Visions as ‘Good to Think’: A Cognitive Approach to Visionary Experience in Islamic Sufi Thought

This article explores one type of visionary experience described and interpreted by mystics within certain traditions, which may be termed a ‘cognitive’ or ‘gnostic’ vision. Such visions provide information or offer solutions to problems of theology or religious interpretation.

A close textual analysis of a selection from the writings of an eighteenth century Indian Sufi, Shāh Wal? Allāh of Delhi, demonstrates this process of intensive thinking through superimposed grids which combine elements of religious symbol systems. This type of thinking triggers a mystical experience which is subsequently interpreted in a problem solving or divinatory mode.     

Enactive imagery in paired-associate learning

Three experiments were conducted to study the effects of enactive imagery (EI) on associative learning. In Experiment I, groups of Ss rated 226 verbs on EI and frequency. In Experiments II and III, Ss learned a 24- and a 16-item list, respectively. The lists consisted of the four possible stimulus-response combinations of high (H) and low (L) EI verb pairs: H-H, H-L, L-H, L-L. In both experiments, EI was found to be a significant factor on the stimulus side, performance being superior when the stimulus was of high EI. In Experiment III, the response EI main effect and the Stimulus by Response EI interaction were also found to be significant. The results indicated that like the imagery evoked by nouns, the EI evoked by verbs facilitates learning.     

Multiple cue use and integration in pigeons (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Columba livia</Emphasis>)

Encoding multiple cues can improve the accuracy and reliability of navigation and goal localization. Problems may arise, however, if one cue is displaced and provides information which conflicts with other cues. Here we investigated how pigeons cope with cue conflict by training them to locate a goal relative to two landmarks and then varying the amount of conflict between the landmarks. When the amount of conflict was small, pigeons tended to integrate both cues in their search patterns. When the amount of conflict was large, however, pigeons used information from both cues independently. This context-dependent strategy for resolving spatial cue conflict agrees with Bayes optimal calculations for using information from multiple sources.     

Grammatical Encoding in Aphasia: Evidence from a “Processing Prosthesis”

Agrammatic aphasia is characterized by severely reduced grammatical structure in spoken and written language, often accompanied by apparent insensitivity to grammatical structure in comprehension. Does agrammatism represent loss of linguistic competence or rather performance factors such as memory or resource limitations? A considerable body of evidence supports the latter hypothesis in the domain of comprehension. Here we present the first strong evidence for the performance hypothesis in the domain of production: an augmentative communication system that markedly increases the grammatical structure of agrammatic speech while providing no linguistic information, functioning merely to reduce on-line processing demands. Copyright 2000 Academic Press and Unisys Corporation.     

Automatic auditory disambiguation of visual awareness

Multisensory integration can play a critical role in producing unified and reliable perceptual experience. When sensory information in one modality is degraded or ambiguous, information from other senses can crossmodally resolve perceptual ambiguities. Prior research suggests that auditory information can disambiguate the contents of visual awareness by facilitating perception of intermodally consistent stimuli. However, it is unclear whether these effects are truly due to crossmodal facilitation or are mediated by voluntary selective attention to audiovisually congruent stimuli. Here, we demonstrate that sounds can bias competition in binocular rivalry toward audiovisually congruent percepts, even when participants have no recognition of the congruency. When speech sounds were presented in synchrony with speech-like deformations of rivalling ellipses, ellipses with crossmodally congruent deformations were perceptually dominant over those with incongruent deformations. This effect was observed in participants who could not identify the crossmodal congruency in an open-ended interview (Experiment 1) or detect it in a simple 2AFC task (Experiment 2), suggesting that the effect was not due to voluntary selective attention or response bias. These results suggest that sound can automatically disambiguate the contents of visual awareness by facilitating perception of audiovisually congruent stimuli.     

Interculturality and Early Attachment: A Comparison of Urban/ <Emphasis Type="Italic">Non-Mapuche</Emphasis> and Rural/<Emphasis Type="Italic">Mapuche</Emphasis> Mother-Baby Dyads in Chile

It is well known in the field that culture and context play an important role in child rearing and parenting practices. However, many studies do not address the cultural dimension of attachment, although evidence indicates that aspects of early attachment differ across cultures. With the goal of comparing the quality of mother–baby interactions, this study analyzed attachment behaviors and maternal sensitivity in two settings: urban/non-Mapuche and rural/Mapuche in Chile. The sample was composed of 34 mother-baby dyads (17 urban/non-Mapuche and 17 rural/Mapuche) with 12-month-old children. During a feeding episode, the attachment style of the interaction was assessed with the Attachment during Stress scale, and maternal sensitivity was evaluated with the Child-Adult Relationship Experimental Index-Toddlers (CARE-Index). The groups differed in their interaction attachment style and in affective and proximity modalities: Urban/non-Mapuche mothers tended to have secure and ambivalent attachment styles, and rural/Mapuche mothers tended to have avoidant styles. When educational level is controlled, ethnicity group can explain the differences in mothers’ attachment styles. The findings of the study and their implications are discussed.