Review of Eric D. Perl, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite</Emphasis>

Theophany is an excellent introduction to Dionysius, and to the principles of Neoplatonic thought as developed by Plotinus and Proclus. Graduate students and even advanced undergraduates might profit from it, and those of us who have been working on Dionysius for years certainly will.     

Sequence Encoders Enable Large-Scale Lexical Modeling: Reply to Bowers and Davis (2009)

Sibley, Kello, Plaut, and Elman (2008) proposed the sequence encoder as a model that learns fixed-width distributed representations of variable-length sequences. In doing so, the sequence encoder overcomes problems that have restricted models of word reading and recognition to processing only monosyllabic words. Bowers and Davis (2009) recently claimed that the sequence encoder does not actually overcome the relevant problems, and hence it is not a useful component of large-scale word-reading models. In this reply, it is noted that the sequence encoder has facilitated the creation of large-scale word-reading models. The reasons for this success are explained and stand as counterarguments to claims made by Bowers and Davis.     

Conceptualization and measurement of temporal focus: The subjective experience of the past,present, and future

Temporal focus is the attention individuals devote to thinking about the past, present, and future, and the concept is important because it affects how people incorporate perceptions about past experiences, current situations, and future expectations into their attitudes, cognitions, and behavior. However, temporal focus has not been clearly defined nor situated in a nomological network of constructs. In addition, existing measures of temporal focus suffer from various shortcomings. In this paper, we advance the concept of temporal focus by critically examining its conceptualization, developing a new measure of temporal focus (Temporal Focus Scale; TFS), and evaluating the validity (i.e., construct, convergent, discriminant, nomological, and predictive validity) of the TFS across four studies. We conclude that understanding how individuals focus their attention toward the past, present, and future clarifies their responses to explicit and implicit temporal information, which suggests that a variety of research streams would benefit from incorporating the concept of temporal focus.     

Memory as a Self‐Protective Mechanism

The autobiographical memory literature has established that people remember poorly unpleasant, relative to pleasant, life events. We complemented this literature with a theoretical model – the mnemic neglect model – and an experimental paradigm that exerts tight control over the to‐be‐remembered material. Participants recall poorly self‐threatening feedback compared to self‐affirming or other‐relevant feedback – a phenomenon we labeled mnemic neglect. The phenomenon is motivational: it is in the service of self‐protection. The phenomenon is also flexible. Participants can switch from self‐protection (e.g. avoiding negative feedback) to an alternative goal (e.g. striving for feedback with improvement potential), when circumstances call for it such as when the feedback is provided by a close other rather than a stranger. Finally, self‐threatening feedback may be forgotten, but it is not lost: the mnemic neglect effect is not obtained in recognition recall.     

A task-difficulty artifact in subliminal priming

Subliminal priming is said to occur when a subliminal prime influences the classification of a subsequent target. Most subliminal-priming claims are based on separate target- and prime-classification tasks. Because primes are intended to be subliminal, the prime-classification task is difficult, and the target-classification task is easy. To assess whether this task-difficulty difference accounts for previous claims of subliminal priming, we manipulated the ease of the prime-classification task by intermixing long-duration (visible) primes with short-duration (near liminal) ones. In Experiment 1, this strategy of intermixing long-duration primes raised classification of the shortduration ones. In Experiments 2 and 3, prime duration was lowered in such a way that prime classification was at chance in intermixed presentations. Under these conditions, we failed to observe any priming effects; hence, previous demonstrations of subliminal priming may simply have reflected a task-difficulty artifact.     

Expanding the utility of behavioral momentum for youth with developmental disabilities

Non‐compliance with requests in educational or therapeutic settings interferes with teaching and learning. Recent studies indicate that the probability of compliance can be increased when short sequences of requests with a high probability of compliance are followed by a request less likely to be followed by compliance. The high probability command sequence (HPCS) consists of requests that produce compliance rates of 80% or more. For some individuals with severe disabilities it is difficult to find sufficient number of requests that result in 80% compliance. This study assessed the effects of two levels of high probability request sequences on compliance with subsequent low probability requests. The three participants (ages 7, 11, and 20) met the diagnostic criteria for autism and/or severe to profound mental retardation. Results showed that both high (>80% compliance) and medium (50–70% compliance) request sequences produced increases in compliance to subsequent requests that had produced low compliance rates (<40%) during baseline. No systematic differences were observed between high and medium probability sequences. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effects of an interdisciplinary infant stimulation—parent education intervention program upon infant development

An eight month infant-stimulation/parent-education program was presented to mother-child dyads participating in one of three types of classes: a structured twenty-two session group, an unstructured twenty-two session group, or a structured eleven session group. Infants (2–15 months) in all intervention groups as well as those from a control group were tested three times (pre-test, mid-test, post-test) during the course of the program using the Bayley Mental Test of Infant Development and the Uzgiris-Hunt Ordinal Scales of Psychological Development. Results tend to indicate that the intervention strategy was an effective method of parent education in enhancing infant gains on developmental indices. The results are discussed in relation to a preventative psychotherapeutic model.