Several factors have been put forward to explain the variability of moral judgments for superficially analogous moral dilemmas, in particular in the paradigm of trolley cases. In this paper we elaborate on Mikhail’s view that (i) causal analysis is at the core of moral judgments and that (ii) causal judgments can be quantified by linguistic methods. According to this model, our moral judgments ...

How does knowledge of real-world events shape our understanding of incoming language? Do temporal terms like "before" and "after" impact the online recruitment of real-world event knowledge? These questions were addressed in two ERP experiments, wherein participants read sentences that started with "before" or "after" and contained a critical word that rendered each sentence true or false (e.g....

Recent scientific research has settled on a purely descriptive definition of happiness that is focused solely on agents' psychological states (high positive affect, low negative affect, high life satisfaction). In contrast to this understanding, recent research has suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness is also sensitive to the moral value of agents' lives. Five studies systematically...

fMRI was employed to assess whether the neural correlates of accurate source memory are modulated by the reward value of recollected information. Study items comprised pictures of objects, each paired with a depiction of 1 of 2 coins. The reward value of the coins ($2.00 vs. $0.02) was disclosed after study. At test, a source memory procedure was employed in which subjects discriminated between...

The authors explored the relations between predictions of the likelihood of recalling studied items (called judgments of learning, or JOLs) and second-order judgments (SOJs), in which one rates confidence in the accuracy of each JOL. Each participant studied paired–associate items and made JOLs. A given JOL was either immediate or delayed and was followed immediately by an SOJ. After all items ...

Studies have found that human categorization judgments are affected by exemplar similarity, even when a simple, perfectly predictive rule is provided and paying attention to instance similarity is harmful to performance. These data provide an interesting challenge for recent hybrid rule-plus-exemplar models of category learning. We report the results of a modeling effort with a pre-existing hyb...