Articles

Target Articles

Target Articles

Commentaries and Reports

PARAPSYCHOLOGY

2007-01-03 Guess for Success. Parapsychology is a term coined by J. B. Rhine that covers phenomena such as telepathy the direct transmission of information from mind to mind. The landmark work is Rhine, J. B. (1964) Extra-sensory perception. (Boston: Bruce Humphries), and a flow of other publications by Rhine’s associates and others. In this extended article, Lockhead shows how very small deviations from randomness in the to-be-guessed sequence can give rise to better- or worse-than-chance guessing performance. Lockhead/Rhine: Formats:Lockhead 2007-01-03

SOCIAL SCIENCE

2006-10-27 Ill-defined. What is happening to political science when leading thinkers can pretend to advance knowledge by little more than re-defining words? In their article Anti-Americanisms, an abstract of a forthcoming book, Katzenstein and Keohane begin thus... Bertrand/Keohane: Formats:Bertrand 2006-10-27

EMOTION

2006-09-23 Emotion is Natural but Categories are Not. Barrett (2006) argues against the construct of emotion by conflating the basic-emotions perspective in neural physiology with a type of category discussed in reference philosophy... Alvarado/Barrett: Formats:Alvarado 2006-09-23

BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS

2006-07-16 Behavior-centric versus reinforcer-centric descriptions of behavior. The paper is a brilliant tour-de-force, but a subtext to the paper is what I will call the behavior-centric view. In this view, stimuli are remembered until a response is emitted, and reinforcers reach back in time to effect this response in the presence of the remembered stimulus... Davison/Rachlin: Formats:Davison 2006-07-09

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

2007-03-15 Minority Report It is perhaps unfair to critique in a scientific journal an interview in a popular magazine… The idea is this: perhaps we should forcibly treat and restrain “abnormal” individuals before they can do harm if the propensity can be detected in some way…Churchland/Staddon: Formats:Staddon 2007-03-15

LANGUAGE PROCESSING

2006-09-07 Report: Visual Language Processing and Additive Effects of Multiple Factors on Timed Performance: A Challenge for the Interactive Activation Framework? Two factors often have additive effects on timed performance in language tasks. Despite 25 years of work, fans of the dominant theoretical framework for language processing have yet to publicly address even a single instance of such additivity... Besner: Formats:Besner 2006-09-08

NEUROECONOMICS

2006-07-16 Will you take ‘neuro’ with that? Neuroeconomics is an interesting idea that has an epistemological worm at its core... but there is no guarantee at all that the optimizing process corresponds to “explicit optimization” in which courses of action are well-defined... Staddon/Bernheim: Formats:Staddon 2006-06-28