Linking metacognition and mindreading: Evidence from autism and dual-task investigations

Questions of how we know our own and other minds, and whether metacognition and mindreading rely on the same processes, are longstanding in psychology and philosophy. In Experiment 1, children/adolescents with autism (who tend to show attenuated mindreading) showed significantly lower accuracy on an explicit metacognition task than neurotypical children/adolescents, but not on an allegedly metacognitive implicit one. In Experiment 2, neurotypical adults completed these tasks in a single-task condition, or a dual-task condition that required concurrent completion of a secondary task that tapped mindreading. Metacognitive accuracy was significantly diminished by the dual-mindreading-task on the explicit task, but not the implicit task. In Experiment 3, we included additional dual-tasks to rule out the possibility that any secondary task (regardless of whether it required mindreading) would diminish metacognitive accuracy. Finally, in both experiments 1 and 2, metacognitive accuracy on the explicit task, but not the implicit task, was associated significantly with performance on a measure of mindreading ability. These results suggest that explicit metacognitive tasks (used frequently to measure metacognition in humans) share metarepresentational processing resources with mindreading, whereas implicit tasks (which are claimed by some comparative psychologists to measure metacognition in non-human animals) do not

Integral correlation measures for multiparticle physics

We report on a considerable improvement in the technique of measuring multiparticle correlations via integrals over correlation functions. A modification of measures used in the characterization of chaotic dynamical sytems permits fast and flexible calculation of factorial moments and cumulants as well as their differential versions. Higher order correlation integral measurements even of large multiplicity events such as encountered in heavy ion collisons are now feasible. The change from ``ordinary'' to ``factorial'' powers may have important consequences in other fields such as the study of galaxy correlations and Bose-Einstein interferometry.Comment: 23 pages, 6 tar-compressed uuencoded PostScript figures appended, preprint TPR-92-4

The Impact of Transit Corridors on Residential Property Values

Most of the literature on transit corridors, such as superhighways and tunnels, focuses on the positive externality of transit access (e.g., interstate access, transit station) and fails to isolate the negative externality of the corridor itself. This empirical study examines two situations: one with both access benefits and negatives, and another without the access benefit. The findings reveal that proximity to the transit corridor alone without direct access conveys a negative impact on nearby housing values.

The Use of Magnets for Introducing Primary School Students to Some Properties of Forces Through Small-group Pedagogy

Seventeen Grade Six students were divided into small groups to study the concept of forces in the context of magnets and their properties. The researcher, a pre-service primary school teacher, encouraged the students into conversation about magnets and it was found that, without hesitation, they talked about their prior experience of magnets. The words, \u27pushing\u27 and \u27pulling\u27, endemic to an early introduction to the notion of force, were used spontaneously by the students when referring to the repulsion and attraction properties of magnets. In conversation, the students were prepared to make claims or hypotheses about magnet behaviour and often sought evidence for these. This study indicates that, given the right context, the rudimentary elements of argumentation can be appropriated naturally by children. In this paper, the focus is on the push-pull character of forces and the fact that forces appear to interact in pairs. [Author abstract

Factorial Moments in a Generalized Lattice Gas Model

We construct a simple multicomponent lattice gas model in one dimension in which each site can either be empty or occupied by at most one particle of any one of $D$ species. Particles interact with a nearest neighbor interaction which depends on the species involved. This model is capable of reproducing the relations between factorial moments observed in high--energy scattering experiments for moderate values of $D$. The factorial moments of the negative binomial distribution can be obtained exactly in the limit as $D$ becomes large, and two suitable prescriptions involving randomly drawn nearest neighbor interactions are given. These results indicate the need for considerable care in any attempt to extract information regarding possible critical phenomena from empirical factorial moments.Comment: 15 pages + 1 figure (appended as postscript file), REVTEX 3.0, NORDITA preprint 93/4

Causality and CPT violation from an Abelian Chern-Simons-like term

We study a class of generalized Abelian gauge field theories where CPT symmetry is violated by a Chern-Simons-like term which selects a preferred direction in spacetime. Such Chern-Simons-like terms may either emerge as part of the low-energy effective action of a more fundamental theory or be produced by chiral anomalies over a nonsimply connected spacetime manifold. Specifically, we investigate the issues of unitarity and causality. We find that the behaviour of these gauge field theories depends on whether the preferred direction is spacelike or timelike. For a purely spacelike preferred direction, a well-behaved Feynman propagator exists and microcausality holds, which indicates the possibility of a consistent quantization of the theory. For timelike preferred directions, unitarity or causality is violated and a consistent quantization does not seem to be possible.Comment: LaTeX, 27 pages, v4: to appear in NP

Extended-soft-core Baryon-Baryon Model II. Hyperon-Nucleon Interaction

The YN results are presented from the Extended-soft-core (ESC) interactions. They consist of local- and non-local-potentials due to (i) One-boson-exchange (OBE), with pseudoscalar-, vector-, scalar-, and axial-vector-nonets, (ii) Diffractive exchanges, (iii) Two-pseudoscalar exchange, and (iv) Meson-pair-exchange (MPE). This model, called ESC04, describes NN and YN in a unified way using broken flavor SU(3)-symmetry. Novel ingredients are the inclusion of (i) the axial-vector-mesons, (ii) a zero in the scalar- and axial-vector meson form factors. We describe simultaneous fits to the NN- and YN-data, using four options in the ESC-model. Very good fits were obtained. G-matrix calculations with these four options are also reported. The obtained well depths (U_\Lambda, U_\Sigma, U_\Xi) reveal distinct features of ESC04a-d. The \Lambda\Lambda-interactions are demonstrated to be consistent with the observed data of_{\Lambda\Lambda}^6He. The possible three-body effects are investigated by considering phenomenologically the changes of the vector-meson masses in a nuclear medium.Comment: preprint vesion 66 pages, two-column version 27 pages, 17 figure