Peripheral visual processing

An attempt was made to examine the development of the ability to identify stimuli presented to peripheral vision in several different tasks. Five- and 8-year-old children and college adults saw, for 20 msec, either a single figure at 1°, 2°, 4°, or 6° of visual angle from the fovea (singleform condition) or an off-foveal figure with an additional figure at the fovea (double-form condition). In the double-form conditions, the subjects were required to identify either the peripheral figure only (double-form presentation) or both figures (double-form report). The main effects of Age, Distance, and Form Condition were significant. Accuracy improved with increasing age and with decreasing distance. The Form Condition effect reflected lower accuracy in the two double-form conditions than in the single-form condition. Interestingly, there was no difference between the two double-form conditions, suggesting that the mere presence of a foveal stimulus, with instructions to ignore it, produces as much decrement in peripheral performance as when subjects are told to fully process and report the foveal stimulus. Also, there was no interaction between Form Condition and Distance, suggesting that the label “tunnel vision” may be misleading, since the presence of the foveal stimulus seems to have an equal effect on all peripheral locations and does not really “restrict” the size of the effective visual field.     

Towards a global human embryonic stem cell bank

An increasingly unbridgeable gap exists between the supply and demand of transplantable organs. Human embryonic stem cell technology could solve the organ shortage problem by restoring diseased or damaged tissue across a range of common conditions. However, such technology faces several largely ignored immunological challenges in delivering cell lines to large populations. We address some of these challenges and argue in favor of encouraging contribution or intentional creation of embryos from which widely immunocompatible stem cell lines could be derived. Further, we argue that current immunological constraints in tissue transplantation demand the creation of a global stem cell bank, which may hold particular promise for minority populations and other sub-groups currently marginalized from organ procurement and allocation systems. Finally, we conclude by offering a number of practical and ethically oriented recommendations for constructing a human embryonic stem cell bank that we hope will help solve the ongoing organ shortage problem.     

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

The central theme of this article is that a feminist perspective is not only compatible with the history, objectives, and emphases of social psychology, but necessary for its continued vitality. In view of social psychology's humanist roots and its nurturist and social optimist tenets, it is not surprising that feminist scholarship has flourished within it. Situational factors and group membership—the focus of social psychological inquiry—are also key to understanding how culture constructs gender, a central issue in the feminist agenda. Some of the important women in the early decades of American psychology are claimed as foremothers of social psychology and as feminist voices, and the feminist perspective is defined and identified in terms of its major interrelated themes. The influence of feminist scholarship on contemporary social psychology is illustrated, and it is argued that a feminist perspective will become increasingly more visible.     

Rapid word identification in pure alexia is lexical but not semantic

Following the notion that patients with pure alexia have access to two distinct reading strategies-letter-by-letter reading and semantic reading-a training program was devised to facilitate reading via semantics in a patient with pure alexia. Training utilized brief stimulus presentations and required category judgments rather than explicit word identification. The training was successful for trained words, but generalized poorly to untrained words. Additional studies involving oral reading of nouns and of functors also resulted in improved reading of trained words. Pseudowords could not be trained to criterion. The results suggest that improved reading can be achieved in pure alexia by pairing rapidly presented words with feedback. Focusing on semantic processing is not essential to this process. It is proposed that the training strengthens connections between the output of visual processing and preexisting orthographic representations.     

Time urgency and the Type A behavior pattern: Implications for time investment and psychological entrapment

Type A's have been described as more time urgent than Type B's, and research indicates that they underestimate the passage of fixed time intervals. The present study examined the implications of these differences in time perception for decisions where time is a resource that can be invested. Type A's and B's were given an initial stake of $4 and provided the opportunity to invest some or all of that amount for the chance to win an additional $2. Investment occurred as a function of time, with subjects believing they would win the additional $2 if a counter reached a randomly determined number. Each unit increment on the counter also resulted in the loss of 1¢ from the initial stake, thus as the counter progressed, goal attainment became more certain, but expenses also increased. Subjects could stop the counter at any time and keep the remainder of their initial stake or continue to invest until the initial stake was depleted (the counter was programmed to never hit the “jackpot”). Half of the subjects could monitor the counter directly, while the other half could not and had to rely on their subjective time estimates. Results indicated that when objective time passage cues were present, Type A's and B's did not differ in their investment decisions. When subjects had to estimate time passage, however, Type A's invested far more than Type B's. These results indicate that under appropriate conditions, Type A's are more susceptible than Type B's to psychological entrapment.     

A developmental study of the effect of familiarity on short-term visual memory

An attempt was made to specify whether previously reported limitations on young children's full-report capacity lay in a smaller amount of available information, in a shorter trace duration of information in visual information storage (VIS), or in poorer coding of information into permanent storage. Five- and 8-year-olds and adults were shown an eight-item array of figures. followed at varying intervals by an indicator signaling the subject to report the figure to which the indicator had pointed. The effects of three levels of familiarity or “labelability” were examined. While no age differences were revealed in amount of information available nor in the trace duration of information in VIS, strong age differences emerged in coding of information into permanent storage. Data on latency to verbal labeling and familiarity suggested that verbal labeling could not account for the age trends. Rather, the differences seemed to lie in the use of organized visual coding and rehearsal strategies by adults and their relative lack of use by children.