Mori Ōgai, “The Grouch” – A Kanshi (Sino-Japanese Poem) about Paintings for Sale in a Modern Department Store

Mori Ōgai 森鷗外 (1862–1922) stands at the fountainhead of modern Japanese literature. He is most famous for his prose writings: the groundbreaking short story, Maihime 舞姬 (The Danseuse); the full-length novel, Gan 雁 (The Wild Goose); and a half-dozen lengthy historical biographies. Much of Ōgai’s most creative writing is found in his translations. In Sokkyō shijin 即興詩人, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Improvisatore is transformed into mesmerizing quasi-classical Japanese. Fausuto ファウスト, written in a pithy Japanese vernacular full of wit, provides the first full-length translation of the Goethe classic. And his renderings of plays by Ibsen and Strindberg stand at the forefront of modern Japanese theatre. Mori Ōgai’s Sino-Japanese poems are especially important. They are revealing in biographical terms, the better to understand Ōgai (the person, the author, the public figure); in historical terms, to comprehend better the era in which he wrote, as well as how he experienced it and perceived earlier periods; and in literary terms, the better to appreciate his achievement as a writer. The selection presented here is revelatory on all three counts. One should keep in mind that, by writing in classical Chinese, Ōgai was not only participating in a centuries-long tradition in Japan. He was also “enacting civilization”, as it were, by writing in the pan-East Asian idiom that anyone educated was assumed to know. By the time the following poem was written, such a view had become quite conservative, if not reactionary

On the applied implications of the “Verbal Overshadowing Effect”

Schooler and Engstler-Schooler (1990) found that participants who wrote out a description of the perpetrator’s face after watching a simulated crime video were subsequently less likely to identify that perpetrator from a photo lineup compared to participants in a control condition (i.e., the correct ID rate was reduced). The first registered replication report in Perspectives on Psychological Science confirmed this verbal overshadowing effect (Alogna et al., 2014). Does this result indicate a reduced ability to recognize the person who was verbally described, or does it instead reflect more conservative responding? The answer depends on the still unknown likelihood of identifying an innocent suspect from a lineup (the false ID rate). Assuming the reduced correct ID rate does reflect memory impairment, should the legal system be advised to give less weight to a suspect identification if the witness previously provided a verbal description of the perpetrator? Intuitively, the answer is “yes,” but without knowing the false ID rate, it is unclear if a suspect identification following a verbal description should be given less weight or more weight. This is true even if the correct and false ID rates show that verbal descriptions impair memory. In our view, psychologists should withhold giving advice to the legal system about the effect of verbal descriptions on suspect identifications until the issue is investigated by including lineups that contain an innocent suspect. </jats:p

The role of estimator variables in eyewitness identification

This article was published Online First February 1, 2018Estimator variables are factors that can affect the accuracy of eyewitness identifications but that are outside of the control of the criminal justice system. Examples include (1) the duration of exposure to the perpetrator, (2) the passage of time between the crime and the identification (retention interval), (3) the distance between the witness and the perpetrator at the time of the crime. Suboptimal estimator variables (e.g., long distance) have long been thought to reduce the reliability of eyewitness identifications (IDs), but recent evidence suggests that this is not true of IDs made with high confidence and may or may not be true of IDs made with lower confidence. The evidence suggests that while suboptimal estimator variables decrease discriminability (i.e., the ability to distinguish innocent from guilty suspects), they do not decrease the reliability of IDs made with high confidence. Such findings are inconsistent with the longstanding “optimality hypothesis” and therefore require a new theoretical framework. Here, we propose that a signal-detection-based likelihood ratio account – which has long been a mainstay of basic theories of recognition memory – naturally accounts for these findings.Carolyn Semmler, John Dunn, Laura Mickes, John T. Wixte

Policy regarding the sequential lineup is not informed by probative value but is informed by ROC analysis.

It is important to determine if switching from simultaneous to sequential lineups affects response bias (the inclination to make an identification from a lineup), discriminability (the ability to distinguish between innocent and guilty suspects), or both. Measures of probative value cannot provide such information; receiver operating characteristic analysis can. Recent receiver operating characteristic analyses indicate that switching to sequential lineups both induces more conservative responding and makes it more difficult to distinguish between innocent and guilty suspects. If more conservative responding is preferred (i.e., if policymakers judge that the harm associated with the reduction of correct identifications is exceeded by the benefit associated with the reduction in false identifications), recent data indicate that this result can be achieved without a loss of discriminability by using the simultaneous lineup procedure in conjunction with a more conservative decision criterion.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

In the DNA Exoneration Cases, Eyewitness Memory was Not the Problem:A reply to Berkowitz and Frenda (2018) and Wade, Nash and Lindsay (2018)

The available real-world evidence suggests that, on an initial test, eyewitness memory is often reliable. Ironically, even the DNA exoneration cases—which generally involved nonpristine testing conditions and which are usually construed as an indictment of eyewitness memory—show how reliable an initial test of eyewitness memory can be in the real world. We endorse the use of pristine testing procedures, but their absence does not automatically imply that eyewitness memory is unreliable. </jats:p

Useful scientific theories are useful: A reply to Rouder, Pratte, and Morey (2010)

In a recognition memory experiment, Mickes, Wixted, and Wais (2007) asked a simple question: Would the same result-namely, a higher mean and variance of the memory strengths for the targets as compared with the lures-be evident if one used a 20-point confidence scale and then simply computed the relevant distributional statistics from the ratings themselves instead of estimating them by fitting a Gaussian model to ROC data? And if an unequal-variance model were suggested by the ratings data, would the magnitude of the estimated ratio of the standard deviations based on the ratings (s Lure / s Target ) be similar to the magnitude of the estimated ratio obtained by fitting a Gaussian model to ROC data ( Lure / Target )? A priori, agreement between the two ratio estimates seems unlikely, because there are many reasons why they might disagree. For example, if the Gaussian assumption is not valid, then disagreement between the two estimates seems more likely than agreement. In addition, if the rating scale does not approximate an interval scale, or if it covers only a limited range of the memory strength dimension, then, again, disagreement seems more likely than agreement. Somewhat surprisingly, From these results, 1. The two experiments reported here support a conclusion that is commonly drawn from ROC analysis-namely, that the memory strengths of the targets are more variable than the memory strengths of the lures. (p. 864) 2. The close agreement between the model-based ROC analysis and the model-free ratings method supports not only an unequal-variance model, but also the idea that the memory strengths are distributed in such a way that fitting a specifically Gaussian model to the data yields accurate conclusions (even if the true underlying distributions are not strictly Gaussian). (p. 864