Imagery and meaning,the cognitive science connection

Taking the integrated viewpoints of causal theory of reference, cognitive science and the notion of correspondence principles from physics, this paper addresses the problems of creativity, the nature of visual imagery and the manner in which science progresses.     

Syntactic and semantic processes in aphasic deficits: The availability of prepositions

The availability of a specific category of closed class items (prepositions) was examined in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia. The role of prepositions was varied (syntactic/semantic) in two tasks: one requiring production of prepositions and the other acceptability judgments. Overall, it was easier to perform the acceptability task than to produce the target item. In the judgment task, Wernicke's aphasics more accurately determined the acceptability of prepositions in their syntactic role than in their semantic role, but Broca's aphasics showed no such difference. In the production task, Wernicke's aphasics again were more likely to produce prepositions which were in a primarily syntactic role. Broca's aphasics, however, failed to produce such syntactically based prepositions. The results suggest that the availability of a given closed class vocabulary form is not merely a function of its class membership but also of its functional role, and this fact serves to distinguish aspects of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics' deficit.     

Discrete versus continuous stage models of human information processing: in search of partial output

This article introduces a new technique designed to study the flow of information through processing stages in choice reaction time tasks. The technique was designed to determine whether response preparation can begin before stimulus identification is complete ("continuous" models), or if a stimulus must be fully identified prior to any response activation ("discrete" models). To control the information available at various times during stimulus identification, some relevant stimulus characteristics were made easy to discriminate and some were made hard to discriminate. The experimental strategy was to look for effects of partial output based on information conveyed by characteristics that were easy to discriminate. The technique capitalized on the fact, demonstrated in Experiment 1, that preparation of two response fingers on the same hand is more effective than preparation of two response fingers on different hands. The usefulness of partial output was varied by manipulating the assignments of stimuli to responses. For some mappings partial information could contribute to effective response preparation because the responses consistent with partial information were assigned to fingers on the same hand. For other mappings partial information could not contribute to effective response preparation because the responses consistent with partial information were assigned to fingers of different hands. Performance differences between these mappings were considered evidence that partial information about a stimulus was transmitted to response activation processes before the stimulus was uniquely identified, and thus were considered evidence against discrete transmission of information about the stimulus as a whole. A variety of stimulus sets were studied; the results suggest that information is transmitted discretely with respect to stimulus codes, although distinct codes activated by a single stimulus may be transmitted at different times.     

In defense of monotheistic father religion

Many questions are currently being raised, by women especially, regarding the religious, social, and psychological effects of the emphasis on God as father in Western religion. Viewed in the light of key insights from developmental psychoanalysis, patriarchal monotheism does indeed seem to confront us with a dilemma. However, a resolution of this dilemma does not appear to lie in a move toward androgyny or matriarchy. Evaluated from the point of view of its overall capacity to mediate a meaningful, unified, personal religious reality to both sexes, monotheistic father religion is still the preferable ultimate symbolic configuration.