Are there critical bands in kinesthesia?

The effect of changing the bandwidth of noise on the ability of human subjects to detect a 10-Hz sinusoidal movement signal was measured in two experiments. The objective of these studies was to investigate whether critical bands exist for the kinesthetic system, as has been demonstrated for the auditory and tactile systems. It was found that subjects' ability to detect a 10-Hz sinusoidal movement stimulus embedded in noise was not influenced by the bandwidth of the noise over a range of 4-10 Hz. These findings suggest that, if a critical filter does exist for this system, it would have to be greater than 10 Hz.     

Relation of Age of Onset to the Type and Severity of Child and Adolescent Conduct Problems

In a cross-sectional household sample of 9-through 17-year-old youths from 4 U.S. communities, youths with earlier ages of onset of conduct problems engaged in more conduct problems than youths with later ages of onset when current age and gender were controlled. Specifically, youths with earlier ages of onset were more likely to engage in several types of physical aggression, frequent lying, theft, and vandalism and were less likely to engage in only truancy. There also was an inverse relation between age of onset and level of functional impairment, mental health service use, and meeting diagnostic criteria for conduct disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and oppositional defiant disorder. Within the limits of cross-sectional data, these results support the hypothesis that key aspects of the heterogeneity of conduct problems among youths are related to the age of onset of conduct problems.     

How Knowledge Works

The doctrine that knowledge is a species of belief has encouraged philosophers to confuse the question of what knowledge is and the question of how it can be acquired. But we can form a conception of knowledge by asking how knowledge gets expressed in our mental lives and in our conduct, instead of asking where it comes from. Accordingly, knowledge can be defined as the ability to do things, or refrain from doing things, or believe, or want, or doubt things, for reasons that are facts. I examine the nature of reasons, and the relationship between reasons, facts and beliefs; I consider the question of whether animals without language are capable of knowledge; and I briefly criticize Wittgenstein's doctrine that I cannot be said to know that I am in pain.     

Information processing during saccadic eye movements

Saccadic eye movements are made at least 100,000 times each day. It is well known that sensitivity to visual input is suppressed during saccades; recent evidence suggests that some kinds of information processing are suppressed as well. Suppression during saccades implies that processing occurs discretely (during eye fixations only), rather than continuously (during both fixations and saccades). We examined this issue in the context of the Posner and Snyder (1975) primed letter-matching task. We found that a prime viewed in one fixation had a larger influence on targets viewed in a second fixation when a long rather than a short saccade separated the two fixations. This result demonstrates that at least some information processing occurs during saccades.     

Towards a New Religious Dialogue: Buddhism and Postmodern Theology

This paper proffers an example of a new form of religious dialogue. It subverts, rather than assumes the philosophical tradition of universal reason, upon which religious dialogue has traditionally proceeded. To this end, I call into question the frequently perceived affinity between Buddhism and radical postmodern a/theology. Whereas the latter works within a framework of oppositions inherited from the modern philosophical tradition, Buddhism is innocent of such a framework, and jettisons its 'either-or' antinomies. In this respect, I argue that there is a striking 'coincidence in outlook' between Buddhism and conservative postmodern theology, which also seeks to subvert the modern philosophical framework which it regards as being essentially secular. I suggest that this 'coincidence in outlook', which contrasts with the modern outlook, opens the way for a religious dialogue based on a mutual affirmation of difference, rather than on the distorting universalist quest for affinity at all costs.     

Intrusive memories and depression in cancer patients

Matched samples of depressed and nondepressed cancer patients were interviewed about past life events, particularly experiences of death and illness. They identified and described any spontaneous intrusive visual memories they had experienced in the past week corresponding to these events. About one quarter reported such memories and, as predicted, the majority of intrusive memories concerned illness, injury and death. The mean levels of intrusion and avoidance were equivalent to patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. Consistent with prediction, depressed patients reported significantly more intrusive memories than controls, and described the memories as typically beginning with or being exacerbated by the onset of depression. Greater numbers of intrusive memories were associated with more maladaptive coping, and greater avoidance with deficits in autobiographical memory functioning.     

Stability of memory for colour in context.

Memory for colours presented in isolation was compared with that for colours presented as part of a clip-art image or as part of a non-meaningful, Mondrian-like image. The area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic for deciding that two colours, presented at different delay intervals, were the same or different provided an index of memory for colour. The provision of a context reduced the decay of memory, regardless of whether the context was meaningful (clip-art images) or non-meaningful (Mondrian-like images). The result was seen as a generalisation of the auditory phenomenon of profile analysis, in which memory for the amplitude of a single component of a complex sound is more stable than that for the component in isolation.     

Training the supervisor: Integrating a family of origin approach

The replication of intergenerational patterns is considered here within the supervisor-family therapist-and family system, and the proposal of integrating a family of origin approach into the training of supervisors is presented. To become aware of the relation of one's own family of origin issues and their potential impact within the supervision and treatment can effectively improve intervention approaches, benefitting the supervisor, the therapist and the family in treatment. Being considerate of the training needs and levels of supervisors is an important component when integrating family of origin work into the training.     

Conversational remembering: Story recall with a peer versus for an experimenter

This research investigated the role social context plays in determining the content and organization of remembered information. As a manipulation of social context, subjects talked about a short story either with another subject (dyads) or for an experimenter (experimenter-tested). In addition, the instructions were manipulated: Subjects were asked about their memory of the story or their personal reactions to it. Regardless of instructions, the dyad subjects spoke more about their evaluations of the story, included more comments linking the story to a larger knowledge frame (metacomments), and more often used remembered details to support their positions. In contrast, the experimenter-tested subjects more often included story details and interpretations in narrative accounts of the story. The dyad subjects included in their recalls information that is part of story memory but seldom evidenced by single subjects remembering for an experiment. Thus conversational remembering often relies on a nonnarrative retrieval strategy. Regardless of social context, personal reaction instructions led to more meta-comments and evaluations, and less narrative than memory instructions. The organization and content of non-narrative conversational remembering may be explained by the dual demands of conforming to conversational rules and of establishing social bonds through self-revealing comments.     

Noncognitive factors in high-road/low-road learning: I. Modes of abstraction in adulthood

Since the termscognition andcognitive are broadly used but not clearly defined, it may be helpful to clarify what is meant bynoncognitive factors. In cognitive science, the termscognition andcognitive generally describe mental processes that are informational insofar as they carry information about the organism's own body and the material world. Thus defined, there are three sorts of noncognitive organismic factors important in adult learning:affective processes, self-developmental processes, andhardware factors (i.e., noninformational, purely organismic constraints such as mental capacity/working memory limitations, gestaltist field factors, etc.). In this series of papers, we attempt to show how these noncognitive factors interact with cognitive factors to facilitate adult learning. We outline and give reference to a dialectical constructivist (neoPiagetian) model of the psychological organism that integrates noncognitive with cognitive factors and that can serve to explicate the findings of the literature and to process/task analyze adult learning. An important aim is the integration of the findings of decline and regression from the cognitive literature with the findings regarding the increase in self-directedness reported by adult education theorists. This is explicated through a process-analytic account of the will, particularly as it pertains to noncognitive factors. In Part II, we continue our explication of a dialectical model of the ego and conclude with a discussion of modes of learning/instruction in adulthood.