Discrimination might be considered unjust on account of the comparative disadvantage it imposes, the absolute advantage it imposes, the disrespect it shows, or the prejudice it shows. This article argues that each of these accounts overlooks some cases of unjust discrimination. In response to this state of affairs we might combine two or more of these accounts. A promising approach combines the...

Previous studies have reported two types of event-related potential (ERP) mismatch responses in infants to infrequent auditory changes: a broad discriminative positivity in younger infants and a negativity resembling adult mismatch negativity (MMN) in older infants. In the present study, we investigated whether the positive discriminative slow wave and the adult-like MMN are functionally distin...

The decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union to ban sex discrimination in insurance has shown the potential reach of the principle of non-discrimination. This paper discusses the different positions taken by participants in the policy process leading up to the decision, in order to reveal the potential and limitations of nondiscrimination as the basis for market-regulatory social ...

The effects of musical interference and noise on pitch-matching accuracy were examined. Vocal training was explored as a factor influencing pitch-matching accuracy, and the relationship between pitch matching and pitch discrimination was examined. Twenty trained singers (TS) and 20 untrained individuals (UT) vocally matched tones in six conditions (immediate, four types of chords, noise). Funda...

The mouse is receiving growing interest as a model organism for studying visual perception. However, little is known about how discrimination and learning interact to produce visual conditioned responses. Here, we adapted a two-alternative forced-choice visual discrimination task for mice and examined how training with equiprobable stimuli of varying similarity influenced conditioned response a...

The present studies were carried out to investigate the effects of different retroactive stimuli on pitch discrimination in a short-term recognition memory task. Tones, Gaussian noise, and "Blank" stimuli were employed in the retroactive (interference) interval. Tones in the interference interval can enhance memory for pitch if the observer (0) employs the interference stimulus as a point of re...

Same/different discrimination is a classic task for investigating relational learning in animals. Recent research suggests that pigeons can learn a trial-unique same/different discrimination, which eliminates the opportunity to memorize the training items (Brooks & Wasserman, 2008). The authors conducted three tests to elucidate the role that item-based comparison plays in this trial-unique dis...

In this issue of Neuron, Uka and DeAngelis report a neural signature of the strategy that monkeys' brains developed to solve a visual discrimination task by training them on one version of the task and testing them on another. Extensive training on one version caused decision networks in the animals' brains to ignore certain classes of neurons whose signals would have been useful on the modifie...

In the present study, we investigated whether luminance and the side of response execution are associated, showing a SNARC-like effect (faster responses with the left hand for dark stimuli, and vice versa for light stimuli). A total of 30 participants were tested in two experiments. In Experiment 1, the association between space and the luminance of chromatic stimuli was directly tested (bright...