Art as Festival in Heidegger and Gadamer

In 'Art as Festival', I put Heidegger and Gadamer into dialogue concerning their respective critiques of traditional aesthetics and their more positive views on the work of art. I use the festival theme to examine some of the philosophical issues in Heidegger's and Gadamer's approaches to the work of art. Specifically, I look at the way both figures conceive the work of art as an encounter which, like the festival, involves a transcendence of subjectivity in an encounter with an event - in this case, the artwork - which the individual does not direct, but rather in which they participate. Putting the theme of festival into play also provides a useful critical lever, especially in the way that it raises important issues of community. More specifically, reflecting on the festival celebration raises questions of the nature of this community, of the relation of the community created in the festival event to the community of the everyday, and thus also of the relation of the aesthetic and the political.     

Effect of early intervention on social interaction between mothers and preterm infants at 12 months of age: a randomized controlled trial

In a randomized controlled trial at 12-months of age, the effect of the Mother Infant Transaction Program was tested on social interaction between mothers and moderately and late preterm infants with gestational age ≥ 30.0 and <36 weeks. Ninety-three play sessions were videotaped and coded, 46 mothers-infants in the intervention group and 47 mothers-infants in the control group. The intervention mothers scored higher on maternal sensitivity/responsiveness (p = .05). Being a first-time mother was a moderator that enhanced the effects of the intervention. First-time mothers were more sensitive/responsive to their infant's cues (p = .01), and the dyads evinced higher level of synchrony (p = .02) as compared with experienced mothers. More positive mood was observed among their infants (p = .04). The findings suggest that the intervention contributes to better mother-infant interactions in moderately and late preterm infants of first-time mothers.     

Subjective Well-Being of Beijing Taxi Drivers

This study investigates subjective well-being among a sample of Beijing taxi drivers in the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games using the Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI). The specific aims of this study are (a) investigate the psychometric properties of the PWI in this unique population; (b) ascertain whether Beijing taxi drivers are satisfied with their lives; and (c) examine whether the responses to the PWI from participants falls within the narrow range predicted by the ‘Theory of Subjective Wellbeing Homeostasis’. The PWI demonstrated good psychometric properties and was consistent with previous studies for Western and non-Western samples. The data revealed a moderate level of subjective well-being (PWI score = 61.1). While Beijing taxi drivers work long hours for low wages, the PWI was nonetheless within the normative range predicted for Chinese societies by the ‘Theory of Subjective Wellbeing Homeostasis’. The results suggest that the homeostatic mechanism is fairly resilient, even when the individual leads relatively a hard life based on objective indicators. Specifically, for Beijing taxi drivers, it appears that external, buffers such as personal relationships and feeling part of the community, act to assist the homeostatic system.     

Enhancing implicit change detection through action

Implicit change detection demonstrates how the visual system can benefit from stored information that is not immediately available to conscious awareness. We investigated the role of motor action in this context. In the first two experiments, using a one-shot implicit change-detection paradigm, participants responded to unperceived changes either with an action (jabbing the screen at the guessed location of a change) or with words (verbal report), and sat either 60 cm or 300 cm (with a laser pointer) away from the display. Our observers guessed the locations of changes at a reachable distance better with an action than with a verbal judgment. At 300 cm, beyond reach, the motor advantage disappeared. In experiment 3, this advantage was also unavailable when participants sat at a reachable distance but responded with hand-held laser pointers near their bodies. We conclude that a motor system specialized for real-time visually guided behavior has access to additional visual information. Importantly, this system is not activated by merely executing an action (experiment 2) or presenting stimuli in one's near space (experiment 3). It is activated only when both conditions are fulfilled, which implies that it is the actual contact that matters to the visual system.     

Measuring and modeling salience with the theory of visual attention

For almost three decades, the theory of visual attention (TVA) has been successful in mathematically describing and explaining a wide variety of phenomena in visual selection and recognition with high quantitative precision. Interestingly, the influence of feature contrast on attention has been included in TVA only recently, although it has been extensively studied outside the TVA framework. The present approach further develops this extension of TVA’s scope by measuring and modeling salience. An empirical measure of salience is achieved by linking different (orientation and luminance) contrasts to a TVA parameter. In the modeling part, the function relating feature contrasts to salience is described mathematically and tested against alternatives by Bayesian model comparison. This model comparison reveals that the power function is an appropriate model of salience growth in the dimensions of orientation and luminance contrast. Furthermore, if contrasts from the two dimensions are combined, salience adds up additively.     

Index to Volume 28

Other Index

Index to Volume 28     

More Bang for the Buck?: Personality Traits as Moderators of Responsiveness to Pay-for-Performance

Extensive prior research has found that, on average, people are more productive under properly designed incentive pay systems; this effect is not necessarily uniform across people, however. In two laboratory studies utilizing within-person study designs and tasks varying in level of structure, we examine how individuals’ personality dispositions systematically predict differential responsiveness to pay-for-performance (PFP) relative to fixed pay. As expected, average productivity was higher when people received PFP (in the form of piecework pay) than when they received fixed pay, but the productivity-enhancing effects of PFP were especially pronounced for more extraverted and less conscientious individuals in less structured tasks. Emotionally stable individuals also had enhanced productivity under PFP, an effect that has not been observed in previous research on personality and pay.