Default Assumption Research Articles

Correction to Tsantani et al. (2022).

Reports an error in "Does a lack of perceptual expertise prevent participants from forming reliable first impressions of "other-race" faces" by Maria Tsantani, Harriet Over and Richard Cook (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Advanced Online Publication, Nov 07, 2022, np). The original article is being made available open access under the CC-BY license following the University of Nottingham opt-in to the Jisc/APA Read and Publish agreement. The correct copyright is "© 2022 The Author(s)" and the CC-BY license disclaimer is below. All versions of this article have been corrected. "Open Access funding provided by Birkbeck, University of London: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY). This license permits copying and redistributing the work in any medium or format, as well as adapting the material for any purpose, even commercially." (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2023-15561-001). Many studies investigating first impressions from faces employ stimulus sets that comprise only White faces. It is argued that participants lack the necessary perceptual expertise to provide reliable trait evaluations when viewing faces from ethnicities that differ from their own. In combination with a reliance on White and WEIRD participants, this concern has contributed to the widespread use of White face stimuli in this literature. The present study sought to determine whether concerns about the use of so-called other-race faces are justified by assessing the test-retest reliability of trait judgments made about same- and other-race faces. In two experiments conducted on 400 British participants, we find that White British participants made reliable trait judgments about Black faces, and Black British participants made reliable trait judgments about White faces. It is important that future work be conducted to determine how widely these results generalize. Considering our findings, however, we suggest (a) that the default assumption in future first impressions research should be that participants-particularly those recruited from diverse communities-are able to form reliable first impressions of other-race faces and (b) that faces of color be included in stimulus sets whenever possible. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Breathing beyond borders: Reclaiming BIPOC knowledges and methodologies in drama therapy

This editorial reflects on the urgent need for literature that reflects Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) theories, practices and methods. This Special Issue investigates the social and cultural contexts that support and enable decolonial practices of theorizing and healing. The authors herein experiment with different forms of resistance, imagine new research methodologies, engage collective imagination, and lift and re-cover cultural wisdom through their contributions. Calling on ancestral, cultural and embodied knowledge, the contributors to this Special Issue unsettle default assumptions and expectations regarding knowledge, theory and practice in drama therapy and beyond.

Iconicity in Ideophones: Guessing, Memorizing, and Reassessing.

Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and contrasted with default assumptions of arbitrariness in spoken language. But does iconicity in spoken language have a special status when it comes to learnability? A simple way to gauge learnability is to see how well something is retrieved from memory. We can further contrast this with guessability, to see (1) whether the ease of guessing the meanings of ideophones outperforms the rate at which they are remembered; and (2) how willing participants' are to reassess what they were taught in a prior task-a novel contribution of this study. We replicate prior guessing and memory tasks using ideophones and adjectives from Japanese, Korean, and Igbo. Our results show that although native Cantonese speakers guessed ideophone meanings above chance level, they memorized both ideophones and adjectives with comparable accuracy. However, response time data show that participants took significantly longer to respond correctly to adjective-meaning pairs-indicating a discrepancy in a cognitive effort that favored the recognition of ideophones. In a follow-up reassessment task, participants who were taught foil translations were more likely to choose the true translations for ideophones rather than adjectives. By comparing the findings from our guessing and memory tasks, we conclude that iconicity is more accessible if a task requires participants to actively seek out sound-meaning associations.

Taking the mystery away from shared intentionality: The straightforward view and its empirical implications.

Ordinary language in Western and non-Western cultures individuates shared mental states or experiences as unitary interpersonal events that belong to more than one individual. However, a default assumption in modern Western thought is that, in this regard, ordinary language is either illusory or merely metaphorical: a mental state or experience can belong to only one person. This assumption is called Cartesian eliminativism and is often taken to be foundational in psychology. It follows that any view that contradicts Cartesian eliminativism is a priori suspected of being "mysterious," i.e., of not meeting scientific standards. This paper suggests that the very opposite may be the case. The straightforward view explains how individuals assemble and experience a shared mental state as a unitary whole whose components are distributed among the participants. The naturalistic advantages of such a view are brought to light by focusing on developmental science. Since it explains early shared emotions, goals, and attention merely by relying on domain-general, associative processes, the straightforward view is more parsimonious than current psychological theories. Indeed, it abandons the cumbersome postulates of (i) multi-level recursive mindreading and (ii) a special, conceptually elusive phenomenal quality. I outline the distinctive developmental predictions of the view and discuss how it accounts for the functions of shared mental states. As a reductionist, non-eliminativist approach, the straightforward view promises to be viable also for cognitive scientists who have so far worked within the Cartesian framework due to a lack of a rigorous and sufficiently developed alternative.

Preschoolers modulate contrastive inferences during online language comprehension.

This study examined 4- and 5-year-olds' incremental interpretation of size adjectives, focusing on whether contrastive inferences are modulated by speaker behavior. Children (N=120, 59 females, mostly White, tested between July, 2018 and August, 2019) encountered either a conventional or unconventional speaker who labeled objects in a correspondingly typical or atypical way. Critical utterances contained size adjectives (e.g., "Look at the big duck"). With conventional speakers, gaze measures indicated that children rapidly used the adjective to differentiate members of a contrasting pair, indicating that even 4-year-olds derive contrastive inferences. With unconventional speakers, contrastive inferences were delayed in processing. The findings demonstrate that preschoolers adjust their use of pragmatic cues when presented with evidence disconfirming their default assumptions about a speaker.

Modeling COVID-19 infection dynamics and mitigation strategies for in-person K-6 instruction.

U.S. school closures due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic led to extended periods of remote learning and social and economic impact on families. Uncertainty about virus dynamics made it difficult for school districts to develop mitigation plans that all stakeholders consider to be safe. We developed an agent-based model of infection dynamics and preventive mitigation designed as a conceptual tool to give school districts basic insights into their options, and to provide optimal flexibility and computational ease as COVID-19 science rapidly evolved early in the pandemic. Elements included distancing, health behaviors, surveillance and symptomatic testing, daily symptom and exposure screening, quarantine policies, and vaccination. Model elements were designed to be updated as the pandemic and scientific knowledge evolve. An online interface enables school districts and their implementation partners to explore the effects of interventions on outcomes of interest to states and localities, under a variety of plausible epidemiological and policy assumptions. The model shows infection dynamics that school districts should consider. For example, under default assumptions, secondary infection rates and school attendance are substantially affected by surveillance testing protocols, vaccination rates, class sizes, and effectiveness of safety education. Our model helps policymakers consider how mitigation options and the dynamics of school infection risks affect outcomes of interest. The model was designed in a period of considerable uncertainty and rapidly evolving science. It had practical use early in the pandemic to surface dynamics for school districts and to enable manipulation of parameters as well as rapid update in response to changes in epidemiological conditions and scientific information about COVID-19 transmission dynamics, testing and vaccination resources, and reliability of mitigation strategies.

Tropical forests post-logging are a persistent net carbon source to the atmosphere

Logged and structurally degraded tropical forests are fast becoming one of the most prevalent land-use types throughout the tropics and are routinely assumed to be a net carbon sink because they experience rapid rates of tree regrowth. Yet this assumption is based on forest biomass inventories that record carbon stock recovery but fail to account for the simultaneous losses of carbon from soil and necromass. Here, we used forest plots and an eddy covariance tower to quantify and partition net ecosystem CO2 exchange in Malaysian Borneo, a region that is a hot spot for deforestation and forest degradation. Our data represent the complete carbon budget for tropical forests measured throughout a logging event and subsequent recovery and found that they constitute a substantial and persistent net carbon source. Consistent with existing literature, our study showed a significantly greater woody biomass gain across moderately and heavily logged forests compared with unlogged forests, but this was counteracted by much larger carbon losses from soil organic matter and deadwood in logged forests. We estimate an average carbon source of 1.75 ± 0.94 Mg C ha-1 yr-1 within moderately logged plots and 5.23 ± 1.23 Mg C ha-1 yr-1 in unsustainably logged and severely degraded plots, with emissions continuing at these rates for at least one-decade post-logging. Our data directly contradict the default assumption that recovering logged and degraded tropical forests are net carbon sinks, implying the amount of carbon being sequestered across the world's tropical forests may be considerably lower than currently estimated.

Risk Assessment of Combined Exposure to Multiple Chemicals at the European Food Safety Authority: Principles, Guidance Documents, Applications and Future Challenges.

Human health and animal health risk assessment of combined exposure to multiple chemicals use the same steps as single-substance risk assessment, namely problem formulation, exposure assessment, hazard assessment and risk characterisation. The main unique feature of combined RA is the assessment of combined exposure, toxicity and risk. Recently, the Scientific Committee of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) published two relevant guidance documents. The first one "Harmonised methodologies for the human health, animal health and ecological risk assessment of combined exposure to multiple chemicals" provides principles and explores methodologies for all steps of risk assessment together with a reporting table. This guidance supports also the default assumption that dose addition is applied for combined toxicity of the chemicals unless evidence for response addition or interactions (antagonism or synergism) is available. The second guidance document provides an account of the scientific criteria to group chemicals in assessment groups using hazard-driven criteria and prioritisation methods, i.e., exposure-driven and risk-based approaches. This manuscript describes such principles, provides a brief description of EFSA's guidance documents, examples of applications in the human health and animal health area and concludes with a discussion on future challenges in this field.

Dermal measurement of exposure to plant protection products: Actual hand exposure from hand washing vs. wearing cotton gloves.

For the authorization of plant protection products, a quantitative non-dietary exposure risk assessment relies on established dermal exposure models, measured mainly using passive dosimetry. Exposure to the hands is determined via hand washing or using cotton gloves as a surrogate for skin. This study compared both methods using operator exposure data available from the Agricultural Operator Exposure Model (AOEM) project report. These data indicate that hand exposure determined using cotton gloves resulted in markedly higher exposure values for all exposure scenarios compared to those determined by hand washes. One explanation for this is that dermal uptake of the residues reduces the amount of residue that can be recovered by hand washing. Uncertainty due to dermal uptake can be addressed by either default assumptions or by specific dermal absorption data. However, this cannot solely account for the large difference observed between the values and is mainly likely to be due to the higher capacity of the cotton gloves vs. human skin to retain residues. The results further indicate that the variability between hand wash samples and cotton glove samples differs between the exposure scenarios. Hence, the level of conservatism related to the use of cotton gloves as surrogate skin remains unknown. In conclusion, this evaluation of the AOEM data indicates that the cotton glove method results in much higher levels of measured hand exposure than the hand wash method. It cannot be excluded that dermal uptake has contributed to that result. However, the findings suggest the higher retention capacity of cotton gloves vs. human skin to be the main impact parameter. The cotton glove method does not provide the results with regards to the protection level that can be expected from the use of protective gloves. Therefore, we believe that the application of the hand wash method is a more accurate measure of exposure levels, if either specific dermal absorption data or, in its absence, default assumptions are applied as adjustment factor.

Review: Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art, by Nicole Erin Morse

Review: <i>Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art</i>, by Nicole Erin Morse

Measured air concentrations of pesticides for the estimation of exposure to vapour in European risk assessments

There is an identified need to revise the default air concentration values and assumptions applied in assessing vapour exposure in the risk assessment of bystanders and residents to plant protection products. To address this, we evaluated inhalation exposure via vapour using previously unpublished data from 29 field and wind tunnel studies. The database comprises 35 trials with 11 active ingredients covering a wide range of scenarios with respect to vapour pressure, crops, application rates and European regions. Of the 961 individual measurements, 634 were below the Limit of Detection (LOD), 282 were between the LOD and Limit of Quantification (LOQ) and only 45 (4.7%) were quantifiable. Ten individual non-normalized samples exceeded 0.1 μg/m³. Of the 81 first-day measurements after the application, 36 were <LOD, and quantifiable mean, 75th and 95th percentiles values were 0.114, 0.083, 0.552 μg/m³/kg AI applied/ha, respectively. No robust correlations between air concentration and temperature, leaf coverage, humidity, wind speed, and field size were identified; there is very limited correlation between air concentration and vapour pressure and Henry's constant in a subset of the data. These data indicate that potentially inhalable pesticide vapour within or near fields occurs only at very low concentrations in real scenarios.

Reactive Vortexes in a Naturally Activated Process: Non-Diffusive Rotational Fluxes at Transition State Uncovered by Persistent Homology.

The dynamics of reaction coordinates during barrier-crossing are key to understanding activated processes in complex systems such as proteins. The default assumption from Kramers' physical intuition is that of a diffusion process. However, the dynamics of barrier-crossing in natural complex molecules are largely unexplored. Here we investigate the transition dynamics of alanine dipeptide isomerization, the simplest complex system with a large number of non-reaction coordinates that can serve as an adequate thermal bath feeding energy into the reaction coordinates. We separate conformations along the time axis and construct the dynamic probability surface of reaction. We quantify its topological structure and rotational flux using persistent homology and differential form. Our results uncovered a region with a strong reactive vortex in the configuration-time space, where the highest probability peak and the transition state ensemble are located. This reactive region contains strong rotational fluxes: Most reactive trajectories swirl multiple times around this region in the subspace of the two most important reaction coordinates. Furthermore, the rotational fluxes result from cooperative movement along the isocommitter surfaces and orthogonal barrier-crossing. Overall, our findings offer a first glimpse into the reactive vortex regions that characterize the non-diffusive dynamics of barrier-crossing of a naturally occurring activation process.

Review: Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers, by Charles McCrary

Review: <i>Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers</i>, by Charles McCrary

Data-Driven Thyroid Nodule Diagnosis Using Belief Rule Base.

Doctors’ diagnosis preferences are different, which makes them adopt different assumptions in medical decision making. Taking the diagnosis of thyroid nodules as an example, this study compares three assumptions, namely deletion, imputation based on the distribution (distribution), and benign by default (benign). For deletion, which is the most used assumption, the clinical reports with missing features would be deleted. For distribution, the missing features would be replaced with a distribution of features with respective probabilities. Besides the two assumptions, certain doctors have also stated that they leave benign features unrecorded because they think that such benign features are irrelevant to the final diagnosis. Under the benign assumption, the missing features would be replaced with benign features. The three assumptions are tested comparatively. Moreover, the belief rule base (BRB) is used to construct the diagnostic model under the three assumptions since it is essentially a white-box approach that can provide good interpretability and direct access to doctors and patients. A total of 3766 clinical reports on thyroid nodule diagnosis were collected from ten radiologists over a seven-year period. Case study results validate that the benign by default assumption has produced the optimal results, although different doctors could present varied tendencies towards different assumptions. Guidance and suggestions for doctors’ practical work have been made based on the study results to improve work efficiency and diagnostic accuracy.

Refusal in Data Ethics: Re-Imagining the Code Beneath the Code of Computation in the Carceral State

In spite of a growing interest in ethical approaches to computation, engineers and quantitative researchers are often not equipped with the conceptual tools necessary to interrogate, resist, and reimagine the relationships of power which shape their work. A liberatory vision of computation requires de-centering the data in “data ethics” in favor of cultivating an ethics of encounter that foregrounds the ways computation reproduces structures of domination. This article draws from a rich body of feminist scholarship that explores the liberatory potential of refusal as a practice of generative boundary setting. To refuse is to say no—to reject the default categories, assumptions and problem formulations which so often underpin data-intensive work. But refusal is more than just saying no; it can be a generative and strategic act, one which opens up space to renegotiate the assumptions underlying sociotechnical endeavors. This article explores two complementary modalities of refusal in computation: “refusal as resistance” and “refusal as re-centering the margins.” By exploring these two modes of refusal, the goal of this paper is to provide a vocabulary for identifying and rejecting the ways that sociotechnical systems reinforce dependency on oppressive structural conditions, as well as offer a framework for flexible collective experimentation towards more free futures.

Large Interferometer For Exoplanets (LIFE)

Aims. Optical interferometry from space for the purpose of detecting and characterising exoplanets is seeing a revival, specifically from missions such as the proposed Large Interferometer For Exoplanets (LIFE). A default assumption since the design studies of Darwin and TPF-I has been that the Emma X-array configuration is the optimal architecture for this goal. Here, we examine whether new advances in the field of nulling interferometry, such as the concept of kernel-nulling, challenge this assumption. Methods. We develop a tool designed to derive the photon-limited signal-to-noise ratio of a large sample of simulated planets for different architecture configurations and beam combination schemes. We simulate four basic configurations: the double Bracewell/X-array, and three kernel-nullers with three, four, and five telescopes respectively. Results. We find that a configuration of five telescopes in a pentagonal shape, using a five-aperture kernel-nulling scheme, outperforms the X-array design in both search (finding more planets) and characterisation (obtaining better signal, faster) when the total collecting area is conserved. This is especially the case when trying to detect Earth twins (temperate, rocky planets in the habitable zone), showing a 23% yield increase over the X-array. On average, we find that a five-telescope design receives 1.2 times more signal than the X-array design. Conclusions. With the results of this simulation, we conclude that the Emma X-array configuration may not be the best choice of architecture for the upcoming LIFE mission, and that a five-telescope design utilising kernel-nulling concepts will likely provide better scientific return for the same collecting area, provided that technical solutions for the required achromatic phase shifts can be implemented.

A Population-Based Human In Vitro Approach to Quantify Inter-Individual Variability in Responses to Chemical Mixtures.

Human cell-based population-wide in vitro models have been proposed as a strategy to derive chemical-specific estimates of inter-individual variability; however, the utility of this approach has not yet been tested for cumulative exposures in mixtures. This study aimed to test defined mixtures and their individual components and determine whether adverse effects of the mixtures were likely to be more variable in a population than those of the individual chemicals. The in vitro model comprised 146 human lymphoblastoid cell lines from four diverse subpopulations of European and African descent. Cells were exposed, in concentration–response, to 42 chemicals from diverse classes of environmental pollutants; in addition, eight defined mixtures were prepared from these chemicals using several exposure- or hazard-based scenarios. Points of departure for cytotoxicity were derived using Bayesian concentration–response modeling and population variability was quantified in the form of a toxicodynamic variability factor (TDVF). We found that 28 chemicals and all mixtures exhibited concentration–response cytotoxicity, enabling calculation of the TDVF. The median TDVF across test substances, for both individual chemicals or defined mixtures, ranged from a default assumption (101/2) of toxicodynamic variability in human population to >10. The data also provide a proof of principle for single-variant genome-wide association mapping for toxicity of the chemicals and mixtures, although replication would be necessary due to statistical power limitations with the current sample size. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using a set of human lymphoblastoid cell lines as an in vitro model to quantify the extent of inter-individual variability in hazardous properties of both individual chemicals and mixtures. The data show that population variability of the mixtures is unlikely to exceed that of the most variable component, and that similarity in genome-wide associations among components may be used to accrue additional evidence for grouping of constituents in a mixture for cumulative assessments.

Dual-MGAN: An Efficient Approach for Semi-supervised Outlier Detection with Few Identified Anomalies

Outlier detection is an important task in data mining, and many technologies for it have been explored in various applications. However, owing to the default assumption that outliers are not concentrated, unsupervised outlier detection may not correctly identify group anomalies with higher levels of density. Although high detection rates and optimal parameters can usually be achieved by using supervised outlier detection, obtaining a sufficient number of correct labels is a time-consuming task. To solve these problems, we focus on semi-supervised outlier detection with few identified anomalies and a large amount of unlabeled data. The task of semi-supervised outlier detection is first decomposed into the detection of discrete anomalies and that of partially identified group anomalies, and a distribution construction sub-module and a data augmentation sub-module are then proposed to identify them, respectively. In this way, the dual multiple generative adversarial networks (Dual-MGAN) that combine the two sub-modules can identify discrete as well as partially identified group anomalies. In addition, in view of the difficulty of determining the stop node of training, two evaluation indicators are introduced to evaluate the training status of the sub-GANs. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that the proposed Dual-MGAN can significantly improve the accuracy of outlier detection, and the proposed evaluation indicators can reflect the training status of the sub-GANs.

On modeling the induced charge in density-functional calculations for field emitters

The default assumption of many density-functional theory codes that the simulation cell is spatially periodic implies that any unbalanced charge in the cell will cause the solution to diverge, unless the imbalance is removed in some unphysical way. Periodic solution thus makes it difficult to model accurately the charge and field that are induced at the apex of a single carbon nanotube (CNT) when a background electric field is applied. We describe how the charge induced in a single cell containing 1.8 nm of the capped end of a (5,5) CNT can be calculated from a macroscopic model of the CNT with an external field acting on the whole CNT. With this method, a cell containing the CNT tip has been analyzed using the program ONETEP, a linear-scaling code that iterates the density kernel and the localized orbitals self-consistently to minimize the Helmholtz free energy. The results shown include (1) the sheath of mobile charge outside the framework of nuclei; (2) Kohn–Sham (KS) orbitals including the localized end states that are occupied when the field is applied; (3) total effective potential distribution as a function of the applied field; and (4) an induced field-enhancement factor of 50 deduced from the change of potential with the applied field. The computation also shows that (5) the charge density in zero field extends into the potential barrier over a distance of at least 0.12 nm beyond the Fermi equipotential, consistent with KS theory for the boundary between emitter and barrier.

Examining Physiologically Based Pharmacokinetic Model Assumptions for Cross-Tissue Similarity of Activity per Unit of Enzyme: The Case Example of Uridine 5′-Diphosphate Glucuronosyltransferase

The default assumption during in vitro in vivo extrapolation (IVIVE) to predict metabolic clearance in physiologically-based pharmacokinetics (PBPK) is that protein expression and activity have the same relationship in various tissues. This assumption is examined for uridine 5'-diphosphate glucuronosyltransferases (UGTs), a case example where expression and, hence, metabolic activity are distributed across various tissues. Our literature analysis presents overwhelming evidence of a greater UGT activity per unit of enzyme (higher kcat) in kidney and intestinal tissues relative to liver (greater than 200-fold for UGT2B7). This analysis is based on application of abundance values reported using similar proteomic techniques and within the same laboratory. Our findings call into question the practice of assuming similar kcat during IVIVE estimations as part of PBPK, and call for a systematic assessment of the kcat of various enzymes across different organs. The analysis focused on compiling data for probe substrates that were common for two or more of the studied tissues, to allow for reliable comparison of cross-tissue enzyme kinetics; this meant that UGT enzymes included in the study were limited to UGT1A1, 1A3, 1A6, 1A9 and 2B7. Significantly, UGT1A9 (n=24) and the liver (n=27) were each found to account for around half of the total dataset; these were found to correlate, with hepatic UGT1A9 data found in 15 of the studies, highlighting the need for more research into extrahepatic tissues and other UGT isoforms. Significance Statement During PBPK modelling (in vitro in vivo extrapolation) of drug clearance, the default assumption is that the activity per unit of enzyme (kcat) is the same in all tissues. The analysis provides preliminary evidence that this may not be the case, and that renal and intestinal tissues may have almost 250-fold greater UGT activity per unit of enzyme than liver tissues.