Autobiographical memories for places

The purpose of the present exploratory study was to investigate operations and contents of a naturally occurring reminiscence for physical places in 26 Swedish participants. Using Conway and Pleydell-Pearce's (2000) model of autobiographical memory as a framework, two main questions were examined. First, in what sense are physical places ingredients of our selves-that is, of our self-knowledge-and, if so, how are they and their characteristics organised in the autobiographical knowledge base? Second, what form do personal memories for places take and what kinds of meanings and emotional contents do we bind to this type of reminiscence? The results showed that the Swedish participants' most important places in their lives were mainly childhood- and cottage-related rural types of milieus, and mostly categorised as summarised events; that is, frequently revisited. The personal recollections of the place-related event-specific knowledge were mostly of the generic imagery type, comprising semantic, perceptual, and emotional contents related to the "self", "others", and the "environment". The memories mainly reflected on the participants' growth period and feelings of activation and pleasantness. This was more pronounced in older (M = 59) than in younger (M = 35) participants. All this indicates that physical places can serve as thematic pathways guiding reminiscence and self-knowing consciousness as we recollect details of perceptual, semantic, and emotional characters of periods in our lives.     

Simultaneous attentional guidance by working-memory and selection history reveals two distinct sources of attention

Recent theories of attention have proposed that selection history is a separate, dissociable source of information that influences attention. The current study sought to investigate the simultaneous involvement of selection history and working-memory on attention during visual search. Experiments 1 and 2 used target feature probability to manipulate selection history and found significant effects of both working-memory and selection history, although working-memory dominated selection history when they cued different locations. Experiment 3 eliminated the contribution of voluntary refreshing of working-memory and replicated the main effects, although selection history became dominant. Using the same methodology, but with reduced probability cue validity, both effects were present in Experiment 4 and did not significantly differ in their contribution to attention. Effects of selection history and working-memory never interacted. These results suggest that selection history and working-memory are separate influences on attention and have little impact on each other. Theoretical implications for models of attention are discussed.     

The Educational Community as In-tentional Community

This paper reassesses a perennial concern of philosophy of education: the nature of the educational community and the role of the teacher in relation to such a community. As an entry point into this broader question, we turn to Philosophy for children (P4C), which has consistently emphasized the importance of community. Yet, not unlike pragmatist notions of community more broadly, the P4C community has largely focused on the goal-directed, purposive, aspect of the process of inquiry. The purpose of our paper is to move beyond P4C (as it has traditionally been conceived) in order to theorize a non-instrumental, in-tentional, educational community without pre-conceived goals or intentions. Drawing largely from the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, we describe the P4C-classroom as one that refuses to be operative (moving forward toward reaching common goals) and thus undermines the taken-for-granted logic of means and ends that underlies how educational communities are typically depicted and justified. Again drawing from Agamben, we identify the specific ways in which the experience of love and friendship (both of which are pure means rather than means to an end) constitute the in-tentional community. The silence of the voice of the teacher enables the experience of love and friendship to come about. Being included as an exclusion via his/her silence, the teacher is neither immanent (facilitator of student learning) nor transcendent (outside or beyond learning) but alongside the community as a paradigm of friendship.