Infants’ identification of three-dimensional form from transformations of linear perspective

The ability of infants to perceive three-dimensional structure from transformations of linear perspective was investigated in two studies. Infants were habituated to the pattern of linear perspective transformations corresponding to a particular three-dimensional object, and their relative preference for that object as compared with a different three-dimensional object was assessed both before and after habituation. The habituation displays showed the distorting shadow cast by a rotating object and therefore provided only transformations of linear perspective as information specifying three-dimensional form. The pre- and posttest displays involved the actual three-dimensional objects and provided binocular, shading, and texture information specifying three-dimensional form, but did not provide informative transformations of linear perspective. In Study 1, 6-month-olds showed changes in preference from pre- to posttest that were related to the identity of the object whose shadow they had seen during habituation; 4-month-olds, however, did not show preference changes related to the habituation object. In Study 2, rhythm information that may have served as a basis for responding in Study 1 was eliminated from the test displays. Six-month-olds again showed changes in preference that were dependent on their habituation experience. It is concluded that, by 6 months of age, infants are able to perceive object structure from the isolated cue of transformations of linear perspective. The findings are discussed with reference to infants’ three-dimensional form perception based on other cues and also with reference to the emergence of certain spatially related moter activities.     

Infants’ perception of depth from cast shadows

Five- and 7-month-old infants viewed displays in which cast shadows provided information that two objects were at different distances. The 7-month-olds reached preferentially for the apparently nearer object under monocular-viewing conditions but exhibited no reaching preference under binocularviewing conditions. These results indicate that 7-month-old infants perceive depth on the basis of cast shadows. The 5-month-olds did not reach preferentially for the apparently nearer object and, therefore, exhibited no evidence of sensitivity to cast shadows as depth information. In a second experiment, 5-month-olds reached preferentially for the nearer of two objects that were similar to those used in the first experiment but were positioned at different distances from the infant. This result indicated that 5-month-olds have the motor skills and motivation necessary to exhibit a reaching preference under the conditions of this study. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that depth perception based on cast shadows first appears between 5 and 7 months of age.     

A review of outcome studies of rational-emotive therapy from 1982–1989

In 1977, DiGiuseppe and Miller provided a review of the literature assessing the effectiveness of Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET). In 1984, McGovern and Silverman completed a similar review for outcome studies conducted from 1977 through mid-1981. This present study is meant as a continuation of those reviews. The 89 studies reviewed are divided into three sections: outcome studies that do not compare Rational-Emotive Therapy with other types of treatment; a review of outcome studies that do compare RET with other types of psychotherapy; and a review of Rational-Emotive outcome studies that either combine RET with other therapies or are not appropriate for the first two sections. There does appear to be some increased sophistication in the research conducted since 1982. Increases were noted in the number of control groups used in the current research as well as in the number of follow-up studies. There also appears to be an improvement in the comparison of RET with other forms of therapy, and the number of problem areas in which RET has been tested has increased. A decrease in post-test only studies and an increased variety of subjects have also improved the current research. Issues such as socioeconomic status and I.Q. of subjects, duration of treatment, and lack of longitudinal studies remain unaddressed. It is suggested that future researchers concentrate on these specific problems to improve the credibility of RET. This review coincides with the previous findings that RET is a valuable, effective therapy that warrants increased research to broaden its application.Manuel S. Silverman, Ph.D., is a Professor of Counseling Psychology at Loyola University Chicago.Margaret M. McCarthy, M.A., is a recent graduate of Loyola University Chicago.Terrance McGovern, Ph.D., is in Private Practice in Downers Grove, Illinois.     

The rise of Soviet sociolinguistics from the ashes of Völkerpsychologie

Nineteenth-century Russian philology was dominated by an approach derived from German V?lkerpsychologie. Language and social consciousness were viewed as embodiments of "national-popular psychology." The shortcomings of this approach were becoming apparent at the end of the prerevolutionary period, but it was only in the 1920s that the hegemony of V?lkerpsychologie was decisively challenged. V?lkerpsychologie was attacked in the name of "objective psychology," and concrete studies of the relationship between language and social structure were carried out. By the end of the 1920s, v?lkerpsychologische ideas were subsumed into a new and progressive form of sociological linguistics.     

Countertransference—Transference seen from the Point of View of Child Psychoanalysis

This paper explores the ‘point of interaction’, that interface where the psyches of the patient and analyst meet. The author examines what is activated in the analytic pair at the point of interaction, with a particular focus on the mental activity of the patient and analyst. This exploration of the mental activity of the patient and analyst is from a theoretical position that combines contemporary Freudian and Kleinian perspectives on the therapeutic process. The author concludes that the capacity for mutuality in both the patient and analyst rests upon a part of the mind that is connected to a certain aspect of the Oedipus complex. Finally, the point of interaction is also discussed as a place where there is a potential meeting of minds around divergent methods and applications of psychoanalytic treatment. Clinical material is presented to illustrate these points.     

Learning to learn from video? 30-month-olds benefit from continued use of supportive scaffolding

Young children struggle to learn new words presented on video, but adult co-viewers can support them by providing scaffolds that explicitly connect the video and real world. In this study, we asked whether scaffolding facilitates children’s symbolic understanding of the video, such that they will subsequently transfer labels from video to real referents. Sixty-three 30-month-olds and 61 36-month-olds participated in a series of three word learning trials in one of three conditions. In the supportive condition, an in-person adult explicitly drew connections between each on-screen object and the corresponding real object in the room with the child. In the unsupportive condition, the in-person adult provided similar-length statements about the objects but did not draw connections between them. In the partial scaffold condition, the in-person adult provided the supportive scaffolds for the first two trials and the unsupportive version for the third trial. At 30 months, children selected the correct object on the third trial more often in the supportive than the unsupportive scaffold condition, and performance in the partial scaffold condition fell in between. At 36 months, performance on the third trial did not differ across conditions. The results showed that experiencing the scaffold twice was not enough to reliably support 30-month-olds in learning to think symbolically on the third trial; rather, they appeared to rely on the adult to connect the video image with its specific real-world referent. At 36 months, however, children did not rely on the adult scaffold to apply the video label to the real-world objects.     

What can the Philosophy of Mathematics Learn from the History of Mathematics?

This article canvasses five senses in which one might introduce an historical element into the philosophy of mathematics: 1. The temporal dimension of logic; 2. Explanatory Appeal to Context rather than to General Principles; 3. Heraclitean Flux; 4. All history is the History of Thought; and 5. History is Non-Judgmental. It concludes by adapting Bernard Williams’ distinction between ‘history of philosophy’ and ‘history of ideas’ to argue that the philosophy of mathematics is unavoidably historical, but need not and must not merge with historiography.

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Does the Interventionist Notion of Causation Deliver Us from the Fear of Epiphenomenalism?

This article reviews the causal exclusion argument and confronts it with some recently proposed refutations based on the interventionist account of causation. I first show that there are several technical and interpretative difficulties in applying the interventionist account to the exclusion issue. Different ways of accommodating the two to one another are considered and all are shown to leave the issue without a fully satisfactory resolution. Lastly, I argue that, on the most consistent construal, the interventionist approach can provide grounds for thinking that higher-level causal notions are as legitimate as lower-level causal notions, but it does not provide grounds for postulating inter-level causal interactions.     

Joint-space analysis of “pick-any” data: Analysis of choices from an unconstrained set of alternatives

Social and naturally occurring choice phenomena are often of the pick-any type in which the number of choices made by a subject as well as the set of alternatives from which they are chosen is unconstrained. These data present a special analytical problem because the meaning of non-choice among pick-any choice data is always ambiguous: A non-chosen alternative may be either unacceptable, or acceptable but not considered, or acceptable and considered but not chosen. A model and scaling method for these data are introduced, allowing for this ambiguity of non-choice. Subjects are represented as points whose coordinates are proportional to the centroids of the points representing their choices. Alternatives are represented at points whose coordinates are proportional to the centroids of the points representing subjects who have chosen them. This centroid scaling technique estimates multidimensional joint spaces from the pick-any data.I am indebted to John Baird, Clyde Coombs, David Eames, John Hunter, Michael J. Levine, Elliot Noma, Robert Z. Norman, William S. Roy, Joseph Schwartz, Daniel Velleman, the editor, and anonymous reviewers for ideas and suggestions that have been incorporated into this work. Conferences organized by Hans J. Hummel for the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (1977) and by Samuel Leinhardt for the National Science Foundation (1975) were instrumental in the development of this work.     

Predicting the Level of Pastors’ Risk of Termination/Exit from the Church

This study conducts an exploratory factor analysis on Wickman’s (2004) Pastors at Risk Inventory that measures the likelihood of whether clergy may face forced or unforced resignation. An online survey was administered to 285 evangelical pastors containing 42 Likert-type items developed from 20 years of qualitative practitioner ministry among clergy. The two factors identified—vision conflict and compassion fatigue—are discussed in relation to the extant literature and in their unique function with clergy. Results indicate that varying levels of disparity typically exist between expected ministry outcomes and actual ministry experiences, and that vision conflict and compassion fatigue are more likely among clergy who lack a support team and/or whose church has recently plateaued or declined in attendance.     

Conflict of interest from a Romanian geneticist’s perspective

This paper examines Romanian bioethics regulations for biomedical sciences, looking in particular at the genetics area as a source for conflict of interest. The analysis is focused on the organizational level, national regulations, the sources for generating conflicts of interest, and management of conflicts. Modern biotechnology and gene technology are among the key technologies of the twenty-first century. The application of gene technology for medical and pharmaceutical purposes is widely accepted by society, but the same cannot be said of the development and application of gene technology in agriculture and food processing. Because the use of a technology in the production and processing of food is regarded more sceptically than in the production of biomedical products, there can be areas of conflict in many cases when communication is undertaken about gene technology in the agro-food sector. Ethical concerns play an important factor in this, but a society’s attitude to a developing technology is an amalgam of many effects which are beyond ethics as such. This paper contains a study carried out by the author for the Romanian Association for Consumer Protection about the attitudes of consumers towards genetically modified (GM) foods. This study revealed that in Romania more than 98% of consumers did not know anything about GM foods and frequently were confused about the definitions of these terms. In conclusion, it is necessary to say that there is a low level of knowledge regarding biotechnology in Romania and this is an important reason why there is neither public acceptance of gene technology products nor is there a rejection. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an International Conference on “Conflict of Interest and its Significance in Science and Medicine” held in Warsaw, Poland on 5–6 April, 2002. Ioana Ispas, MD in Molecular Biology, is a scientific researcher and Member of the Romanian Association for Consumer Protection, NCP for FP5-Quality of life and management of living resources.     

Where to from here? On the future development of autonomous vehicles from a cognitive systems perspective

Self-driving cars not only solve the problem of navigating safely from location A to location B; they also have to deal with an abundance of (sometimes unpredictable) factors, such as traffic rules, weather conditions, and interactions with humans. Over the last decades, different approaches have been proposed to design intelligent driving systems for self-driving cars that can deal with an uncontrolled environment. Some of them are derived from computationalist paradigms, formulating mathematical models that define the driving agent, while other approaches take inspiration from biological cognition. However, despite the extensive work in the field of self-driving cars, many open questions remain. Here, we discuss the different approaches for implementing driving systems for self-driving cars, as well as the computational paradigms from which they originate. In doing so, we highlight two key messages: First, further progress in the field might depend on adapting new paradigms as opposed to pushing technical innovations in those currently used. Specifically, we discuss how paradigms from cognitive systems research can be a source of inspiration for further development in modelling driving systems, highlighting emergent approaches as a possible starting point. Second, self-driving cars can themselves be considered cognitive systems in a meaningful sense, and are therefore a relevant, yet underutilized resource in the study of cognitive mechanisms. Overall, we argue for a stronger synergy between the fields of cognitive systems and self-driving vehicles.     

Can intelligence be estimated from drawings of a man?

There has been some disagreement as to whether intelligence can be estimated reliably and validly from the Goodenough-Harris Draw-A-Man Test (DAM). In order to assess the DAM, 21 graduate students in psychology administered the Harris DAM and either the WISC or Stanford-Binet (S-B) to 158 “normal” children. Discrepancy scores between the DAM and the S-B or WISC indicated that the DAM IQ tends to be below, at times considerably, IQs obtained from individual scales. Moreover, the DAM seemed to be virtually useless in making discriminations among children of average and superior intelligence. The Harris scoring system was not found to be more discriminating than the original Goodenough, and the results provided little encouragement for the practice of estimating intelligence from a child's DAM.     

Learning from Animals? Examining the Nature of Human Uniqueness

The Psychological Record -     

What do we Want from a Theory of Happiness?

I defend a methodology for theorizing about happiness. I reject three methods: conceptual analysis; scientific naturalism; and the “pure normative adequacy” approach, where the best conception of happiness is the one that best fills a role in moral theory. The concept of happiness is a folk notion employed by laypersons who have various practical interests in the matter, and theories of happiness should respect this fact. I identify four such interests in broad terms and then argue for a set of desiderata that theories of happiness ought to satisfy. The theory of happiness falls within the province of ethics. It should, however, be viewed as autonomous and not merely secondary to moral theory.