The pause in global warming:Turning a routine fluctuation into a problem for science

Abstract There has been much recent published research about a putative “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming. We show that there are frequent fluctuations in the rate of warming around a longer-term warming trend, and that there is no evidence that identifies the recent period as unique or particularly unusual. In confirmation, we show that the notion of a pause in warming is considered to be misleading in a blind expert test. Nonetheless, the most recent fluctuation about the longer-term trend has been regarded by many as an explanatory challenge that climate science must resolve. This departs from long-standing practice, insofar as scientists have long recognized that the climate fluctuates, that linear increases in CO2 do not produce linear trends in global warming, and that 15-yr (or shorter) periods are not diagnostic of long-term trends. We suggest that the repetition of the “warming has paused” message by contrarians was adopted by the scientific community in its problem-solving and answer-seeking role and has led to undue focus on, and mislabeling of, a recent fluctuation. We present an alternative framing that could have avoided inadvertently reinforcing a misleading claim.</jats:p

A test of interference versus decay in working memory:Varying distraction within lists in a complex span task

We tested two competing explanations of the effect of processing on working memory. According to decay models, memory representations decay during processing and can be rehearsed or refreshed in the free time between processing steps. Alternatively, one interference-based model assumes that processing involves encoding of distractor representations in working memory, and free time is used to remove distractors. In several experiments the demand from distractor processing was varied within lists, such that one burst of processing following an item on the list was either particularly demanding or particularly undemanding. The exceptional distractor burst had its greatest effect on the list item that immediately preceded it (a local effect), and it affected items that had not yet been presented as well as preceding items. Both findings are predicted by a computational interference model of working memory, and together are problematic for the viewpoint that refreshing offsets decay.</p

Computational fact checking from knowledge networks

Traditional fact checking by expert journalists cannot keep up with the enormous volume of information that is now generated online. Computational fact checking may significantly enhance our ability to evaluate the veracity of dubious information. Here we show that the complexities of human fact checking can be approximated quite well by finding the shortest path between concept nodes under properly defined semantic proximity metrics on knowledge graphs. Framed as a network problem this approach is feasible with efficient computational techniques. We evaluate this approach by examining tens of thousands of claims related to history, entertainment, geography, and biographical information using a public knowledge graph extracted from Wikipedia. Statements independently known to be true consistently receive higher support via our method than do false ones. These findings represent a significant step toward scalable computational fact-checking methods that may one day mitigate the spread of harmful misinformation

Active versus passive maintenance of visual nonverbal memory

Forgetting over the short-term has challenged researchers for more than a century, largely because of difficulty in controlling what goes on within the memory retention interval. But the “recent negative probes” procedure offers a valuable paradigm, by examining influences of (presumably) unattended memoranda from prior trials. Here we used a recent probes task to investigate forgetting for visual non-verbal short-term memory. Target stimuli (2 visually presented abstract shapes) on a trial were followed after a retention interval by a probe, and participants indicated whether the probe matched one of the target items. Proactive interference, and hence memory for old trial probes, was observed whereby participants were slowed in rejecting a non-matching probe on the present trial that nevertheless matched a target item on the previous trial (a recent negative probe). The attraction of the paradigm is that, by uncovering proactive influences of past trial probe stimuli, it is argued that active maintenance in memory of those probes is unlikely. In two experiments we recorded such proactive interference of prior trial items over a range of interstimulus (ISI) and intertrial (ITI) intervals (between 1 and 6 seconds respectively). Consistent with a proposed two-process memory conception (the active-passive memory model or APM), actively maintained memories on current trials decayed but passively “maintained,” or unattended, visual memories of stimuli on past trials did not

"Object Categorization: Reversals and Explanations of the Basic-Level Advantage" (Rogers & Patterson, 2007): A simplicity account

T. T. Rogers and K. Patterson (2007), in their article “Object Categorization: Reversals and Explanations of the Basic-Level Advantage” (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136, 451–469), reported an impressive set of results demonstrating a reversal of the highly robust basic-level advantage both in patients with semantic dementia and in healthy individuals engaged in a speeded categorization task. To explain their results, as well as the usual basic-level advantage seen in healthy individuals, the authors employed a parallel distributed processing theory of conceptual knowledge. In this paper, we introduce an alternative way of explaining the results of Rogers and Patterson, which is premised on a more restricted set of assumptions born from standard categorization theory. Specifically, we provide evidence that their results can be accounted for based on the predictions of the simplicity model of unsupervised categorization