Involuntary attention and identification accuracy

Using the spatial cuing paradigm, Prinzmetal, McCool, and Park (2005) made the distinction between voluntary and involuntary attention. They claimed that although accuracy was affected by an informative spatial cue (which controls voluntary attention), it was not affected by a noninformative cue (which controls involuntary attention). We reevaluate two reports that assert that noninformative spatial cues affect accuracy. Dufour (1999) reported that a noninformative auditory cue enhanced visual identification in a conjunction search task. Klein and Dick (2002) reported that, in an RSVP task with visual cues, the cue also enhanced accuracy at short stimulus onset asynchronies. We found that Dufour's results were due to overt orienting (eye movements) rather than to covert attention. The results of Klein and Dick were due either to location uncertainty or to a confounding of the order of stimulus presentation and condition.     

Does task-set reconfiguration create cognitive slack?

C. Oriet and P. Jolicoeur (2003) reported 2 experiments in which the perceptual contrast of stimuli was manipulated in a task-switching paradigm. They failed to observe an interaction in the reaction time data between task switching, perceptual contrast, and response-stimulus interval. Using the locus of slack logic, they concluded from these results that early perceptual processing of stimuli awaits the completion of a task-set reconfiguration stage, rather than proceeding in parallel with it. Here, an assumption necessary for this argument is questioned, and it is shown that an existing computational model of task switching, without successive stages for task-set reconfiguration and perceptual processing, produces a similar pattern of data. Thus, C. Oriet and P. Jolicoeur's data are compatible with models in which early perceptual processing and task-set reconfiguration take place in parallel.     

Decreasing Psychiatric Symptoms by Increasing Choice in Services for Adults with Histories of Homelessness

Despite the increase in consumer-driven interventions for homeless and mentally ill individuals, there is little evidence that these programs enhance psychological outcomes. This study followed 197 homeless and mentally ill adults who were randomized into one of two conditions: a consumer-driven “Housing First” program or “treatment as usual” requiring psychiatric treatment and sobriety before housing. Proportion of time homeless, perceived choice, mastery, and psychiatric symptoms were measured at six time points. Results indicate a direct relationship between Housing First and decreased homelessness and increased perceived choice; the effect of choice on psychiatric symptoms was partially mediated by mastery. The strong and inverse relationship between perceived choice and psychiatric symptoms supports expansion of programs that increase consumer choice, thereby enhancing mastery and decreasing psychiatric symptoms.     

Grammatical structure and recall: A function of the space in immediate memory or of recall delay?

Savin and Perchonock suggest that when a sentence and additional unrelated words are presented for immediate recall, the number of words recalled in addition to that sentence represents the space left over in a limited memory store after the sentence and its transformational tag have been stored. They report error data and word-recall data in support of a transformational model of sentence processing. In two replications of that study, error data failed to support the transformational model. Furthermore, the word-recall data could be attributed to differential word-recall delays-the more complex the sentence, the longer the delay between word presentation and word recall. These findings, as well as others in the literature. fail to support a transformational interpretation of sentence processing.     

Organizing Muslim Virtue: Community Organizing,Comparative Religious Ethics,and the South African Muslim Struggle Against Apartheid

While offering valuable comparative insights into models of the self and ethical formation across religious traditions, studies of virtue ethics have been critiqued for putting forward accounts which are elite-focused. Some comparative ethicists have pointed to work in religious ethics and political theology on faith-based community organizing as offering compelling case studies of non-elite ethical formation. I seek to add to this literature by performing an analysis of the theories and practices of ethical formation in the South African Muslim anti-apartheid grassroots organization known as the “Call of Islam.” The “Call of Islam” emphasized a liberation-oriented praxis and active solidarity with non-Muslim organizations for the purposes of protesting apartheid and employed a range of social practices including study circles (halaqat) and political funeral processions to prepare and equip its members for such work. As such, it not only sheds light on non-elite ethical formation, but in its cultivation of the habits and dispositions of democratic solidarity, it also serves as an Islamic example of broad-based community organizing.     

Teachers'' ratings of social competence of children with high versus low levels of depressive symptoms

This study examined the relationship between children's self-ratings of depressive symptoms on the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI) and teachers' ratings of the situational social competence of these children based on the Taxonomy of Problematic Social Situations (TOPS). Children in the high CDI group showed significantly higher teacher ratings (indicating lower social competence) than children in the low CDI group on four TOPS scales: peer group entry, response to provocation, response to success, and teacher expectations. Of the children in the high CDI group, 85% could be correctly classified with a discriminant analysis on the basis of TOPS ratings; of the children in the low CDI group, 77% were correctly classified. Implications of these findings, as well as limitations of the study, are discussed.     

Book reviews

The Many Faces of Science: An Introduction to Scientists, Values and Society, Leslie Stevenson & Henry Byerly, 1995. Oxford, Westview Press

Reason, Truth and Self: The Postmodern Reconditioned, Michael Luntley, 1995. London, Routledge xv + 247 pp., hb ISBN 0 415 118522

John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait, Sidney Hook, 1995. New York, Prometheus xviii + 242 pp., hb ISBN 0 87975 9852

The Logical Status of Diagrams, Sun‐Joo Shin, 1994. Cambridge, CUP xii + 197 pp.