Ordinary people make moral judgments that are consistent with philosophical and legal principles. Do those judgments derive from the controlled application of principles, or do the principles derive from automatic judgments? As a case study, we explore the tendency to judge harmful actions morally worse than harmful omissions (the 'omission effect') using fMRI. Because ordinary people readily a...

In this paper we argue that the distribution of article omission in newspaper headlines is constrained by information-theoretical principles (Shannon 1948). To this effect, we present corpus data and results from an acceptability rating study. Both point in the same direction: In our corpus, articles are significantly more frequent, when they precede a less predictable head noun. And subjects p...

In this study omission evoked potentials (OEPs) were studied in rhythmic experts (n=12) and non-musicians (n=12). Trains of auditory stimuli were presented. Trials (n=90) contained five omissions and started with a random number of beats, thus making every first omission unpredictable. Participants had to tap along with the first beat after the fifth omission (n=90), thus determining timing-acc...