It is not easy to discuss the question of infectivity in a disease for which there is no known cause. In this circum stance, one must rely on the epidemiological observations which suggest that a disease may be infectious. While epidemiological studies alone can never determine the specific etiology of a disease, they can often indicate whether its characteristics are consistent with those of a...

Morally-motivated decision making has recently emerged as an especially relevant domain of study for understanding cultural conflict. Baron and Spranca (1997) have proposed that people hold protected values that are protected against being traded off for other goods. One of the most characteristic properties of protected values is quantity insensitivity, meaning that holders of these values are...

The study aimed to compare the shaping effects, preservation of the original curvature, and transportation of the apical foramen of Reciproc (VDW, Munich, Germany), UnicOne (Medin, Nové Město na Moravě, Czech Republic), and Protaper Universal (Dentsply Maillefer, Ballaigues, Switzerland) in simulated root canals. Thirty resin blocks with simulated curved root canals were distributed into three ...

It has been shown that when people are asked, in the absence of experimenter feedback, to free classify stimuli into categories that appear natural to them, they tend to sort on the basis of a single dimension (e.g. Medin et al., 1987) rather than by overall similarity. This result is somewhat surprising considering that many natural categories appear to be organized around a number of characte...

Subjects exposed to strings of letters generated by a finite state grammar can later classify grammatical and nongrammatical test strings, even though they cannot adequately say what the rules of the grammar are (e.g., Reber, 1989). The MINERVA 2 (Hintzman, 1986) and Medin and Schaffer (1978) memory-array models and a number of connectionis? autoassociator models are tested against experimental...

SUSTAIN (Supervised and Unsupervised STratified Adaptive Incremental Network) is a network model of human category learning. SUSTAIN is a three layer model where learning between the first two layers is unsupervised, while learning between the top two layers is supervised. SUSTAIN clusters inputs in an unsupervised fashion until it groups input patterns inappropriately (as signaled by the super...

The arguments of Fodor, Garrett, Walker and Parkes [(1980) Against definitions, Cognition, 8, 263-367] are the source of widespread skepticism in cognitive science about lexical semantic structure. Whereas the thesis that lexical items, and the concepts they express, have decompositional structure (i.e. have significant constituents) was at one time “one of those ideas that hardly anybody [in t...

This chapter considers a set of questions at the interface of the study of intuitive theories, causal knowledge, and problems of inductive inference. By an intuitive theory, we mean a cognitive structure that in some important ways is analogous to a scientific theory. It is becoming broadly recognized that intuitive theories play essential roles in organizing our most basic knowledge of the wor...

We examined the time-course of the in ̄uence of background knowledge on perceptual categorization by manipulating the meaningfulness of labels associated with categories and by manipulating the amount of time provided to subjects for making a categorization decision. Extending a paradigm originally reported by Wisniewski and Medin (1994) (Cog. Sci. 18 (1994) 221), subjects learned two categories...

J. Medin and D. Fowler (eds.), Experimental and Applied Immunotherapy, DOI 10.1007/978-1-60761-980-2_2, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract The role of B lymphocytes in the pathogenesis and treatment of cancer has not received as much attention as the role of T cells. However, most patients with solid tumors harbor circulating antitumor antibodies and most tumors contain a popu...