Many political practitioners believe that voters are more likely to approve propositions listed at the top than the bottom of the ballot, potentially distorting democratic decision making, and this belief influences election laws across the United States. Numerous studies have investigated ballot order effects in candidate elections, but there is little evidence for direct democracy elections, ...

We found that the depth of sequential effects depends on the judgment task. An experiment with squares indicated that stimulus-response pairs up to two trials back were included in the judgment process when subjects were required to make category judgments of size, whereas only the immediately preceding event was incorporated when subjects were making magnitude estimations. In the case of categ...

In this paper we describe some of our progress towards an operational implementation of a modern programming logic. The logic is inspired by the variable type systems of Feferman, and is designed for reasoning about imperative functional programs. The logic goes well beyond traditional programming logics, such as Hoare’s logic and Dynamic logic in its expressibility, yet is less problematic to ...

The combination of two existing words is a productive strategy used by speakers to convey new concepts and extend the limits of their vocabulary. In English compounds, the first word or modifier attaches further meaning to the second word or head, thus creating a reference to the intended concept. According to Gagné and Shoben’s (1997) Competition Among Relations In Nominals (CARIN) theory, the...

Much of the knowledge people acquire is structured: number systems, taxonomies; chemical structures. Learning using the individual components that compose a structured theory may be difficult due to the memory load induced by remembering the entities and their relations. Though much research has demonstrated the effects of ordering on category learning, to our knowledge, none has been conducted...

Simultaneous protocols typically yield poorer stimulus equivalence outcomes than do other protocols commonly used in equivalence research. Two independent groups of three 3-member equivalence sets of stimuli were used in conditional discrimination procedures in two conditions, one using the standard simultaneous protocol and the other using a hybrid simultaneous training and simple-to-complex t...

M uch has been written about Steve Jobs’ amazing leadership at Apple and how he transformed the company into one of the world’s most recognizable and profitable brands after his return from NeXT. But if you look closer, it’s easy to find examples of how Jobs-inspired Apple and NeXT products were platforms for many of the amazing innovations we take for granted today. Between 1987 and 1997, we e...

Light propagating through an optically anisotropic resonant medium excites coherent Raman fields that propagate together with the original wave; the interference between the two fields generates the well-known Raman beats. We solve the coupled-wave equations for finite optical path lengths and show how the coherent exchange of energy between the two fields leads to interference effects that dis...

Does it matter in what order the four irrigations are conducted in the caloric test? It has been suggested that warm water (44 degrees C) elicits stronger reactions than does cold water (30 degrees C), which might be explained simply by slight differences in water temperatures. However, if it can be shown that starting with cold water diminishes the difference between the warm and cold irrigati...