Perceptual categories and the computation of “grandmother”

Abstract

Recent theoretical approaches to understanding face recognition have used converging evidence from studies of normal face processing, everyday errors and patterns of neuropsychological impairment to suggest how different face processing modules are related to each other. This paper disuses four issues that arise from this body of work. These concern the nature of representations involved in face recognition, the existence of parallel pathways for processing different types of information, the relationship between recognition and awareness, and the question of how faces become familiar. Current research provoked by these issues is reviewed in the paper and suggestions are made about the ways in which such research will help refine theories of face processing.     

Does the Phenomenality of Perceptual Experience Present an Obstacle to Phenomenal Externalism?

Although Externalism is widely accepted as a thesis about belief, as a thesis about experience it is both controversial and unpopular. One potential explanation of this difference involves the phenomenality of perceptual experience—perhaps there is something about how perceptual experiences seem that straightforwardly speaks against Externalist accounts of their individuation conditions. In this paper, I investigate this idea by exploring the role that the phenomenality of color experience plays in a prominent argument against Phenomenal Externalism: Ned Block's Inverted Earth Argument. In the course of carrying out this investigation, I will show that challenging Phenomenal Externalism on phenomenological grounds is not as straightforward a task as it is commonly assumed to be.     

Perceptual study of the speech of “successfully therapeutized” stutterers

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if the fluent speech of “successfully therapeutized” stutterers and a group of partially treated stutterers was perceptually different from the fluent speech of normal speaking subjects. Tape recorded speech samples of treated stutterers were obtained from leading exponents of (1) Van Riperian, (2) metronome-conditioned speech retraining, (3) delayed auditory feedback, (4) operant conditioning, (5) precision fluency shaping, and (6) “holistic” therapy programs. All forms of disfluency were edited out of these tapes. The remaining samples were then paired with matched fluent samples of normal talkers and presented to a group of 20 sophisticated judges. The judges were instructed to select from each paired speech sample presented to them the one produced by the stuttering subject. The results of the analyses of variance for correct identification of the stutterers showed that the partially treated stutterers, as well as each group of therapeutized stutterers, were identified at levels significantly above chance. This meant that the fluent speech of the partially and successfully treated stutterers was perceptibly different from the utterances of the normal speakers sampled. In addition, the analyses of variance also revealed that all stuttering groups had a significant severity factor. This finding indicated there was a significant difference between the severity subgroup in all the samples investigated. These results were discussed in terms of their clinical implications.     

Constructing the “Good Mother”: The Experience of Mothering Ideologies by Work Status

The purpose of this study was to explore how mothers construct their worker–parent identity within a cultural context of competing mothering ideologies. We used narrative data from interviews with 95 married mothers with at least 1 child under the age of 5 to compare the construction of intensive mothering expectations by middle-class full-time employed mothers, part-time employed mothers, and at-home mothers. Although previous research has shown that mothers alter work status to live up to intensive mothering expectations, our results show that mothers also alter their construction of intensive mothering expectations to reconcile these demands with their work status choices. The results also suggest that mothers with different employment decisions differ in their construction of Y. Elvin-Nowak and H. Thomsson's (2001) 3 discursive positions—accessibility, happy mother/happy child, and separation of work and home.     

The Immigration Experience of Iranian Baha’is in Saskatchewan: The Reconstruction of Their Existence, Faith, and Religious Experience

For approximately 150 years, Baha’is in Iran have been persecuted on the basis of their religion. Limitations to aspects of their lives have compelled them to face “civic death” or migrate to other countries. This qualitative pilot study explored the experience of forced migration and how religion attenuates the disruption to the lives of Iranian Baha’is. Adaptive strategies that four participants utilised to re-establish continuity were examined. Participants who were satisfied with their lives developed a way to allow parallel cultural traditions (Iranian and Canadian) to co-exist; those who could not integrate found it difficult to maintain a balance between these traditions.     

A “Little Death”: The Near-Death Experience and Tibetan Delogs

A phenomenon remarkably like the near-death experience has been uncovered in Tibetan culture, aside from the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead (Thurman, 1994). Anthropologists have gathered accounts of contemporary and historical cases of remarkable people called delogs. Seemingly dead for several hours or days, these people revive spontaneously and tell detailed accounts of otherworldly journeys. Their journey accounts contain elaborate versions of Buddhist otherworldly landscapes and characters, emphasizing the moral and spiritual teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. These delogs are a bridge between contemporary near-death experiences and ancient shamanic practices.     

How Does It Feel? The Development of the Experience of Creativity Questionnaire

Creativity research has tended to neglect the phenomenology of the creative process. This article addresses this by describing the development of the Experience of Creativity Questionnaire (ECQ), designed to measure experiential (Part A) and existential (Part B) dimensions of artistic creativity. The questionnaire items were generated on the basis of an earlier qualitative investigation. Participants were 100 artists, from diverse fields of the creative arts. Two Maximum Likelihood factor analyses with Promax rotation were performed on the items comprising the initial ECQ, resulting in 6 factors in Part A and 3 factors in Part B. Factor analyses were then performed on a reduced number of items, providing the basis for 5 scales in Part A (labeled Distinct Experience, Anxiety, Absorption, Power/Pleasure, Clarity/Preparation) and 3 scales in Part B (Transformation, Centrality, Beyond the Personal). The scales demonstrated acceptable reliability, ranging from .82 to.60 (Guttman coefficient). Use of the ECQ in future research will facilitate further investigation of the phenomenology of the creative process and afford greater integration of research paradigms in creativity research.     

The meaning of “Evolution”

In a recent article [Mertz 2001] in this journal I argued for the virtues of a realist ontology of relation instances (unit attributes). A major strength of this ontology is an assay of ontic ('material') predication that yields an account of individuation without the necessity of positing and defending 'bare particulars'. The crucial insight is that it is the unifying agency or combinatorial aspect of a relation instance as predicable that is for ontology the principium individuationis [Mertz 2002; 1996]. Or in short, what is ontically predicable, precisely as such, is the cause of individuation. As a preface to this positive doctrine I offered arguments against the coherence of bare particulars as defended in an article by J. P. Moreland [1998]. In a reply contained in this issue Moreland and Timothy Pickavance (hereafter M/P) propose to answer my objections [2002]. The response that follows provides reasons why, I contend, M/P have not succeeded in parrying my objections to bare particulars.     

“Perceptual centers” in speech production and perception

Morton, Marcus, and Frankish (1976) report that listeners hear acoustically isochronous digit sequences as anisochronous. Moreover, given a chance to adjust intervals in the sequences until they are perceptually isochronous, the listeners introduce systematic deviations from isochrony. The present series of studies investigates these phenomena further. They indicate that when asked toproduce isochronous sequences, talkers generate precisely the acoustic anisochronies that listeners require in order tohear a sequence as isochronous. The acoustic anisochronies that talkers produce are expected if talkers initiate the articulation of successive items in the sequence at temporally equidistant intervals. Items whose initial consonants differ in respect to manner class will have acoustic consequences (other than silence) at different lags with respect to their articulatory onsets thereby generating the observed acoustic anisochronies. The findings suggest that listeners judge isochrony based on acoustic information aboutarticulatory timing rather than on some articulation-free acoustic basis.     

The Floating “I”—An Experience of Shifting Form: Commentary on Paper by Anne Sweetnam

The author offers a subjective reading of the clinical segment of Annie Sweetnam's paper. For clinical writing to have a lively impact, the form must be effective. This commentary focuses on how shifts in the written form convey shifting internal states of the patient and analyst and how the form then draws the reader into the emotional field within the transference–countertransference.     

Investigating the validity of the Perceptual Awareness Scale – The effect of task-related difficulty on subjective rating

The Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS) is often used to probe conscious experience, but the assumptions behind the scale and its validity are rarely tested. Using a continuous colour estimation task to assess perceptual quality, we focus on how well PAS follows perceptual quality and how the presence of the estimation task affects PAS ratings. We varied the number and presentation time of stimuli in a simultaneous presentation and target position in a sequential presentation. In all experiments, PAS rating closely followed colour precision. However, it was affected by task-induced response bias, even when the possible task difficulty was judged, without performing the task itself. Still, this bias was only observed on the absolute rating level rather than the scale's ability to capture changes in perceptual quality. Reported studies shed light on factors influencing scales outside of the scale formulation and construction.     

The Impact of ‘the Dream’ on Women's Experience of the Midlife Transition

Daniel Levinson's claim for the universality of age-linked periods is considered highly controversial considering that his theory evolved from a study consisting of males only. Theories relating to women's development, particularly at midlife, are somewhat scarce and restricted. Using Levinson's theory of adult development as a framework, the present study retrospectively examined the Dream and its impact on women's psychological health and adjustment to the Midlife Transition. Three hundred midlife women completed a questionnaire examining Dream Status, Dream Content, Dream Success, and the psychological health variables, depression, anxiety, self-esteem, and life satisfaction. Dream Success was significantly related to psychological health on dimensions of well-being and composure, and interesting changes were observed in Dream Content across the early and current Dream. Our findings revealed that, despite the overall greater complexity of women's Dreams, Levinson's theory is largely applicable to women's development.     

Perceptual restoration of a “missing” speech sound: Auditory induction or illusion?

This study investigated whether the apparent completeness of the acoustic speech signal during phonemic restoration derives from a process of auditory induction (Warren, 1984) or segregation, or whether it is an auditory illusion that accompanies the completion of an abstract phonological representation. Specifically, five experiments tested the prediction of the auditory induction (segregation) hypothesis that active perceptual restoration of an [s] noise that has been replaced with an extraneous noise would use up a portion of that noise’s high-frequency energy and consequently change the perceived pitch (timbre, brightness) of the extraneous noise. Listeners were required to compare the pitch of a target noise, which replaced a fricative noise in a sentence, with that of a probe noise preceding or following the speech. In the first two experiments, a significant tendency was found in favor of the auditory induction hypothesis, although the effect was small and may have been caused by variations in acoustic context. In the following three experiments, a larger variety of stimuli were used and context was controlled more carefully; this yielded negative results. Phoneme identification responses collected in the same experiments, as well as informal observations about the quality of the restored phoneme, suggested that restoration of a fricative phone distinct from the extraneous noise did not occur; rather, the spectrum of the extraneous noise itself influenced phoneme identification. These results suggest that the apparent auditory restoration which accompanies phonemic restoration is illusory, and that the schema-guided process of phoneme restoration does not interact with auditory processing.     

The Influence of Individual Attachment Styles on Group Members’ Experience of Therapist Transitions

Abstract

Attachment theory has recently been applied to clinical practice in an effort to improve understanding and treatment of the maladaptive relational patterns clients bring to therapy. While most of this research has focused on individual therapy, interest in the application of attachment theory to group psychotherapy is growing. This paper will explore the impact of clients’ attachment styles on their experiences of co-therapist transition in an ongoing psychodynamic therapy group. This discussion will elucidate how knowledge of attachment theory and an understanding of clients’ individual attachment styles can be useful in predicting responses to therapist-initiated terminations and transitions.