RAGING WITH THE TRUTH: Condemnation and Concealment in the Poetry of Blake and Hill

An analysis of Geoffrey Hill's lyric poem about William Blake illuminates the relations between art, prophecy, and imperial politics across more than two centuries. Hill's poem responds to David V. Erdman's argument that Blake was resolutely, if ineffectually and sometimes secretly, opposed to war. It also establishes Hill's own cryptic but definite resistance to contemporary war and warmongers, while it mourns poetry's public powerlessness to halt the violent competition for material resources. Ignored by the majority, poetry fails to bring about the ethical social change that poets often envision. The layering of perspectives (Hill the poet and scholar writing about Erdman the scholar, who is explicating Blake the poet and artist) allows for a multidimensional interpretation of the role of poets and prophetic poetry. Despite their fury at society's deafness and greed, and frustration at their own incapacities, poets—because if they are great poets, they are prophets, too—continue to speak to their audiences about the problems of this world and about the better worlds that can be imagined. Hill's text obliquely teaches how the small success of a great poem can provide a minor note of consolation as it objects to terror and tyranny.     

不同经验教师对学生课堂行为加工的眼动研究

教师对课堂信息的知觉和加工是教师教学能力和教学专长发展的重要组成部分。以往有关课堂场景中学生行为知觉和注意的研究主要采用问卷调查、主观报告和定性分析等研究方式,不仅缺乏对学生课堂问题行为客观量化的分析,对教师如何加工课堂场景中学生行为也研究较少。本研究选取11名专家、9名经验教师和17名新手,让其观看一段时长约15秒的小学数学课堂教学视频,并记录其观看过程中的眼动信息。结果发现,教师对学生课堂典型行为的注视次数和注视次数比率多于问题行为;相对于专家和经验教师,新手对学生的典型课堂行为注视次数更多、总注视时间更长、注视比率更大;就学生的典型行为而言,新手比专家和经验教师注视的次数更多、总注视时间更长,注视的比率也更大。结论认为,教学经验会影响教师对课堂教学场景中学生行为信息的知觉,新手对突显的典型行为关注要多于问题行为,而专家和经验教师则在典型行为和问题行为上平均分配注意资源。     

Arguments from Expert Opinion and Persistent Bias

Accounts of arguments from expert opinion take it for granted that expert judgments count as (defeasible) evidence for propositions, and so an argument that proceeds from premises about what an expert judges to a conclusion that the expert is probably right is a strong argument. In Mizrahi (Informal Log 33:57–79, 2013), I consider a potential justification for this assumption, namely, that expert judgments are significantly more likely to be true than novice judgments, and find it wanting because of empirical evidence suggesting that expert judgments under uncertainty are not significantly more likely to be true than novice judgments or even chance. In this paper, I consider another potential justification for this assumption, namely, that expert judgments are not influenced by the cognitive biases novice judgments are influenced by, and find it wanting, too, because of empirical evidence suggesting that experts are vulnerable to pretty much the same cognitive biases that novices are vulnerable to. If this is correct, then the basic assumption at the core of accounts of arguments from expert opinion, namely, that expert judgments count as (defeasible) evidence for propositions, remains unjustified.     

The Convergent Conceptions of Being in Mainstream Analytic and Postmodern Continental Philosophy

This article argues that there is ultimately a very close convergence between prominent conceptions of being in mainstream Anglo‐American philosophy and mainstream postmodern Continental philosophy. One characteristic idea in Anglo‐American or analytic philosophy is that we establish what is meaningful and so what we can say about what is, by making evident the limits of sense or what simply cannot be meant. A characteristic idea in Continental philosophy of being is that being emerges through contrast and interplay with what it is not, with what has no being at all and so is beyond sense. The two traditions consequently conceive being in significantly related ways. As a result, what the Continental tradition gets at with “the meaning of being as such and in general,” and how it gets at it, has much in common with what the Anglo‐American tradition gets at, and how it gets at it, by establishing “what can be meaningfully said.”     

Influence of Expertise on the Intentional Transfer of Motor Skill

Intentional transfer of expert knowledge is an important issue in cognitive science and motor skills. How subjects deliberately transfer expertise in karate when learning a closely related motor skill (tai chi) was examined in this study. Subjects (N = 20) learned a videotaped sequence of self-defense movements, evaluated their learning, and then performed the sequence. Self-regulation of learning is believed to be central to effective transfer. The measures of self-regulation were accuracy of self-evaluation, video use, and approach to learning. Results showed that unlike novices, experts used self-regulation, learning strategies, and the video player in more complex ways in self-regulation. Experts, as compared with novices, demonstrated their greater knowledge through the higher quality of their performance and their better comprehension of movement meaning; but both groups recalled an equal number of moments, suggesting that both experts and novices transferred general knowledge about learning.     

Prompt comprehension in UNIX command production

We hypothesize that a cognitive analysis based on the construction-integration theory of comprehension (Kintsch, 1988) can predict what is difficult about generating complex composite commands in the UNIX operating system. We provide empirical support for assumptions of the Doane, Kintsch, and Polson (1989, 1990) construction-integration model for generating complex commands in UNIX. We asked users whose UNIX experience varied to produce complex UNIX commands, and then provided help prompts whenever the commands that they produced were erroneous. The help prompts were designed to assist subjects with respect to both the knowledge and the memory processes that our UNIX modeling efforts have suggested are lacking in less expert users. It appears that experts respond to different prompts than do novices. Expert performance is helped by the presentation of abstract information, whereas novice and intermediate performance is modified by presentation of concrete information. Second, while presentation of specific prompts helps less expert subjects, they do not provide sufficient information to obtain correct performance. Our analyses suggest that information about the ordering of commands is required to help the less expert with both knowledge and memory load problems in a manner consistent with skill acquisition theories.     

Cognition and motivation in emotion

The role of cognition--and to some extent motivation--in emotion, the ways meaning is generated, unconscious appraising, and the implications of this way of thinking for life-span development are addressed. It is argued that appraisal is a necessary as well as sufficient cause of emotion and that knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. This position is examined in light of what is known about emotions in infants and young children, the effects of drugs on acute emotions and moods, and recent patterns of thought about the brain in emotions. The discussion of how meaning is generated is the core of the article. Automatic processing without awareness is contrasted with deliberate and conscious processing, and the concept of resonance between an animal's needs and what is encountered in the environment is examined. The idea that there is more than one way meaning is achieved strengthens and enriches the case for the role of appraisal in emotion and allows the consideration of what is meant by unconscious and preconscious appraisal and the examination of how they might work.     

An expert–novice comparison of feature choice

Perceptual experts have learned to rapidly and accurately perceive the structural regularities that define categories and identities within a domain. They extract important features and their relations more efficiently than novices. We used fingerprint examination to investigate expert–novice differences in feature choice. On each fingerprint within our set, experts and novices selected one feature they thought was most useful for distinguishing a particular print and one feature they thought was least useful. We found that experts and novices often differed in the features they chose, and experts tended to agree more with each other. However, any such expert–novice difference appeared to depend on the image at hand typically emerging when salient or more conspicuous features of a fingerprint were unclear. We suggest that perceptual training ought to direct attention to useful features with the understanding that what is useful may change depending on the clarity of the stimuli.     

What Poetry Brings to the Table of Science and Religion

Ever since Plato's famous attack on artists and poets in Book 10 of The Republic, lovers of literature have felt pressed to defend poetry, and indeed from ancient times down to the present, literature and art have had to fight various battles against philosophy, religion, and science. After providing a brief overview of this conflict and then arguing that between poetry and science there are some noteworthy similarities—that is, that some of the basic mental structures with which the scientist studies the “text” of nature (facts, laws, theories) find their counterparts in ways an informed reader studies the poetic text, I develop what I see as the most important differences between poetry, on the one hand, and science, philosophy, and theology, on the other. These differences lie chiefly in two areas: (1) in the stance that each takes toward language itself and (2) in the stance each takes toward that ancient polarity between the one and the many. The aim of my argument is neither to privilege poetry over the other modes of knowing the world nor to grant, particularly to science in its reductive “objectivity,” a higher epistemological status than that accorded to poetry and the arts. Instead, I wish to argue that science, by pushing the boundaries of knowledge about the material world, shows the poet, as well as the theologian, some of the more important work to be done and that poetry, with its emphasis on the particular over the abstract and on the ambiguities and paradoxes of language as inherently metaphorical, serves science and religion by providing a caution against the naive acceptance of language as literal and the consequent enthrallment to the power of absolutes and totalizing abstractions.     

“That's what they talk about when they talk about epiphanies”: An invitation to engage with the process of developing found poetry to illuminate exceptional human experience

This paper illuminates some of the journey taken by me, the researcher, whilst completing my doctoral research into the lived experience of epiphanies. The research journey is conceptualised as one of the discoveries into the task of qualitative research to “carry forward” the meaning of human experience, that is, considered “more than words can say.” Six participants took part in an unstructured interview aimed at exploring how they made sense of their epiphanic experiences. Following the application of an interpretative phenomenological analysis, an arts‐based representation of the research findings, in the form of found poetry, was chosen to supplement the emerging interpretation. Six found poems are dispersed throughout the paper. The aim is to offer the reader the crucial opportunity to simultaneously engage responsively and rationally with an exploration of the value of found poetry. Moreover, this style of presentation may offer the reader more space and time to notice, observe and reflect on the impact of research poetry as they move through the paper. An evaluation of the utility of found poetry is also offered. By providing an insight into the process of constructing found poetry, it is intended that the merits of its integration within qualitative enquiry are highlighted as successfully being able to bring the meaning of exceptional human experience alive to the reader. Furthermore, the experiential knowledge offered here is considered particularly relevant to professionals working in caring or therapeutic roles.     

Attentional strategies for studying scientific texts

Content-area novices develop rules as to what types of information (e.g., definitions, facts, equations) are important in texts (Dee-Lucas & Larkin, 1988). The study reported here indicates that these rules influence text learning. Experts and novices read and recalled science texts. Reading times and recall for different types of content were compared for the two groups. Results indicate that novices’ importance rules function as part of novices’ control schema during reading, influencing their attentional processes and the resulting representation formed for the text. This was evident in qualitative differences between experts and novices in their attentional patterns and text recall. The study also found that the number of passage readings and the passage topic have a greater influence on the reading times of exports, but both groups adjust processing time according to the hierarchical level of the passage content. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for novices learning from texts.     

How Experts Adapt Their Gaze Behavior When Modeling a Task to Novices

Domain experts regularly teach novice students how to perform a task. This often requires them to adjust their behavior to the less knowledgeable audience and, hence, to behave in a more didactic manner. Eye movement modeling examples (EMMEs) are a contemporary educational tool for displaying experts’ (natural or didactic) problem-solving behavior as well as their eye movements to learners. While research on expert-novice communication mainly focused on experts’ changes in explicit, verbal communication behavior, it is as yet unclear whether and how exactly experts adjust their nonverbal behavior. This study first investigated whether and how experts change their eye movements and mouse clicks (that are displayed in EMMEs) when they perform a task naturally versus teach a task didactically. Programming experts and novices initially debugged short computer codes in a natural manner. We first characterized experts’ natural problem-solving behavior by contrasting it with that of novices. Then, we explored the changes in experts’ behavior when being subsequently instructed to model their task solution didactically. Experts became more similar to novices on measures associated with experts’ automatized processes (i.e., shorter fixation durations, fewer transitions between code and output per click on the run button when behaving didactically). This adaptation might make it easier for novices to follow or imitate the expert behavior. In contrast, experts became less similar to novices for measures associated with more strategic behavior (i.e., code reading linearity, clicks on run button) when behaving didactically.     

THE ELUSIVENESS OF POETIC MEANING

Various aspects of poetic meaning are discussed, centred on the relation of form and content. A C Bradley's thesis of form-content identity, suitably reformulated, is defended against criticisms by Peter Kivy. It is argued that the unity of form-content is not discovered in poetry so much as demanded of it when poetry is read 'as poetry'. A shift of emphasis from talking about 'meaning' in poetry to talking about 'content' is promoted, as is a more prominent role for 'experience' in characterising responses to poetry and its value. It is argued that the key to poetic meaning lies less in a theory of meaning, more in a theory of poetry, where what matters are modes of reading poetry. Content-identity in poetry is said to be 'interest-relative' such that no absolute answer, independent of the interests of the questioner, can determine when a poem and a paraphrase have the same content. Interpretation of poetry need not focus exclusively on meaning, but on ways in which the experience of a poem can be heightened.     

Self-Regulation Differences during Athletic Practice by Experts,Non-Experts,and Novices

Basketball experts, non-experts, and novices were studied for differences in their self-regulatory forethought and self-reflection processes regarding their free-throw shooting. Forty-three adolescent boys participated individually in the study, which involved a practice session in a gymnasium. The subjects were queried regarding their forethought goals, strategy choice, self-efficacy as well as their self-reflection attributions and feelings of satisfaction as they practiced their shooting. Among the significant results, experts set more specific goals, selected more technique-oriented strategies, made more strategy attributions, and displayed higher levels of self-efficacy than non-experts and novices. Forethought phase processes intercorrelated significantly as did self-reflection phase processes. In addition, self-reflection attributions were predictive of forethought strategy selection during further efforts to learn. The results were discussed in terms of a social cognitive model of self-regulation.     

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: doctoral students' experiences of family therapy research training through alternative forms of data representation

In this study, we interviewed 14 doctoral students from 10 COAMFTE-accredited doctoral programs to learn more about how they experienced their research training and what they might suggest to strengthen the research culture in their training programs. We solicited somewhat unconventional data--metaphors, poetry, free associations, critical experiences--to (a) tap into our participants' underlying thought processes, (b) capture the multifaceted nature of their doctoral research training, and (c) represent the richness of our participants' subjective experiences. The themes we identified reflect both positive and negative research training experiences and suggest several ways that family therapy program faculty might improve their programs' research training and culture.     

Introduction: The Meaning of Work

Abstract

The theme of this special issue is how cultural, societal, group, and individual factors shape what working has meant, means, and is going to mean in future societies. Concepts and empirical data from the Meaning of Working study (MOW, 1987), an eight-country comparison of work-related attitudes and values, and from complementary follow-up studies, serve as the “red thread” or empirical basis throughout the issue. The original MOW (1987) study and some of the follow-up studies reported in this issue are based on a heuristic model for the subjective meaning of work, which is briefly discussed in the first paper by Ruiz Quintanilla and Wilpert. However, as nearly all of the discussants point out, and Heller's paper tries to discuss specifically, there is still a lot of theoretical work to do. The studies reported in this issue provide some empirical data bases and point towards new and crucial questions that are raised by the results. On the other hand, this issue also wants to contribute to a focused discussion about alternative conceptions of the meaning of work and its central role in understanding the concept of work. Since the way we conceptualize a particular problem issue crucially determines the kind of answers and explanations we derive, as Brief points out in his discussant paper, a thorough and lively discussion about how we are to understand work (and “non-work”), what meaning it has in a person's life, what significance the meaning attributed to work has, and by what processes work attains its meaning for society in general, becomes of utmost importance. Moreover, in the light of European integration across cultures and the global internationalization of organizations, differences in cultural contexts for the meaning of work take on a particularly urgent problem for better understanding. Finally, Fineman in his discussant paper raises the crucial point, that the basic epistemological assumptions that guided both the basic conceptual framework and the methodology used in the MOW (1987) and the follow-up studies reported in this issue can be questioned. He argues that these assumptions allow only a rather restricted view of the meaning of work and forego many options in addressing more holistic perspectives of work and its meaning generating processes. Given the fact that meaning is in principle a product of subjective interpretation processes, the question about what social processes form the basis for the meaning of work and its consequences, as well as what epistemological assumptions make sense in trying to understand better the holistic nature of work and its meaning, must be finally addressed.

In this sense this issue attempts: (1) to contribute to the ongoing debate on the concept of meaning of work; as well as (2) to invite interested researchers and practitioners in W & 0 psychology to join in this debate. This journal strongly encourages such a debate and will publish quality rejoinders, commentaries, and critical alternatives to the problems raised in this special issue.     

Set as an Instance of a Real‐World Visual‐Cognitive Task

Complex problem solving is often an integration of perceptual processing and deliberate planning. But what balances these two processes, and how do novices differ from experts? We investigate the interplay between these two in the game of SET. This article investigates how people combine bottom‐up visual processes and top‐down planning to succeed in this game. Using combinatorial and mixed‐effect regression analysis of eye‐movement protocols and a cognitive model of a human player, we show that SET players deploy both bottom‐up and top‐down processes in parallel to accomplish the same task. The combination of competition and cooperation of both types of processes is a major factor of success in the game. Finally, we explore strategies players use during the game. Our findings suggest that within‐trial strategy shifts can occur without the need of explicit meta‐cognitive control, but rather implicitly as a result of evolving memory activations.     

Words of wisdom: language use over the life span

Two projects explored the links between language use and aging. In the first project, written or spoken text samples from disclosure studies from over 3,000 research participants from 45 different studies representing 21 laboratories in 3 countries were analyzed to determine how people change in their use of 14 text dimensions as a function of age. A separate project analyzed the collected works of 10 well-known novelists, playwrights, and poets who lived over the last 500 years. Both projects found that with increasing age, individuals use more positive and fewer negative affect words, use fewer self-references, use more future-tense and fewer past-tense verbs, and demonstrate a general pattern of increasing cognitive complexity. Implications for using language as a marker of personality among current and historical texts are discussed.     

Cognitive Reorganization and the development of chess expertise

One current research strategy in the study of expertise is to compare experts and novices. An important aspect of decision making involves looking for similarities among problem types. Little is known about such processes. We used grid technique to examine similarity judgments associated with different levels of chess expertise. Novice, expert, and master chess players evaluated 4 sets of 12 chess boards. Average FIC scores showed a curvilinear relation to expertise, suggesting increasing differentiation followed by integration in cognitive frameworks for construing board positions. Additional cognitive measures based on move generation tended to support and extend this structural model.