The artist speaks. Sigmund Koch on aesthetics and creative work

Sigmund Koch is widely recognized as a prime mover of the radical transformation of psychology from a discipline dominated by behaviorism and related views to a multivalenced set of inquiries into human mentality and functioning. It is less widely remarked that Koch saw aesthetic endeavors as standing at the center of human life and thus warranting psychologists' closest attention. Koch's interest in aesthetics and art making is evident in his writings from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s on different states of mind, the notion of value properties, and the theory of definition. Koch's study of creative work in the latter decades of his life with artists of high accomplishment was guided by a set of methodological signposts for the study of creative work, contains formulations relevant to contemporary psychoaesthetics, and generates significant questions for further inquiry.     

Transient time and the persistence of the concrete

Conclusion I suggest that Carter and Hestevold's arguments for L1 and L2 can be given a chance to succeed if (i) everywhere in them that we find an occurrence of the thesis Transient Time we replace it with an occurrence of Presentism, and (ii) everywhere in them that we find an occurrence of the thesis Static Time we replace it with an occurrence of Presentism's denial. I'm fairly confident that their arguments for L1 would succeed if these changes were made. (If Presentism is true, nothing has temporal parts, for some at least of the temporal parts of a thing extended in time must be past or future. But if nothing has temporal parts, Endurance must be true.) I'm less confident that their arguments for L2 would succeed if those changes were made. But if the changes that I suggest are not made, the arguments for L1 and L2 certainly fail.     

Longitudinal Behavioral and Academic Adjustment in Children with HIV Infection

This study investigated; the behavioral adjustment and academic status of children with HIV infection through serial evaluations over a ten-year period. The parents of children were assessed with Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist Parent Forms and the children were administered the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Academic Achievement at regular intervals as part of their treatment in the HIV Program of a children’s hospital. Children with HIV were found to have behavioral adjustment within normal limits over time. Aggressive behavior was noted to decrease over time. Academic achievement mirrored IQ status, unlike other studies, which have reported poorer achievement than expected for IQ. Math skills appeared to improve over time. Thus, these findings suggest children with HIV infection did not show significant behavioral disturbance across time, however, aggressive behavior appeared to decrease. Academic achievement was stable over time.     

Pediatric trichotillomania: descriptive psychopathology and an open trial of cognitive behavioral therapy

In study 1, 46 children and adolescents with trichotillomania who sought treatment at 2 specialty outpatient clinics were assessed. Most children reported pulling hair from multiple sites on the body, presented with readily visible alopecia, reported spending 30-60 minutes per day pulling or thinking about pulling, and reported experiencing significant distress about their symptoms. Most were described by their parents as having significant problems in school functioning. Few children met criteria for obsessive-compulsive disorder or tic disorder. Child and family rates of other forms of psychopathology were high. In study 2, 22 of these children were enrolled in an open trial of individual cognitive behavioral therapy with particular attention to relapse prevention. Trichotillomania severity decreased significantly and 77% of children were classified as treatment responders at post-treatment and 64% at 6-month follow-up.     

Persistent structural priming from language comprehension to language production

To examine the relationship between syntactic processes in language comprehension and language production, we compared structural persistence from sentence primes that speakers heard to persistence from primes that speakers produced. [Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 177-192.] showed that the production of target priming structures increased the probability of spontaneously using the same structures to describe events in subsequent pictures that were semantically unrelated to the primes. These priming effects persisted across as many as ten intervening filler trials. The present studies replicated these results using auditorily presented primes to which participants only listened. The results indicated persistence of priming across all lags, with relative magnitudes of priming as large as those observed by Bock and Griffin. The implication is that structural priming is persistent regardless of the modality in which language structures are experienced, underscoring the power of priming as an implicit learning mechanism.     

Auditory word identification in dyslexic and normally achieving readers

The integrity of phonological representation/processing in dyslexic children was explored with a gating task in which children listened to successively longer segments (gates) of a word. At each gate, the task was to decide what the entire word was. Responses were scored for overall accuracy as well as the children's sensitivity to coarticulation from the final consonant. As a group, dyslexic children were less able than normally achieving readers to detect coarticulation present in the vowel portion of the word, particularly on the most difficult items, namely those ending in a nasal sound. Hierarchical regression and path analyses indicated that phonological awareness mediated the relation of gating and general language ability to word and pseudoword reading ability.     

Event-causal libertarianism,functional reduction,and the disappearing agent argument

Event-causal libertarians maintain that an agent’s freely bringing about a choice is reducible to states and events involving him bringing about the choice. Agent-causal libertarians demur, arguing that free will requires that the agent be irreducibly causally involved. Derk Pereboom and Meghan Griffith have defended agent-causal libertarianism on this score, arguing that since on event-causal libertarianism an agent’s contribution to his choice is exhausted by the causal role of states and events involving him, and since these states and events leave it open which decision he will make, he does not settle which decision occurs, and thus “disappears.” My aim is to explain why this argument fails. In particular, I demonstrate that event-causal libertarians can dismantle the argument by enriching the reductive base in their analysis of free will to include a state that plays the functional role of the self-determining agent and with which the agent is identified.     

Adolescents let sufficient evidence accumulate before making a decision when large incentives are at stake

Adolescent decision‐making has been described as impulsive and suboptimal in the presence of incentives. In this study we examined the neural substrates of adolescent decision‐making using a perceptual discrimination task for which small and large rewards were associated with correctly detecting the direction of motion of a cloud of moving dots. Adults showed a reward bias of faster reaction times on trials for which the direction of motion was associated with a large reward. Adolescents, in contrast, were slower to make decisions on trials associated with large rewards. This behavioral pattern in adolescents was paralleled by greater recruitment of fronto‐parietal regions important in representing the accumulation of evidence sufficient for selecting one choice over its alternative and the certainty of that choice. The findings suggest that when large incentives are dependent on performance, adolescents may require more evidence to accumulate prior to responding, to be certain to maximize their gains. Adults, in contrast, appear to be quicker in evaluating the evidence for a decision when primed by rewards. Overall these findings suggest that rather than reacting hastily, adolescents can be incentivized to take more time to make decisions when large rewards are at stake. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://youtu.be/1g4F5vzFDl0     

Thinking one thing,saying another: The behavioral correlates of mind-wandering while reading aloud

Although mind-wandering during silent reading is well documented, to date no research has investigated whether similar processes occur during reading aloud. In the present study, participants read a passage either silently or aloud while periodically being probed about mind-wandering. Although their comprehension accuracies were similar for both reading conditions, participants reported more mind-wandering while they were reading aloud. These episodes of mindless reading were associated with nearly normal prosody, but were nevertheless distinguished by subtle fluctuations in volume that were predictive of both overall comprehension accuracy and individual sentence comprehension. Together, these findings reveal that previously hidden within the common activity of reading aloud lies: (1) a demonstration of the remarkable automaticity of speech, (2) a situation that is surprisingly conducive to mind-wandering, (3) subtle vocal signatures of mind-wandering and comprehension accuracy, and (4) the promise of developing useful interventions to improve reading.