If My Memory Serves Me Well: Investigating My Memory for the Past 24 Years

This paper reports on a study of my autobiographical memory for 2691 notes recorded over 24 years in my diary, without any intention to ever use the notes as test material. I never read any of the notes again until the start of the memory study. I remembered less than two thirds of the recorded events and the retention curve showed a curvilinear shape. I dated 2% of the described events correctly but misdated on average about one and a half year, with an equal number of over and underestimations of the event age. Retention correlated significantly with ratings of salience, emotional involvement, pleasantness, event rehearsal and self-relatedness, but not with intimacy. Dating accuracy correlated with salience, pleasantness, intimacy and event rehearsal, but not with emotional involvement or self-relatedness. Regression analyses showed that event rehearsal was the best predictor of retention and dating, but the predictive value of other ratings was dependent on the content of the recorded events

Inferring choice criteria with mixture IRT models: A demonstration using ad hoc and goal-derived categories

Whether it pertains to the foods to buy when one is on a diet, the items to take along to the beach on one’s day off or (perish the thought) the belongings to save from one’s burning house, choice is ubiquitous. We aim to determine from choices the criteria individuals use when they select objects from among a set of candidates. In order to do so we employ a mixture IRT (item-response theory) model that capitalizes on the insights that objects are chosen more often the better they meet the choice criteria and that the use of different criteria is reflected in inter-individual selection differences. The model is found to account for the inter-individual selection differences for 10 ad hoc and goal-derived categories. Its parameters can be related to selection criteria that are frequently thought of in the context of these categories. These results suggest that mixture IRT models allow one to infer from mere choice behavior the criteria individuals used to select/discard objects. Potential applications of mixture IRT models in other judgment and decision making contexts are discussed

Spacecraft Radiation Shielding by a Dispersed Array of Superconducting Magnets

Two studies examined how lexical information contained in words affects people’s category representations. Some words are lexically suggestive regarding the taxonomic position of their referent (e.g., bumblebee, starfish). However, this information differs from language to language (e.g., in Dutch the equivalent words hold no taxonomic information: hommel, vlinder). Three language groups, Dutch, English, and Indonesian speakers, were tested in similarity and typicality judgment tasks. The results show that the lexical information affects only the users of the language (e.g., Dutch speakers rated Dutch-informative items, both in similarity and typicality tasks, higher than English and Indonesian speakers). Results are discussed in light of theories of concept representation and the language relativity hypothesis.status: publishe

Whistleblowing in Science: in the Lion's Den

With the growing emphasis on scientific integrity as a way to curb research misconduct, the “moral obligation to act” when a researcher observes a breach of integrity is becoming stronger. However, it takes a lot of courage to blow the whistle as it can have an enormous impact on the whistleblower’s career and personal well-being – and that of colleagues and researchers associated with the perpetrator. Therefore, it is important to be cognizant of the stressful process that accompanies the act of whistleblowing, to provide clear and accessible procedures to report misconduct, and to support whistleblowers throughout the process. Furthermore, it is essential that appropriate whistleblower protection measures are in place and enforced. Based on our review, we argue that an obligation to report scientific misconduct would currently do more harm than good

Metaphor interpretation and use : a window into semantics in schizophrenia

The nature of putative semantic anomalies in schizophrenia is controversial. Metaphor interpretation and use provide a useful methodology with which to probe semantics since metaphors are critical in reasoning processes and in how conceptual knowledge is organized. The first study examined free speech for figurative language. The second study explored whether emotional versus non-emotional metaphorical language interpretation elicits differences in the tendencies to produce idiosyncratic (bizarre) or literal interpretations or use of other metaphors to describe the meaning of a metaphor. The third study examined the interpretation of time metaphors. We expected the time perspective in ambiguous sentences to be differentially influenced by previously presented unambiguous sentences of a specific perspective, either events moving relative to a stationary observer (moving-time) or an observer moving relative to a stationary event (moving-ego). First, we found that patients used a similar amount of figurative language as control participants. Second, we did not find any difference between the groups in terms of idiosyncratic interpretations, although patients did interpret more metaphors literally and controls utilized more figurative language. Third, we did not find evidence of a difference between the groups in terms of time perspectives influencing ambiguous target sentences differentially. As operationalized here, the interpretation and use of metaphors is similar in patients with schizophrenia to that of healthy control participants. To the extent that metaphors recruit semantic processes this area of cognition is generally intact in schizophrenia

Linear separability in superordinate natural language concepts.

Two experiments are reported in which linear separability was investigated in superordinate natural language concept pairs (e.g., toiletry-sewing gear). Representations of the exemplars of semantically related concept pairs were derived in two to five dimensions using multidimensional scaling (MDS) of similarities based on possession of the concept features. Next, category membership, obtained from an exemplar generation study (in Experiment 1) and from a forced-choice classification task (in Experiment 2) was predicted from the coordinates of the MDS representation using log linear analysis. The results showed that all natural kind concept pairs were perfectly linearly separable, whereas artifact concept pairs showed several violations. Clear linear separability of natural language concept pairs is in line with independent cue models. The violations in the artifact pairs, however, yield clear evidence against the independent cue models

Predicting Lexical Norms: A Comparison between a Word Association Model and Text-Based Word Co-occurrence Models

In two studies we compare a distributional semantic model derived from word co-occurrences and a word association based model in their ability to predict properties that affect lexical processing. We focus on age of acquisition, concreteness, and three affective variables, namely valence, arousal, and dominance, since all these variables have been shown to be fundamental in word meaning. In both studies we use a model based on data obtained in a continued free word association task to predict these variables. In Study 1 we directly compare this model to a word co-occurrence model based on syntactic dependency relations to see which model is better at predicting the variables under scrutiny in Dutch. In Study 2 we replicate our findings in English and compare our results to those reported in the literature. In both studies we find the word association-based model fit to predict diverse word properties. Especially in the case of predicting affective word properties, we show that the association model is superior to the distributional model

A comparison of the Spatial Arrangement Method and the Total-Set Pairwise Rating Method for obtaining similarity data in the conceptual domain

We compare two methods for obtaining similarity data in the conceptual domain. In the Spatial Arrangement Method (SpAM), participants organize stimuli on a computer screen so that the distance between stimuli represents their perceived dissimilarity. In Total-Set Pairwise Rating Method (PRaM), participants rate the (dis)similarity of all pairs of stimuli on a Likert scale. In each of three studies, we had participants indicate the similarity of four sets of conceptual stimuli with either PRaM or SpAM. Studies 1 and 2 confirm two caveats that have been raised for SpAM. (i) While SpAM takes significantly less time to complete than PRaM, it yields less reliable data than PRaM does. (ii) Because of the spatial manner in which similarity is measured in SpAM, the method is biased against feature representations. Despite these differences, averaging SpAM and PRaM dissimilarity data across participants yields comparable aggregate data. Study 3 shows that by having participants only judge half of the pairs in PRaM, its duration can be significantly reduced, without affecting the dissimilarity distribution, but at the cost of a smaller reliability. Having participants arrange multiple subsets of the stimuli does not do away with the spatial bias of SpAM

When cheating is an honest mistake

Dishonesty is an intriguing phenomenon, studied extensively across various disciplines due to its impact on people’s lives as well as society in general. To examine dishonesty in a controlled setting, researchers have developed a number of experimental paradigms. One of the most popular approaches in this regard, is the matrix task, in which participants receive matrices wherein they have to find two numbers that sum to 10 (e.g., 4.81 and 5.19), under time pressure. In a next phase, participants need to report how many matrices they had solved correctly, allowing them the opportunity to cheat by exaggerating their performance in order to get a larger reward. Here, we argue, both on theoretical and empirical grounds, that the matrix task is ill-suited to study dishonest behavior, primarily because it conflates cheating with honest mistakes. We therefore recommend researchers to use different paradigms to examine dishonesty, and treat (previous) findings based on the matrix task with due caution