DETERMINANTS OF PERFORMANCE ON DOUBLE CLASSIFICATION TASKS

Two groups of children, median ages 6–7 and 8–7, were presented with objects examplifying three combinations of two dichotomous attributes, and asked to indicate the remaining combination. Keeping objects covered vs. uncovered at the time of the test response had generally little effect. Labelling was consistently superior to perceptual matching, apparently because the latter involved a search process. The errors in the labelling condition consisted mostly in naming an object identical to or different in both attributes from those given, reflecting perhaps an inability to break down the impression of the objects into independent attributes.     

Murder in the family: An analysis of two Poe short stories

Learning to be possessed has been described elsewhere by the writer as a form of pathogenic relating begun when children are taught by adults that they will receive a lesser penalty for misbehavior if they can show they were not responsible, such as if it were caused by an evil agent or the Devil. It was suggested that learning to be possessed can be an underlying cause of psychopathology, the delusion of persecution in particular. Two short stories by the distinguished American writer Edgar Allan Poe are examined to develop the formulation of learning to be possessed, especially when it has passed to a delusion of persecution. Two propositions are offered: (1) Where it appears that a family member is murdered by a delusional assailant by accident, it is not an accident; and (2) the delusion of persecution entails a memory loss so that the murderer not only can claim lack of personal responsibility for the act, but also spares himself the guilt of having broken a fundamental taboo. Further comparison is made between learning to be possessed as a cause of delusion, and the psychoanalytic theory in which the defense mechanism of projection is central. In the latter theory, interpretation of the delusion is critical; whereas in the former, interpretation is counterproductive because it merely reinforces the delusion.Probably a note of appreciation is due the writer's daughter Cary, who at age 14 is an expert at badgering her father for help with homework assignments. For several weeks the writer was alternatively pestered and cajoled to help Cary with her Poe Project for high school English which required an essay analyzing the work of a great American writer denigrated by the author as weird by his recollection formed decades earlier. Cary's persistence required the author to consider Poe anew, to recognize his unwarranted earlier prejudice, and to recognize that Poe offered him a gift of understanding regarding a topic about which the author had been thinking for several years, namely that form of pathogenic relating named learning to be possessed.     

Agricultural policy and strategic investment in information technology

In this article the perspective shifts to the “upstream” end of the agricultural knowledge and information system (AKIS). Because knowledge policy and strategic decision-making are not the prerogative of the public sector, organizations such as cooperative unions and multinational companies are included. After considering the influence of the changing environment on the nature of the AKIS, the role of knowledge management and policy in the emerging knowledge and information market is examined. Special attention is given to public and private R&D. The article then looks where information technology (IT) fits in and what considerations determine strategic investment in IT projects and sustained services. Some of the European experiences with this strategic investment are evaluated.     

Improvisational therapy: Evolving one's own clinical style

This article offers an invitation to develop one's own unique clinical style, relying less on institutionalized schools of therapy and more on the therapist's own natural resources. An emphasis is placed upon understanding therapy as art, trusting one's imagination, and maintaining a healthy irreverence for professional politics.     

PIGEONS ARE SENSITIVE TO THE SPATIAL ORGANIZATION OF COMPLEX VISUAL STIMULI

Abstract— Two experiments investigated the role of spatial organisation in the discrimination and generalization of complex visual stimuli by pigeons. In Experiment 1, after pigeons had been trained to discriminate line drawings of four objects, they were tested with novel pictures in which the same component parts of the objects were spatially rearranged. The spatially scrambled pictures led to a dramatic drop in recognition accuracy, hut responding remained above chance. In Experiment 2, pigeons reached a high level of discriminative performance when required to choose among four different spatial arrangements of the same object parts. These results confirm Cerella's (1980) conclusion that pigeons discriminate the component parts of complex visual stimuli, but. unless it is assumed that the scrambling deleted or created emergent features, the results disconfirm his conclusion that spatial organization plays no role in pigeons' picture perception.     

ELI: An Interactive Elicitation Technique for Subjective Probability Distributions

Uncertain knowledge about continuous quantities is usually formalized through subjective probability distributions (SPD′s). However, results from past experimental research have often pointed to the rather poor quality of SPD′s. Moreover, previous attempts to improve SPD quality frequently appeared to be only partly successful; overconfidence especially proved to be an exceptionally persistent phenomenon. In the present study, method-induced biases in particular are considered to be responsible for the poor quality of SPD′s, and an alternative means for eliciting uncertain knowledge was designed to meet fundamental quality criteria to a more satisfactory degree. The direct realization of a proper scoring rule in a graphically oriented interactive computer program is one of the central features of this new elicitation technique, ELI. An experiment with 48 subjects was carried out to evaluate ELI performance and to compare it with the performance of (a) an existing elicitation technique and (b) a simple technique that only asks for a best guess and a lower and upper bound. The three techniques were evaluated and compared with respect to their contribution to reliable and valid SPD′s and with respect to their practical usefulness. The results indicated that for ELI the fundamental requirements were realized to a great extent. Furthermore, compared with the two other techniques, ELI performance appeared to be superior. In particular, only with the support of ELI did overconfidence appear to be almost absent.     

Family coping strategies and the rural Appalachian working poor

Naturalistic research methods were used in this study to collect the voices, ideas, and opinions of rural, working poor, Appalachian families from Southeast Ohio about the stress of poverty in family life and family coping in the face of poverty. This data should be of interest to the professional family therapist who practices with the working poor.