Tensorial basis to the constancy of perceived object extent over variations of dynamic touch

Subjects wielded occluded rods, with or without attached masses, and reported the distances reachable with their distal tips. Experiments 1–3 compared wielding about the wrist, the elbow, and the shoulder. Experiments 4 and 5 compared free wielding, using the whole arm, with wielding only about the wrist. The two comparisons, respectively, were of spatial and temporal variations in the rod’s rotational inertia. Perceived extent was found to be constant in both comparisons. This constancy was tied to the inertia tensorI _ij defined about a point that remains a fixed distance from the object during wielding—an invariant of the spatially and temporally dependent patterning of mechanical energy impressed upon the tissues of the body. Discussion focused on the reciprocal action and perception capabilities of multisegmented limbs, the tensorial relations in the neurobiology of dynamic touch, and the strategy of understanding perceptual constancy through invariants.     

Comprehension and expression of affect in language-impaired children

Eight children with developmental language impairment (LI) and eight age-, sex-, socioeconomic-status-, and I.Q.-matched controls were given tests of comprehension and expression of affective intent in spoken language and through facial expression. The LI children performed significantly more poorly than did controls in both comprehension and spontaneous expression of vocal affect. On tasks involving emotional facial expression, the opposite results were observed: The LI children were more dramatic in their expression of facial affect than were the controls. Children with language impairment appear to have a deficit in affective comprehension and expression that is modality-specific, i.e., limited to vocal affect. The heightened range of affective facial expression that they demonstrate may be a compensatory mechanism to offset their difficulties with vocal affect.This work was supported by grant 12-203 from the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation, and by NINDS grant NS22343 for the Center for the Study of the Neurological Basis of Language.     

Salience of rape affects self-esteem: The moderating role of gender and rape myth acceptance

In two experiments, conducted in Germany and the U.S.A., it was found that exposure to a rape report lowered self-esteem and positive affect in women who do not accept ‘rape myths’ (stereotypical beliefs which blame the victim and exonerate the rapist; Burt, 1980). Men high in rape myth acceptance (RMA) showed an increase in positive affect and self-esteem as a function of exposure to rape; men low in RMA and women high in RMA were largely unaffected. Both experiments demonstrated that these effects were specific to rape, as opposed to violence in general. These results support the feminist hypothesis that the threat of rape serves the function to exert social control over women and to sustain men's dominance. Potential cognitive mechanisms mediating the observed effects are discussed.     

Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.     

RESOLUTION OF LEXICAL AMBIGUITY BY EMOTIONAL STATE

Abstract— The role of emotion in the resolution of lexical ambiguity was investigated. Happy and sad subjects listened to a list of words that included homophones that had happy and neutral meanings (eg., presents-presence ) and homophones that had sad and neutral meanings (eg., mourning-morning ). Words were presented every 3 s, and subjects wrote down the words, as they heard them (Meaning could be identified by spelling in all cases). An interaction between emotional state and homophone category was observed. Sad subjects were more likely to write down sad meanings than were happy subjects. Results are discussed with reference to the literatures on both emotion and lexical access.     

The role of verbal ability in the processing of complex verbal information

Summary This study investigated the relation between psychometric mental-ability test scores and several reaction-time measures; a simple-reaction task, a choice-reaction task, the Posner and Mitchell (1967) letter-identification task, and a variation of the sentence-verification task. Scores on the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices and the Verbal Subtest of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SATV) were obtained. The less complex information-processing tasks replicate earlier studies in which general intelligence was only marginally related to reaction-time measures. The sentence-verification task systematically varied task complexity. Several direct and derived measures from the task were significantly correlated with psychometric mentalability measures. However, even though a number of precautions were taken to ensure that the sentence-verification task assessed purely verbal-processing efficiency, there was little evidence for an important task-specific relation between verification measures and verbal ability. Moreover, despite its relative verbal complexity, sentence verification did not reflect a greater relationship to verbal ability than other tasks did. Overall, the information-processing efficiency measures used in this study suggested a fairly general, rather than a task-specific, relationship to intellectual ability.The research presented in this paper was conducted while the first author was affiliated with the University of Georgia, U. S. A.