How the mind works

饒斯對功效主義（Utilitarianism）的批評

The Art of Memory, was said to have been invented by a poet named Simonides (according to Cicero). In a bit of ancient forensics, Simonides had been able to identify the remains of guests at a banquet by their seating places around a table, after a roof had fallen in upon them and obliterated them beyond recognition. In the Classical use of the art, abstract images of a somewhat bizarre (and therefore memorable) nature were conceived that would be linked to parts of a speech and then to a well-known architectural feature of the hall in which the speech was to take place. By scanning the variety of statuary, friezes, articulated columns, or whatever, within the hall, the rhetorician skilled in the art could remember all the aspects of his speech. The hall would provide the order and a frame of reference which could be used over and over again for a complex constellation of constantly changing ideas.

The art of memory

Several influential publications have sensitized the community of behavioral scientists to the dangers of inflated effects and false-positive errors leading to the unwarranted publication of nonreplicable findings. This issue has been related to prominent cases of data fabrication and survey results pointing to bad practices in empirical science. Although we concur with the motives behind these critical arguments, we note that an isolated debate of false positives may itself be misleading and counter-productive. Instead, we argue that, given the current state of affairs in behavioral science, false negatives often constitute a more serious problem. Referring to Wason’s (1960) seminal work on inductive reasoning, we show that the failure to assertively generate and test alternative hypotheses can lead to dramatic theoretical mistakes, which cannot be corrected by any kind of rigor applied to statistical tests of the focal hypotheses. We conclude that a scientific culture rewarding strong inference (Platt, ...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691612462587

The Long Way From α-Error Control to Validity Proper Problems With a Short-Sighted False-Positive Debate

Distinguishing between living (animate) and nonliving (inanimate) things is essential for survival and successful reproduction. Animacy is widely recognized as a foundational dimension, appearing early in development, but its role in remembering is currently unknown. We report two studies suggesting that animacy is a critical mnemonic dimension and is one of the most important item dimensions ultimately controlling retention. Both studies show that animate words are more likely to be recalled than inanimate words, even after the stimulus classes have been equated along other mnemonically relevant dimensions (e.g., imageability and meaningfulness). Mnemonic "tunings" for animacy are easily predicted a priori by a functional-evolutionary analysis.

Adaptive Memory The Mnemonic Value of Animacy

Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada (2007) discovered a strong and rather general memory advantage for word material processed in a survival-related context. One possible explanation of this effect conceives survival processing as a special form of encoding: Nature specifically “tuned” our memory systems to process and remember fitness-relevant information. We tested this explanation by studying whether the survival processing effect is robust against encoding manipulations that do not affect the fitness relevance of information. Three experiments replicated a strong survival processing effect under standard conditions but showed that the mnemonic benefit of survival processing diminishes or even vanishes when participants focus on a single problem (Experiments 1 and 2) or technique (Experiment 3) of survival. We argue that it is not survival processing per se that facilitates recall but the richness and distinctiveness with which information is encoded.

On the plasticity of the survival processing effect.

A popular hypothesis in evolutionary psychology posits that reciprocal altruism is supported by a cognitive module that helps cooperative individuals to detect and remember cheaters. Consistent with this hypothesis, a source memory advantage for faces of cheaters (better memory for the cheating context in which these faces were encountered) was observed in previous studies. Here, we examined whether positive or negative expectancies would influence source memory for cheaters and cooperators. A cooperation task with virtual opponents was used in Experiments 1 and 2. Source memory for the emotionally incongruent information was enhanced relative to the congruent information: In Experiment 1, source memory was best for cheaters with likable faces and for cooperators with unlikable faces; in Experiment 2, source memory was better for smiling cheater faces than for smiling cooperator faces, and descriptively better for angry cooperator faces than for angry cheater faces. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that the emotional incongruity effect generalizes to 3rd-party reputational information (descriptions of cheating and trustworthy behavior). The results are inconsistent with the assumption of a highly specific cheater detection module. Focusing on expectancy-incongruent information may represent a more efficient, general, and hence more adaptive memory strategy for remembering exchange-relevant information than focusing only on cheaters.

On the flexibility of social source memory: A test of the emotional incongruity hypothesis.

Nairne and collaborators showed that assessing the relevance of words in the context of an imagined survival scenario boosts memory for these words. Although this survival-processing advantage has attracted a considerable amount of research, little is known about the proximate memory mechanism mediating this effect. Recently, Kroneisen and Erdfelder (2011) argued that it is not survival processing itself that facilitates recall but rather the richness and distinctiveness of encoding that is triggered by the survival-processing task. Alternatively, however, it is also conceivable that survival processing fosters interactive imagery, a process known to improve associative learning. To test these explanations we compared relevance-rating and interactive imagery tasks for survival and control scenarios. Results show that the survival advantage replicates in the relevance-rating condition but vanishes in the interactive imagery condition. This refutes the interactive imagery explanation and corroborates the ri...

/pdf/the-proximate-memory-mechanism-underlying-the-survival-qtsjca9eu6.pdf

The proximate memory mechanism underlying the survival-processing effect: Richness of encoding or interactive imagery?

The present study examines memory for social-exchange-relevant information. In Experiment 1 male and female faces were shown together with behaviour descriptions of cheating, altruistic, and neutral behaviour. Previous results have led to the hypothesis that people preferentially remember schema-atypical information. Given the common gender stereotype that women are kinder and less egoistic than men, this atypicality account would predict that source memory (that is, memory for the type of context to which a face was associated) should be enhanced for female cheaters in comparison to male cheaters. The results of Experiment 1 confirmed this hypothesis. Experiment 2 reveals that source memory for female faces associated with disgusting behaviours is enhanced in comparison to male faces associated with disgusting behaviours. Thus the atypicality effect generalises beyond social-exchange-relevant information, a result which is inconsistent with the assumption that the findings can be ascribed to a highly spe...

Sex, cheating, and disgust: enhanced source memory for trait information that violates gender stereotypes.

In a series of experiments, Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada (2007) demonstrated that words judged for their relevance to a survival scenario are remembered better than words judged for a scenario not relevant on a survival dimension. They explained this survival-processing effect by arguing that nature “tuned” our memory systems to process and remember fitness-relevant information. Kroneisen and Erdfelder (2011) proposed that it may not be survival processing per se that facilitates recall but the richness and distinctiveness with which information is encoded. To further test this account, we investigated how the survival processing effect is affected by cognitive load. If the survival processing effect is due to automatic processes or, alternatively, if survival processing is routinely prioritized in dual-task contexts, we would expect this effect to persist under cognitive load conditions. If the effect relies on cognitively demanding processes like richness and distinctiveness of encoding, however, th...

Meike Kroneisen

Papers

On the plasticity of the survival processing effect.

On the flexibility of social source memory: A test of the emotional incongruity hypothesis.

The proximate memory mechanism underlying the survival-processing effect: Richness of encoding or interactive imagery?

Sex, cheating, and disgust: enhanced source memory for trait information that violates gender stereotypes.

Working memory load eliminates the survival processing effect.