Pragmatism and Developmentalism in Brazilian Educational Thought in the 1950s/1960

This article proposes to analyse some aspects of the appropriation of New School thinking in Brazil, particularly Deweyan pragmatism, in the 1950s and 1960s. The analysis is based on the assumption that the developmentalist ideology that punctuated the debate on the economic, political and social restructuring of the country in these two decades constituted fertile ground for the return and expansion of pragmatist thinking amongst Brazilian educators, articulating itself, sometimes in contradictory ways, with this ideology. The focus of the analysis will be on the writings of the group of educators which circulated around the figure of Anísio Teixeira, at the time director of the National Institute for Pedagogic Studies (INEP), an organ linked to the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC), which set itself the task of producing research that would support public policy in the field of education, as well as constituting itself as a center for teacher education and the stimulus and development of innovative experiences in the public school system. The appropriation of Deweyan pragmatism, in this context, had a triple perspective: pragmatism as scientific method, implying a specific conception of science, particularly the social sciences, with emphasis on the application of scientific knowledge in the solution of practical problems; as a way of democratic life; and as a synonym for experimentalism, in the sphere of schooling.     

Linking inhibition to activation in the control of task sequences

Inhibition of abandoned tasks in task switching can be inferred when a worse performance is found withn− 2 task repetitions (ABA sequences) than with nonrepetitions (CBA sequences). Recent evidence has shown that this inhibition effect decreases with long intertrial intervals (i.e., response-cue intervals, RCIs). Two alternatives have been proposed to account for this decrease. One alternative attributes the observed decrease to the decay of inhibition itself. The other alternative proposes that decay of the activation of competing tasks reduces the interference and leads to less inhibition. To decide between these alternatives, we manipulated RCI trialwise. The results favor the decay-of-activation account as an explanation for the decreased inhibition effect. This links the amount of inhibition to the activation level of the competing tasks, whereas evidence for the decay of inhibition remains weak.     

Gender bias in fame judgments: Implicit gender stereotyping or matching study phase fame?

Familiarized names are falsely judgedfamous more often than nonfamiliarized names. Banaji and Greenwald (1995) demonstrated a gender bias in thisfalse fame effect, with the effect being larger for male than for female names. This effect was interpreted as reflecting the operation of a gender stereotype. However, the famous male names were, in fact, better known than the famous female names. Thus, the presence of more famous male names during study may have contributed to the observed male-famous association. If so, there should be no gender bias if the studied famous male and female names are equally famous, and a reversed gender bias should emerge if the famous female names are more famous than the male names. In two experiments, these predictions were corroborated. A “classical” gender bias was found only when the famous males were more famous than the famous females. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the gender bias in fame judgments, rather than showing implicit gender stereotyping in the sense of a transsituational judgment bias, reflects the fact that, in test, participants select a proportion of fame judgments to male and female names so that it matches the relative degree of fame of male and female names encountered during study.     

Development of attentional and oculomotor control

The present study was conducted to examine the development of attentional and oculomotor control. More specifically, the authors were interested in the development of the ability to inhibit an incorrect but prepotent response to a salient distractor. Participants, who ranged in age from 8 to 25 years, performed 3 different eye movement tasks: a prosaccade, an antisaccade, and an oculomotor capture task. The time required to initiate a saccade decreased with age across all 3 tasks. Consistent with previous reports, accuracy was relatively age invariant in the prosaccade task. Performance improved with age, asymptoting at 16 years in the antisaccade task. It is interesting to note that despite the superficial similarity of the antisaccade and oculomotor capture tasks, performance was relatively age invariant in the latter. These results are discussed in terms of developmental differences in the interaction of goal-directed and stimulus-driven processes in the control of attention and action.     

Treatment of panic disorder: live therapy vs. self-help via the Internet

A randomized trial was conducted comparing 10 individual weekly sessions of cognitive behaviour therapy for panic disorder (PD) with or without agoraphobia with a 10-module self-help program on the Internet. After confirming the PD diagnosis with an in-person structured clinical interview (SCID) 49 participants were randomized. Overall, the results suggest that Internet-administered self-help plus minimal therapist contact via e-mail can be equally effective as traditional individual cognitive behaviour therapy. Composite within-group effect sizes were high in both groups, while the between-group effect size was small (Cohen's d=16). One-year follow-up confirmed the results, with a within-group effect size of Cohen's d=0.80 for the Internet group and d=0.93 for the live group. The results from this study generally provide evidence to support the continued use and development of Internet-distributed self-help programs.     

Temporal ventriloquism: sound modulates the flash-lag effect

A sound presented in close temporal proximity to a visual stimulus can alter the perceived temporal dimensions of the visual stimulus (temporal ventriloquism). In this article, the authors demonstrate temporal ventriloquism in the flash-lag effect (FLE), a visual illusion in which a flash appears to lag relative to a moving object. In Experiment 1, the magnitude and the variability of the FLE were reduced, relative to a silent condition, when a noise burst was synchronized with the flash. In Experiment 2, the sound was presented before, at, or after the flash (+/- approximately 100 ms), and the size of the FLE varied linearly with the delay of the sound. These findings demonstrate that an isolated sound can sharpen the temporal boundaries of a flash and attract its temporal occurrence.     

Destruktivität in Paarbeziehungen

Quarreling couples caught in destructive patterns of communication often cause difficult situations during couple therapy. Such communication patterns range from pure verbal humiliation and insults up to outbursts of violence. In order to remain capable of therapy, psychotherapists must know the underlying mechanisms that provoke and maintain the destructive viscious circles. Moreover, they must have at their disposal the required explanatory ideas and practical intervention strategies for de-escalation and interruption of these destructive patterns.     

Effect of visual experience on face processing: a developmental study of inversion and non-native effects

In adults, three phenomena are taken to demonstrate an experience effect on face recognition: an inversion effect, a non-native face effect (so-called 'other-race' effect) and their interaction. It is crucial for our understanding of the developmental perception mechanisms of object processing to discover when these effects are present in childhood. Three- to 5-year-old Caucasian children (N = 64) were asked to recognize upright and inverted Caucasian and Asian faces. Recognition was tested with a forced-choice procedure. Overall performance improved with age. However, there was an interaction between the inversion and non-native effects that did not change with age between ages 3 and 5: (a) the inversion effect with native (Caucasian) faces was larger than with non-native (Asian) faces, and (b) upright native faces were recognized better than upright non-native faces. These results show that face orientation and morphology constrain face processing in 3- to 5-year-olds. The first 3 years of life during which the brain and the environment interact are sufficient to build a face-processing system that constrains recognition.     

Valence of distractor words increases the effects of irrelevant speech on serial recall

Participants memorized target words in silence or while ignoring neutral or valent (positive or negative) distractor words that could be either possessor-relevant or other-relevant. Distractor words impaired recall performance, but valent distractor words caused more disruption than neutral distractors, and negative distractors caused more disruption than positive distractors. The results are problematic for explanations of the irrelevant speech effect within working memory models that do not specify an explicit role of attention in the maintenance of information for immediate serial recall.     

Processing of temporal information: Evidence from eye movements

In two experiments, we recorded eye movements to study how readers monitor temporal order information contained in narrative texts. Participants read short texts containing critical temporal information in the sixth sentence, which could be either consistent or inconsistent with temporal order information given in the second sentence. In Experiment 1, inconsistent sentences yielded more regressions to the second sentence and longer refixations of it. In Experiment 2, this pattern of eye movements was shown only by readers who noticed the inconsistency and were able to report it. Theoretical and methodological implications of the results for research on text comprehension are discussed.