We argue that the nativist-empiricist debate in developmental psychology is distorted, both theoretically and methodologically, by a shared framework of assumptions concerning the nature of representation. In particular, both sides of the debate assume models of representation that make the emergence of representation impossible. This, in turn,…

The target paper by Barba (2012) raises issues that were the focus of the author's first two publications on operant variability. The author will describe the main findings in those papers and then discuss Barba's specific arguments. Barba has argued against the operant nature of variability. (Contains 2 figures.)

Sloutsky and Fisher (2012) attempt to reframe the results presented in Noles and Gelman (2012) as a pure replication of their original work validating the similarity, induction, naming, and categorization (SINC) model. However, their critique fails to engage with the central findings reported in Noles and Gelman, and their reanalysis fails to…

Koen and Yonelinas (2010; K&Y) reported that mixing classes of targets that had short (weak) or long (strong) study times had no impact on zROC slope, contradicting the predictions of the encoding variability hypothesis. We show that they actually derived their predictions from a mixture unequal-variance signal detection (UVSD) model, which…

Most biological scientists conduct experiments to look for effects, and test the results statistically. One of the commonly used test is Student's t test. However, this test concentrates on a very limited question. The authors assume that there is no effect in the experiment, and then estimate the possibility that they could have obtained these…

In their paper, Meara and Olmos Alcoy (2010) attempted to find a means of estimating productive second language (L2) vocabulary size based on the premise that many known lexical items simply do not appear in learner-produced texts. To do so, they borrowed an ecological model, in which a capture-recapture formula, the Petersen estimate, is used to…

In an integrative review, we concluded that implicit affective cues--rudimentary stimuli associated with the onset of arousing positive or negative emotional states and/or with appraisals that the environment is benign or threatening--automatically moderate the scope of attention (Friedman & Forster, 2010). In their comment, Harmon-Jones, Gable,…

Tsetsos, Usher, and Chater (2010) presented several criticisms of decision field theory (DFT) involving its distance function, instability under externally controlled stopping times, and lack of robustness to various multialternative choice scenarios. Here, we counter those claims with a specification of a distance function based on the…

Friedman and Forster (2010) reviewed an extensive program of research that was consistent with the view that positive affective states broaden, whereas negative affective states narrow, the scope of attention. We applaud their creative investigations into these important psychological questions and appreciate their thorough review. However, recent…

In this post scrit, the authors discuss an article by Hotaling, Busemeyer, and Li which provided a valuable reply to the challenges the current authors raised for the decision field theory (DFT) account of preference reversal in multiattribute choice. They agree with Hotaling, Busemeyer, and Li's observation that with the addition of an internal…

The slope of the z-transformed receiver-operating characteristic (zROC) in recognition memory experiments is usually less than 1, which has long been interpreted to mean that the variance of the target distribution is greater than the variance of the lure distribution. The greater variance of the target distribution could arise because the…

In "Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?" Jerry M. Burger (see record 2008-19206-001) reported a high base rate of obedience, comparable to that observed by Stanley Milgram (1974). Another condition, involving a defiant confederate, failed to significantly reduce obedience. This commentary discusses the primary contributions of…

J. C. Ziegler, C. Perry, and M. Zorzi (2009) have claimed that their connectionist dual process model (CDP+) can simulate the data reported by S. O'Malley and D. Besner. Most centrally, they have claimed that the model simulates additive effects of stimulus quality and word frequency on the time to read aloud when words and nonwords are randomly…

Recently, J. J. Starns and J. L. Hicks (2005) have argued that source dimensions are retrieved independently from memory. In their innovative experiment, manipulating the retrievability of 1 source feature did not affect memory for a 2nd feature. Following C. S. Dodson and A. P. Shimamura (2000), the authors argue that the source memory measure…

K. Rayner, A. Pollatsek, D. Drieghe, T. J. Slattery, and E. D. Reichle argued that the R. Kliegl, A. Nuthmann, and R. Engbert corpus-analytic evidence for distributed processing during reading should not be accepted because (a) there might be problems of multicollinearity, (b) the distinction between content and function words and the skipping…