Playing the Simon game: Use of the Simon task for investigating human information processing

A little more than 40 years ago, J. R. Simon and colleagues introduced what is now called the Simon task, which yielded a correspondence effect known as the Simon effect. In this paper, I set Simon's contribution in the context of research on stimulus-response compatibility. The novel contribution of the Simon task is described, along with foundational findings using the task that Simon and colleagues reported. I acknowledge the significance of Simon's (1990) review chapter in generating my own interests in the Simon task and describe four selected lines of research from my lab that have been a result of those interests. The article concludes with a brief tribute to Simon and his contribution to experimental psychology.     

How I Become a Psychoanalyst

In this essay, I focus on how my personal history contributed to my choosing to become a psychoanalyst, what I then encountered and the choices I made professionally, and the issue of being “inside” versus “outside” the classical tradition. In this context, I describe some of the political conditions that prevented Ph.D.'s from being able to be trained as analysts within the classical tradition during those years. I also describe how the training I received outside the classical tradition actually was much broader than what would have been offered within it and how it allowed for a level of intellectual freedom and critical thinking about traditional ways of working that would not have been possible in the classical institutes. I also describe briefly how I began developing the concept of working at the “intimate edge” in the analytic relationship, which I first began writing about in 1974 and which is detailed most fully in my 1992 book, The Intimate Edge: Extending the Reach of Psychoanalytic Interaction, and in several subsequent publications (Ehrenberg, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2003).     

Neuronal representations of cognitive state: reward or attention?

The effects of spatial or featural attention on the activity of neurons have been studied in many experiments that have used a variety of neurophysiological approaches. Other experiments have examined how expectations about reward are represented in neuronal activity in various brain regions. Although attention and reward are distinct concepts, I argue here that many neurophysiological experiments on attention and reward do not permit a clean dissociation between the two. This problem arises in part because reward contingencies are the only parameter manipulated in any of these experiments. I describe how attention and reward expectations have been confounded, giving rise to uncertainty about how signals related to attention and reward are distributed in the brain.     

Perceptions of Wellness From Adults With Mobility Impairments

The purpose of this study was to describe the perceptions of wellness from adults with mobility impairments by using phenomenological‐heuristic inquiry. The primary research question was, how do adults with mobility impairments perceive wellness? Eight participants were interviewed, and 6 core themes emerged: overcoming barriers, pain management, psychological wellness, physical activity and nutrition, social connectedness and family support, and spirituality. Implications for counselors and counselor educators and suggestions for future research are presented.     

Finding Empathy: How Neuroscientific Measures,Evidence and Conceptualizations Interact

ABSTRACT

Questions about how empathy should be conceptualized have long been a preoccupation of the field of empathy research. There are numerous definitions of empathy that have been proposed and that often overlap with other concepts such as sympathy and compassion. This makes communication between research groups or across disciplines difficult. Many researchers seem to see the diversity of definitions as a problem rather than a form of benign pluralism. Within this debate about conceptualization, researchers sometimes suggest that more neuroscientific evidence will make the problem go away – that uncovering the processes underlying empathy will thereby also sort out conceptual difficulties. In this paper, I challenge this assumption by examining how neuroscientists studying empathy use concepts in practice – both in the development of their measures and in the interpretation of their data. I argue that this neuroscientific literature demonstrates that continuity and stability comes from the use of certain established measures, while progress comes from expansion upon those measures and the flexibility of stated concepts. We do not ‘find’ empathy through increased neuroscientific evidence but we do get closer to understanding empathic processes, flexibly understood.     

Changing the Criminal Justice System Response to Sexual Assault: An Empirical Study of a Participatory Action Research Project

In jurisdictions throughout the United States, thousands of sexual assault kits (SAKs; also known as a “rape kits”) have not been submitted by the police for forensic DNA testing. DNA evidence may be helpful to sexual assault investigations and prosecutions by identifying perpetrators, revealing serial offenders through DNA matches across cases, and exonerating those who have been wrongly accused. This paper describes a longitudinal action research project conducted in Detroit, Michigan after that city discovered approximately 11,000 untested sexual assault kits in a police department storage facility. We conducted a root cause analysis to examine individual, organizational, community, and societal factors that contributed to the development of the rape kit backlog in Detroit. Based on those findings, we implemented and evaluated structural changes to increase staffing, promote kit testing, and retrain police and prosecutors so that cases could be reopened for investigation and prosecution. As we conducted this work, we also studied how this action research project impacted the Detroit criminal justice system. Participating in this project changed stakeholders’ attitudes about the utility of research to address community problems, the usefulness of DNA evidence in sexual assault cases, and the impact of trauma on survivors. The results led to new protocols for SAK testing and police investigations, and new state legislation mandating SAK forensic DNA testing.     

Southern Roles in Global Nanotechnology Innovation: Perspectives from Thailand and Australia

The term ‘nano-divide’ has become a catch-phrase for describing various kinds of global nanotechnology inequities. However, there has been little in-depth exploration as to what the global nano-divide really means, and limited commentary on its early nature. Furthermore, the literature often presents countries from the Global South as ‘passive’ agents in global nanotechnology innovation—without the ability to develop endogenous nanotechnology capabilities. Yet others point to nanotechnology providing opportunities for the South to play new roles in the global research and development process. In this paper I report on the findings of a qualitative study that involved the perspectives of 31 Thai and Australian key informants, from a broad range of fields. The study was supplemented by a survey of approximately 10% of the Thai nanotechnology research community at the time. I first explore how the global nano-divide is understood and the implication of the divide’s constructs in terms of the roles to be played by various countries in global nanotechnology innovation. I then explore the potential nature of Southern passivity and barriers and challenges facing Southern endogenous innovation, as well as an in-depth consideration of the proposition that Southern countries could be ‘active’ agents in the nanotechnology process. I argue that it is the nano-divide relating to nanotechnology research and development capabilities that is considered fundamental to nanotechnology’s Southern outcomes. The research suggests that Southern countries will encounter many of the traditional barriers to engaging with emerging technology as well as some new barriers relating to the nature of nanotechnology itself. Finally, the research suggests that nanotechnology may offer new opportunities for Southern countries to enter the global research and development picture.     

Enclothed cognition

We introduce the term “enclothed cognition” to describe the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer's psychological processes. We offer a potentially unifying framework to integrate past findings and capture the diverse impact that clothes can have on the wearer by proposing that enclothed cognition involves the co-occurrence of two independent factors—the symbolic meaning of the clothes and the physical experience of wearing them. As a first test of our enclothed cognition perspective, the current research explored the effects of wearing a lab coat. A pretest found that a lab coat is generally associated with attentiveness and carefulness. We therefore predicted that wearing a lab coat would increase performance on attention-related tasks. In Experiment 1, physically wearing a lab coat increased selective attention compared to not wearing a lab coat. In Experiments 2 and 3, wearing a lab coat described as a doctor's coat increased sustained attention compared to wearing a lab coat described as a painter's coat, and compared to simply seeing or even identifying with a lab coat described as a doctor's coat. Thus, the current research suggests a basic principle of enclothed cognition—it depends on both the symbolic meaning and the physical experience of wearing the clothes.     

Fantasy Objects: The Perception of Safety of Emergency Shelter in Place Kits

Using interview data (n = 30) of residents in Calhoun County, Alabama, we examine the meaning respondents give to the objects (shelter-in-place kits) disseminated to residents in order to manage risk of accidents from Anniston Army Depot’s Chemical Weapons storage and incinerator activities. Our research builds on previous research examining how organizations engage in ‘fantasy planning,’ where they create plans that objectively do not increase safety but do create the perception of safety within the organization and especially the public.     

The place of once-weekly treatment in the work of an analytically trained child psychotherapist

In this paper, I explore how we might link ideas about clinical facts to current issues in child psychotherapy research. I consider what our understanding of clinical facts might contribute to our research methods and how our research methods might better represent the clinical facts. The paper introduces a selection of psychoanalytic writers' formulations of the concept and describes some of the debates about the shortcomings of the traditional style of case reporting. The importance of keeping emotional experience central in our research is discussed. I describe a research method that I believe has the potential to capture and describe some of the complicated processes of change in psychotherapy. This is the concept of the ‘turning point’ session. Introducing the paradigm of complexity theory, I briefly explore how we might think about and understand the relationship between processes revealed through detailed analysis of a single session and change over a longer period of therapy.     

What can a perception-memory expert tell a jury?

Witnesses to crimes and other forensically relevant events sometimes describe memories in which they express confidence that, on the basis of research in perception and memory, may be inappropriately high, given the circumstances of the case. The most effective way of conveying this observation and the reasons for it to a jury is via an expert in perception and memory. In any given case, a mosaic of factors having to do with perception and memory are relevant. I briefly sketch the most common of these factors and categorize them as to the degree to which they may be unambiguously and/or quantitatively applied to a specific case. I discuss one such factor, witness-object distance, in some detail, showing how an expert might describe distance effects on perception and providing examples from actual cases.     

Computational explorations of perceptual symbol systems theory

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we provide a methodological pathway from theories of situated, embodied cognition to simulations with an eye to empirical evidence, and suggest a possible cross-fertilization between cognitive robotics and psychology. Psychological theories, in particular those formulated at an abstract level, include models which are often severely underspecified at the level of mechanisms. This is true in the synchronic, constructive perspective (how can the effects observed in experiments be concretely generated by the model's mechanisms?) and in the diachronic, developmental perspective (how can such mechanisms be learned and developed?). The synthetic method of artificial cognitive systems research, and in particular of cognitive robotics, can complement research in psychology (and neurosciences) by exploring the constructive and developmental aspects of theories. Our second aim is to provide an example of such a methodology by describing simulations aiming at developing a perceptual symbol system (PSS) (Barsalou, 1999). We then describe the two main theoretical constructs of the PSS, perceptual symbols and simulators, illustrate their development in an artificial system, and test the system in prediction, categorization, and abstraction tasks.     

Doing things with music

This paper is an exploration of how we do things with music—that is, the way that we use music as an “esthetic technology” to enact micro-practices of emotion regulation, communicative expression, identity construction, and interpersonal coordination that drive core aspects of our emotional and social existence. The main thesis is: from birth, music is directly perceived as an affordance-laden structure. Music, I argue, affords a sonic world, an exploratory space or “nested acoustic environment” that further affords possibilities for, among other things, (1) emotion regulation and (2) social coordination. When we do things with music, we are engaged in the work of creating and cultivating the self, as well as creating and cultivating a shared world that we inhabit with others. I develop this thesis by first introducing the notion of a “musical affordance”. Next, I look at how “emotional affordances” in music are exploited to construct and regulate emotions. I summon empirical research on neonate music therapy to argue that this is something we emerge from the womb knowing how to do. I then look at “social affordances” in music, arguing that joint attention to social affordances in music alters how music is both perceived and appropriated by joint attenders within social listening contexts. In support, I describe the experience of listening to and engaging with music in a live concert setting. Thinking of music as an affordance-laden structure thus reaffirms the crucial role that music plays in constructing and regulating emotional and social experiences in everyday life.     

Understanding reading as a form of language-use: A language game hypothesis

Reading research and research on conversation have followed different paths: While the research program for reading committed itself to a relatively static view of language, where objective text properties serve to elicit specific effects on cognition and behavior of a reader, research on conversation has embraced a language-use perspective, where language is primarily seen as a dynamic, context dependent process. In this essay I contrast these two perspectives, and argue that in order to reach a unified understanding of natural language – be it reading, talking, or conversing – one needs to adopt a language-use perspective. Furthermore, I describe how reading can be seen as a form of language-use, and how the current landscape of research on reading can be re-interpreted in terms of a dynamic, context-sensitive perspective on language. In particular, I propose that the concept of ‘language games’ serves as a good starting point to conceive reading as a form of language-use, describe how one can derive first concrete hypotheses by re-interpreting reading in terms of language games, and show how they can be readily operationalized using tools from dynamic systems analysis.     

Agnosticism gone awry: Why developmental robotics must commit to an understanding of embodiment and shared intentionality

We argue that developmental robotics, in its integration of developmental psychology and robotics, has the potential to encounter unexpected and unexamined conceptual difficulties. In particular, the various uses of embodiment and shared intentionality single out certain robots and behaviors as more or less relevant for the modeling of social cognition. As these terms have relatively orthogonal histories, there is no account for how their use will interact to shape methodology. We provide a brief discussion of how they may do so. Moreover, theorists often avoid explicit endorsement of some use or another. Although this agnosticism is understandable, we use the model of Dominey and Warneken (2011) as an illustrative example of why it is potentially dangerous. While Dominey and Warneken have succeeded in encouraging theorists to adopt clearer formulations of shared intentionality, their model suffers from important difficulties in interpretation, which, we argue, are a consequence of their uses of embodiment and shared intentionality respectively.     

Responsible Psychopaths Revisited

This paper updates, modifies, and extends an account of psychopaths’ responsibility and blameworthiness that depends on behavioral control rather than moral knowledge. Philosophers mainly focus on whether psychopaths can be said to grasp moral rules (or reasons, or demands) as such, whereas it seems to be important to their blameworthiness that typical psychopaths are hampered by impulsivity and other barriers to exercising self-control. I begin by discussing an atypical case, for contrast, of a young man who was diagnosed as a psychopath at one point but who lacks the element of impulsivity. He exhibits the usual deficits of empathy and related moral emotions, but by now he has developed effective alternative means of conforming to moral rules, essentially on the basis of self-interest. I think it does seem reasonable to hold him morally responsible if he should violate a rule, despite his refusal to acknowledge any specifically moral reasons. I then turn to more typical cases, arguing that blameworthiness is mitigated by the difficulty of learning alternative means of self-control. In a departure from my earlier work, I do not take responsibility to have degrees. But since both blameworthiness and freedom to do otherwise have degrees that depend on the same factors, I go on to explain how it can be reasonable to blame a typical psychopath for an act he may not have been free to avoid. More generally, my suggestion is that notions commonly conflated in philosophers’ treatments of responsibility should be prized apart.     

Christian Initiation,Apprenticeship in Prayer

Abstract

I confess to you, Lord, that I still do not know what time is. Yet I confess too that I do know that I am saying this in time, that I have been talking about time for a long time, and that this long time would not be a long time if it were not for the fact that time has been passing all the while. How can I know this, when I do not know what time is? Is it that I do know what time is, but do not know how to put what I know into words? I am in a sorry state, for I do not even know what I do not know!     

Overcoming Functional Fixedness in Naming Traditions: A Commentary on Pilcher’s Names and “Doing Gender”

Because people’s names are central to everyday life, their role in the gender system is often overlooked. In the target article, Pilcher (2017) brings novel attention to the ways in which naming traditions allow individuals to enact gender in their lives. In this commentary, I expand on Pilcher’s argument that naming traditions merit more attention than they currently receive. Specifically, I begin by discussing links between forenaming and the gender binary. I then describe the ways in which the marital surname tradition reflects gendered power dynamics. In an effort to spur additional scholarly attention to naming traditions, I also delineate fruitful areas for future research. These future directions primarily focus on identifying why and how individuals “do gender differently” through their naming practices.