The Continuum of Consciousness

Research in a wide variety of domains provides converging evidence for the psychological unconscious—percepts, memories, and other mental contents that influence experience, thought, and action outside of phenomenal awareness. Studies of preconscious processing indicate that two continua underlie conscious experience—one having to do with the quality of the stimulus event or its mental representation, and the other having to do with the cognitive resources brought to hear on the processing of that representation. However, evidence of subconscious processing violates these conclusions and suggests that something more is involved—perhaps a link between mental representations of events and of the self as the agent or experiencer of them.     

Using self-evaluation to improve difficult-to-read handwriting of secondary students

We used delayed multiple-baseline and multiple-probe techniques to assess the effects of self-evaluation training on the legibility of cursive handwriting. Five secondary special education students with difficult-to-read handwriting served as participants. All participants improved the legibility of their handwriting during self-evaluation training. A systematic withdrawal of the training package demonstrated maintenance of treatment effects. For the most part, the students' handwriting remained at least 90% legible to judges following the systematic withdrawal of the self-evaluation training.     

Toward a new conceptualization and operationalization of risk perception within the genetic counseling domain

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it provides an historical overview of studies of risk, risk perception, and decision making under risk within the genetic counseling domain. Second, it proposes an alternative conceptualization and operationalization for the study of risk perception. The conceptualization involves probability, adversity, incompleteness, and ambiguity. Prior studies of risk perception focus on the recurrence risk and operationalize risk perception by asking for interpretations of the magnitude of the probability of the outcome. Their focus is on the probability of a particular outcome. We formulate the problem in terms of a gamble and suggest that risk perception be operationalized in terms of the riskiness of the gamble. Our focus is on the riskiness of a decision option which entails two or more outcomes.     

The crane's foot: The rise of the pedigree in human genetics

The standard pedigree used by geneticists is intimately connected to the history of genetics. Pedigrees drawn today are based on standards established in the early decades of the twentieth century. Those standards were established by geneticists who pursued an active interest in eugenics. The slightly different standards followed in America vs. England to some extent followed the stronger support of Mendelism by the Americans, as well as the individual preferences of the leading human geneticists in those countries.     

Development of knowledge bases and the reliability of a decision support system for behavioral treatment consultation for persons with mental retardation: The Mental Retardation-Expert

The development of expert and decision support systems requires the collection, organization, codification, and storage of a body of specialized knowledge. The development, using reconstructive methods, of two such knowledge bases, the first containing the current scientific literature and the second containing an expert’s knowledge, is described for an automated decision support system, the Mental Retardation-Expert. This system provides practitioners with assistance in the treatment of aggressive, self-injurious, and destructive behaviors displayed by individuals with mental retardation or developmental disabilities. The average interobserver reliability of the expert knowledge base ranged from 92.5% to 95.0% when calculated across four clinicians’ assessments of 31 abstracted cases.     

An examination of concept lattices,types, and functions inRoget’s International Thesaurus

The notions of objects and attributes are essential to knowledge representation. Rudolf Wille’s concept lattices group objects and attributes into concepts, with concepts organized in a lattice, so that some concepts are subconcepts of others. This paper applies certain aspects of type theory to concept lattices in order better to facilitate the representation of knowledge inRoget’s International Thesaurus. Of particular interest is a formal analysis of functions providing concept lattices with a way of representing procedures and actions that currently are not present in the thesaurus.