BACKGROUND Despite hundreds of studies, there is continuing debate about the extent to which violent video games increase aggression. Believers argue that playing violent video games increases aggression, but this stance is disputed by skeptics. The present study addressed believers' and skeptics' responses to summaries of scientific studies that do or do not present evidence for increased aggr...

BACKGROUND While the use of different cognitive strategies when encoding episodic memory information has been extensively investigated, modulation of brain activity by memory self-efficacy beliefs has not been studied yet. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Sixteen young adults completed the prospective and retrospective metamemory questionnaire, providing individual subjective judgments of every...

In 1956, a research team in Moscow led by Georgy Flerov bombarded 241Pu with 16O using recently developed heavy-ion beam techniques. The Moscow team may have produced element 102, and contemplated the name joliotium (Jo) to honour 1935 Chemistry Nobelist Irène Joliot-Curie, who had died earlier that year. As Flerov noted later, the early data was inconclusive, and not widely disseminated. Cold ...

Conspiracy theories (CTs) are widespread ways by which people make sense of unsettling or disturbing cultural events. Belief in CTs is often connected to problematic consequences, such as decreased engagement with conventional political action or even political extremism, so understanding the psychological and social qualities of CT belief is important. CTs have often been understood to be "mon...

The work described in this paper aims at the definition of a general framework for the formal specification of agents’ beliefs in a multiagent environment. The basic idea is to model both agents’ beliefs and the view that each agent has of other agents’ beliefs as logical theories. Consider an agent as having beliefs only about the world. At a very abstract level, ai’s beliefs can be modeled by...

We examined with functional magnetic resonance imaging the brain activity of 12 supernatural believers and 11 skeptics who first imagined themselves in critical life situations (e.g. problems in intimate relationships) and then watched emotionally charged pictures of lifeless objects and scenery (e.g. two red cherries bound together). Supernatural believers reported seeing signs of how the situ...

The need to belong can motivate belief in God. In Study 1, 40 undergraduates read bogus astrophysics articles "proving" God's existence or not offering proof. Participants in the proof-for-God condition reported higher belief in God (compared to control) when they chronically imagined God as accepting but lower belief in God when they imagined God as rejecting. Additionally, in Study 2 (72 unde...

To someone unfamiliar with Artificial Intelligence, all of the activity that is taking place at this IJCAI conference must be very puzzling. And the current fuss about what is called a "knowledge-based system" (KBS) must be a total mystery. For one thing, there is an amazing amount of talk about knowledge. There are even advertisements in The AI Magazine reminding us of the value of knowledge. ...