How illusory is the solitaire illusion? Assessing the degree of misperception of numerosity in adult humans

open3siopenAgrillo, Christian; Parrish, Audrey E.; Beran, Michael J.Agrillo, Christian; Parrish, Audrey E.; Beran, Michael J

Epistemic Limitations and Precise Estimates in Analog Magnitude Representation

This chapter presents a re-understanding of the contents of our analog magnitude representations (e.g., approximate duration, distance, number). The approximate number system (ANS) is considered, which supports numerical representations that are widely described as fuzzy, noisy, and limited in their representational power. The contention is made that these characterizations are largely based on misunderstandings—that what has been called “noise” and “fuzziness” is actually an important epistemic signal of confidence in one’s estimate of the value. Rather than the ANS having noisy or fuzzy numerical content, it is suggested that the ANS has exquisitely precise numerical content that is subject to epistemic limitations. Similar considerations will arise for other analog representations. The chapter discusses how this new understanding of ANS representations recasts the learnability problem for number and the conceptual changes that children must accomplish in the number domain

Nienależne świadczenie w polskim Kodeksie zobowiązań z 1933 r. na tle porównawczym

This paper discusses the concept of undue payment in the Polish Code of Obligations of 1933 within a comparative perspective which includes a number of other contemporary codes (the Napoleonic Code, the Austrian ABGB, the German BGB and the Swiss Obligationrecht), Roman law, and the Polish Civil Code of 1964. The discussion is concerned with the framework of legal provisions constituting undue payment in each of the codes. Furthermore, while tracing the relationship between the Roman condictiones and its successors in modern law, the paper analyses the concept of legal ground of action. This is followed by a close examination of the conditions and circumstances which made the payor’s claim for the restitution of his payment admissible or inadmissible in the eyes of the court. The paper also examines the issue of liability in this type of actions that were actually heard at Polish courts. In the summary, the author attempts to make a reassessment of the functioning of undue payment in the Code of Obligations, a historic landmark of Polish legislation

A Shared Intuitive (Mis)understanding of Psychophysical Law Leads Both Novices and Educated Students to Believe in a Just Noticeable Difference (JND)

Abstract: Humans are both the scientists who discover psychological laws and the thinkers who behave according to those laws. Oftentimes, when our natural behavior is in accord with those laws, this dual role serves us well: our intuitions about our own behavior can serve to inform our discovery of new laws. But, in cases where the laws that we discover through science do not agree with the intuitions and biases we carry into the lab, we may find it harder to believe in and adopt those laws. Here, we explore one such case. Since the founding of psychophysics, the notion of a Just Noticeable Difference (JND) in perceptual discrimination has been ubiquitous in experimental psychology—even in spite of theoretical advances since the 1950’s that argue that there can be no such thing as a threshold in perceiving difference. We find that both novices and psychologically educated students alike misunderstand the JND to mean that, below a certain threshold, humans will be unable to tell which of two quantities is greater (e.g., that humans will be completely at chance when trying to judge which is heavier, a bag with 3000 grains of sand or 3001). This belief in chance performance below a threshold is inconsistent with psychophysical law. We argue that belief in a JND is part of our intuitive theory of psychology and is therefore very difficult to dispel

Metacognitive developments in word learning:mutual exclusivity and theory of mind

This study examines the flexibility with which children can use pragmatic information to determine word reference. Extensive previous research shows that children choose an unfamiliar object as referent of a novel name: the disambiguation effect. We added a pragmatic cue indirectly indicating a familiar object as intended referent. In three experiments, preschool children’s ability to take this cue into account was specifically associated with false belief understanding and the ability to produce familiar alternative names (e.g., rabbit, animal) for a given referent. The association was predicted by the hypothesis that all three tasks require an understanding of perspective (linguistic or mental). The findings indicate that perspectival understanding is required to take into account indirect pragmatic information to suspend the disambiguation effect. Implications for lexical principles and socio-pragmatic theories of word learning are discussed

Responding by exclusion in temporal discrimination tasks

Responding by exclusion, one of the most robust phenomena in Experimental Psychology, consists of choosing an undefined comparison stimulus given an undefined sample, when the comparison stimulus is presented next to other experimentally defined stimuli. The goal of the present study was to determine whether responding by exclusion could be obtained using samples that varied along a single dimension. Using a double temporal bisection task, ten university students learned to choose visual comparisons (colored circles) based on the duration of a tone. In tests of exclusion, sample stimuli with new durations were followed by comparison sets that included one previously trained, defined comparison (colored circle) and one previously untrained, undefined comparison (geometric shape). Subjects preferred the defined comparisons following the defined samples and the undefined comparisons following the undefined samples, the choice pattern typical of responding by exclusion. The use of samples varying along a single dimension allows us to study the interaction between stimulus generalization gradients and exclusion in the control of conditional responding.The first author was supported by a master's degree fellowship by the Ministry of Education (CAPES). Armando Machado was supported by grant PTDC/MHC-PCN/3540/2012 from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. Camila Domeniconi had a post-doctoral fellowship from the Foundation for Research Support in the State of Sao Paulo (FAPESP, 2009/18479-5). She is currently affiliated with the National Institute of Science and Technology on Behavior, Cognition and Teaching. Grants: FAPESP (08/57705-8) and CNPq (573972/2008-7). She has a research productivity fellowship by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, 301623/2012-0)

Dzieje doktryny actio personalis moritur cum persona w angielskim common law

Pursuant to the maxim that actio personalis moritur cum persona, the claims and debts of the party become extinct on the day of its death. That is the reason why in English common law the successors could not sue their predecessor’s debtors; on the other hand, they were protected against the creditors of the deceased. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of doctrine for the legal relations, especially within the scope of contract law. In the early years (12th–13th centuries) of the functioning of the doctrine nearly all personal actions came into play. However, lawyers began to create more and more exceptions that narrowed the maxim’s impact. As a result, at the beginning of the 17th century (the Pynchon’s case, 1611) the court had in fact transformed the doctrine of actio personalis moritur cum persona into the exception. It is worthwhile to note that the maxim’s history may act as an example of the peculiarity of English law and the domination of its procedural rules. Throughout the centuries the most important reason against the transmission of rights and duties was the practical impossibility of the wager of law’s application. In that case lawyers could only modify rules of evidence. Instead, in England it was decided to treat the claims and debts of the deceased as extinct. As a result, the consequences of the actio personalis moritur cum persona doctrine went much too far