On the Nature of Public and Private Self-Consciousness

ABSTRACT Wicklund and Gollwitzer raise a number of questions concerning the explanatory value of self-consciousness as a trait and the validity of the distinction between public and private self-consciousness These questions are based on strawperson arguments, the issues they attack are largely of their own creation and bear little relation to the original authors' own positions My response attempts to point out their false assumptions concerning the nature of self-attentional traits, to examine some of the research, much of which they have ignored or misrepresented, which supports the public-private self-consciousness distinction, and to question Wicklund and Gollwitzer's tendency to regard their own theory as some sort of standard against which others must be judged, apparently unaware of the possibility that their own conceptions may be flawed     

The effect of a prior presentation on temporal judgments in a perceptual identification task

Subjects read aloud words presented once at the rate of one per second. A perceptual identification task, involving 30- or 50-msec presentations, followed. Some of the words presented for identification had been read previously; others were new. After each presentation, in addition to identifying the word, the subjects judged its duration. The data indicate that a single presentation of a word affects its later perception, as revealed by enhanced perceptual identification, longer duration judgments, and better temporal discrimination. A second experiment showed that a single presentation influenced duration judgments even when identification was not required. The final experiment addressed the issue of what is preserved in memory from a prior presentation. The results from the three experiments indicate that duration judgments provide a valuable dependent measure of memory in the perceptual identification task and support the misattribution hypothesis: A prior presentation enhances perceptual identification, and this increase in relative perceptual fluency is incorrectly attributed to a longer presentation duration.     

A mind to go out of: reflections on primary and secondary consciousness

Dreaming and waking are two brain-mind states, which are characterized by shared and differentiated properties at the levels of brain and consciousness. As part of our effort to capitalize on a comparison of these two states we have applied Edelman's distinction between primary and secondary consciousness, which we link to dreaming and waking respectively. In this paper we examine the implications of this contrastive analysis for theories of mental illness. We conclude that while dreaming is an almost perfect model of organic psychosis, it is less so for schizophrenia and major affective disorder where it must serve a primarily heuristic role helping us to model hallucinations and delusions but not the diseases themselves.     

Duration discrimination of brief light flashes

The data from four experiments indicate that when Os discriminate between light flashes of different durations, for durations for which Bloch’s law has been shown to hold, their discriminations are frequently made on the temporal information available in the flashes rather than on their apparent brightness. A model for duration discrimination which specifies that discriminability depends only on the difference in duration between the two brief flashes, and is independent of their durations, is presented and applied to the data.     

Developmental change and the multidimensional cognitive system

The cognitive system is a multidimensional, hierarchically-structured arrangement of cognitive dimensions functionally organized into three subsystems: perceiving, conceptualizing, and symbolizing. Ontogenetic change in these subsystems is described using theoretical concepts from both multivariate developmental psychology and systems theory. Both quantitative and qualitative changes in cognitive dimensions are discussed, including a synthesis of relevant empirical research. The Gompertz equation is used to describe the general form of quantitative change throughout the life-span. The pattern oo quantitative development involves growth, stability, and decline. The pattern of qualitative development, or shifts in structural organization, also invloves three periods: divergence, parallelism, and paraller-convergence. Thus, the overall quantitative-qualitative synthesis reveals a three-phase sequence of cognitive development: divergent growth (childhood- adolescence), parallel stability (adulthood), and parallel-convergent decline (old age).     

Influences of cognitive complexity on the dimensions underlying perceptions of the work environment

The literature on cognitive processes suggests that individuals differ in the dimensions they use to describe the work environment and thus the behavioral implications they attach to characteristics of that environment. Using the technique described by Bem and Allen (1974), navy enlisted personnel were separated into subgroups with high, medium, and low cognitive complexity scores. Responses about perceived characteristics of the work environment produced six components for the high complexity group versus four for the low group. Questions about supervisor behaviors, role characteristics, and work group interactions yielded similar dimensions for all groups, although differences were found for responses about macroorganizational characteristics. Significant but low relationships were found between complexity scores and global indices of job performance.This article is Report Number 79-2, supported by Naval Medical Research and Development Command, Department of the Navy, under Research Work Unit MF58.524.022-0011. The views presented are those of the authors. No endorsement by the Department of the Navy has been given or should be inferred.