there is the danger that they and the structure of behavior. New York, NY: Holt.
will corrupt one another. A blue circle and a green Miyake, A., & Shah, P. (Eds.). (1999). Models of working
square that are parts of a set of items that is slightly memory: Mechanisms of active maintenance and
too large for memory might get misremembered as a executive control. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
blue square and a green circle. University Press.
A few mathematically oriented researchers have Saults, J. S., & Cowan, N. (2007). A central capacity limit
argued that groups of three or four items make up an to the simultaneous storage of visual and auditory
ideal grouping for the retrieval of information from arrays in working memory. Journal of Experimental
memory. Items within a group of three are easily iden- Psychology: General, 136, 663684.
tifiable inasmuch as there is a beginning, middle, and
end of each group. Evolutionary psychologists have
argued that working memory is especially important WORKING MEMORY,
in group interactions. One might have to figure out
and bear in mind not only what a friend thinks but EVOLUTION OF
also what the friend thinks that he or she thinks, and
what other people think that they both think. A good This entry discusses a prominent cognitive theory
theory of the minds of others can help one be a leader called working memory and discusses evidence for
in society. That takes working memory. its evolution in the archaeological record. Working
memory is a theory of cognitive function proposed
Nelson Cowan by experimental psychologists Alan Baddeley and
Graham Hitch in 1974. In their original formula-
See also Aging, Memory, and Information Processing
tion, working memory was conceived to be a mul-
Speed; Emotion and Working Memory; Intelligence
and Working Memory; Rehearsal and Memory; Visual
ticomponent system that allows an organism to
Working Memory; Working Memory, Evolution of keep task-relevant information in active attention
while filtering out task-irrelevant interference. At
the core of this system was the central executive, a
Further Readings limited-capacity, attentional controller and decision
Baddeley, A. (2007). Working memory, thought, and maker. At its behest were two subsystems, the pho-
action. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. nological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad. The
792 Working Memory, Evolution of
phonological loop consisted of two components: a because organisms must make decisions regarding
quickly fading phonological store (about 2 seconds their perceptions of the world, the central executive
in length) and an articulatory rehearsal mecha- must play a prominent role in deciding on subsequent
nism, which could be invoked vocally or subvocally. behavior based on information held in attention and
Repeated articulatory rehearsal of verbal stimuli was analyzed. Baddeley noted that conditions of rapid
considered to have obligatory storage in declara- change, such as those that would have confronted
tive long-term memory. Baddeley and his colleagues our early ancestors, would require the organism to
found empirical support for the hypothesis that the be able to learn and learn quickly (i.e., implicit learn-
phonological loop was critical to language compre- ing). Finally, Baddeley proposed that a successful sys-
hension and production. The visuospatial sketchpad tem would be able to remember previous experiences
maintained visual and spatial information in atten- and use this information in the creation of alternative
tion and played an important role in spatial orienta- scenarios (i.e., planning). Baddeleys episodic buffer,
tion and wayfinding. More recently, Baddeley has described in his 2007 book, plays a central role in
proposed a fourth component, the episodic buffer. this planning function, and working memory would
As originally conceived, the central executive had therefore reside at the intersection of cognitive func-
no storage capacity of its own; it was the analytical tions, including perception, learning, attention, and
component of working memory. Because the pho- action, which he believed enhanced the organisms
nological loop and visuospatial sketchpad consisted flexibility and survivability.
of modality specific, rapidly fading, limited-capacity Recently, Frederick L. Coolidge and Thomas
stores, the model as originally conceived lacked a Wynn have proposed that an enhancement in work-
store that could hold integrated information. He ing memory capacity was an important component
therefore proposed a subsystem for the multimodal in the long evolutionary trajectory of human cogni-
integration of verbal and visual information and the tion. Their model of cognitive evolution posits two
temporary maintenance of the resulting information major evolutionary leaps in cognition, one about
for manipulation by the central executive. 1.8 million years ago with the transition from some-
times living in trees (the Australopithecines) to fully
Misconceptions About Working Memory terrestrial life (Homo erectus), and the second begin-
ning somewhere between 100,000 to 30,000 years
There is some confusion in the cognitive literature
ago with the advent of fully modern behavior.
about the term working memory. Sometimes, the
Several developments in cognition can be inferred
term working memory is used only in a narrow
from the archaeological and fossil evidence that
sense, and it does not imply Baddeleys multi-com-
marked the advent of Homo erectus. Among them
ponent model. When it is used in the narrow sense,
are developments in spatial cognition, fine motor
the term usually refers to the ability to maintain
control (praxis), ability to imitate (perhaps driven
and manipulate thoughts over a brief period of time
by the motor neuron system), and a likely change
despite interference. Readers must often discover for
in sleep. The transition from tree to ground sleep-
themselves whether the term is being used in the nar-
ing aided in the integrity of a single sleep period,
row sense or the broad, multicomponent sense.
which may have released pressures against the
deepest stages of sleep (slow-wave and REM sleep).
Evolution of Working Memory
This in turn may have led to a greater ability to con-
Baddeley himself recognizes that evolutionary solidate procedural memories, a greater opportunity
approaches are currently popular within psychology. for threat rehearsal in dreams, and even creativity.
His own investigations led him to believe in the selec- One development in working memory is also evi-
tive value of the phonological loop as a powerful aid dent. Homo erectus was able to coordinate visual
in the acquisition of language. Baddeley has also pon- information from the ventral stream (shape recogni-
dered the biological, adaptive functions of the other tion) and dorsal stream (spatial arrangement) in the
components of working memory. The two working manufacture of stone tools. This ability was almost
memory subsystems (phonological loop and visuospa- certainly deployed via the visuospatial sketchpad of
tial sketchpad) would play a role in an organisms per- working memory and indicates an advance in cogni-
ception of its environment. Baddeley recognized that tion over ape abilities.
Working Memory in Language Processing 793
limitations. These factors may include limitations purpose working memory system supports both
on the amount of activation, similarity-based inter- linguistic and nonlinguistic functions. Moreover,
ference, processing speed, encoding and retrieval the storage and processing functions are fueled by
problems, and the ability to inhibit irrelevant activation, a commodity that maintains knowledge
information. elements in memory and supports computation.
Variation in WMC has been shown to correlate Activation is shared among storage and processing
with performance on a range of cognitive tasks, functions such that activation-consuming processes
including language comprehension. Complex lan- limit the amount of activation available to sup-
guage-processing tasks place the greatest demands port storage and vice versa. Individual differences
on working memory and so offer the opportunity in language comprehension depend on differences
to observe differences in performance across indi- in capacity, the total amount of activation available
viduals who differ in WMC. Complex tasks involve to the system. Language places demands on limited
multiple component processes, however, which working memory resources, and more complex lan-
complicates the interpretation of any observed cor- guage creates greater demands than less complex
relations between WMC and task performance. language. So, for example, syntactically complex
WMC measures assess an individuals ability to sentences consume more memory resources than
keep information activated while undertaking a task simple sentences. As a result, individuals with lower
that prevents rehearsal. Reading span is often used to working memory capacities should have greater dif-
measure WMC. In this task, participants read aloud ficulty with more complex than simple sentences,
a set of sentences, presented one at a time. They whereas individuals with large working memory
recall the final word of each sentence after reading capacities should process complex sentences with
the entire set. Reading span is the largest set size for about the same efficiency as they process less com-
which a reader recalls all the sentence-final words. plex sentences. In some studies, groups of individ-
Reading span correlates with the verbal Scholastic uals with lower WMC show greater complexity
Aptitude Test (SAT) (about .5) and the ability to effects than groups with higher WMC. Dual-task
answer questions about a text (about .8). When paradigms also provide evidence that lower capac-
reading span and text complexity are used to predict ity comprehenders are more affected by complexity
reading times, they interact. Differences between than are higher capacity comprehenders.
high- and low-capacity comprehenders increase as Just and Carpenters formulation has been chal-
text complexity increases. However, reading span lenged by two separate lines of inquiry. First, work-
does not correlate with short-term memory tasks, ing memory capacity does not interact with syntactic
such as digit span. complexity when appropriate statistical methods are
Other measures of working memory capac- used. Second, groups of patients with scores of zero
ity include the following: (a) operation span on working memory tasks are able to parse and inter-
participants perform simple arithmetic problems pret sentences containing complex structures and
while retaining a set of words; (b) alphabet span long-distance dependencies. Results such as these
participants repeat a list of words after arranging have motivated David Caplan and Gloria Waters to
them in alphabetic order; and (c) minus span propose two separate sources of working memory
participants repeat a list of numbers after subtract- resources: One is involved in interpretive functions
ing two from each. These measures correlate highly (e.g., lexical access, parsing, and the assignment of
with each other and with the reading-span measure. standard meaning), and the other is involved in post-
interpretive functions (e.g., contextual integration,
and inferencing). Aphasic patients could parse and
The Relation Between WMC and
interpret complex sentences even though they could
Language Comprehension
not remember any words in the reading-span task,
Marcel Just and Pat Carpenters theory of work- perhaps because one source of working memory
ing memory and language comprehension requires resources was impaired while the other source was
a working memory system that maintains partial intact. Minimally, theories of WMC must explain
products of the comprehension process in an active how an individual whose reading-span score is zero
state while additional input is analyzed. A general can comprehend complex sentences.
Working Memory in Language Processing 795
Other approaches to working memory and working memory and language comprehension, and
language start by noting that scores on working the fact that working memory capacity is correlated
memory tasks depend on (a) the content of the infor- with a wide variety of other individual differences.
mation being held in working memory and (b) the Studies often rely on a single measure of working
degree to which processes have been automatized. memory capacity. No single measure of capacity has
The reorganization of to-be-remembered informa- exhibited very high reliability in studies assessing the
tion by chunking can increase the apparent capac- psychometric properties of working memory tasks.
ity of working memory, so a single retrieval cue can In other words, tests used to assess WMC do not
recover vastly greater information than the standard produce the same score for the same individual if the
seven plus or minus two chunks. Further, auto- test is taken on two separate occasions. This prob-
mating a process can greatly reduce the demands that lem can largely be avoided by using multiple mea-
processes impose on working memory. To determine sures of WMC.
the extent to which a task loads working memory, The relation between WMC and language com-
one has to know what information is being manipu- prehension is often studied using quasi-experimental
lated, how that information is organized, and how designs. WMC is measured and then people par-
much practice the individual has had with that spe- ticipate in an experiment in which some text vari-
cific task. Language interpretation processes such as able is manipulated (e.g., word frequency, syntactic
syntactic parsing are overlearned and automatized; complexity). Quasi-experimental designs treat con-
thus, they may place minimal demands on work- tinuous variables (such as WMC) as categorical.
ing memory. This account places heavy emphasis on This technique can artificially magnify differences
experiencethe more often you have encountered between groups and mask variation in performance
a stimulus of a given type, the more automated the within each artificially established group. Most of
interpretive processes should be and the more effi- the published quasi-experimental studies of indi-
cient you should be in processing that stimulus. vidual differences on WMC and language compre-
A third approach to working memory and lan- hension also use an extreme-groups design. In such
guage appeals to processes that clean up the by- experiments, individuals are selected for analysis
products of automated access and retrieval processes. because they score very high or very low on some
These approaches argue that differences in working test, such as the reading-span test. Subjects who are
memory capacity are a by-product of the ability to closer to average are excluded. This kind of experi-
efficiently activate relevant information and sup- ment does not allow one to draw conclusions about
press or ignore activated but irrelevant information. performance on the language comprehension task
Two individuals may have equivalent ability to acti- across the full range of WMC. Finally, the results
vate and manipulate information, but one individual of these studies can be difficult to interpret when
may overactivate associated information in response WMC is the only measure of individual variation
to a particular string of words or be unable to examined. Individuals who score low on measures
reduce or suppress information not directly relevant of working memory span tend also to score low on
to the intended meaning. In that case, the individual tests of word-recognition ability, vocabulary, print
will behave as though he or she has a small working exposure, reasoning ability, and domain knowledge.
memory, because the available capacity supports the Is variation in language comprehension because of
activation of irrelevant information. individual differences in WMC, or is it secondary to
abilities that are correlated with capacity?
Some researchers have begun to examine this
Methodological Advances in
question using multiple regression and multilevel
Studying WMC and Language
modeling techniques. For example, Bruce Britton
Research on the relation between WMC and lan- and his colleagues used structural-equation modeling
guage comprehension has been plagued by a set of to examine the individual characteristics that affect
methodological problems. These involve the psy- learning from instructional texts. They assessed the
chometric qualities of the instruments used to mea- influence of four individual difference factors on text
sure working memory capacity, the nature of the learning: the ability to make inferences, metacogni-
statistical designs used to test the relation between tive ability, working memory capacity, and domain
796 Working Memory in Language Processing
knowledge. Text learning was predicted by a reliable studies suggest that the relation between WMC and
path such that metacognitive ability predicted infer- language comprehension may be derivative. WMC
ence-making ability; inference-making ability pre- and language comprehension share variance because
dicted domain knowledge, and domain knowledge WMC is correlated with other variables that have a
predicted text learning. Also, metacognitive ability causal relation with comprehension. More studies
predicted inference ability and inference ability pre- are needed before we can definitively say whether
dicted WMC. The relation between WMC and text WMC plays a direct role in explaining variation in
learning, however, was not significant. Thus, WMC language comprehension ability.
strongly correlated with other individual differences
Matthew J. Traxler and Debra L. Long
but did not predict text learning when these other
variables were entered into the model. See also Attention, Resource Models; Automaticity;
Other studies have also failed to find a relation Discourse Processing, Models of; Working Memory
between language comprehension and working
memory capacity when correlated variables have
been included in the analyses. Alexandra Gottardo, Further Readings
Linda Siegel, and Keith Stanovich examined the Baddeley, A. D., & Hitch, G. J. (1974). Working memory.
influence of WMC on comprehension in adults with In G. H. Bower (Ed.), The psychology of learning and
reading disabilities. They found that WMC predicted motivation: Advances in research and theory
reading comprehension when it was entered early in (pp. 4790). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
a regression equation but failed to predict unique Britton, B. K., Stimson, M., Stennett, B., & Glgz, S.
variance when it was entered after other variables. (1998). Learning from instructional text: Test of an
Debra Long and her colleagues found similar individual-differences model. Journal of Educational
results in a study examining how individual dif- Psychology, 90, 476491.
ference variables interact with properties of texts Caplan, D., & Waters, G. S. (1999). Verbal working
to influence comprehension. They assessed partici- memory and sentence comprehension. Behavioral and
pants performance on several information process- Brain Sciences, 22, 77126.
ing and language tasks. The individual difference Daneman, M., & Carpenter, P. A. (1980). Individual
tests included (a) word decoding speed (how quickly differences in working memory and reading. Journal of
a person can pronounce a visually presented word), Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19, 450466.
(b) word decoding accuracy (the number of word- Gottardo, A., Siegel, L. S., & Stanovich, K. E. (1997). The
reading errors), and (c) WMC. Sentence-reading assessment of adults with reading disabilities: What can
times for each participant were analyzed as a func- we learn from experimental tasks? Journal of Research
tion of three text characteristics: (a) number of func- in Reading, 20, 4254.
tion words (grammatical markers such as of and Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1992). The capacity theory
of comprehension: New frontiers of evidence and
although); (b) number of new argument nouns
arguments. Psychological Review, 99, 122149.
how many new concepts a sentence introduces;
MacDonald, M. C., & Christiansen, M. H. (1992).
and (c) number of repeated argument nounsthe
Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and
number of old concepts. Individual differences in
Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996).
reading times were influenced by different combina- Psychological Review, 109, 3554.
tions of word-decoding ability, overall verbal ability, Masson, M. E., & Miller, J. A. (1983). Working memory
and print exposure. When all the individual differ- and individual differences in comprehension and
ence variables were included in the analyses, work- memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 75,
ing memory capacity did not moderate the effect of 314318.
function words, repeated arguments, or new argu- Salthouse, T. A. (1996). The processing-speed theory of
ments. When WMC was entered into the model by adult age differences in cognition. Psychological Review,
itself, it did predict the relation between the number 103, 403428.
of function words and sentence-reading time. Traxler, M. J., Williams, R. S., Blozis, S. A., & Morris, R. K.
Research examining the shared variance among (2005). Working memory, animacy, and verb class in the
working memory capacity and other individual- processing of relative clauses. Journal of Memory and
difference variables is still in its infancy. Initial Language, 53, 204224.
Index
797
798 Index
Scheines, Richard, 1:329 Self, development of, 2:669673. See also Moral
Scheler, Max, 2:659 development; Personal identity, development of
Schemas, 2:704 Self-actualization, 1:380
Schiffer, Stephen, 1:241 Self-affects, 2:670
Schizophrenia, 2:663666 Self-affirmation theory, 1:155
action selection, 2:558 Self-awareness, 2:674
aphasia, 1:43 Self-categorization, 1:435
autoscopic phenomena, 1:101 Self-cognitions, 2:707
delusions, 1:231 Self-concept, 1:154155, 2:669673, 674, 707708
neurodevelopmental model, 2:663664 Self-consciousness, 2:673675
onset of, 2:664665 guilt, 1:376
pathology, 2:665666 meanings, 2:674
risk factors, 2:664665 neural bases, 2:675
symptomology, 2:663 Self-efficacy, 2:509
treatment, 2:666 Self-esteem, 2:669, 671673
Schmid, Michael, 1:123 Self-help audio media, 2:753, 754
Schmidt, Richard, 2:531 Self-knowledge, 2:676678
Schnall, Simone, 1:303 belief and judgment, 1:112
Schoenfeld, Alan, 2:508 constitutive accounts, 2:677
Schotter, Andrew, 2:567 epistemic accounts, 2:677
Schroyens, Walter, 1:227 inferential model, 2:677
Schultz, Wolfram, 1:245, 2:645 introspection, 1:436439
Schwarz, Norbert, 2:504 introspective model, 2:676677
Schwitzgebel, Eric, 1:328 mental action, 2:498
Scientific reasoning, 2:667668 wakeful consciousness, 2:498
analysis of, 2:667668 Self-monitoring, 1:438
childrens, 2:450451 Self-motion, 2:573576
historical context, 2:668 Self-perception theory, 1:78, 437
legal reasoning vs., 2:469470 Self-regulation, 1:106, 310, 2:502
modern approaches, 2:668 Sellars, Wilfrid, 1:358, 359, 2:444
overview, 2:667 Semantic dementia, 1:45, 2:678679
role of hypotheses, 2:667, 668 Semantic externalism, 1:152
Scientism, 1:144 Semantic knowledge, 2:680683
Scotomas, 1:120121 Semantic memory, 2:679681
Scott Morton, Michael S., 1:213214 aphasia, 1:45
Scottish Enlightenment, 1:301 defined, 1:402, 2:679
Seamon, John, 2:752 feature overlap model, 2:680681
Searle, John, 1:2, 188, 200201, 2:444, 510, 570, hierarchical model, 2:680
572, 595, 653654 semantic dementia, 2:678
Sears, David, 2:610 spreading activation model, 2:681
Sebanz, Natalie, 1:162 time frame, 1:24
Sebat, Jonathan, 1:92 Semantic memory, computational perspectives,
Secondary qualities, 2:703, 734 2:681683
Secure attachment style, 2:475, 647 Semantic priming effects, 1:45, 2:618
Sefton, Martin, 1:247 Semantic proximity, 2:494495
Segal, Gabriel, 1:238 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE)
Segmentation (speech), 2:717718 system, 1:213
Seidenberg, Mark, 1:268 Sensation
Selective attention, 1:5356, 75, 411 awareness of, 2:752
Self. See also Personal identity cross-modal effects, 2:732734
autoscopic phenomena, 1:99102 Sense data, 1:398, 2:452
cognitive dissonance, 1:154155 Sensibility theory, 1:302
indexical thought, 1:406407 Sensory adaptation, 2:478480
origin of, 2:515 Sensory memory, 2:788
Index 833
Stimulus-response (S-R) chains, 1:105, 109110, 111 Sutton, Richard, 1:218, 338
Stimulus-response compatibility, 2:632 Swain, Stacey, 1:330
Stoerig, Petra, 1:121, 2:579 Syllables, 2:618
Stoet, Gijsbert, 1:162 Symbol learning, 2:779
Stoicism, 2:629 Sympathy, 1:301
Stone, Leland, 2:574 Synesthesia, 2:725727
Stop-signal tasks, 2:632 Syntactic production, agreement in, 2:618619,
Storage, compound word processing and, 1:163165 727729. See also Language production, agreement in
Storge, 2:473 Syntagmatic associations, 2:683
Strait, Dana, 2:542 Syntax, 2:458
Strange situation, 2:647648 Sytsma, Justin, 1:329
Strategic theories, of spacing effect, 2:711 Szab, Zoltn, 1:237, 238
Strategy-motivated thinking, 2:528
Strawson, Galen, 1:188, 399 Tabert, Matthias, 1:318
Strawson, Peter, 1:237, 241, 244, 388 Tachistoscopic viewing task, 1:315
Stress-inoculation training, 1:106 Tallal, Paula, 1:268
Striate cortex, 1:5758 Tan, Lydia, 2:642
Striatum, 1:131133, 393, 2:486 Tanenhaus, Michael, 1:205, 367
Stroke, 1:181 Tangney, June, 1:376
Stroop, John Ridley, 2:722 Target analog, 1:25
Stroop effect, 2:722723, 726 Task switching, 2:544, 632
Stroop task, 1:18, 69, 70, 7273, 9697 Task-positive network, 2:504
Structural priming, 2:618 Taste, philosophical perspectives, 2:731734
Structural theories, of knowledge acquisition, 2:450 Tau rhythm, 1:274
Structure-mapping engine (SME), 1:28 Taylor, John, 1:73
Subcortical structures, 1:412413 Taylor, Stephen F., 1:318
Subjective doubles, 1:364. See also Doppelgngers TEACCH, 1:93
Subjective expected utility, 1:221 Teleology, 2:735737
Subjective threshold, 2:751 causalist view vs., 2:735737
Subjective we-intentions, 2:444 evolution, 2:737
Subjective well-being, 1:380381 explanation of action, 1:332333
Subjectivism, 2:701, 733734 reductive accounts, 2:736737
Subjects, 2:514515 Teleosemantics, 1:143
Subliminal influence, 1:78, 2:750, 754 Telford, Charles, 2:622
Subliminal perception, 2:723725, 751, 753755. Template matching, 2:477478
See also Unconscious perception Tempo, 2:549
Subliminal priming, 2:707 Temporal cortex, 2:485
Subset principle, 1:414, 417 Temporal discounting, 1:216
Substance, 1:194 Temporal lobe, 1:325
Substance abuse, 1:89 Temporally graded retrograde amnesia, 2:482
Substance dependence, 1:9 Tenenbaum, Joshua, 2:682
Substance use disorders (SUDs), 1:810 Tesan, Graciela, 1:415
Substitution therapies, 1:10 Testimony, eyewitness, 1:340342
Subsumption architecture, 2:465 Testing effect, 2:660661
Subtheory of love as a story, 2:474 Tetlock, Philip, 2:610
Sucker effect, 2:709 Text learning, 2:795796
Sumner, William Graham, 1:435 Thalamus, 1:22, 87, 2:695, 697
Superior colliculus, 1:123 Thematic Apperception Test, 2:609
SuperMemo, 2:712 Theoretical behaviorism, 1:108
Supertasters, 2:733 Theories, 1:173
Supervenience, 1:33, 2:501, 601 Theory construction, in child development, 1:170
Suppressibility, of voluntary actions, 2:772 Theory of appearing, 2:737739
Surface dyslexia, 1:266 Theory of dimensional overlap, 1:162
Surowiecki, James, 2:777 Theory of mind
836 Index