The N-back task requires participants to decide whether each stimulus in a sequence matches the one that appeared n items ago. Although N-back has become a standard "executive" working memory (WM) measure in cognitive neuroscience, it has been subjected to few behavioral tests of construct validity. A combined experimental- correlational study tested the attention-control demands of verbal 2- a...

Objective Bayesianism has been criticised for not allowing learning from experience: it is claimed that an agent must give degree of belief 2 to the next raven being black, however many other black ravens have been observed. I argue that this objection can be overcome by appealing to objective Bayesian nets, a formalism for representing objective Bayesian degrees of belief. Under this account, ...

Idea: E [∼Ra &∼Ba] confirms H [(∀x)(Rx ⊃ Bx)] relative to >, but E doesn’t confirm H relative to some background K ≠ >. Question: Which K ≠ >? Answer: K = ∼Ra. Idea: If you already know that ∼Ra, then observing a’s color won’t tell you anything about the color of ravens. Distinguish the following two claims: (PC) ∼Ra &∼Ba confirms (∀x)(Rx ⊃ Bx), relative to >. (PC*) ∼Ra &∼Ba confirms (∀x)(Rx ⊃ ...

Hempel’s paradox of the ravens has to do with the question of what constitutes confirmation from a logical point of view; Wason’s selection task has been used extensively to investigate how people go about attempting to confirm or disconfirm conditional claims. This paper presents an argument that the paradox is resolved, and that people’s typical performance in the selection task can be explai...