The Ways of ‘Being’ and ‘Becoming’ Human

We argue that developing integrative models of psychological phenomenon require dealing simultaneously with information-theoretic and meaning making processes at the individual and group levels. Attempts to fuse these across levels based on intentionality become difficult because phenomena at the lower level organisms are conceptualized employing concrete systems language, while in case of human and social systems both concrete and abstracted systems concepts are used. Intentionality also needs to be looked at as arising out of the processes of both being and becoming. Fusing of psycho-and socio-logics necessarily requires taking into consideration psychological processes and notions of intentionality and future within cultural contexts in a more holistic manner. It is also argued that both at personal and collective levels, human intentionality operate as bounded intentionality alternating between states of being and becoming.     

Factors Facilitating and Impeding Growth of Psychology in South Asia with Special Reference to India

The growth of psychology in South Asian countries has been impeded by the lack of intellectual climate, scarcity of resources, and poor professional support. These proximate factors are embedded in a socio-cultural milieu of pervasive poverty, collectivism, and centralized control of resources. The cultural factors get a free hand because of the inappropriate nature of Western psychology, which is being transplanted as a greenhouse plant. Psychologists can come out of this greenhouse and develop an appropriate science by addressing societal problems from indigenous perspectives. If they do so, the same cultural factors would either facilitate the growth of psychology or be contained to a great extent.     

ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVE AND RURAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Cette recherche s'inscrit dans le cadre des études traitant de la relation entre le degré de croissance économique et la motivation à la réalisation (Achievement motive). Une épreuve mesurant ce besoin d'accomplissement a été appliquée à des enfants, adultes et vieillards appartenant à deux villages indiens, l'un hautement développé économiquement, l'autre fortement sous-développé. Conformément aux hypothèses, les sujets des villages favorisés ont montré un plus haut niveau de motivation à la réalisation. Il faut noter aussi, chez les sujets moins développés économiquement, une corrélation négative entre l'âge et la motivation à l'accomplissement: les personnes âgées manifestent plus de tendance à éviter l'échec que d'aspiration au succès. La présence, chez les jeunes ruraux défavorisés, d'une motivation à la réalisation relativement supérieure à celle de leurs aînés laisse entrevoir une possibilité d'accélérer la croissance économique de ces villages, à la condition qu'une plus grande part de responsabilité leur soit confiée.     

The influence of an interpolated experience upon recognition

It was demonstrated in a previous experiment that an experience interpolated between an original experience and its recall may bring about changes in the points of emphasis in the recall of the original experience. Moreover, details of the interpolated experience may be recalled as if they had formed part of the original experience. These results were taken to mean that two experiences of a related kind may become merged in memory into something akin to Bartlett's notion of an organized mass of past experiences. In the experiment here reported, the original experience was the hearing of a story, and the interpolated experience the seeing of a picture which illustrated part of the story. When in a recognition test subjects were asked to select from three alternatives (including the original) the one version which was “most like the original story,” a proportion of them preferred to the original story a version which differed from the original by including a number of details from the picture. Asked about details, all the subjects tended to place details from the picture in the story, even if they had not been mentioned there. The results of the two experiments are thought to show that irreversible changes are brought about in the memory of an experience by subsequent experiences of a related kind.     

Perceiving illumination inconsistencies in scenes

The human visual system is adept at detecting and encoding statistical regularities in its spatiotemporal environment. Here, we report an unexpected failure of this ability in the context of perceiving inconsistencies in illumination distributions across a scene. Prior work with arrays of objects all having uniform reflectance has shown that one inconsistently illuminated target can 'pop out' among a field of consistently illuminated objects (eg Enns and Rensink, 1990 Science 247 721 723; Sun and Perona, 1997 Perception 26 519-529). In these studies, the luminance pattern of the odd target could be interpreted as arising from either an inconsistent illumination or inconsistent pigmentation of the target. Either cue might explain the rapid detection. In contrast, we find that once the geometrical regularity of the previous displays is removed, the visual system is remarkably insensitive to illumination inconsistencies, both in experimental stimuli and in altered images of real scenes. Whether the target is interpreted as oddly illuminated or oddly pigmented, it is very difficult to find if the only cue is deviation from the regularity of illumination or reflectance. Our results allow us to draw inferences about how the visual system encodes illumination distributions across scenes. Specifically, they suggest that the visual system does not verify the global consistency of locally derived estimates of illumination direction.