Selective effects of errorful generation on recognition memory: The role of motivation and surprise.

The current research examined the effects of errorful generation on memory, focusing particularly on the roles of motivation and surprise. In two experiments, participants were first presented with photographs of faces and were asked to associate four facts with each photograph. On Generate trials, the participants guessed two of the facts (Guess targets) before those correct facts, and another two correct facts (Study targets), were revealed. On the remaining Read trials, all four facts were presented without a guessing stage. In Experiment 1, participants also ranked their motivation to know the answers before they were revealed, or their surprise on learning the true answers. Guess targets were subsequently better recognised than the concurrently presented, non-guessed Study targets. Guess targets were also better recognised than Read targets, and recognition of Study and Read targets did not differ. Errorful generation also increased self-reported motivation, but not surprise. Experiment 2 showed that the results of Experiment 1 can outlive a 20-minute delay, and that they generalise to a more challenging recognition test. Together, the results suggest that errorful generation improves memory specifically for the guessed fact, and this may be linked to an increase in motivation to learn that fact

The Antarctic Slope Current in a Changing Climate

The Antarctic Slope Current (ASC) is a coherent circulation feature that rings the Antarctic continental shelf and regulates the flow of water towards the Antarctic coastline. The structure and variability of the ASC influences key processes near the Antarctic coastline that have global implications, such as the melting of Antarctic ice shelves and water mass formation that determines the strength of the global overturning circulation. Recent theoretical, modeling, and observational advances have revealed new dynamical properties of the ASC, making it timely to review. Earlier reviews of the ASC focused largely on local classifications of water properties of the ASC's primary front. Here, we instead provide a classification of the current's frontal structure based on the dynamical mechanisms that govern both the along‐slope and cross‐slope circulation; these two modes of circulation are strongly coupled, similar to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. Highly variable motions, such as dense overflows, tides, and eddies are shown to be critical components of cross‐slope and cross‐shelf exchange, but understanding of how the distribution and intensity of these processes will evolve in a changing climate remains poor due to observational and modeling limitations. Results linking the ASC to larger modes of climate variability, such as El Niño, show that the ASC is an integral part of global climate. An improved dynamical understanding of the ASC is still needed to accurately model and predict future Antarctic sea ice extent, the stability of the Antarctic ice sheets, and the Southern Ocean's contribution to the global carbon cycle

Pre-testing effects are target-specific and are not driven by a generalised state of curiosity

Guessing an answer to an unfamiliar question prior to seeing the answer leads to better memory than studying alone (the pre-testing effect), which some theories attribute to increased curiosity. A similar effect occurs in general knowledge learning: people are more likely to recall information that they were initially curious to learn. Gruber and Ranganath [(2019). How curiosity enhances hippocampus-dependent memory: The prediction, appraisal, curiosity, and exploration (PACE) framework. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(12), 1014–1025] argued that unanswered questions can cause a state of curiosity during which encoding is enhanced for the missing answer, but also for incidental information presented at the time. If pre-testing similarly induces curiosity, then it too should produce better memory for incidental information. We tested this idea in three experiments that varied the order, nature and timing of the incidental material presented within a pre-testing context. All three experiments demonstrated a reliable pre-testing effect for the targets, but no benefit for the incidental material presented before the target. This pattern suggests that the pre-testing effect is highly specific and is not consistent with a generalised state of curiosity

Global Governance Behind Closed Doors : The IMF Boardroom, the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility, and the Intersection of Material Power and Norm Change in Global Politics

Up on the 12th floor of its 19th Street Headquarters, the IMF Board sits in active session for an average of 7 hours per week. Although key matters of policy are decided on in the venue, the rules governing Boardroom interactions remain opaque, resting on an uneasy combination of consensual decision-making and weighted voting. Through a detailed analysis of IMF Board discussions surrounding the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF), this article sheds light on the mechanics of power in this often overlooked venue of global economic governance. By exploring the key issues of default liability and loan conditionality, I demonstrate that whilst the Boardroom is a more active site of contestation than has hitherto been recognized, material power is a prime determinant of both Executive Directors’ preferences and outcomes reached from discussions. And as the decisions reached form the backbone of the ‘instruction sheet’ used by Fund staff to guide their everyday operational decisions, these outcomes—and the processes through which they were reached—were factors of primary importance in stabilizing the operational norms at the heart of a controversial phase in the contemporary history of IMF concessional lending

Taxing the powerful, the rise of populism and the crisis in Europe: the case for the EU Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base

Contemporary populism is rooted in a crisis of legitimacy. Corporate taxavoidance by multinationals is one cause of that crisi s. Although states tend to beincreasingly formally committed to tackling avoidance, they do so in a system thatpromotes contradictory sets of behaviour. This tends to undermine attempts to solvethe problem of avoidance unless a more transformative collective approach is taken.Ironically, despite its own democratic deficit, the European Comm ission has taken aleading role in promoting such a solution: the Common Consolidated Corporate TaxBase (CCCTB). In this paper, I set out the case for ‘unitary taxation’ based on theCCCTB and state some of its current problems. The problem of corporation taxraises a basic issue in terms of who is sovereignty for, and solving the problemprovides an important contribution to legitimacy of both the state and the EU

Panama and the WTO : new constitutionalism of trade policy and global tax governance

"Corrigendum" in Review of International Political Economy, 24(4), p. 738 (DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2017.1332547).Tax havens and tax flight have lately received increasing attention, while interest toward multilateral trade policies has somewhat diminished. We argue that more attention needs to be paid exactly to the interrelations between trade and tax policies. Drawing from two case studies on Panama's trade disputes, we show how World Trade Organization (WTO) rules can be used both to resist attempts to sanction secrecy structures and to promote measures against tax flight. The theory of new constitutionalism can help to explain how trade treaties can 'lock in' tax policies. However, our case studies show that trade policy not only 'locks in' democratic policy-making, but also enables tax havens to use their commercialized sovereignty to resists anti-secrecy measures. What is being 'locked in' are the policy tools, not necessarily the policies. The changing relationship between trade and tax policies can also create new and unexpected tools for tackling tax evasion, underlining the importance of epistemic arbitrage in the context of new constitutionalism. In principle, political actors with sufficient technical and juridical knowledge can shape global tax governance to various directions regardless of their formal position in the world political hierarchies. This should be taken into account when trade treaties are being negotiated or revised.Peer reviewe

Grey matter in shadow banking: international organizations and expert strategies in global financial governance

Who controls global policy debates on shadow banking regulation? We show how experts secured control over how issues in shadow banking regulation are treated by examining the policy recommendations of the Bank of International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund and the Financial Stability Board. The evidence suggests that IO experts embedded a bland reformism opposed to both strong and ‘light touch’ regulation at the core of the emerging regulatory regime. Technocrats reinforced each other's expertise, excluded some potential competitors (legal scholars), co-opted others (select Fed and elite academic economists), and deployed measurement, mandate, and status strategies to assert issue control. In the field of shadow banking regulation, academic economists’ influence came from their credibility as arbitrageurs between several professional fields rather than their intellectual output. The findings have important implications for how we study the relationship between IO technocrats and experts from other professional field

Corporation tax as a problem of MNC organisational circuits: The case for unitary taxation

The tax practices of multinational corporations have become a matter of significant public and political concern. The underlying issues are rooted in the capacity of multinational corporations (MNCs) to construct organisational circuits that shift where sales, revenue and profit are reported. This capacity in turn becomes a focus because of the way MNCs are treated as a series of separate entities, subject to the arm’s length principle. This has become a classic example of a system whose current form and consequences were not foreseen when the original principles were set out. The continued existence of that system owes more to specific interests and inertia than it does to the absence of a viable alternative. Unitary taxation based on formula apportionment clearly resolves the underlying issues and unitary taxation may well ultimately emerge as a new generalised basis for corporate taxation. However, for it to do so, the problems of the current system and the advantages of the alternative need to be more clearly understood within academia, business and on a societal basis. This paper is a contribution to such an understanding

Weighing up Exercises on Phrasal Verbs: Retrieval Versus Trial-And-Error Practices

EFL textbooks and internet resources exhibit various formats and implementations of exercises on phrasal verbs. The experimental study reported here examines whether some of these might be more effective than others. EFL learners at a university in Japan were randomly assigned to four treatment groups. Two groups were presented first with phrasal verbs and their meaning before they were prompted to retrieve the particles from memory. The difference between these two retrieval groups was that one group studied and then retrieved items one at a time, while the other group studied and retrieved them in sets. The two other groups received the exercises as trial-and-error events, where participants were prompted to guess the particles and were subsequently provided with the correct response. One group was given immediate feedback on each item, while the other group tackled sets of 14 items before receiving feedback. The effectiveness of these exercise implementations was compared through an immediate and a 1-week delayed post-test. The best test scores were obtained when the exercises had served the purpose of retrieval, although this advantage shrank in the delayed test (where scores were poor regardless of treatment condition). On average 70% of the post-test errors produced by the learners who had tackled the exercises by trial-and-error were duplicates of incorrect responses they had supplied at the exercise stage, which indicates that corrective feedback was often ineffective

A dimensional summation account of polymorphous category learning

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via the DOI in this record.Data and code availaibility: The data and code for all analyses for all experiments are available at the OSF addresses given in each Results section. The stimuli are available at the same locations.Polymorphous concepts are hard to learn, and this is perhaps surprising because they, like many natural concepts, have an overall similarity structure. However, the dimensional summation hypothesis (Milton & Wills, 2004) predicts this difficulty. It also makes a number of other predictions about polymorphous concept formation, which are tested here. In Experiment 1 we confirm the theory’s prediction that polymorphous concept formation should be facilitated by deterministic pretraining on the constituent features of the stimulus. This facilitation is relative to an equivalent amount of training on the polymorphous concept itself. In Experiments 2–4, the dimensional summation account of this single feature pretraining effect is contrasted with some other accounts, including a more general strategic account (Experiment 2), seriality of training and stimulus decomposition accounts (Experiment 3), and the role of errors (Experiment 4). The dimensional summation hypothesis provides the best account of these data. In Experiment 5, a further prediction is confirmed — the single feature pretraining effect is eliminated by a concurrent counting task. The current experiments suggest the hypothesis that natural concepts might be acquired by the deliberate serial summation of evidence. This idea has testable implications for classroom learning.Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC