How young children and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) perceive objects in a 2D display: putting an assumption to the test

Object recognition research is typically conducted using 2D stimuli in lieu of 3D objects. This study investigated the amount and complexity of knowledge gained from 2D stimuli in adult chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and young children (aged 3 and 4 years) using a titrated series of cross-dimensional search tasks. Results indicate that 3-year-old children utilize a response rule guided by local features to solve cross-dimensional tasks. Four-year-old toddlers and adult chimpanzees use information about object form and compositional structure from a 2D image to guide their search in three dimensions. Findings have specific implications to research conducted in object recognition/perception and broad relevance to all areas of research and daily living that incorporate 2D displays.     

Neuronal oscillations and visual amplification of speech

It is widely recognized that viewing a speaker's face enhances vocal communication, although the neural substrates of this phenomenon remain unknown. We propose that the enhancement effect uses the ongoing oscillatory activity of local neuronal ensembles in the primary auditory cortex. Neuronal oscillations reflect rhythmic shifting of neuronal ensembles between high and low excitability states. Our hypothesis holds that oscillations are 'predictively' modulated by visual input, so that related auditory input arrives during a high excitability phase and is thus amplified. We discuss the anatomical substrates and key timing parameters that enable and constrain this effect. Our hypothesis makes testable predictions for future studies and emphasizes the idea that 'background' oscillatory activity is instrumental to cortical sensory processing.     

Aspects of psychoanalytic theory: drives, defense, and the pleasure-unpleasure principle

Freud explained certain fundamentally important aspects of mental motivation by assuming the existence of two drives, one libidinal and the other aggressive/destructive. Elements of this theory that seem invalid are identified and discussed, and revisions are proposed that appear to have more validity and greater clinical usefulness.     

Trouble crossing the bridge: altered interhemispheric communication of emotional images in anxiety

Worry is thought to involve a strategy of cognitive avoidance, in which internal verbalization acts to suppress threatening emotional imagery. This study tested the hypothesis that worry-prone individuals would exhibit patterns of between-hemisphere communication that reflect cognitive avoidance. Specifically, the hypothesis predicted slower transfer of threatening images from the left to the right hemisphere among worriers. Event-related potential (ERP) measures of interhemispheric transfer time supported this prediction. Left-to-right hemisphere transfer times for angry faces were relatively slower for individuals scoring high in self-reported worry compared with those scoring low, whereas transfer of happy and neutral faces did not differ between groups. These results suggest that altered interhemispheric communication may constitute one mechanism of cognitive avoidance in worry.     

The roles of thought suppression and metacognitive beliefs in proneness to auditory verbal hallucinations in a non-clinical sample

In a non-clinical sample (N = 751), we investigated relations among two subscales (self-reported intrusiveness of unwanted thoughts and thought suppression) of the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI), metacognitive beliefs, and proneness to auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs). Both subscales of the WBSI were found to be related to AVH-proneness and strongly positively related to metacognitive beliefs about the uncontrollability and danger of thoughts. Regression analyses were used to test models of the relations among AVH-proneness and a range of metacognitive beliefs. When the WBSI subscale relating to the self-reported intrusiveness of unwanted thoughts was controlled for, the metacognitive style that was the strongest predictor of AVH-proneness was cognitive self-consciousness. Cognitive confidence and beliefs about the uncontrollability of thoughts were also significant predictors of AVH-proneness. These findings are used to revise existing models of the relations between metacognitive beliefs and AVHs. Implications for the management of AVHs are discussed.     

STEREOTYPE THREAT AND THE GENDER GAP IN POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE

Men tend to achieve higher response accuracy than women on surveys of political knowledge. We investigated the possibility that this performance gap is moderated by factors that render the communicative context of a survey intellectually threatening to women and thereby induce stereotype threat. In a telephone survey of college students' political knowledge, we manipulated two factors of the survey context: the alleged diagnosticity of the question set (i.e., whether it was portrayed as being sensitive to potential gender differences) and the gender of the interviewer. Consistent with previous studies of political knowledge, men scored higher than women overall. However, as predicted, this difference was reliably moderated by the manipulated factors. Women's scores were not reliably different from men's when the survey was portrayed as nondiagnostic and when women were interviewed by female interviewers. Diagnosticity and interviewer gender had no effects on men's scores. Consistent with previous research on stereotype threat, these results suggest that explicit and implicit cues reminding women of the possibility that they might confirm a negative gender stereotype can impair their retrieval of political knowledge.     

Klein and Lacan Meet 21st Century Schizoid Man: Fairy Stories for the Modern Era

Melanie Klein invited us into the phenomenology of the schizoid dilemma through her depictions of the paranoid?schizoid position. By inserting his recursive arrows, Bion extended this conceptualization, showing us the folly of believing that we can ever entirely move beyond the frightening fantasies and realities of social exclusion and isolation. The 21st century has brought, along with the explosion of technology, an expulsion from the social order of many children who have found refuge from isolation and humiliation in the more accessible and less terrifying world of media and technological invention. What may look like narcissism can mask a terrible underlying schizoid failure to enter into the human race. This is the realm of fantasy run amok, where desire becomes alien and alienated such that one is haunted and hunted down by its very possibility. In this universe, conceptualizations from Klein, Bion, and Lacan help us to locate the individual who has become caught in a massive psychic retreat such that there is no subject because there are no objects. To illustrate, I describe my work with a young man who is living in a terrible “zombie zone” where people are not real and therefore are incomprehensible and terribly dangerous. The poignancy of his dilemma is heartbreaking. Perhaps that is one lesson we can still take from our old fairy tales: when one’s heart can be broken by another’s plight, then comes the possibility of a healing, an entry through that piercing of what had been impenetrable.     

An Odd Coupling: Nietzsche and W.E.B. Du Bois on 21st Century Philosophy of Education

Studies in Philosophy and Education - This essay contrasts Nietzsche’s remarks on elite education with W.E.B. Du Bois’ demand for democratized education. The essay takes their remarks...     

The perception of space and form recognition in a simulated environment: the case of minimalist sensory-substitution devices

Whenever we explore a simulated environment, the sensorimotor interactions that underlie our perception of space may be modified. We investigated the conditions under which it is possible to acquire the mastery of new sensorimotor laws and thereby to infer new perceptual spaces. A computer interface, based on the principles of minimalist sensory-substitution devices, was designed to enable different possible links between a user's actions (manipulation of a mouse and/or keys of a keyboard) and the resulting pattern of sensory stimulation (visual or auditory) to be established. The interface generated an all-or-none stimulus whose activation varied as a function of the participant's exploration of a hidden form. In this study we addressed the following questions: What are the conditions necessary for participants to understand their actions as constituting a displacement in a simulated space? What are the conditions required for participants to conceive of sensations as originating from the encounter with an object situated in this space? Finally, what are the conditions required for participants to recognise forms within this space? The results of the two experiments reported here show that, under certain conditions, participants can interpret the new sensorimotor laws as movements in a new perceptual space and can recognise simple geometric forms, and that this occurs no matter whether the sensory stimulation is presented in the visual or auditory modality.     

Visual dominance and attention: the Colavita effect revisited

Under many conditions, humans display a robust tendency to rely more on visual information than on other forms of sensory information. Colavita (1974) illustrated this visual dominance effect by showing that naive observers typically fail to respond to clearly suprathreshold tones if these are presented simultaneously with a visual target flash. In the present study, we demonstrate that visual dominance influences performance under more complex stimulation conditions and address the role played by attention in mediating this effect. In Experiment 1, we show the Colavita effect in the simple speeded detection of line drawings and naturalistic sounds, whereas in Experiment 2 we demonstrate visual dominance when the task targets (auditory, visual, or bimodal combinations) are embedded among continuous streams of irrelevant distractors. In Experiments 3-5, we address the consequences of varying the probability of occurrence of targets in each sensory modality. In Experiment 6, we further investigate the role played by attention on visual dominance by manipulating perceptual load in either the visual or the auditory modality. Our results demonstrate that selective attention to a particular sensory modality can modulate--although not completely reverse--visual dominance as illustrated by the Colavita effect.