147,839 research outputs found

    Segundo FOLGADO FLÓREZ, Teoría eclesial en el Pastor de Hermas, Real Monasterio de El Escorial (Biblioteca «La Ciudad de Dios». I. Libros, n. 30), 1979, 142 pp., 17 X 24. [RECENSIÓN]

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    Visual comparison of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) is commonly encountered in various disciplines (e.g., finance, biology). Still, knowledge about humans' perception of their similarity is currently quite limited. By similarity perception, we mean how humans perceive commonalities and differences of DAGs and herewith come to a similarity judgment. To fill this gap, we strive to identify factors influencing the DAG similarity perception. Therefore, we conducted a card sorting study employing a quantitative and qualitative analysis approach to identify (1) groups of DAGs the participants perceived as similar and (2) the reasons behind their groupings. We also did an extended analysis of our collected data to (1) reveal specifics of the influencing factors and (2) investigate which strategies are employed to come to a similarity judgment. Our results suggest that DAG similarity perception is mainly influenced by the number of levels, the number of nodes on a level, and the overall shape of the DAG. We also identified three strategies used by the participants to form groups of similar DAGs: divide and conquer, respecting the entire dataset and considering the factors one after the other, and considering a single factor. Factor specifics are, e.g., that humans on average consider four factors while judging the similarity of DAGs. Building an understanding of these processes may inform the design of comparative visualizations and strategies for interacting with them. The interaction strategies must allow the user to apply her similarity judgment strategy to the data. The considered factors bear information on, e.g., which factors are overlooked by humans and thus need to be highlighted by the visualization

    A Similarity-Based Process for Human Judgment in the Parietal Cortex

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    One important distinction in psychology is between inferences based on associative memory and inferences based on analysis and rules. Much previous empirical work conceive of associative and analytical processes as two exclusive ways of addressing a judgment task, where only one process is selected and engaged at a time, in an either-or fashion. However, related work indicate that the processes are better understood as being in interplay and simultaneously engaged. Based on computational modeling and brain imaging of spontaneously adopted judgment strategies together with analyses of brain activity elicited in tasks where participants were explicitly instructed to perform similarity-based associative judgments or rule-based judgments (n = 74), we identified brain regions related to the two types of processes. We observed considerable overlap in activity patterns. The precuneus was activated for both types of judgments, and its activity predicted how well a similarity-based model fit the judgments. Activity in the superior frontal gyrus predicted the fit of a rule-based judgment model. The results suggest the precuneus as a key node for similarity-based judgments, engaged both when overt responses are guided by similarity-based and rule-based processes. These results are interpreted such that similarity-based processes are engaged in parallel to rule-based-processes, a finding with direct implications for cognitive theories of judgment

    Causes and Predictors of Thematic Intrusion on Human Similarity Judgments

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    Most theoretical accounts of psychological similarity maintain that similarity judgments are based on shared features (and shared relations among those features, e.g., the commonalities between spatula and ladle). Accounts rarely include associations between targets of comparison (e.g., the association between egg and spatula) as a contributor to similarity judgments. This position is taken despite the fact that people will often choose associates over things with shared features and relations in similarity judgment tasks. So-called dual-process models - where thematic integration and feature (and relation) based comparison are component processes of perceived human similarity - have been proposed to handle this apparent failure to account for human similarity judgments. The present experiments were designed to further explore the thematic association effect on similarity with the goal to test the hypothesis that confusion about similarity and association (rather than a radical theoretical redirection, e.g., the dual-process model) is the cause of the reported thematic association influence on similarity judgments. Experiment 1 introduces a novel task for collecting similarity judgments of real world concepts - the Anti-Thematic Intrusion (ATI) task - and tests alternative task instructions as a possible driver of thematic intrusion on similarity. Experiment 2 examines the effect of the isolated components of the ATI task as compared to the classic two-alternative, forced choice similarity judgment task to determine what changes from the classic task are most influential for reducing thematic intrusion. Experiment 3 was conducted to confirm that the concept sets used in Experiments 1 and 2 did not produce biased responding. Having explored task, instruction and concept-based effects, Experiment 4 investigated behavioral and electrophysiological differences among individuals to attempt to clarify how differences between individuals correspond to similarity judgment behavior. The results were not expected in that the strength of the thematic association effect on similarity was weaker than predicted; Experiments 1, 2, and 4 show that overall association-based preferences were only present in situations strongly biased toward producing that response type. It was also found that taxonomic pair matching reliably increased across the time course of the task. Changes in the properties of the task and the instructions attenuate the effect, suggesting that the intrusion of thematic relationships on similarity judgments is not an unyielding feature of the similarity judgment process (as dual-process accounts propose) but instead (at least in part) due to interpretation of the task goal and confusion about similarity and association-based relatedness. Finally, this confusion is identifiable by less differentiation in the EEG signal elicited by these competing semantic relations, where people who produce more similarity-based responding also produce more distinctive ERP waveforms for taxonomic and thematic category members

    Understanding Moral Judgments: The Role of the Agent’s Characteristics in Moral Evaluations

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    Traditional studies have shown that the moral judgments are influenced by many biasing factors, like the consequences of a behavior, certain characteristics of the agent who commits the act, or the words chosen to describe the behavior. In the present study we investigated a new factor that could bias the evaluation of morally relevant human behavior: the perceived similarity between the participants and the agent described in the moral scenario. The participants read a story about a driver who illegally overtook another car and hit a pedestrian who was crossing the street. The latter was taken to the hospital with a broken leg. The driver was described either as being similar to the participant (a student, 21 years old, the same gender as th­e participant) or dissimilar (a retired person, 69 years old, different gender as the participant). The results show that the participants from the increased similarity group expressed more lenient evaluations of the immorality of the driver’s behavior compared to the participants from the decreased similarity group. The results are discussed within a framework which puts emphasis on motivational and protective reasons

    The perfective past tense in Greek child language

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    ABSTRACTThis study examines the perfective past tense of Greek in an elicited production and an acceptability judgment task testing 35 adult native speakers and 154 children in six age groups (age range: 3 ; 5 to 8 ; 5) on both existing and novel verb stimuli. We found a striking contrast between sigmatic and non-sigmatic perfective past tense forms. Sigmatic forms (which have a segmentable perfective affix (-s-) in Greek) were widely generalized to different kinds of novel verbs in both children and adults and were overgeneralized to existing non-sigmatic verbs in children's productions. By contrast, non-sigmatic forms were only extended to novel verbs that were similar to existing non-sigmatic verbs, and overapplications of non-sigmatic forms to existing sigmatic verbs were extremely rare. We argue that these findings are consistent with dual-mechanism accounts of morphology.</jats:p

    Individual differences in the perception of similarity and difference.

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    Thematically related concepts like coffee and milk are judged to be more similar than thematically unrelated concepts like coffee and lemonade. We investigated whether thematic relations exert a small effect that occurs consistently across participants (i.e., a generalized model), or a large effect that occurs inconsistently across participants (i.e., an individualized model). We also examined whether difference judgments mirrored similarity or whether these judgments were, in fact, non-inverse. Five studies demonstrated the necessity of an individualized model for both perceived similarity and difference, and additionally provided evidence that thematic relations affect similarity more than difference. Results suggest that models of similarity and difference must be attuned to large and consistent individual variability in the weighting of thematic relations

    Thematic relations affect similarity via commonalities

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    Thematic relations are an important source of perceived similarity. For instance, the rowing theme of boats and oars increases their perceived similarity. The mechanism of this effect, however, has not been specified previously. We investigated whether thematic relations affect similarity by increasing commonalities or by decreasing differences. In Experiment 1, thematic relations affected similarity more than difference, thereby producing a non-inversion of similarity and difference. Experiment 2 revealed substantial individual variability in the preference for thematic relations and, consequently in the non-inversion of ratings. In sum, the experiments demonstrated a non-inversion of similarity and difference that was caused by thematic relations and exhibited primarily by a subgroup of participants. These results indicate that thematic relations affect perceived similarity by increasing the contribution of commonalities rather than by decreasing the contribution of differences
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