A developmental evaluation of the role of word shape in word recognition

Fourth- and seventh-grade children and college-age adults proofread passages typed either in lowercase or in all capital letters. Words were misspelled by deleting one of four letters, s, c, k, or p, that have similar features in lowercase and uppercase. Proofreading errors decreased with age and increasing reading ability, but all of the subjects were sensitive to changes in word shape--they missed more words with deletions of s or c than k or p in the lowercase passage but not in the all-capitals passage. These findings indicate that word shape is an important variable in recognizing familiar words, even for young readers.     

The role of inhibition in a spreading-activation model of language production. II. The simulational perspective

This is the second part of a project aimed at establishing the role of lateral inhibition in spreading-activation models of language production. While the first part (Berg &; Schade, 1992) reviewed the psycholinguistic evidence for inhibition and established that indeed inhibition takes place, this paper addresses the issue from the implementational perspective. A series of computer simulations are reported in which spreading-activation models with or without inhibition are directly contrasted. The performance of the competing models is evaluated against two sets of criteria. On the more technical side, the “heat death” and the selection problems have to be solved. That is, the target must have a high and the nontarget units a low level of activation. Additionally, there are certain empirical effects from the production literature which may serve as test cases for deciding between the rival models. The results of the simulations indicate that only the inhibition-based model proves capable of meeting all challenges. All inhibitionless variants fail in one or more respects. It is further shown that the need for the inhibitory component increases with the size of the processing network and that one well-known production model can do without lateral inhibition only at the expense of introducing a concept which resembles inhibition in its effect but cannot replace it.     

The tunnel effect,Gibson's perception theory,and reflective seeing

Summary Subjects can have continuous visual experience of an object's movement across a display though the movement's middle phase takes place behind an opaque screen. The present article considers explanatory issues pertaining to this so-called, tunnel effect, with special reference to Gibson' s perception theory and the visual activity that I have been calling reflective seeing. Among the issues discussed are the following. (a) In the tunnel experiments, I suggest, there occur both persisting perception, as Michotte held, and persistence perception, as Gibson held. The subjects pick up stimulus information that allows visually experiencing the object's going out of sight at one edge of the screen and coming back into sight at another edge of the screen; the subjects have visual experience of the continued existence and movement of the object while it is out of sight. Moreover, persistence of perceptual experience is involved: when the object goes out of sight, the subjects' visual experience of its movement goes on. (b) I also argue that the tunnel effect is a phenomenon of both straightforward and reflective seeing. Adopting a phenomenal attitude, as one does when reporting one's perceptual experience, one still sees movement taking place on the other side of the screen, as one does in straightforward seeing. However, whereas straightforward seeing does not give inner awareness of visual experience, the subjects in the tunnel experiments report visually experiencing the object's movement while also visually experiencing the opaque screen in front of it as opaque. I argue that these reports, and those about the object's going out of and coming back into sight, must be based on the kind of visual experience that is part and product of reflective seeing.     

An exploratory study of videotapes of long-term group psychotherapy of outpatients with major and chronic mental illness

This study explored patterns emerging in videotaped sessions of group psychotherapy with seven outpatients of a large mental health facility. The 22 sessions spanned the 12th to 27th months of the group's existence. Group members had long histories (25–50 years) of symptoms characteristic of schizophrenia. Each session was rated on the Group Environment Scale. One session from a group in its earlier stages was also rated on the same instrument to give some indication of baseline patterns. Analyses of changes across the 15 months were not statistically significant. However, some GES subscales, including Cohesion, Independence, and Self-Discovery, showed relatively high mean levels across the 15-month period. These elevations are discussed as suggesting the codevelopment of orientations that have sometimes been viewed as incompatible and unattainable for schizophrenics. Interpreted clinically, the GES patterns help to elaborate recent findings about the relatively good success of long-term group therapy with such populations. The study, although merely suggestive, illustrates the potential for gleaning solid and clinically useful data from group psychotherapy research.The authors would like to thank Drs. Jill Rierdan, Nina Fieldsteel, Joseph Christy, and an anonymous reviewer for their suggestions, Kendra Bryant for serving as the reliability rater, and Janet Eltinge for her skilled videotaping.     

Radikaler Konstruktivismus und Konstruktionismus

Both radical constructivism and constructionism are naturalized approaches to epistemology. They try to fertilize results from biology and psychology for epistemological aims. They both refuse epistemological realism as unsustainable metaphysics. This raises the problem of the range of the naturalistic approach to epistemology. Constructivism, in both forms, turns out to be untenable because it runs in an aporia: it must borrow from realism either, or it must qualify its own position as a metaphysical one. But therewith, constructivism would be blamed to be metaphysical itself.     

Visually controlled matching of pattern movement

Utrecht Biophysics Research Institute, Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands Subjects were asked to match the speeds of two moving random-dot patterns seen through circular apertures. The speed of one pattern that moved horizontally toward the right of a computer screen changed continuously. The speed of this pattern represented the target. It was to be matched with the speed of the second pattern, which moved in the opposite direction. The subject controlled the speed of the second pattern by means of an isometric joystick. The distance between the apertures on the screen as well as the subject’s distance from the screen served as experimental parameters. In this way, the effects of both spatialand temporal transients of pattern speed on human tracking performance were studied. To avoid anticipation by the subject, the amplitude and the frequency of the target pattern speed changed pseudorandomly. The accuracy with which the subject performed the matching task was influenced by the mean pattern speed and the parameters of the visual field. Within lower velocity ranges, the subject’s sensitivity to the instantaneous speed differences varied according to Weber’s law. The cross-correlation of the velocity time courses decreased when the mean speed of the target pattern was increased. Two stimulus parameters had a strong influence on the modulation of the correlation value: (1) the angular size of the stimulus on the retina and (2) the retinal eccentricity of the stimulus.     

Initial experiences with cognitive therapy of schizophrenic patients

Based on earlier experiences of various groups of authors, we developed and modified a programme of cognitive therapy for schizophrenic patients. The aim of the application of the therapeutic programme to subacute patients was to decrease subjectively perceptible basic disorders and to improve the functions of performance. The present results and experiences with 4 groups consisting of a total of 31 patients encourage us to continue applying cognitive procedures of therapy. Problems of the ascertainment of measuring values and fundamental questions of therapeutic efficacy are discussed.     

The psychoanalytic narrative. On the problem of objectivity

The author seeks to develop a narrative conceptualization of psychoanalytic treatment. Its nucleus is the causal explanation of life history and illness. She criticizes the hermeneutic approach to interpretation that is chiefly concerned with the constitution of life history as meaningful with no consideration given at times to objective truth.