Between Subjects: Commentary on Paper by Robert P. Drozek

This commentary on Drozek's paper outlines its key points under 10 headings, looking at various aspects of the intrapsychic and intersubjective elements involved in understanding motivation. There is discussion of issues of autonomy and dignity based upon Kant's philosophy that underpin the paper's assumptions about unconditional valuing of the other as a universal element of intersubjective motivation. In the commentary attention is paid to the role of desire in motivation, as well as some of the psychoanalytical literature on motivation, including papers by Sandler, Loewald, and Winnicott, some aspects of which connect up with the paper's theses. At various points, some of the clinical relevance of the paper's proposals are brought to light, in particular how the patient may be in a position to use the analyst's interventions as a source of intersubjective motivation.     

A Note on (K)Nots: Response to Robert W. Kentridge''s Commentary

GY, an extensively studied human hemianope, is aware of salient visual events in his cortically blind field but does not call this "vision." To learn whether he has low-level conscious visual sensations or whether instead he has gained conscious knowledge about, or access to, visual information that does not produce a conscious phenomenal sensation, we attempted to image process a stimulus s presented to the impaired field so that when the transformed stimulus T(s) was presented to the normal hemifield it would cause a sensation similar to that caused by s in the impaired field. While degradation of contrast, spatio-temporal filtering, contrast reversal, and addition of smear and random blobs all failed to match the response to a flashed bar s(f), moving textures of low contrast were accepted to match the response to a moving contrast-defined bar, s(m). Orientation and motion direction discrimination of the perceptually matched stimuli [s(m) and T(s(m))] was closely similar. We suggest that the existence of a satisfactory match indicates that GY has phenomenal vision.     

Strategies and problem representations: Implications for models of changing cognitive structure. Commentary on “Learning new problem-solving strategies leads to changes in problem representation” by M.W. Alibali,K.M. Ockuly and A.D. Fischer

In an accompanying study, Alibali et al. [Alibali, M. W., Ockuly, K. M., Fischer, A. D. (2009) Learning new problem-solving strategies leads to changes in problem representation. Cognitive Development, 24, 89–101.] present an important experimental result: introducing a new strategy can affect conceptual aspects of children's problem representation. In this commentary, we briefly explore implications of this finding for theories of the development of mathematical cognition and of the development of cognitive structures, more generally. We argue that Alibali et al.’s results, taken in the context of previous findings, imply that children's actions during mathematical problem solving affect their subsequent understanding of the problem. We further suggest that results such as these may be best accommodated by reconceptualizing how cognitive structures achieve both stability and flexibility.     

Love Will Do the Thing That's Right: Commentary on Paper by Stuart A. Pizer,Ph.D., A.B.P.P.

In this paper, hope is explored as a motivating force in analysis. To see the patient's and the analyst's hopes in terms of changes they expect the treatment to accomplish emphasizes the cognitive aspect of hope. While touching on these cognitive expectations, this paper focuses on the emotional, rather than the cognitive, function of hope in treatment. It addresses the question of how hope can inspire analytic participants to have the strength and stamina that analysis requires.     

Precuing benefits for color and location in a visual search task

Selection in multiple-item displays has been shown to benefit immensely from advance knowledge of target location (e.g., Henderson, 1991), leading to the suggestion that location is completely dominant in visual selective attention (e.g., Tsal & Lavie, 1993). Recently, direct selection by color has been reported in displays in which location does not vary (Vierck & Miller, 2005). The present experiment investigated the possibility of independent selection by color in a task with multiple-item displays and location precues in order to see whether color is also used for selection even when target location does vary and supposedly dominant location precues can be used. Precues provided independent information about the location and color of a target, and each type of precue could be either valid or invalid. The precues were followed by brief displays of six letters in six different colors, and participants had to discriminate the case of a prespecified target letter (e.g., R vs. r). Performance was much better when location cues were valid than when they were invalid, confirming the large advantage associated with valid advance location information. Performance was also better with valid advance color information, however, both when location cues were valid and when they were invalid. But these color benefits were dependent on the closeness of the colored letter to the cued location. Our results thus suggest that selection by color in a multiple-item display, where location and color information are independent from each other and equalized, is mediated by location information.     

Stroop dilution depends on the nature of the color carrier but not on its location

Stroop dilution is the reduction of the Stroop effect in the presence of a neutral word. It has been attributed to competition for attention between the color word and neutral word, to competition between all stimuli in the visual field, and to perceptual interference. Five experiments tested these accounts. The critical manipulation was whether the color to be named was carried by the color word or the neutral word. Neutral words diluted the Stroop effect when they were the color carrier, but not when the color word was the color carrier. We argue that Stroop dilution is due to attentional competition between the color word and neutral word, with priority given to the color carrier.     

Critical realism: distinguishing the psychological subjectivity of the analyst from epistemological subjectivism

To clarify the concepts of critical realism, subjectivity, and subjectivism, distinctions are drawn among ontological subjectivism, moral subjectivity, psychological subjectivity, and epistemological subjectivism. Psychological subjectivity, including the ongoing affective life of the analyst, is an essential aspect of the analyst's response to the patient, and may either facilitate or distort an adequate observation of transference and countertransference dynamics and of the psychic reality of the patient. Subjectivism in current psychoanalytic literature involves an argument that there is an "irreducible" subjectivity in the analyst, who is bound to see things from an incorrigibly personal point of view, such that there is no substantial subject-object differentiation between analyst and patient. Issues of authoritarianism in the analyst, or of pathological certainty, should not be confused with the issues of epistemological objectivism. The concept of critical realism or scientific objectivism includes the essential idea that there is no pure knowledge, no complete knowledge, that often evidence is insufficient for knowledge of some aspect of nature, and that care must be to taken understand what is sufficient knowledge in a given area, in this case clinical psychoanalysis. The question is raised whether "projective identification" makes the sorting out of "what comes from whom" impossible. It is argued that when free association is sufficiently facilitated, when there are enough corrections of the distortions wrought by transference and countertransference, when defenses are analyzed, and when sufficient subject-object differentiation is recovered, the analyst can get to know enough of the patient's psychic reality for the therapeutic and scientific purposes of psychoanalysis.     

Top-down contingencies in peripheral cuing: The roles of color and location

According to contingent-processing accounts, peripheral cuing effects are due to the cues' inadvertent selection for processing by control settings set up for targets (e.g., C. L. Folk, R. W. Remington, & J. C. Johnston, 1992). Consequently, cues similar to targets should have stronger effects than do dissimilar cues. In the current study, this prediction is confirmed for cue-target combinations similar or dissimilar in the static features of color (Experiments 1-3) and location (Experiment 4), even when both cues and targets share the dynamic feature of abrupt onset. Perceptual priming (Experiment 2) and reallocation of attention did not account for similar-dissimilar differences (Experiments 3 and 4). The results are best explained by top-down-contingent attentional effects of the similar cues. Implications for bottom-up accounts of peripheral cuing effects are discussed. ((c) 2003 APA, all rights reserved)