Learning to attend: a connectionist model of situated language comprehension

Evidence from numerous studies using the visual world paradigm has revealed both that spoken language can rapidly guide attention in a related visual scene and that scene information can immediately influence comprehension processes. These findings motivated the coordinated interplay account ( Knoeferle & Crocker, 2006 ) of situated comprehension, which claims that utterance-mediated attention crucially underlies this closely coordinated interaction of language and scene processing. We present a recurrent sigma-pi neural network that models the rapid use of scene information, exploiting an utterance-mediated attentional mechanism that directly instantiates the CIA. The model is shown to achieve high levels of performance (both with and without scene contexts), while also exhibiting hallmark behaviors of situated comprehension, such as incremental processing, anticipation of appropriate role fillers, as well as the immediate use, and priority, of depicted event information through the coordinated use of utterance-mediated attention to the scene.     

Taking Relationship Seriously in Psychotherapy: Radical Relationality

Psychologists who have historically focused on relationships have tended to underestimate the radical nature of human relationship. A “serious” or an ontological relationality would change the nature of psychotherapy. We describe this change in a discussion of two approaches to relationship, weak and strong relationality. We argue that weak relationality, the general conception of relationship in mainstream psychology, does not ultimately take even the therapeutic relationship seriously. We then discuss and illustrate ten practical implications that a strong relationality would have for psychotherapy.

Fluency Training a Writing Skill: Editing for Concision

The Psychological Record - The goal of this study was to design and evaluate fluency-based training units to help students eliminate inconcision. Participants first completed a 1.5-hr lesson on...     

Action Understanding in the Superior Temporal Sulcus Region

ABSTRACT— The posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) region plays an important role in the perception of social acts, although its full role has not been completely clarified. This functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment examined activity in the STS region as participants viewed actions that were congruent or incongruent with intentions established by a previous emotional context. Participants viewed an actress express either a positive or a negative emotion toward one of two objects and then subsequently pick up one of them. If the object that was picked up had received positive regard, or if the object that was not picked up had received negative regard, the action was congruent; otherwise, the action was incongruent. Activity in the right posterior STS region was sensitive to the congruency between the action and the actress's emotional expression (i.e., STS activity was greater on incongruent than on congruent trials). These findings suggest that the posterior STS represents not only biological motion, but also how another person's motion is related to his or her intentions.     

(Un)touchability: Disclosure and the Ethics of Loss

In this lyrical essay, I attempt to unravel the complexity behind new modes of HIV prevention and the rise of segregation among people of different antibody status in queer communities. In particular, I question the ease with which disclosure of HIV status is equated with safe sex. Because disclosure often reproduces the power dynamics of confession, I try to imagine an ethics of reciprocity in bearing witness. The essay is perforated by poetic fragments, the way all bodies are perforated, infected or not.     

Expert image analysts show enhanced visual processing in change detection

Expertise facilitates change detection performance, but the neural underpinnings of these benefits are unknown. Expert image analysts showed larger change-related ERP effects between about 100–200 msec after stimulus onset than did novices, which correlated with both accuracy and years of analysis experience. These results demonstrate that years of visual experience can induce fundamental changes in early visual processing which are related to change detection abilities.     

Illocutionary Force and Its Relation to Mood: Comparative Methodology Reconsidered

It is sometimes argued that the study of grammar is irrelevant or unimportant in the business of comparative philosophy, or that it ought to be avoided in favor of methods that presuppose a strongly pragmatic point of view. In this regard, some philosophers have expressed skepticism about whether facts about grammar have anything to offer in the adjudication of competing theories of interpretation or translation. This essay argues that a strongly pragmatic orientation in comparative philosophy invariably overlooks an important role that the study of grammar can play in shedding light on the nature of intention and communicative practice, and that an essential part of the methodology of comparative philosophy should involve a grammatical approach to interpretation and translation. These points are supported by a semantical analysis of passages from Confucius’ Analects that clarifies the relationship between illocutionary force and grammatical mood.     

Incremental Validity of Coping-oriented Marijuana Use Motives in the Prediction of Affect-based Psychological Vulnerability

The present investigation examined whether coping-oriented motives to use marijuana, as measured by the Marijuana Motives Measure (MMM; Simons et al. in J. Couns. Psychol. 45:265–273, 1998), were uniquely related to affect-based psychological vulnerability factors among marijuana users. Participants were 131 adult current marijuana users (72 women, M _age = 20.14, SD = 3.37 years). As hypothesized, after controlling for gender, cigarettes smoked per day, past 30-day marijuana use, total years of marijuana use, and alcohol consumption, coping motives were significantly and incrementally related to negative affect-based psychological vulnerability factors. No other marijuana use motives demonstrated a similar type of relationship to the dependent variables, providing a high degree of explanatory specificity. These data suggest that coping-oriented motives to use marijuana may be an important explanatory construct in better understanding marijuana and psychological vulnerability relations.