On being the object of attention: implications for self-other consciousness

Joint attention to an external object at the end of the first year is typically believed to herald the infant's discovery of other people's attention. I will argue that mutual attention in the first months of life already involves an awareness of the directedness of attention. The self is experienced as the first object of this directedness followed by gradually more distal 'objects'. This view explains early infant affective self-consciousness within mutual attention as emotionally meaningful, rather than as bearing only a spurious similarity to that in the second and third years of life. Such engagements precede and must inform, rather than derive from, conceptual representations of self and other, and can be better described as self-other conscious affects.     

Awareness of one's body as subject and object

Abstract

This paper rejects Hume's famous claim that we never perceive our selves, by arguing that, under conditions specified, our perception of our bodies is perception of our selves. It takes as its point of departure Quassim Cassam's defence of a position to a similar effect but puts a different interpretation on the distinction between perceiving the body as an object, having spatial attributes, and perceiving it as a self or subject of experiences.     

Good supervision: On the experience of being supervised

This paper was written for presentation at a symposium of trainers when the author was a trainee in psychoanalytical psychotherapy. The original title was ‘Good Supervision: a consumer's guide’. The author drew not only on her own experience of being supervised but also on that of colleagues in training. It was found that it was essential to conceptualise the experience in terms of the triangular relationship between student, patient, and supervisor. Primitive feelings are evoked by the supervisory process and some of these are described. Characteristics of supervisors and the supervisory process and how these are felt to help, or otherwise, are discussed.     

My body as an object: self-distance and social experience

In phenomenology the body is often referred to as the lived body which makes the world familiar to me. In this paper, however, I discuss bodily self-consciousness in terms of self-distance. Self-distance is the suggestion that bodily self-consciousness consist in a reflective stance where you conceive of your body as a physical thing, an object in the world as well as the subject of bodily experiences. I argue that we are bodily self-conscious because we experience our own body in more than one way and that these ways are not derivative of one another or hierarchically ordered. This latter claim conflicts with certain phenomenological readings of how the body is experienced, one of which I will refer to and discuss as the Familiarity Objection to my idea of self-distance. I end the paper with a discussion of why we need the conception of experienced objectification that is entailed in the notion of self-distance to account for both pathological and non-pathological bodily self-experiences. The notion of self-distance improves our understanding of how the body plays a central role in psychosis for the experience of distorted inter-subjective relations.     

Heterosocial perceptual organization: application of the choice model to sexual coercion

Luce's (1959, 1963) choice model was used to characterize individual differences in men's perception of women's affect as friendly, sexually interested, sad, or rejecting. Women's clothing styles were associated with differences in the model's parameters. Sensitivity to sadness, rejection, and friendliness declined when women were dressed provocatively, whereas sensitivity to sexual interest increased. Provocative clothing was also associated with an increased bias to assume that positive affect was sexual interest rather than friendliness. Men at risk for perpetrating sexual aggression were less sensitive to women's affect than low-risk men were. They were also more likely than low-risk men to associate provocative clothing with sexual interest, and conservative clothing with friendliness. Results indicate that heterosocial perception may help to predict sexually coercive behavior and may be an important target for intervention.     

Autism and the experience of a perceptual object

Sewards and Sewards (2002) argue that while computations necessary for object recognition occur throughout the ventral visual stream, object recognition awareness involves the anterior temporal lobe and the medial orbital prefrontal cortex. The present paper suggests, however, that the medial orbital prefrontal cortex has a unique contribution, namely that of producing a basic experience of a perceptual object. It is further argued that the mechanisms that produce this experience also result in making the object more important than its subparts and features. Finally, it is argued that a reduction in this importance may account for some perceptual difficulties in high-functioning autism. This view is consistent with evidence for early selective abnormalities in other systems involving the medial prefrontal cortex in autism.     

On being, knowing and having a self

This paper(1) takes the distinction between being conscious ('core consciousness') and knowing that one is conscious (self-reflexive consciousness) as a starting point for differentiating between three different aspects of the self: 1) the overall process of psychosomatic being which we share with all living creatures and which expresses itself through action (self as totality), 2) the conscious awareness of knowing the self that is a peculiarly human phenomenon consequent on the development of symbolic imagination (sense of self including numinous experiences of the self) and 3) having a self (or soul) as an essential attribute of being human that can only be achieved through being endowed with a self in the mind of others (self-identity leading to the self as the centre of the personality). Some clinical implications of these distinctions are considered including the role of interpretation as fostering integration through the provision of alternative self-images, the loss of self-reflexive consciousness in states of overwhelming affect and the attack on the spontaneous psychosomatic being of the self in states of self-hatred and self-division.     

The subjective experience of object recognition: comparing metacognition for object detection and object categorization

Perceptual decisions seem to be made automatically and almost instantly. Constructing a unitary subjective conscious experience takes more time. For example, when trying to avoid a collision with a car on a foggy road you brake or steer away in a reflex, before realizing you were in a near accident. This subjective aspect of object recognition has been given little attention. We used metacognition (assessed with confidence ratings) to measure subjective experience during object detection and object categorization for degraded and masked objects, while objective performance was matched. Metacognition was equal for degraded and masked objects, but categorization led to higher metacognition than did detection. This effect turned out to be driven by a difference in metacognition for correct rejection trials, which seemed to be caused by an asymmetry of the distractor stimulus: It does not contain object-related information in the detection task, whereas it does contain such information in the categorization task. Strikingly, this asymmetry selectively impacted metacognitive ability when objective performance was matched. This finding reveals a fundamental difference in how humans reflect versus act on information: When matching the amount of information required to perform two tasks at some objective level of accuracy (acting), metacognitive ability (reflecting) is still better in tasks that rely on positive evidence (categorization) than in tasks that rely more strongly on an absence of evidence (detection).     

On being a whistleblower: the Needleman case

We believe that members of the scientific community have a primary obligation to promote integrity in research and that this obligation includes a duty to report observations that suggest misconduct to agencies that are empowered to examine and evaluate such evidence. Consonant with this responsibility, we became whistleblowers in the case of Herbert Needleman. His 1979 study (Needleman et al., 1979), on the effects of low-level lead exposure on children, is widely cited and highly influential in the formulation of public policy on lead. The opportunity we had to examine subject selection and data analyses from this study was prematurely halted by efforts to prevent disclosure of our observations. Nevertheless, what we saw left us with serious concerns. We hope that the events here summarized will contribute to revisions of process by which allegations of scientific misconduct are handled and that such revisions will result in less damage to scientists who speak out.     

Drawing the boundary between subject and object: Comments on the mind-brain problem

Physics says that it cannot deal with the mind-brain problem, because it does not deal in subjectivities, and mind is subjective. However, biologists (among others) still claim to seek a material basis for subjective mental processes, which would thereby render them objective. Something is clearly wrong here. I claim that what is wrong is the adoption of too narrow a view of what constitutes ‘objectivity’, especially in identifying it with what a ‘machine’ can do. I approach the problem in the light of two cognate circumstances: (a) the ‘measurement problem’ in quantum physics, and (b) the objectivity of standard mathematics, even though most of it is beyond the reach of ‘machines’. I argue that the only resolution to such problems is in the recognition that closed loops of causation are ‘objective’; i.e. legitimate objects of scientific scrutiny. These are explicitly forbidden in any machine or mechanism. A material system which contains such loops is called ‘complex’. Such complex systems thus must possess nonsimulable models; i.e. models which contain impredicativities or ‘self-references’ which cannot be removed, or faithfully mapped into a single coherent syntactic time-frame. I consider a few of the consequences of the above, in the context of thus redrawing the boundary between subject and object.     

Facial image and object constancy: a clinical experience and a developmental inference

This report is derived from analytic data in the case of a young woman with a concurrent neurologic deficit, prosopagnosia. The condition consists of an inability to recognize or evoke the facial images of the most familiar persons in one's life. With this disability, will there be a corresponding dysfunction in the psychologic structuralization comprising object constancy? The clinical material presented indicates a lack of object constancy in this patient, as well as a corresponding developmental fixation at the rapprochement level of separation-individuation. Reconstruction of the patient's childhood appears to corroborate these findings.     

Determinants of object choice in adulthood: a test case of object-relations theory

A clinical example of the effects of the absence of the father during the early childhood of a male analysand and its consequences for his later object choice is presented. This patient's biological father left the household when the patient was only a few months old, and his mother did not remarry until he was five years of age. Unconscious fantasies of the lost father, with whom the patient had no contact in reality, and longing for him organized the patient's drives and determined his self-identity as well as his later object choice. The patient developed both a positive and negative identification with the lost father. The identification was with a fantasy object not a real one. The case highlights the need to use a precise term in talking of the object, namely the mental representation of the object which may or may not be built up out of experiences with the real object.     

Rats’ visual-spatial working memory: New object choice accuracy as a function of number of objects in the study array

When rats had to find new (jackpot) objects for rewards from among previously sampled baited objects, increasing the number of objects in the sample (study) segment of a trial from 3 to 5 and then to 7 (Experiment 1) or from 3 to 6 and 9 (Experiments 2 and 3) or from 6 to 9 and 12 (Experiment 4) did not reduce rats’ test segment performance. Increasing study segment size improved test segment performance contrary the limited-capacity hypothesis concerning rats’ spatial working memory. This effect occurred when objects either differed visually (Experiments 1, 2, 4) or only by odor (Experiment 3). Rats performed no better than chance in finding a jackpot on their first choice from among three visually different objects in Experiments 1 and 2. Furthermore, results from Experiments 2 and 3 indicate that differences in the probability of finding a jackpot by chance in Experiment 1 were not responsible for failure to find the predicted inverse relationship. Results from Experiment 4 indicate that those from Experiments 2 and 3 were not solely due to size of test arrays. We discussed whether our findings could be attributed to innate foraging or perceptual isolation processes during testing or to perceptual encoding processes during exposure to study segment arrays.