Iconographic representations of renunciation and activism in the Ramakrishna math and mission and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

The growth of seva activities (organised service to humanity) in Hindu movements since the nineteenth century has been the subject of debate among both Hindus and scholarly observers. This article examines popular iconographic images within two movements that claim to have developed modern forms of service rooted in long-standing Hindu principles. Through a consideration of popular depictions of the inspirational figures most associated with the creation of each of these movements, it will be shown that the iconographic representations reveal an unresolved tension between symbolism designed to inculcate social activism and constant allusions to an ideal of renunciation pre-eminently associated with the role of the sannyasi.     

Evidence for holistic representations of ignored images and analytic representations of attended images

According to the hybrid theory of object recognition (J. E. Hummel, 2001), ignored object images are represented holistically, and attended images are represented both holistically and analytically. This account correctly predicts patterns of visual priming as a function of translation, scale (B. J. Stankiewicz & J. E. Hummel, 2002), and left-right reflection (B. J. Stankiewicz, J. E. Hummel, & E. E. Cooper, 1998). The model also predicts that priming for attended images will generalize over configural distortions (split images), whereas priming for ignored images will not. Three experiments tested and confirmed this prediction. Split images visually primed their intact and split counterparts when they were attended but not when they were ignored, whereas intact images primed themselves whether they were attended or not. The data contribute to the growing body of evidence that 1 function of visual attention is to permit the generation of explicitly relational representations of object shape.     

Naming disorders and semantic representations

The status of semantic conceptual structures in aphasia was investigated with relation to naming disorders in spontaneous and constrained speech production. A battery of six tasks was administered to 25 control subjects and 25 aphasics: spontaneous speech production (from which the percentage of nouns was calculated), confrontation naming, understanding class relationships (verbal and pictorial), and understanding thematic relationships (verbal and pictorial). Results indicated the important role of taxonomic abilities for naming, while other conceptual structures (i.e., thematic relations) do not seem to play any important role in the process of naming. These results are discussed in terms of the internal organization of semantic information.This work was supported by grants to Drs. Semenza and Bisiacchi from the Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione and by the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Unita 14, Scienza del Comportamento.     

Sentence representations and anaphor processing

This paper describes the use of anaphora to explore the nature of the representation constructed during the on-line processing of sentences. The central concern of the study was to discover whether this representation is componential or holistic. It was found that subjects took longer to resolve references to objects rather than events and, more interesting, that the componential complexity of the target representation affected the speed of anaphor resolution. The results suggest that events are represented differently from objects, and that the representation of events is componential.     

Meaning structures and mental representations

This paper argues for a distinction between meaning structure and mental representation, and presents the outlines of a theoretical model of their interrelationship. Meaning structures are defined as structures in the human mind/brain which develop as the combined result of genetic predispositions and individual experience, and lead to relatively stable patterns of perceiving, thinking, feeling, behaving, etc. Mental representation is defined as the aspect of mental processes which involves imagining and thinking of things that are not perceptually present. It is suggested that the mind includes a central network of meaning structures (CNMS) for the storage of information, and a number of other subsystems (e.g., perceptual systems, behavioral systems, and a verbal system) for the processing of externally and internally generated information. Against the dual-coding theory, it is argued that there is one code for the long-term storage of information, but several codes for the processing of information. Mental representations are seen as products of activation that is spread from the CNMS to more peripheral systems. The spread of activation from the CNMS to perceptual systems results in mental imagery; when activation spreads to the verbal system the result is conceptual thinking; and when activation spreads to behavioral systems it produces intentions. It is argued that this conceptual model can help to solve some basic theoretical problems that have plagued cognitive psychology.     

Social representations of educability

In the framework of the theory of social representations, the study set out to examine how Finnish parents and teachers have received a major change in educational policy. Surveys on parents' and comprehensive school teachers' views of ongoing school reforms indicated that current educational discourse is structured by two different representations — a “selective” one and a “comprehensive” one-which contain two different notions of intelligence — “natural” and “sociorelativistic”. The subjects' sociai position (socioeducational status and expertise) in the educational hierarchy tended to organize their representations. The findings indicated that the different groups have different relationships to official educational policy and to the ethos of educability embodied by the school. University of Joensuu     

Formation of category representations

Many formal models of categorization assume, implicitly or explicitly, that categorization results in the formation of direct associations from representations of the presented stimuli to representations of the experimentally provided category labels. In three categorization experiments employing a polymorphous classification structure (Dennis, Hampton, & Lea, 1973) and a partial reversal,optional shift procedure (Kendler, Kendler, & Wells, 1960), we provide evidence consistent with the hypothesis that learning a new classification problem results in the creation of category representations that mediate between representations of the stimulus and the label. This hypothesis can be instantiated through the AMBRY model (Kruschke, 1996).     

Early representations of ownership

To navigate a world filled with private property, children must be able to assign ownership information to objects and update that information when appropriate. In this chapter, the authors propose that children include ownership as an attribute of their object representations. Children can learn about ownership attributes either by witnessing owners acting on their property, a visual source, or by receiving information from the testimony of others, a verbal source. The authors consider the differences between these two forms of information and how they might conflict at the representational level, leading to difficulties in learning about ownership.     

Generation of visual representations

The visual confusability of uppercase letters was manipulated in a successive same-different task to study the conditions under which visual generation from auditory inputs would occur and to investigate the figural specificity of the generated representations. Prior experiments have shown that visual confusions do occur when the initial stimulus is auditory and the second one is visual, which indicates that auditory stimuli can be encoded into visual forms. There has been some suggestion, however, that the generated visual code may have been too abstract to differentiate between the two cases in which letters can appear. In the present experiment, although the confusion effect was not eliminated when the subjects had no advance knowledge regarding the case in which the visual stimulus would appear, the marked confusion effect obtained when the visual stimulus was an uppercase letter was substantially attenuated when the letter appeared in lowercase. This was taken to indicate that the visual characteristics of a generated visual representation may be relatively specific. The results also suggested that subjects may wait until after the second stimulus is presented before they generate the visual representation of the initial auditory stimulus.     

Forming subjective representations of subjective representations: evidence of a subjective status bias

In 3 studies and 2 pilot experiments, the author examined whether attending to the subjective status of mental representations would affect the ways humans view representational contents. The author found that simple drawing tasks were executed differently depending on whether or not the subject of the drawing was defined as a mental content (belief, imagination, perception). The results challenged particular lay epistemological concepts. They were partly accounted for by Gricean conversational rules (H. P. Grice, 1975), but the author postulated a subjective status bias to fully explain them. The discussion and recommendations for research center on the nature of this bias and relate it either to a tendency to conceive subjective representations as vague shadows of reality, or to an increased impact of the law of pregnance.