Illusions of conservation

Hotspots and Handouts: Illusions of Conservation and Development in Papua New Guinea

Once upon a time in the not too distant past an international NGO decided to do nature conservation in the Wasi river basin. This was [an] understandable idea. The place was the environmentalist’s dream. Lots and lots of bush filled with a multitude of flying and biting things. A diverse bunch of unwashed and scabrous savages leading traditional lives that they punctuated with stories and wars ...

Overdistribution Illusions

Overdistribution is a form of memory distortion in which an event is remembered as belonging to too many episodic states, states that are logically or empirically incompatible with each other. We investigated a response formatting method of suppressing 2 basic types of overdistribution, disjunction and conjunction illusions, which parallel some classic illusions in the judgment and decision mak...

Auditory Illusions

Memory Illusions

Memory illusions may be defined as cases in which a rememberer’s report of a past event seriously deviates from the event’s actual occurrence. This article introduces the special issue of the Journal of Memory and Language that is devoted to memory illusions by grounding their study in the context of perceptual illusions. Perceptual illusions have been investigated since the 1850s, whereas memo...

Dissolving Illusions

Immunity from such infections may be natural or may be acquired. By natural immunity we understand a natural resistance to infection by certain micro-organisms which are known to have pathogenic properties for other species of animals. It is know, for instance, that microbes which produce a rapidly fatal disease in one kind of animal are quite innocuous when introduced even in enormous numbers ...