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This review synthesizes and critically examines 19 empirical studies that have addressed the domain-specificity/domain-generality issue in personal epistemology. We present an overview of traditional and more contemporary epistemological stances from philosophical perspectives to offer another basis from which to examine this issue. Explicit examples of academic domains are described and epistemological comparisons are made based on our synthesized definition. Given the epistemological similarities and differences across domains that we identified from empirical and philosophical considerations, we propose that beliefs are both domain general and domain specific. Accordingly, we present a theoretical framework of personal epistemology that incorporates both positions and hypothesize how the belief systems might interact in terms of the development of personal epistemology and relations to various facets of cognition, motivation, and achievement. The article ends with a discussion of educational implications.

Using college student samples, two studies were conducted to validate the Chinese version of the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (DOSPERT) Scale. The results replicated important findings reported by Weber et al. (2002) in the Chinese culture. Risk-taking and risk perception were domain-specific, whereas perceived-risk attitudes were relatively stable across domains, supporting the risk-return model of risk taking. Results of both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed that the ethical, recreational, health/safety, and gambling domains were preserved in the Chinese version of DOSPERT and that the items from social and investment domains formed one factor. This result may be explained by Weber and Hsee's (1998) cushion hypothesis. Other possible reasons for this cross-cultural difference in the factor structure were also discussed.

Background Hope has been extensively studied as a predictor of college students’ academic success. Most previous studies used domain-general, global hope measures to gauge the association between hope and academic performance among college students. However, a few studies have suggested that hope is domain-specific and domain-specific academic hope measures should be included in related research to better assess the influence of hope on academic outcomes. In this study, we aimed to further examine this issue to ascertain if there is value in including academic hope measures when studying the link between hope and academic outcomes in college students. Methods Two samples of Hong Kong college students (total N  = 1321) were recruited. Each participant completed a set of self-reported online questionnaires. Results In both samples, global hope and academic hope emerged as related but separate factors in confirmatory factor analyses. Academic hope had consistently stronger unique explanatory power on academic performance and goal setting than global hope did. On the other hand, global hope explained more variance in general wellbeing than academic hope did, but its explanatory role in academic performance was not significant. Conclusions The findings support domain-specificity and show that hope measures explain more variance in outcomes in the matched domains. Therefore, academic hope measures should more routinely be included in related research to better evaluate the role of hope in academic pursuit among college students. Possible implications for hope interventions are also discussed.

Research on interdisciplinary science has for the most part concentrated on the institutional obstacles that discourage or hamper interdisciplinary work, with the expectation that interdisciplinary interaction can be improved through institutional reform strategies such as through reform of peer review systems. However institutional obstacles are not the only ones that confront interdisciplinary work. The design of policy strategies would benefit from more detailed investigation into the particular cognitive constraints, including the methodological and conceptual barriers, which also confront attempts to work across disciplinary boundaries. Lessons from cognitive science and anthropological studies of labs in sociology of science suggest that scientific practices may be very domain specific, where domain specificity is an essential aspect of science that enables researchers to solve complex problems in a cognitively manageable way. The limit or extent of domain specificity in scientific practice, and how it constrains interdisciplinary research, is not yet fully understood, which attests to an important role for philosophers of science in the study of interdisciplinary science. This paper draws upon two cases of interdisciplinary collaboration; those between ecologists and economists, and those between molecular biologists and systems biologists, to illustrate some of the cognitive barriers which have contributed to failures and difficulties of interactions between these fields. Each exemplify some aspect of domain specificity in scientific practice and show how such specificity may constrain interdisciplinary work.

Early psychological theories of autism explained the clinical features of this condition in terms of perceptual and sensory processing impairments. The arrival of domain-specific social cognitive theories changed this focus, postulating a ‘primary’ and specific psychological impairment of social cognition. Across the years, evidence has been growing in support of social cognitive and social attention explanations in autism. However, there has also been evidence for general non-social cognitive impairments in representational understanding, attention allocation and sensory processing. Here, I review recent findings and consider the case for the specificity and primacy of the social cognitive impairment, proposing that we should focus more explicitly on clinically valid features for insights on the integration of ‘social’ and ‘non-social’ cognition.

The maximizing decision-making style describes the style of one who pursues maximum utility in decision-making, in contrast to the satisficing style, which describes the style of one who is satisfied with good enough options. The current research concentrates on the within-person variation in the maximizing decision-making style and provides an explanation through three studies. Study 1 (N = 530) developed a domain-specific maximizing scale and found that individuals had different maximizing tendencies across different domains. Studies 2 (N = 162) and 3 (N = 106) further explored this mechanism from the perspective of subjective task value through questionnaires and experiments. It was found that the within-person variation of maximization in different domains is driven by the difference in the individuals’ subjective task value in the corresponding domains. People tend to maximize more in the domains they value more. Our research contributes to a comprehensive understanding of maximization and provides a new perspective for the study of the maximizing decision-making style.

Visual attention mechanisms are known to select information to process based on current goals, personal relevance, and lower-level features. Here we present evidence that human visual attention also includes a high-level category-specialized system that monitors animals in an ongoing manner. Exposed to alternations between complex natural scenes and duplicates with a single change (a change-detection paradigm), subjects are substantially faster and more accurate at detecting changes in animals relative to changes in all tested categories of inanimate objects, even vehicles, which they have been trained for years to monitor for sudden life-or-death changes in trajectory. This animate monitoring bias could not be accounted for by differences in lower-level visual characteristics, how interesting the target objects were, experience, or expertise, implicating mechanisms that evolved to direct attention differentially to objects by virtue of their membership in ancestrally important categories, regardless of their current utility.

Many everyday tasks appear to be performed at an optimal rate that differs between individuals but is consistent within individuals. These optimal rates are estimated using a participant's Spontaneous Production Rate (SPR), the rate at which an individual produces sequences of sounds in the absence of external tempo cues. A previous study that measured SPRs in speech and piano production found no association between SPRs across tasks, a result suggesting that domain-specific constraints determine optimal rates. The present study addressed whether this dissociation would remain when music and speech are produced with the same effector system: vocal production. Participants spoke short, well-known phrases and sang familiar children's songs on “da” to avoid memorization of words. SPRs were measured by the mean inter-onset interval (IOI) between successively produced syllables or tones and showed large individual differences. Results showed consistent SPRs within individuals within each domain (speaking or singing) as well as consistent SPRs across the speaking and singing conditions. These results align with theories of optimal rates based on energy efficiency arising from biomechanical constraints rather than domain-specific communication goals.

Faces are among the most important visual stimuli we perceive, informing us not only about a person's identity, but also about their mood, sex, age and direction of gaze. The ability to extract this information within a fraction of a second of viewing a face is important for normal social interactions and has probably played a critical role in the survival of our primate ancestors. Considerable evidence from behavioural, neuropsychological and neurophysiological investigations supports the hypothesis that humans have specialized cognitive and neural mechanisms dedicated to the perception of faces (the face-specificity hypothesis). Here, we review the literature on a region of the human brain that appears to play a key role in face perception, known as the fusiform face area (FFA). Section 1 outlines the theoretical background for much of this work. The face-specificity hypothesis falls squarely on one side of a longstanding debate in the fields of cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience concerning the extent to which the mind/brain is composed of: (i) special-purpose ('domain-specific') mechanisms, each dedicated to processing a specific kind of information (e.g. faces, according to the face-specificity hypothesis), versus (ii) general-purpose ('domain-general') mechanisms, each capable of operating on any kind of information. Face perception has long served both as one of the prime candidates of a domain-specific process and as a key target for attack by proponents of domain-general theories of brain and mind. Section 2 briefly reviews the prior literature on face perception from behaviour and neurophysiology. This work supports the face-specificity hypothesis and argues against its domain-general alternatives (the individuation hypothesis, the expertise hypothesis and others). Section 3 outlines the more recent evidence on this debate from brain imaging, focusing particularly on the FFA. We review the evidence that the FFA is selectively engaged in face perception, by addressing (and rebutting) five of the most widely discussed alternatives to this hypothesis. In §4, we consider recent findings that are beginning to provide clues into the computations conducted in the FFA and the nature of the representations the FFA extracts from faces. We argue that the FFA is engaged both in detecting faces and in extracting the necessary perceptual information to recognize them, and that the properties of the FFA mirror previously identified behavioural signatures of face-specific processing (e.g. the face-inversion effect). Section 5 asks how the computations and representations in the FFA differ from those occurring in other nearby regions of cortex that respond strongly to faces and objects. The evidence indicates clear functional dissociations between these regions, demonstrating that the FFA shows not only functional specificity but also area specificity. We end by speculating in §6 on some of the broader questions raised by current research on the FFA, including the developmental origins of this region and the question of whether faces are unique versus whether similarly specialized mechanisms also exist for other domains of high-level perception and cognition.

The P600 Event-Related Brain Potential, elicited by syntactic violations in sentences, is generally interpreted as indicating language-specific structural/combinatorial processing, with far-reaching implications for models of language. P600 effects are also often taken as evidence for language-like grammars in non-linguistic domains like music or arithmetic. An alternative account, however, interprets the P600 as a P3, a domain-general brain response to salience. Using time-generalized multivariate pattern analysis, we demonstrate that P3 EEG patterns, elicited in a visual Oddball experiment, account for the P600 effect elicited in a syntactic violation experiment: P3 pattern-trained MVPA can classify P600 trials just as well as P600-trained ones. A second study replicates and generalizes this finding, and demonstrates its specificity by comparing it to face- and semantic mismatch-associated EEG responses. These results indicate that P3 and P600 share neural patterns to a substantial degree, calling into question the interpretation of P600 as a language-specific brain response and instead strengthening its association with the P3. More generally, our data indicate that observing P600-like brain responses provides no direct evidence for the presence of language-like grammars, in language or elsewhere. •There is an ongoing debate about the possible identity of P600 and P3.•We applied time-resolved MVPA decoding to Oddball and sentence processing EEG data.•A linear classifier was trained to detect patterns in P3 data and tested on P600 data.•The P3 classifiers successfully decoded the P600, but not other ERP components.•This indicates P600 effects are not syntax specific, but correspond to a generic P3.