Awakening from Descartes' nightmare: On the love of ambiguity in phenomenological approaches to education

This paper is an exploration of the Cartesian paradigms of clarity and univocity and how these inform contemporary educational theory and practice. Phenomenology is discussed as a way of disrupting Descartes' visions of clarity and distinctness as paradigms of knowledge and as a return of inquiry to life as it is actually lived. Analogical discourse is examined as a way of giving a voice to this sort of inquiry. Heidegger's notions of inquiry as obedience and thanksgiving are discussed.     

Sex differences in visual-spatial ability: The role of performance factors

Two studies were designed to explore the role of performance factors as sources of the frequently noted higher male scores on visual-spatial ability tests. In the first study, the mental rotations test (MRT) was administered to male and female college students of equally high quantitative ability (based on SAT math scores). Although males had significantly more correct responses on the test than did females, their advantage was eliminated when the ratio of correct responses to items attempted was used as the dependent measure. In the second study, the same test was administered to new groups of male and female college students. In this sample, the males had significantly higher SAT math scores. The MRT was administered under standard, timed conditions and under untimed conditions. Both raw and ratio scores were calculated. With SAT math score as the covariate, analyses of covariance indicated that males demonstrated higher performance in the timed, raw-score condition but not in the untimed or in the ratio-score conditions. The theoretical and social policy implications of these studies are discussed.     

Memorabeatlia: A naturalistic study of long-term memory

Seventy-six undergraduates were given the titles and first lines of Beatles' songs and asked to recall the songs. Seven hundred and four different undergraduates were cued with one line from each of 25 Beatles' songs and asked to recall the title. The probability of recalling a line was best predicted by the number of times a line was repeated in the song and how early the line first appeared in the song. The probability of cuing to the title was best predicted by whether the line shared words with the title. Although the subjects recalled only 21% of the lines, there were very few errors in recall, and the errors rarely violated the rhythmic, poetic, or thematic constraints of the songs. Acting together, these constraints can account for the near verbatim recall observed. Fourteen subjects, who transcribed one song, made fewer and different errors than the subjects who had recalled the song, indicating that the errors in recall were not primarily the result of errors in encoding.     

Naming consistency in Alzheimer''s disease

Although lexical semantic deficits are postulated to play a prominent role in the anomia of Alzheimer's disease, it is unclear whether the primary disturbance is one of lexical access or one of lexical semantic loss. Response consistency on a naming task is one means of evaluating the underlying source of naming impairment. Access dysfunction usually implies variable word-finding difficulty, while a theory of lexical loss predicts that many word names would be consistently unavailable. Nineteen Alzheimer's disease patients were administered a visual confrontation naming task (the Boston Naming Test) on two occasions 6 months apart. Eighty percent of errors occurred consistently at both times; only 20% of errors occurred on only one occasion. Response consistency occurred significantly more often than expected under the assumption of no response consistency. Findings support the hypothesis that anomia in Alzheimer's disease is in part due to a loss of lexical semantic information.     

The use of heuristic strategies in the interpretation of pronouns

The aim of the two experiments reported here was to distinguish between two heuristic strategies that have been proposed to account for the assignment of pronouns: the subject assignment strategy and the parallel function strategy. According to the subject assignment strategy, a pronoun is assigned to a preceding subject noun phrase, whereas according to the parallel function strategy, a pronoun is assigned to a previous noun phrase in the same grammatical position as the pronoun. These two strategies were tested by examining the interpretation of single object pronouns, first in a reading task and second in an assignment task. In both experiments, there was a strong preference for assigning an object pronoun to the preceding subject noun phrase, thus supporting the subject assignment strategy. However, this was only the case for pronouns that were linguistically ambiguous. When assignment was constrained by gender, there was no effect of either strategy. It is suggested that heuristic strategies are only used in the absence of other strong cues to assignment.     

Negatively biased recall in children with self-reported symptoms of depression

This study investigated differences in depressed and nondepressed children's recall of positively and negatively reinforced behavior. Twenty-six children with self-reported symptoms of depression in the fourth through sixth grades were compared with a matched sample of 26 nondepressed children to determine if there was a negative bias in depressed children's recall. Subjects first generated guesses of the most common associations to each of a series of 40 words. Later, when compared with their nondepressed peers, the children with depressive symptomology were less accurate in recalling which words they had answered correctly and remembered fewer of their own correct responses. They also did more poorly when asked to recall the correct answers that had been provided by the investigator. The two groups did not differ, however, in their recall of which items had been answered incorrectly or in their recall of their previous wrong responses. These results suggest that children with self-reported depressive symptomology do not remember negative experiences more than do nondepressed children; rather, they recall positive experiences less well. Selective forgetting of positively reinforced behavior could be a serious handicap for depressed children in school. It could also play an important role in the maintenance and perhaps even the etiology of depressive symptomatology in children.We wish to thank Bruce Compas for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Image statistics and the perception of apparent motion

The short- and long-range apparent motion processes are discussed in terms of the statistical properties of images. It is argued that the short-range process, exemplified by the random-dot kinematogram, is primarily sensitive to the dipole statistics, whereas the long-range process, exemplified by illusory occlusion, is treated by the visual system primarily in terms of the tripole and higher statistical correlation functions. The studies incorporate the balanced dot, which is a unique stimulus element that permits high pass filtering while preserving detailed positional information. Low spatial frequencies are shown to be critical for texture segregation in random-dot kinematograms, independent of the grain size or number density of texture elements. Illusory path perception in the long-range process is shown not to require low spatial frequencies, but is sensitive rather to global temporal phase coherency. These results are interpreted in terms of the respective roles of the power and phase spectra in perceptual organization. The construction of balanced dots is discussed in detail.     

Cognition and metacognition at extreme altitudes on Mount Everest

The FACTRETRIEVAL2 test battery, which assesses both retrieval of general information from memory and metacognition about that retrieval, was administered to people before and after a recent expedition to Mount Everest and at extreme altitudes above 6,400 m (higher than any mountain in North America or Europe). The major findings were as follows: First, the same extreme altitudes already known to impair learning did not affect either accuracy or latency of retrieval, and this robustness of retrieval occurred for both recall and forced-choice recognition. Second, extreme altitude did affect metacognition: The climbers showed a decline in their feeling of knowing both while at extreme altitude and after returning to Kathmandu (i.e., both an effect and an aftereffect of extreme altitude). Third, extreme altitude had different effects than alcohol intoxication (previously assessed by Nelson. McSpadden, Fromme, & Marlatt, 1986). Alcohol intoxication affected retrieval without affecting metacognition, whereas extreme altitude affected metacognition without affecting retrieval; this different pattern for extreme altitude versus alcohol intoxication implies that (a) hypoxia does not always yield the same outcome as alcohol intoxication and (b) neither retrieval nor metacognition is strictly more sensitive than the other for detecting changes in independent variables.     

Predicate-argument structure as a link between linguistic and nonlinguistic representations

We present a study wherein a severe Broca's aphasic patient was trained to learn symbols representing both pure transitive and dative predicates--predicates differing in argument structure--in a visually based artificial language (c-ViC). We found a decrease in performance when two symbols, rather than one, were used to depict these "verbs." However, this decrease in performance was more pronounced for symbols representing pure transitive verbs--those that allow only one argument structure--than for symbols representing dative verbs--those that allow two different argument structures. Also, dative "verbs" yielded better performance when they were inserted in more complex, three-argument "sentences" than when they were inserted in two-argument "sentences." The opposite pattern was found for pure transitives. These results are discussed in terms of our claim that argument structure serves as a point of connection between linguistic information and non-linguistic visual information and in terms of the possibility that argument structure entries are shaped by the form in which visual information is parsed.