Retrospective Judgments Research Articles

BREEDING FOR DURABLE RESISTANCE TO DOWNY AND POWDERY MILDEW IN GRAPEVINE

The current strategy to control grapevine downy and powdery mildew relies on chemical treatments. An alternative solution to the use of chemicals is the development of varieties resistant to pathogens. Therefore a program to create new grapevine varieties with a durable resistance to downy and powdery mildew and with a berry quality suitable for high quality wine production was launched in 2000. The situation seemed very favourable to start up such a program: plenty of resistance sources were available, and several resistance QTLs with various effects had already been discovered. Nevertheless a first case of downy mildew resistance breakdown was described in the cultivar ?Bianca?. Even if resistance durability is a retrospective judgment, some principles can be considered to monitor the risk of resistance break-down: pyramiding resistance genes, taking into account the evolutionary potential of the pathogen or assessing the cost of virulence, from a practical point of view, a durable management of resistance meaning to reduce the selection pressure applied by the resistance genes on the pathogen population. Therefore we chose to use multiple sources of resistance as genitors. The genetic determinism of most of them was analysed and the molecular markers derived from these studies were quickly integrated to assist with selection. Concerning the shortening of the breeding process, we developed a greenhouse growing method allowing to go from seed to seed in one year and a resistance phenotyping platform to get the precise plant phenotype as early as possible in the process. Moreover all the field trials have been performed through an experimental network, which allows us to save time and to take into account the differences in environment conditions. The overall process of selection is organized into three steps and takes 16 years. We expect to propose our first varieties for registration in 2016.

Impression formation of tests: retrospective judgments of performance are higher when easier questions come first.

Four experiments are reported on the importance of retrospective judgments of performance (postdictions) on tests. Participants answered general knowledge questions and estimated how many questions they answered correctly. They gave higher postdictions when easy questions preceded difficult questions. This was true when time to answer each question was equalized and constrained, when participants were instructed not to write answers, and when questions were presented in a multiple-choice format. Results are consistent with the notion that first impressions predominate in overall perception of test difficulty.

Age-related and death-related differences in emotional complexity.

The present study aimed to examine an aspect of emotional complexity as seen in covariation between retrospective judgments of positive and negative affects. We assume that individuals can experience positive affect independently of negative affect. Theories argue that emotional complexity increases in old age, but research shows mixed evidence. Additionally, emotional complexity has been shown to decrease in situations prevalent in old age, such as physical illness and disability. Integrating distinct effects of age and distance to death, we propose that emotional complexity may remain intact or even increase in old age, and yet it decreases in light of functional deterioration shortly before death. The current research examined whether emotional complexity decreases as a function of subjective perception of closeness to death (subjective survival probability) or actual closeness to death. We used 3 large-scale databases: 2 cross-sectional (SHARE, N = 17,437, mean age = 64; HRS, N = 6,032, mean age = 67) and 1 longitudinal (CALAS, N = 1,310, mean age at baseline = 83). Hierarchical multiple regressions and multilevel models showed that respondents who perceived themselves as closer to death or were actually closer to death showed lower emotional complexity (a stronger negative correlation between positive and negative affects). Age and emotional complexity were unrelated or positively related, depending on the sample. Findings remained the same after controlling for demographic characteristics, as well as physical and cognitive functioning. The results indicate that both subjective and objective closeness to death are associated with lower emotional complexity. This death-related decrease in emotional complexity is discussed within current theories of aging.

Are all data created equal?--Exploring some boundary conditions for a lazy intuitive statistician.

The study investigated potential effects of the presentation order of numeric information on retrospective subjective judgments of descriptive statistics of this information. The studies were theoretically motivated by the assumption in the naïve sampling model of independence between temporal encoding order of data in long-term memory and retrieval probability (i.e. as implied by a ”random sampling” from memory metaphor). In Experiment 1, participants experienced Arabic numbers that varied in distribution shape/variability between the first and the second half of the information sequence. Results showed no effects of order on judgments of mean, variability or distribution shape. To strengthen the interpretation of these results, Experiment 2 used a repeated judgment procedure, with an initial judgment occurring prior to the change in distribution shape of the information half-way through data presentation. The results of Experiment 2 were in line with those from Experiment 1, and in addition showed that the act of making explicit judgments did not impair accuracy of later judgments, as would be suggested by an anchoring and insufficient adjustment strategy. Overall, the results indicated that participants were very responsive to the properties of the data while at the same time being more or less immune to order effects. The results were interpreted as being in line with the naïve sampling models in which values are stored as exemplars and sampled randomly from long-term memory.

Comparison of momentary and retrospective soundscape evaluations

The Peak and End rule describes the effect that retrospective evaluations of temporal events significantly depend on the most extreme affect (peak) experienced during an episode and on the affect at the ending. Other features, like the duration of an event, seem to be widely negligible. We are testing this hypothesis in the context of soundscape evaluation in a series of listening tests conducted in Montréal, Canada, and Duesseldorf, Germany. The soundscapes consisted of recordings of different locations (e.g., railway station, park) and were edited so that there was one presumed emotional “peak moment.” The task of the test group was to indicate momentary judgments by continuously adjusting a slider on a computer interface over the course of the stimulus presentation. Additionally, the participants had to make an overall retrospective rating of the soundscapes after listening to them. To investigate attention effects in the course of the test task a second group was asked to only judge the sounds retrospectively. Preliminary results indicate that the Peak and End rule in combination with the averaged momentary evaluations well predict the retrospective judgments. Within this contribution the results of the experiment will be presented and implications for soundscape design will be discussed.

Unifying Prospective and Retrospective Interval-time Estimation: A Fading-gaussian Activation-based Model of Interval-timing

Hass and Hermann (2012) have shown that only variance-based processes will lead to the scalar growth of error that is characteristic of human time judgments. Secondly, a major meta-review of over one hundred studies (Block et al., 2010) reveals a striking interaction between the way in which temporal judgments are queried and cognitive load on participants’ judgments of interval duration. For retrospective time judgments, estimates under high cognitive load are longer than under low cognitive load. For prospective judgments, the reverse pattern holds, with increased cognitive load leading to shorter estimates. We describe GAMIT, a Gaussian spreading-activation model, in which the sampling rate of an activation trace is differentially affected by cognitive load. The model unifies prospective and retrospective time estimation, normally considered separately, by relating them to the same underlying process. The scalar property of time estimation arises naturally from the model dynamics and the model shows the appropriate interaction between mode of query and cognitive load.

The eyewitness post identification feedback effect 15 years later: Theoretical and policy implications.

Eyewitnesses' retrospective reports of certainty, view, attention, and other judgments constitute central variables used by courts to assess the credibility of eyewitness identification evidence. Recently, important state Supreme Court decisions (e.g., New Jersey v. Henderson, 2011; Oregon v. Lawson, 2012) have relied on psychological research regarding the post-identification feedback effect to revamp their assumptions about when witness retrospective self-reports can be trusted. The post-identification feedback effect, originally demonstrated by Wells and Bradfield (1998), refers to the way in which witness self-reports are distorted by feedback to the witnesses that suggests that their identifications were accurate or mistaken. We present a meta-analysis of the post-identification effect involving 7,000 participants from the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. The results show that confirming feedback robustly inflates eyewitnesses' retrospective judgments across experimental manipulations and laboratory settings with large effect sizes. We describe the policy implications of the feedback effect with regard to the need for double-blind lineup procedures. Moreover, we propose that testimony-relevant witness judgments should be collected and documented, preferably with videotape, before feedback can occur. We use moderator analyses to examine the current explanation of the feedback effect and delineate new research questions that could help develop a more complete theoretical understanding of the processes giving rise to the effect.

Interoceptive Focus Shapes the Experience of Time

The perception of time is a fundamental part of human experience. Recent research suggests that the experience of time emerges from emotional and interoceptive (bodily) states as processed in the insular cortex. Whether there is an interaction between the conscious awareness of interoceptive states and time distortions induced by emotions has rarely been investigated so far. We aimed to address this question by the use of a retrospective time estimation task comparing two groups of participants. One group had a focus on interoceptive states and one had a focus on exteroceptive information while watching film clips depicting fear, amusement and neutral content. Main results were that attention to interoceptive processes significantly affected subjective time experience. Fear was accompanied with subjective time dilation that was more pronounced in the group with interoceptive focus, while amusement led to a quicker passage of time which was also increased by interoceptive focus. We conclude that retrospective temporal distortions are directly influenced by attention to bodily responses. These effects might crucially interact with arousal levels. Sympathetic nervous system activation affecting memory build-up might be the decisive factor influencing retrospective time judgments. Our data substantially extend former research findings underscoring the relevance of interoception for the effects of emotional states on subjective time experience.

What Do We Want from the Just War Tradition? New Challenges of Surveillance and the Security State

The nature and scope of government surveillance have intensified debates about liberty and security in a post-9/11 world. Critics of the just war tradition argue it is not able to constructively address these new challenges. Defenders often simply re-affirm its various criteria in making retrospective judgments or clarifying principles. By contrast, this article argues that our political moment—marked by the arbitrary exercise of power, the prospect of permanent war, and the rapid speed of global politics—reinforces the need to frame just war thinking within a constructive account of statecraft and practical reasoning. In particular, I highlight moral (rather than simply legal) dimensions of authority and intention which reveal a fundamental question about what we want from the just war tradition in relation to democratic social criticism and the possibility of political morality.

Post-identification feedback to eyewitnesses impairs evaluators’ abilities to discriminate between accurate and mistaken testimony.

Giving confirming feedback to mistaken eyewitnesses has robust distorting effects on their retrospective judgments (e.g., how certain they were, their view, etc.). Does feedback harm evaluators' abilities to discriminate between accurate and mistaken identification testimony? Participant-witnesses to a simulated crime made accurate or mistaken identifications from a lineup and then received confirming feedback or no feedback. Each then gave videotaped testimony about their identification, and a new sample of participant-evaluators judged the accuracy and credibility of the testimonies. Among witnesses who were not given feedback, evaluators were significantly more likely to believe the testimony of accurate eyewitnesses than they were to believe the testimony of mistaken eyewitnesses, indicating significant discrimination. Among witnesses who were given confirming feedback, however, evaluators believed accurate and mistaken witnesses at nearly identical rates, indicating no ability to discriminate. Moreover, there was no evidence of overbelief in the absence of feedback whereas there was significant overbelief in the confirming feedback conditions. Results demonstrate that a simple comment following a witness' identification decision ("Good job, you got the suspect") can undermine fact-finders' abilities to discern whether the witness made an accurate or a mistaken identification.

Study Time Allocation, Retrospective Confidence, Gender, and Recall Performance: Does MemorySelf-Efficacy Matter?

We examined factors associated with self-regulated learning in a multitrial verbal learning task. Eighty males and 80 females (ages 18–25 years) completed a memory self-efficacy (MSE) questionnaire before being administered a Swahili-English memory task, in which participants received an unlimited amount of time to study each translation and complete cued recall tests across three study-test trials. We hypothesized that MSE, gender, and subsequent study time allocation (STA) based on prior recall performance and retrospective confidence judgments (RCJs) would be related to memory performance. There were gender differences in recall rates on subsequent trials, but no other gender effects were observed. Our results suggested that general beliefs about memory capabilities (MSE), control processes (STA), and monitoring processes (RCJs) are related to recall performance in a multitrial self-regulated learning task, and that the influence of these variables differs by recall trial and whether individuals are in more extreme MSE groups.

“A long time ago, in a context far, far away”: Retrospective time estimates and internal context change.

This investigation aimed to establish retrospective time judgments as markers of internal context change across 2 memory paradigms, the effects of which have been attributed to internal context change by some researchers. Experiment 1 involved the list-method directed forgetting paradigm and established that the forget group significantly overestimated the duration of the experiment compared with the remember group. Experiment 2 involved the list-before-last paradigm, whereby participants studied 3 lists, and in between encoding of List 2 and List 3, some participants retrieved List 1, whereas the control participants restudied List 1. The results showed that the retrieval group significantly overestimated the duration of the experiment compared with the restudy group. Overall, these results support the context-change interpretation of these paradigms, and they also support the contextual-change hypothesis of retrospective timing (Block & Reed, 1978).

GAMIT – A Fading-Gaussian Activation Model of Interval-Timing: Unifying Prospective and Retrospective Time Estimation

Two recent findings constitute a serious challenge for all existing models of interval timing. First, Hass and Hermann (2012) have shown that only variance-based processes will lead to the scalar growth of error that is characteristic of human time judgments. Secondly, a major meta-review of over one hundred studies of participants’ judgments of interval duration (Block et al., 2010) reveals a striking interaction between the way in which temporal judgments are queried (i.e., retrospectively or prospectively) and cognitive load. For retrospective time judgments, estimates under high cognitive load are longer than under low cognitive load. For prospective judgments, the reverse pattern holds, with increased cognitive load leading to shorter estimates. We describe GAMIT, a Gaussian spreading activation model of interval timing, in which the decay and sampling rate of an activation trace are differentially affected by cognitive load. The model unifies prospective and retrospective time estimation, normally considered separately, by relating them to the same underlying process. The scalar property of time estimation arises naturally from the model dynamics and the model shows the appropriate interaction between mode of query and cognitive load.

Time perception, attention, and memory: A selective review

This article provides a selective review of time perception research, mainly focusing on the authors' research. Aspects of psychological time include simultaneity, successiveness, temporal order, and duration judgments. In contrast to findings at interstimulus intervals or durations less than 3.0–5.0s, there is little evidence for an “across-senses” effect of perceptual modality (visual vs. auditory) at longer intervals or durations. In addition, the flow of time (events) is a pervasive perceptual illusion, and we review evidence on that. Some temporal information is encoded All rights reserved. relatively automatically into memory: People can judge time-related attributes such as recency, frequency, temporal order, and duration of events. Duration judgments in prospective and retrospective paradigms reveal differences between them, as well as variables that moderate the processes involved. An attentional-gate model is needed to account for prospective judgments, and a contextual-change model is needed to account for retrospective judgments.

Drinking Deep at Black Mountain College

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, was an icon of progressive education during its short life, from 1933 to 1956. When I was there, from 1946 to 1948, there were sixty to eighty students and twenty faculty. There were few formal academic requirements, no required courses, no grades, limited re sources, but an amazing abundance of creative students and faculty. Students in my two years included such notables as the writer Jose Yglesias, director Arthur Penn, painter Kenneth Noland, and sculptor Ruth Asawa. The Summer Art Institute in 1948 had John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Richard Lippold. The regular faculty had as its star the abstract painter Josef Albers, and many notables in painting, mathematics, chemistry, weaving, and music, including Ilya Bolotowsky, Max Dehn, Natasha Goldowski, Anni Albers, Erwin Bodky, and Edward Lowinsky. The rest of the faculty included lesser-known but often distinguished writers, philosophers, musicians, historians, and a progressive psychologist. The college was always a dynamic, explosive, self-destructive hothouse. Since its inception, it had been a hotel for progressive ideas in American education, the arts, and the social sciences. Isolated in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, it was one of the very few schools in the country that was open to experimentation. A busload of new faculty and students arrived yearly, welcomed as refreshers and feared as competitors by those who had been there a year or two. Some tried to renovate BMC in their own image, some simply basked in its tolerance and idealism. The most authentic of the students and faculty were seeking to feed deeply on its vibrant flesh, immersing themselves in the unique experience and embracing its contradictions. All but a few moved on after a year or two, gratified or rejected, and a new busload arrived. A small core faculty stayed, providing some continuity and every three or four years wearily congratulating themselves on staving off another educational challenge and on disposing of the disruptive faculty and students who sought renovations (and sometimes achieved them). The core faculty sullenly cleaned up and tried again to square the circle, to create stability and security while proclaiming innovation. My busload, I believe, was quintessential. MAKING OUR WAY Almost everyone there at this period seemed a poster-child of some sort, representing a fragment of our culture--the closet gay, the civil rights activist, the communist, the avant-garde painter, the urgent truth-seeker, the parent-escaper. My poster was being about the only student from the West Coast (most were from the Northeast, particularly New York City); about being the only one without parents and siblings who had attended college (most students, but certainly not all, were from a well-educated upper middle class, or intellectual elite class); and being one of the few, I suppose, who had had little contact with Jewish people. BMC, in my retrospective judgment, was predominantly a Jewish culture. Tacoma, Washington, had a few Jews (including a friend), and some of my army friends were probably Jewish, but I never thought much of it. My acquaintance with Jewish culture was so limited that, even after I left BMC and went to live on the Lower East Side (East 6th and Avenue A), it struck me as very strange as I walked in my neighborhood (a Jewish enclave in 1948-49) that all the people chatting on the front steps spent their time telling Jewish jokes. I finally realized that BMC was the only context in which I had heard those wonderful jokes and theatrical accents. I was probably one of the few students who had no conscious intellectual pretensions; a C+ student in high school, I was slated for a career as an electrician, simply because I had to work when in high school and had a job with an electrical contractor. …

Review of "The worldliness of a cosmopolitan education: Passionate lives in public service"

Pinar, W. (2009). The worldliness of cosmopolitan education: Passionate lives in public service. New York: Routledge. Pages: 221. Price: 48.95 USD (paper). ISBN 978-0-415-99551-1.William Pinar is most commonly known for his contributions to curriculum studies. The Worldliness of Cosmopolitan Education expands this work while traversing topics as diverse as educational policy studies, education, cosmopolitanism, and queer theory. An intriguing aspect of the book is the balance it strikes between scholarly engagement and worldly action. The discussion is not about defining what cosmopolitan consists of, rather it is subjective enactment of cosmopolitanism as worldliness: after studying the book one is worldlier as result of the cosmopolitan it represents. Cosmopolitanism is not explored as topic but is demonstrated in the study that is this book and is further clarified through the examples of the worldly lives lived in public service of the subjects studied.The book begins with challenging question: What knowledge is of most worth? (p. vii). Pinar describes the danger of curriculum being hijacked as means to an end of the market. The triumph of power in collectivism (the erasure of individuality), the lack of academic knowledge in education, and the overt control of standardized testing are presented as manifestations of this instrumentalist agenda. Teaching is often misrepresented as a business, based on outcomes (p. 46) with little focus on inputs. Teaching as profession is threatened by an effort to teacher proof the curriculum under the guise of accountability. Pinar provokes teachers and administrators of education, including higher education, by asserting that their obligation is not to the superintendent or to the school board ... but to the profession, to your colleagues, and to the children they teach (p. 51).After rejecting an instrumental approach to curriculum development, Pinar returns to the question, What knowledge is of most worth? It is question best answered by the individual through consideration of their subjective passion, our collective concerns, and structured by academic knowledge (p. 43). A synthesis of lived and self-reflective (autobiographically conscious) academic study is the basis for cosmopolitan that aims for critical engagement with the (p. 62).The subjectivity of the individual is central to Pinar's notion of cosmopolitanism: Subjectivity enables engagement with the informed by study and experience (p. 33). Worldliness, a state of being between the local and the global, simultaneously self-engaged and worldly-wise, cause and consequence of cosmopolitan education (p. 4) is presented as subjective complement to cosmopolitanism and is uniting theme throughout the book. Worldliness is commonly seen as binary that involves love of the as opposed to love of the otherworldly such as religion. Pinar's notion of cos- mopolitan worldliness dissolves this binary. Important from an educational standpoint, Pinar describes worldliness as a retrospective judgment, not an educational objective (p. 7). Worldliness is realized through subject's critical engagement with the world. Pinar's worldliness is not utopian ideal but an engagement with the as it is; the absence of the ideal is evident in lived experience: Immanence, not transcendence, in- forms the worldliness that knows that struggle for global justice is to be conducted from everywhere: from below, from above, from all points in between, working from within to redress the injustice that defines the world (p. 146).The worldly subjects of Pinar's biographical sketches-Laura Bragg, an American museum educator and early feminist; Jane Addams, an American pioneer social worker and feminist; and Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian film director, poet, and writer-all broke through boundaries of race, class, and gender. …

Prefrontal oscillatory stimulation modulates access to cognitive control references in retrospective metacognitive commentary

ObjectiveWe intended to examine how theta-rhythm transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) (versus sham non-active stimulation) modulated associations between working memory accuracy and later retrospective self-evaluation scores. MethodsHealthy participants were required to complete a verbal working memory task while receiving tACS bilaterally over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) versus sham DLPFC stimulation. After completion of the online and post-stimulation working memory tasks, participants were asked to rate the level of success-confidence on the two preceding working memory tasks. ResultsAs expected, online working memory accuracy was improved in the active bilateral DLPFC condition versus sham stimulation. Importantly, this working memory enhancement was related to post-stimulation self-evaluation scores. ConclusionsTheoretically, our findings indicated that cognitive-control representations (e.g., working memory accuracy) could serve as the optimal frame of reference for later retrospective metacognitive judgments. SignificanceNoninvasive application of bi-frontal oscillatory currents might enhance functional connectivity between prefrontal regulatory components of working memory and retrospective monitoring in humans. Importantly, along with recent electrophysiological finding indicating interaction of tACS with ongoing oscillatory activity, our preliminary findings support the feasibility of utilizing tACS to treat theta-rhythm functional disconnectivity and related cognitive impairments in schizophrenia.

Retrospective and prospective metacognitive judgments in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta)

A growing body of research suggests that some non-human animals are capable of making accurate metacognitive judgments. In previous studies, non-human animals have made either retrospective or prospective judgments (about how they did on a test or how they will do on a test, respectively). These two types of judgments are dissociable in humans. The current study tested the abilities of two rhesus macaque monkeys to make both retrospective and prospective judgments about their performance on the same memory task. Both monkeys had been trained previously to make retrospective confidence judgments. Both monkeys successfully demonstrated transfer of retrospective metacognitive judgments to the new memory task. Furthermore, both monkeys transferred their retrospective judgments to the prospective task (one, immediately, and one, following the elimination of a response bias). This study is the first to demonstrate both retrospective and prospective monitoring abilities in the same monkeys and on the same task, suggesting a greater level of flexibility in animals' metacognitive monitoring abilities than has been reported previously.

What We Think before a Voluntary Movement

A central feature of voluntary movement is the sense of volition, but when this sense arises in the course of movement formulation and execution is not clear. Many studies have explored how the brain might be actively preparing movement before the sense of volition; however, because the timing of the sense of volition has depended on subjective and retrospective judgments, these findings are still regarded with a degree of scepticism. EEG events such as beta event-related desynchronization and movement-related cortical potentials are associated with the brain's programming of movement. Using an optimized EEG signal derived from multiple variables, we were able to make real-time predictions of movements in advance of their occurrence with a low false-positive rate. We asked participants what they were thinking at the time of prediction: Sometimes they were thinking about movement, and other times they were not. Our results indicate that the brain can be preparing to make voluntary movements while participants are thinking about something else.

Social Meaning of Ambiguous Sounds Influences Retrospective Duration Judgments

Social Meaning of Ambiguous Sounds Influences Retrospective Duration Judgments