A human-centered approach for designing World-Wide Web browsers

Because the World-Wide Web has features that are not found in traditional information systems, it has some unique problems pertaining to human use, such as the difficulty of searching for specific information. This paper describes human cognitive limitations pertinent to the design of Web browsers and provides a conceptual model for human information processing on the Web. It also compares user strategies and use of browser functions for two tasks that differ in the specificity of the information that is to be retrieved. General principles and specific recommendations for the design of Web browsers are derived from these considerations.     

Treatment with Unethical Practitioners; Caveat Emptors

Therapists who are trained at psychoanalytic institutes often foster unethical relationships between trainees and senior therapists. This practice may pass on the damage to the unsuspecting population of patients at large. One way in which trainees are harmed, at these institutes, is in their failure to develop a clear sense of the importance of boundaries in treatment. In not learning how to develop a secure frame from their own treatment, neophyte therapists are often unable to recognize the need for appropriate boundaries in their treatment of others. As a result, their patients may be in danger. The therapist who does not value the struggle to maintain a healthy balance between independence and dependence in their own treatment will probably not be able to help their patients find the proper balance either. One can only wonder how such a therapist could help their own patients know when the time to end treatment is at hand. My own research seems to indicate that unethical treatment practices at these institutes cut across ideological and theoretical differences within the analytic community. Consequently, the problem is not one of individuals who are poorly analyzed and poorly trained. Rather, the focus is a wider one, in which a serious blindspot seems to be endemic to a system that fosters a lack of regard for appropriate boundaries in treatment.     

Influences of Destructive Personality Information on Decision Making1

This study examined the effects of information about a landlord's personality on juror judgments for a landlord-tenant civil trial. The personality information manipulated was specifically relevant to destructive acts. Alternative versions of witness testimony were used to describe a landlord either high or low on need for power. treating people as objects, and negative life themes. This information strongly influenced aspects of the schema for this case constructed by the individual mock jurors. Destructive personality information caused dislike of the landlord and lowered the credibility of his story. If the landlord treated people as objects, the credibility of the tenant's story and positive evaluations of the tenant increased. Juror judgments about relative fault were strongly shifted by destructive personality information. An empirical model for juror decisions indicated a dynamic interplay of story components and fault judgments.     

El Greco's Eyesight: Interpreting Pictures and the Psychology of Vision

There is a common assumption about pictures, that seeing them produces in us something like the same effects as seeing the things they depict. This assumption lies behind much empirical research into vision, where experiments often expose subjects to pictures of things in order to investigate the processes involved in cognizing those things themselves. Can philosophy provide any justification for this assumption? I examine this issue in the context of Flint Schier's account of pictorial representation. Schier attempts to infer the assumption from what he takes to be the fundamental facts about picturing. I argue that there is no plausible form of Schier's basic claims from which the assumption can be inferred. I then reject a second argument, that by appealing to the assumption Schier could explain why it is impossible to depict a particular without depicting it as having certain properties. I conclude that those sympathetic to the assumption need to articulate and defend some version of it suited to their needs.     

Similarity in context

Similarity comparisons are highly sensitive to judgment context. Three experiments explore context effects that occur within a single comparison rather than across several trials. Experiment 1 shows reliable intransitivities in which a target is judged to be more similar to stimulus A than to stimulus B, more similar to B than to stimulus C, and more similar to C than to A. Experiment 2 explores the locus of Tversky’s (1977) diagnosticity effect in which the relative similarity of two alternatives to a target is influenced by a third alternative. Experiment 3 demonstrates a new violation of choice independence which is explained by object dimensions’ becoming foregrounded or backgrounded, depending upon the set of displayed objects. The observed violations of common assumptions to many models of similarity and choice can be accommodated in terms of a dynamic property-weighting process based on the variability and diagnosticity of dimensions.     

Book reviews

Socializing Epistemology: The Social Dimensions of Knowledge, Frederick F. Schmitt, Ed., 1994. Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield, ix + 315 pp., US$22.95, ISBN: 0847679594

A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action, Esther Thelen & Linda B. Smith. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, xxii + 376 pp., $50, ISBN 0–262–20095–3 cloth

From Kant to Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics, William B. Ewald, Ed., 1996. Oxford, Oxford University Press. xviii+ 1340 pp., £195.00, two volumes, ISBN 0–19–853271–7 (the set)     

Precursors to Masochistic and Dependent Character Development

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -