Vibrotactile timing: Are vibrotactile judgements of duration affected by repetitive stimulation?

Timing in the vibrotactile modality was explored. Previous research has shown that repetitive auditory stimulation (in the form of click-trains) and visual stimulation (in the form of flickers) can alter duration judgements in a manner consistent with a “speeding up” of an internal clock. In Experiments 1 and 2 we investigated whether repetitive vibrotactile stimulation in the form of vibration trains would also alter duration judgements of either vibrotactile stimuli or visual stimuli. Participants gave verbal estimates of the duration of vibrotactile and visual stimuli that were preceded either by five seconds of 5-Hz vibration trains, or, by a five-second period of no vibrotactile stimulation, the end of which was signalled by a single vibration pulse (control condition). The results showed that durations were overestimated in the vibrotactile train conditions relative to the control condition; however, the effects were not multiplicative (did not increase with increasing stimulus duration) and as such were not consistent with a speeding up of the internal clock, but rather with an additive attentional effect. An additional finding was that the slope of the vibrotactile psychometric (control condition) function was not significantly different from that of the visual (control condition) function, which replicates a finding from a previous cross-modal comparison of timing.     

Modality effects in memory for basic stimulus attributes: a temporal and nontemporal comparison

Previous research suggests that there are significant differences in the operation of reference memory for stimuli of different modalities, with visual temporal entries appearing to be more durable than auditory entries (Ogden, Wearden, & Jones, 2008 , 2010). Ogden et al. ( 2008 , 2010 ) demonstrated that when participants were required to store multiple auditory temporal standards over a period of delay there was significant systematic interference to the representation of the standard characterized by shifts in the location of peak responding. No such performance deterioration was observed when multiple visually presented durations were encoded and maintained. The current article explored whether this apparent modality-based difference in reference memory operation is unique to temporal stimuli or whether similar characteristics are also apparent when nontemporal stimuli are encoded and maintained. The modified temporal generalization method developed in Ogden et al. (2008) was employed; however, standards and comparisons varied by pitch (auditory) and physical line length (visual) rather than duration. Pitch and line length generalization results indicated that increasing memory load led to more variable responding and reduced recognition of the standard; however, there was no systematic shift in the location of peak responding. Comparison of the results of this study with those of Ogden et al. (2008, 2010) suggests that although performance deterioration as a consequence of increases in memory load is common to auditory temporal and nontemporal stimuli and visual nontemporal stimuli, systematic interference is unique to auditory temporal processing.     

Teaching Exegesis in Historically Black Theological Schools

This Forum collects the papers presented at a 2010 panel at the Society of Biblical Literature, an outcome of a Wabash Center funded grant project. The project examined the unique dimensions and experiences of teaching Biblical exegesis at the six historically black theological schools (HBTSs), including discussion of the unique needs of HBTS students and their communities, and appropriate learning goals and effective teaching practices for this context. None of the biblical studies faculty were prepared as graduate students for the unique challenges that they have encountered teaching at a HBTS, so they have all had to “learn on the job” how best to approach the unique needs of the student body. The brief statements collected here summarize the findings from the project, describe and analyze some effective teaching strategies, and offer suggestions for continuing the conversation.     

Fear of breakdown and the unlived life

Winnicott's Fear of breakdown is an unfinished work that requires that the reader be not only a reader, but also a writer of this work which often gestures toward meaning as opposed to presenting fully developed ideas. The author's understanding of the often confusing, sometimes opaque, argument of Winnicott's paper is as follows. In infancy there occurs a breakdown in the mother–infant tie that forces the infant to take on, by himself, emotional events that he is unable to manage. He short‐circuits his experience of primitive agony by generating defense organizations that are psychotic in nature, i.e. they substitute self‐created inner reality for external reality, thus foreclosing his actually experiencing critical life events. By not experiencing the breakdown of the mother–infant tie when it occurred in infancy, the individual creates a psychological state in which he lives in fear of a breakdown that has already happened, but which he did not experience. The author extends Winnicott's thinking by suggesting that the driving force of the patient's need to find the source of his fear is his feeling that parts of himself are missing and that he must find them if he is to become whole. What remains of his life feels to him like a life that is mostly an unlived life.     

Psychoanalysis as a Pocket of Resistance Against Inhumanity: Commentary on Paper by Rachael Peltz

In this commentary I discuss ways in which Rachael Peltz makes use of a work of art—John Berger's The Shape of a Pocket—to glimpse “the absent,” Berger's word for the inarticulate living core of human experience. I first take up the idea that art must overcome the existent as “an act of resistance instigating hope” (Berger, 2001, p. 22). Each of the mediums in which art (including the art of psychoanalysis) is made involves the artist's effort to overcome the resistance inherent in transforming one form of experience (e.g., an analyst's reverie experience) into another (e.g., an intervention or an analytic essay). Peltz describes the state of mind necessary for such transformational movement as “an attitude of receptivity to whatever is about to happen,” but never completely comes into being. A second strand of thought that I discuss is the idea that disappearance is as important a part of the human condition as is appearance. Dreams, for example, would lose their mystery and power if they were not just out of reach, perpetually receding. And finally, I comment on how Berger and Peltz share the belief that each of us is personally responsible for making our own individual effort to come together with others to create acts of resistance against man's inhumanity to man.     

Anterior-posterior interhemispheric differences in the loci of lesions producing visual hemineglect

Five neuropsychological tests designed to measure the presence and severity of visual hemineglect were given to 101 patients with clearly defined unilateral lesions. Of these, visual hemineglect was present in 28 out of a total of 56 left brain damaged (LBD) patients and in 20 out of 45 right brain damaged (RBD) patients. The incidence of hemineglect in these groups did not differ significantly, but the severity of hemineglect was greater in the RBD group than in the LBD group. However, the two groups were found to differ significantly with respect to the loci of the lesions most likely to result in hemineglect. In the RBD group most patients with hemineglect had posterior lesions, and in the LBD group most patients with hemineglect had anterior lesions. Possible reasons for this were discussed first from the point of view of an inattention hypothesis and second in terms of the effects the lateralization of language representation might have on the representation of spatial functions.     

The influence of gender labels on the sex typing of imaginary occupations

Social scientists have been concerned not only with gender stratification within the occupational labor force but with young peoples' recognition and aspiration toward same-gender careers. In this paper we investigate how gender labels influence individuals' evaluational sex typing of occupations. Four gender-marked booklets were constructed such that six imaginary occupations within the story were performed by persons labeled as women, men, both men and women, or individuals. College, high-school, and fifth-and third-grade students were asked to evaluate whether a gender-marked occupation was a position for women, men, or both sexes and possible for girls and boys. Students were also asked to indicate which occupations they preferred. Not only were the occupations classified in relation to the gender labels, but occupational gender barriers were perceived. In essence, males were restricted from engaging in female-labeled jobs and females were restricted from engaging in male-labeled jobs. However, career aspirations