Effects of high-pass and low-pass spatial filtering on face identification

If face images are degraded by block averaging, there is a nonlinear decline in recognition accuracy as block size increases, suggesting that identification requires a critical minimum range of object spatial frequencies. The identification of faces was measured with equivalent Fourier low-pass filtering and block averaging preserving the same information and with high-pass transformations. In Experiment 1, accuracy declined and response time increased in a significant nonlinear manner in all cases as the spatial-frequency range was reduced. However, it did so at a faster rate for the quantized and high-passed images. A second experiment controlled for the differences in the contrast of the high-pass faces and found a reduced but significant and nonlinear decline in performance as the spatial-frequency range was reduced. These data suggest that face identification is preferentially supported by a band of spatial frequencies of approximately 8-16 cycles per face; contrast or line-based explanations were found to be inadequate. The data are discussed in terms of current models of face identification.     

Component problems in dichotic listening

The experiments reported examined monitoring for semantically defined targets whilst concurrently shadowing (Experiment I) or listening silently (Experiment II). The word lists for monitoring were either visual or auditory. Monitoring and shadowing accuracy showed less interference when presentation was bimodal than when it was dichotic. However, monitoring latency and recognition memory for shadowed material did not show this effect. It is argued that these data reveal the existence of a number of different sources of potential difficulty in dichotic listening situations and the nature of these is discussed.     

Spatial organization in the free recall of pictorial stimuli

Thirty-one young adults were presented with a series of visual arrays each containing drawings of objects. Free recall of the objects on each visual array could be organized by the spatial location of the objects or by another type of organization. The other type of organization was different on each array and comprised semantic, shape, colour, size, orientation or phonetic categories. The results showed that free recall could be organized by spatial location or by semantic, shape, colour or size categories. However, only semantic and colour category organization were found to correlate significantly with recall. To account for the correlation results, two distinct general forms of organization are hypothesized.     

Monte Carlo studies in nonmetric scaling

In response to Arabie several random ranking studies are compared and discussed. Differences are typically very small, however it is noted that those studies which used arbitrary configurations tend to produce slightly higher stress values. The choice of starting configuration is discussed and we suggest that the use of a principal components decomposition of the doubly centered matrix of dissimilarities, or some transformation thereof, will yield an initial configuration which is superior to a randomly chosen one.This research was supported by the National Research Council of Canada (Grant No. A8351) and by the National Institute of Mental Health (Grant Nos. MH10006 and MH26504). The authorship order has been determined by Monte Carlo methods.     

The haptic perception of curvature

Ninety-two subjects, schoolchildren and undergraduate and postgraduate students, took part in a series of experiments on the haptic perception of curvature. A graded series of surfaces was produced using piano-convex lenses masked off to produce curved strips that could be explored without using arm movements. Thresholds were measured using the constant method and a staircase procedure. Experiments 1 and 2 yielded data on the absolute and difference thresholds for curvature. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the effective stimulus for curvature is represented by the overall gradient of a curved surface. Using this measure, it was shown that the present absolute thresholds for curvature are lower than those previously reported. In Experiment 4, absolute thresholds were compared using spherical and cylindrical curves: the results showed that, at least with the narrow strips used, the type of curvature does not exert a significant influence on performance. In Experiment 5, the subjective response to curvature was assessed using a rating procedure. Power functions are reported, although the relationship between stimuli and responses had a strong linear component. This suggests that haptically perceived curvature may be a metathetic rather than a prothetic continuum.     

Lexical and grammatical processing of unshadowed messages: A re-examination of the Mackay effect

Mackay (1973) claimed to have provided evidence that subjects could process the grammatical structure and lexical content of nonshadowed messages. In the present study, it was found impossible to repeat Mackay's findings when controls for several factors that had been ignored in Mackay's study were employed. Subsequent experiments indicated that two major factors contributing to Mackay's results were that he had a gap between sentences in his experiment and that the nonshadowed material came out of a background of silence. Both of these probably enabled subjects to switch attention to the nonshadowed material without disruption of shadowing performance.     

Modeling the effects of irrelevant speech on memory

The feature model (Nairne, 1990) is extended to account for the effects of irrelevant speech and concomitant interactions in immediate serial recall. In the feature model, both articulatory suppression and irrelevant speech are seen as adding noise to the memory representation, the difference being that articulatory suppression diverts more resources than does irrelevant speech. The addition of noise impairs recall because it reduces the probability of successful redintegration. When a competitor is incorrectly recalled, rather than the correct item, this competitor is recalled out of order, producing an increase in order errors. Six simulations are reported that show that the model accounts for (1) the impairment by both irrelevant speech and articulatory suppression, (2) the irrelevance of the phonological and semantic composition of the irrelevant speech, (3) greater disruption when the irrelevant speech tokens vary, (4) the abolition of the phonological similarity effect for visual, but not for auditory, items, (5) the abolition of the word length effect for both visual and auditory items, and (6) the abolition of the irrelevant speech effect under articulatory suppression for both visual and auditory items. The feature model is compared with the two other major views of irrelevant speech, the phonological store hypothesis and the changing state hypothesis.     

BALANCING THE GENERAL WITH THE PARTICULAR IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

One Life Heals Another: Beginnings,Maturity, Outcomes of a Vocation,by Franco Borgogno, (A. Elgar,trans.), International Psychoanalytic Books,New York, 2021, 169 pp.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -