Are we free to imagine what we choose?

It has long been recognized that we have a great deal of freedom to imagine what we choose. This paper explores a thesis—what we call “intentionalism (about the imagination)”—that provides a way of making this evident (if vague) truism precise. According to intentionalism, the contents of your imaginings are simply determined by whatever contents you intend to imagine. Thus, for example, when you visualize a building and intend it to be of King’s College rather than a replica of the college you have imagined the former rather than the latter because you intended to imagine King’s College. This is so even if the visual image you conjure up equally resembles either. This paper proposes two kinds of counterexamples to intentionalism and discusses their significance. In particular, it sketches a positive account of how many sensory imaginings get to be about what they are about, which explains how the causal history of our mental imagery can prevent us from succeeding in imagining what we intended.

     

Extending end-state comfort effect: do we consider the beginning state comfort of another?

Sharing a drink or passing a tool to another person is frequently done in our daily lives. However, a second thought is rarely given about how the object should be handed; instead we pay attention to other factors (e.g., the company). This interaction (handing a tool to someone) is interesting, since it may give insight to how motor intentions are predicted. Research has demonstrated that individuals exhibit an end-state comfort effect when manipulating objects, and it is of interest to determine how this is applied to a joint-action paradigm. The purpose of this experiment was to determine if participants would anticipate the confederate's postural requirements and pass tools in a manner that allowed the confederate to have beginning state comfort and thus facilitate the motion sequence as a whole. That is, would the participant incur the cost of the movement by adopting an awkward posture to facilitate the use of the tool by the confederate? The results demonstrated that participants allowed the confederate to adopt a comfortable beginning state comfort on 100% of the trials for all the tools. However, the participants did not sacrifice end-state comfort, demonstrating that the participants were able to plan ahead to both maximize their own end-state comfort and the beginning state comfort of the confederate.     

Can we imagine how objects look from other viewpoints?

Many psychologists who study cognition believe that perception achieves object-centered representations that make it possible to extract representations of how the object would appear from differing viewpoints. Others believe we can achieve representations of how an object would appear by a process of visualization or mental rotation. We report experiments in which the subject tries to imagine how three-dimensional novel wire objects would appear from positions other than the one they are in. Subjects are unable to perform this task unless they make use of strategies that circumvent the process of visualization. It is suggested that the linear increase in time required to succeed in mental rotation tasks as a function of the angular discrepancy between the figures compared is the result of increasing difficulty rather than of the time required for rotation.     

Judging relationships between events: how do we do it?

A decade ago, Allan (1993) concluded that associative models provided the best account of data generated in tasks that require human observers to judge the relationship between binary events. In the intervening years, new data have been reported that provide evidence for higher-order processes. Some have argued that these new data pose a serious threat to the viability of the associative account. The purpose of the present paper is to review this evidence and to assess the severity of this threat.     

Susceptibility to memory distortion: how do we decide it has occurred?

When given suggestive information, some people can be led to believe that they had experiences that they did not actually have. For example, they may come to believe falsely that they got sick eating particular foods as children, and as a result of that belief they may avoid the foods. But how do we know that someone has developed a false belief or memory in this research? The criteria we choose when classifying whether someone has fallen for the suggestion are somewhat arbitrary. We reanalyze our prior data, using different criteria for deciding that a person fell for the suggestion (called a "believer") or did not (called a "non-believer"). Changing criteria obviously affects the percentage of people who are called susceptible and could conceivably affect the conclusions reached about that group. Comparisons between false memories and true memories could differ, too, depending on how memories are defined.     

Embodied perception of reachable space: how do we manage threatening objects?

This study aimed at determining whether the size of reachable space is affected by the level of danger of some everyday manipulable objects. Two possibilities are examined: Dangerous objects affect the size of reachable space because of long-term semantic knowledge of their potential hurtful value or the on-line relation between objects’ dangerous attributes and the body. The experimental paradigm combined the danger value (dangerous/not dangerous) and the orientation of objects (e.g. pointing away from/towards the perceiver). Reachability judgments measured the size of peripersonal space, and perception of objects’ danger was estimated through questionnaires. Results revealed that, whatever the estimated level of objects’ danger, the extent of peripersonal space was reduced when the threatening part of dangerous objects was oriented towards participants, not when oriented away. This suggests that the characteristics of the here and now body-objects interaction are crucial in affecting the boundary of peripersonal space.     

Timing of multiple overlapping intervals: how many clocks do we have?

Humans perceive and reproduce short intervals of time (e.g. 1-60 s) relatively accurately, and are capable of timing multiple overlapping intervals if these intervals are presented in different modalities [e.g., Rousseau, L., & Rousseau, R. (1996). Stop-reaction time and the internal clock. Perception and Psychophysics, 58(3), 434-448]. Tracking multiple intervals can be explained either by assuming multiple internal clocks or by strategic arithmetic using a single clock. The underlying timescale (linear or nonlinear) qualitatively influences the predictions derived from these accounts, as assuming a nonlinear timescale introduces systematic errors in added or subtracted intervals. Here, we present two experiments that provide support for a single clock combined with a nonlinear underlying timescale. When two equal but partly overlapping time intervals had to be estimated, the second estimate was positively correlated with the stimulus onset asynchrony. This effect was also found in a second experiment with unequal intervals that showed evidence of subtraction of intervals. The findings were supported by computational models implemented in a previously validated account of interval timing [Taatgen, N. A., Van Rijn, H., & Anderson, J. R. (2007). An integrated theory of prospective time interval estimation: The role of cognition, attention and learning. Psychological Review, 114(3), 577-598].     

Managed care at the bedside: how do we look in the moral mirror?

Managed care per se is a morally neutral concept; however, as practiced today, it raises serious ethical issues at the clinical, managerial, and social levels. This essay focuses on the ethical issues that arise at the bedside, looking first at the ethical conflicts faced by the physician who is charged with responsibility for care of the patient and then turning to the way in which managed care exacts costs that are measured not in dollars but in compromises in the caring dimensions of the patient-physician relationship.     

Embodied perception of reachable space: how do we manage threatening objects?

This study aimed at determining whether the size of reachable space is affected by the level of danger of some everyday manipulable objects. Two possibilities are examined: Dangerous objects affect the size of reachable space because of long-term semantic knowledge of their potential hurtful value or the on-line relation between objects' dangerous attributes and the body. The experimental paradigm combined the danger value (dangerous/not dangerous) and the orientation of objects (e.g. pointing away from/towards the perceiver). Reachability judgments measured the size of peripersonal space, and perception of objects' danger was estimated through questionnaires. Results revealed that, whatever the estimated level of objects' danger, the extent of peripersonal space was reduced when the threatening part of dangerous objects was oriented towards participants, not when oriented away. This suggests that the characteristics of the here and now body-objects interaction are crucial in affecting the boundary of peripersonal space.     

Evaluating evidence of psychological adaptation: how do we know one when we see one?

Evolutionary psychologists argue that human nature contains many discrete psychological adaptations. Each adaptation is theorized to have been functional in humans' ancestral past, and empirical evidence that an attribute is an adaptation can come from showing it possesses complexity, efficiency, universality, and other features of special design. In this article, we present a tutorial review of the evidentiary forms that evolutionary psychologists commonly use to document the existence of human adaptations. We also present a heuristic framework for integrating and evaluating cross-disciplinary evidence of adaptation. Pregnancy sickness, incest avoidance, men's desires for multiple sex partners, and an easily learned fear of snakes are evaluated as possible human adaptations using this framework. We conclude that future research and teaching in evolutionary psychology would benefit from more fully utilizing cross-disciplinary frameworks to evaluate evidence of human adaptation.     

What do we know about how best to assess counsellor competence?

Issues of assessment of counsellor competence are becoming increasingly important as counselling becomes more professionalized and recognizable as a distinct profession. There is, however, a lack of systematic research into competence assessment in this field. The existing literature is discussed in terms of the issues involved in employing different sources of assessment, such as trainers, tutors, managers, supervisors, external assessors, clients, self and peers. Techniques of assessment are reviewed, including questionnaires, video and audiotapes, role play, examinations, learning diaries and computer simulations. Some suggestions are offered for increasing the validity of assessment judgements.     

Acalculia in a patient with severe language disturbances: how do we test it?

The present paper describes a case of a patient with severe Wernicke aphasia, which when tested with a number processing and calculation battery adapted to his difficulties showed remarkable arithmetic skills. These findings suggest that the patients with severe cognitive impairments (e.g., aphasia, apraxia) should be tested with batteries adapted to their disturbances because using a standard test may bias the results.     

Unification: What is it,how do we Reach and why do we Want it?

This article has three aims. The first is to give a partial explication of the concept of unification. My explication will be partial because I confine myself to unification of particular events, because I do not consider events of a quantitative nature, and discuss only deductive cases. The second aim is to analyze how unification can be reached. My third aim is to show that unification is an intellectual benefit. Instead of being an intellectual benefit unification could be an intellectual harm, i.e., a state of mind we should try to avoid by all means. By calling unification an intellectual benefit, we claim that this form of understanding has an intrinsic value for us. I argue that unification really has this alleged intrinsic value. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Psychoanalytic interpretation of the Rorschach: do we have better hieroglyphics?

Schafer (1954) advanced the "Psychoanalytic Interpretation in Rorschach Testing" and asserted that thoughtful interpretation involved more than translating hieroglyphics or scores. In this book, he presented his thesis by describing four defensive styles (repression, denial, projective, and obsessive-compulsive) at various levels of severity of psychopathology. To investigate whether the Structural Summary data from Exner's (1986) Comprehensive System, with its improved reliability and validity and additional scores, allow one to make similar distinctions among the types of defense and severity of disturbance, we rescored the Schafer records. The results of this conservative test of Exner's system suggest that (a) the Comprehensive System reliably distinguishes the repressive style from the other styles, and (b) scores alone may provide adequate measures of severity of disturbance even with form quality excluded. We concluded that Rorschach scores must be understood as complex products of multiple psychological operations and may correspond to different subjective experiences in various contexts.     

Getting to the Core of Close Reading: What do we Really Know and What Remains to be Seen?

Due to the Common Core State Standards, close reading is becoming a common practice in today’s elementary and middle school classrooms. Qualitative content analysis of journal publications was used to determine the (a) prevalence of close reading in the existing literature, (b) knowledge about close reading from the research literature, (c) themes about close reading in practitioner-oriented articles and (d) questions about close reading in the elementary and middle grade language arts classroom. Results reveal that the majority of articles on close reading are situated in the practitioner literature, with a notable lack of research on close reading.     

What do we owe co-nationals and non-nationals? why the liberal nationalist account fails and how we can do better

Liberal nationalists have been trying to argue that a suitably sanitized version of nationalism—namely, one that respects and embodies liberal values—is not only morally defensible, but also of great moral value, especially on grounds liberals should find very appealing. Although there are plausible aspects to the idea and some compelling arguments are offered in defense of this position, one area still proves to be a point of considerable vulnerability for this project and that is the issue of what, according to the liberal nationalists, we owe both members of our nation, our co-nationals, and what we owe those who are not members of our nation. It is here that we see the project still has some distance to go if a version of liberal nationalism is, indeed, to be morally defensible. In this paper I examine leading liberal nationalist accounts of our obligations to co-nationals and non-nationals. I argue that liberal nationalists have not yet given us an adequate account of our obligations to non-nationals for a number of reasons. For instance, on the issue of the priority we may give co-nationals' interests over non-nationals', the theorists' view show significant tension, they seem to be confused about what their positions entail, the views are unhelpful, ad hoc, or the positions are quite unclear. Liberal nationalists also have a misleading impression that their positions better capture the relation between personal identity and duty, but this turns out to be false. Other defects with their specific projects are highlighted. I go on to offer a more promising method for determining our obligations to non-nationals. Rather than this alternative precluding any scope for nationalism, it actually makes clearer to us how there might be some defensible space for nationalism once our obligations to put in place appropriate institutions and sets of rules have been fulfilled.