A Review of Finn,Fischer, and Handler (Eds.), Collaborative/Therapeutic Assessment: A Casebook and Guide

Abstract

Oscar N. Myer The Language of Handwriting. Reviewed by Rose Wolfson

Klara Roman Handwriting: a Key to Personality. Reviewed by Rose Wolfson

Frank Victor Handwriting: A Personality Projection. Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, 1952. American Lecture Series Monograph No. 96. Reviewed by Gerald S. Blum, Ph.D.

Robert I. Watson The Clinical Method in Psychology. New York: Harper &; Bros. 1951. $4.50. Reviewed by Walter G. Klopfer, Ph.D.     

Perception and action: On the praxial structure of intentional consciousness

Progressively Husserl started referring to the whole sphere of the life of intentional acts in terms of praxis. Perception, imagination, judgement, scientific consciousness, etc., are all seen as practices. What is the meaning of this move? A seemingly self-evident possibility is that intentionality is praxial, because even perception is not completely free from empty intending moments that demand fulfilment; and all fulfilment is attained by means of bodily activities that enable our senses to acquire the relevant contents. I reject this approach as insufficient and misguided. I argue that perception and intentionality in general is praxial because consciousness, in all of its constituting syntheses, is or becomes organized as a practice-structure. Intentional consciousness organizes its contents according to rules so as to accomplish the evident or true givenness of its intended correlates.     

Streams and consciousness: visual awareness and the brain

Vision is our most powerful sense and, arguably, it gives us our most vivid sensory and imaginal experiences. It is also one of the best understood systems in contemporary neuroscience. Yet, contrary to both traditional assumptions and our phenomenological intuition, recent research has shown that vision is not a monolithic system that creates a single general-purpose representation in the brain. For example, selective brain damage can compromise visuomotor control while leaving perception intact, and damage elsewhere can compromise visual perception while leaving visuomotor control intact. Thus, it is becoming apparent that we have two (largely) separate visual systems. One of them is dedicated to the rapid and accurate guidance of our movements: it is a complex and powerful system, and yet it lies outside the realm of our conscious visual awareness. The other seems to provide our perceptual phenomenology, although its primary purpose is probably to provide suitably coded visual inputs for storage in and retrieval from memory. According to this conceptualization, both systems can be seen as serving our behaviour, but each does so on a different time scale. Recent studies suggest that neuropsychological research in humans can play a central role in bridging the gap between neurobiological studies of the monkey's visual system and the search to narrow down the brain mechanisms that mediate our visual awareness.     

Perception of the visual vertical: Utricular and somatosensory contributions

Summary The subjective visual vertical (SV) has been investigated in centrifugation experiments in order to test the hypothesis, that changes in the SV are proportional to changes in the shear force acting on the utricles. The results deviate from those predicted from the shear hypothesis. This deviation can be accounted for by assuming that the SV is determined by the average of utricular and somaesthetic inputs.Thanks are due to A. Stein for performing some of the experiments of series d and e. N.J. Wade was supported by a Forschungsstipendium from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. Renate Alton skillfully assisted with the drawings.     

John D. Caputo,Mark Dooley,and Michael J. Scanlon (eds.), Questioning God

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Influence of feedback modality on sensorimotor adaptation: contribution of visual, kinesthetic, and verbal cues

In 4 studies, the authors tested the contributions of visual, kinesthetic, and verbal knowledge of results to the adaptive control of reaching movements toward visual targets. The same apparatus was used in all experiments, but the procedures differed in the sensory modality of the feedback that participants (N s = 5, 5, 6, and 6, respectively, in Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 4) received about their performances. Using biased visual, proprioceptive, or verbal feedback, the authors introduced a 5 degrees shift in the visuomanual relationship. Results showed no significant difference in the final amount of adaptation to the mismatch: On average, participants adapted to 79% of the perturbation. That finding is consistent with the view that adaptation is a multisensory, highly flexible process whose efficiency does not depend on the sensory channel conveying the error signal.     

Comment on "Competition for consciousness among visual events: the psychophysics of reentrant visual processes" (Di Lollo,Enns, & Rensink, 2000)

V. Di Lolo, J. T. Enns, and R. A. Rensink (2000) reported properties of masking that they claimed were inconsistent with all current models. The current authors show, through computer simulation, that many current models can account for V. Di Lollo et al.'s (2000) data. Although V. Di Lollo et al. (2000) argued that their data could be accounted for only with models that incorporate reentrant processing, the current authors show that reentrant processing is not necessary.