Queering colonial power: Sikh resistance in the Ghadr movement

This work contemplates gender, and how it shaped both colonial power and the anticolonial Ghadr movement. I will examine how the Sikhs of the Ghadr movement disrupted, or queered, the colonial gender binary of the ‘loyal Sikh masculine’ and the ‘disloyal Hindu feminine’ and how, despite this, the binary remains intact in Ghadr movement historiography, perpetuating colonial logics. I will then draw upon archival and non-archival texts to gather traces of gender, the ‘feminine,’ and the ‘queer,’ in the Ghadr movement, and in a manner parallel to the movement itself – queer (colonial power) in order to decolonize.     

Culture and the quest for universal principles in moral reasoning

The importance of including cultural perspectives in the study of human cognition has become apparent in recent decades, and the domain of moral reasoning is no exception. The present review focuses on moral cognition, beginning with Kohlberg's model of moral development which relies heavily on people's justifications for their judgments and then shifting to more recent theories that rely on rapid, intuitive judgments and see justifications as more or less irrelevant to moral cognition. Despite this dramatic shift, analyses of culture and moral decision-making have largely been framed as a quest for and test of universal principles of moral judgment. In this review, we discuss challenges that remain in trying to understand crosscultural variability in moral values and the processes that underlie moral cognition. We suggest that the universalist framework may lead to an underestimation of the role of culture in moral reasoning. Although the field has made great strides in incorporating more and more cultural perspectives in order to understand moral cognition, theories of moral reasoning still do not allow for substantial variation in how people might conceptualize the domain of the moral. The processes that underlie moral cognition may not be a human universal in any simple sense, because moral systems may play different roles in different cultures. We end our review with a discussion of work that remains to be done to understand cultural variation in the moral domain.     

Thinking Styles and Academic Performance Among Tribal and Non-tribal Students

This study examines differences in thinking styles among tribal (n = 272) and non-tribal (n = 229) secondary school students, and their relationship with academic performance. Based on Sternberg’s (1997) theory of mental self government, MANOVA results indicated that thinking style of tribal and non-tribal students differed. Regression results revealed that hierarchic and local thinking styles contributed positively while legislative, monarchic, anarchic and global thinking styles contributed negatively to academic achievement of the students.     

Superordinate shape classification using natural shape statistics

This paper investigates the classification of shapes into broad natural categories such as animal or leaf. We asked whether such coarse classifications can be achieved by a simple statistical classification of the shape skeleton. We surveyed databases of natural shapes, extracting shape skeletons and tabulating their parameters within each class, seeking shape statistics that effectively discriminated the classes. We conducted two experiments in which human subjects were asked to classify novel shapes into the same natural classes. We compared subjects’ classifications to those of a naive Bayesian classifier based on the natural shape statistics, and found good agreement. We conclude that human superordinate shape classifications can be well understood as involving a simple statistical classification of the shape skeleton that has been “tuned” to the natural statistics of shape.     

To Value and Address Diversity: From Policy to Practice

A basic assumption of Target 3 of the National Agenda is that the rates of identification, placement, and achievement of children and adolescents with serious emotional disturbance (SED) are strongly correlated with dimensions of diversity, such as race, gender, socioeconomic status, and culture. A related assumption is that culturally competent and linguistically appropriate exchanges and collaborations among families, professionals, students, and communities will enable our school systems to achieve better educational outcomes for all children, including those with SED. We discuss these assumptions in the context of current policies and suggest ways of translating these policies into practices.     

Cavum septi pellucidi in first-episode patients and young relatives at risk for schizophrenia

Studies on schizophrenia (SZ) have documented an increased presence of cavum septi pellucidi (CSP) in individuals suffering from the illness. Moreover, the presence of CSP has been cited in support of the early neurodevelopmental hypothesis in SZ. Our objective was to assess the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of first-episode patients and healthy controls to evaluate the frequency of CSP. The presence and the size of CSP were visually assessed on the MRI scans of 40 first-episode SZ patients, 19 nonpsychotic child and high-risk adolescent offspring of patients with SZ or schizoaffective disorder, and 59 controls. Our analysis revealed an absence of statistically significant differences in the occurrence of CSP between SZ patients, high-risk subjects, and controls. Even when the analysis was restricted to large CSP, no differences were found. Furthermore, no association between CSP and sex or handedness was observed. The absence of CSP abnormalities in first-episode SZ subjects might indicate that SZ is not characterized by developmentally mediated alterations in CSP. Also, family history of SZ might not increase likelihood for CSP.     

Early computation of part structure: evidence from visual search

The visual system represents object shapes in terms of intermediate-level parts. The minima rule proposes that the visual system uses negative minima of curvature to define boundaries between parts. We used visual search to test whether part structures consistent with the minima rule are computed preattentively--or at least, rapidly and early in visual processing. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that whereas the search for a non-minima-segmented shape is fast and efficient among minima-segmented shapes, the reverse search is slow and inefficient. This asymmetry is expected if parsing at negative minima occurs obligatorily. The results of Experiments 3 and 4 showed that although both minima- and non-minima-segmented shapes pop out among unsegmented shapes, the search for minima-segmented shapes is significantly slower. Together, these results demonstrate that the visual system segments shapes into parts, using negative minima of curvature, and that it does so rapidly in early stages of visual processing.     

Constructing surfaces and contours in displays of color from motion: the role of nearest neighbors and maximal disks

Color-from-motion displays consist of a sparse array of dots which never move but change color according to various algorithms. Yet such displays can trigger human vision to construct apparent motion of a subjective surface which is uniformly colored and bounded by a subjective contour. We show that the perceptual strength of this construction depends on the density and regularity of dot placement. We studied three objective measures of density and regularity: nearest-neighbor distance, mean of maximal disks, and variance of maximal disks. We found that nearest-neighbor mechanisms alone are inadequate to account for the perceptual strength of the subjective surfaces and contours. Mechanisms sensitive to areal gaps provide a more adequate account.