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.     

A motor timing experiment implemented using a musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) approach

The musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) offers a way for perception and behavior researchers to implement high-quality experiments using inexpensive, commercially available hardware and software. We describe the MIDI and illustrate its applicability to research using a replication of the oscillator signature finding reported recently by Collyer, Broadbent, and Church (1992, 1994).     

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.     

Group intervention with children of parents with aids

This paper describes a format for group intervention with children of parents with AIDS. Therapeutic factors specific to group work with these children and special issues regarding AIDS are discussed. The stages of development of such groups are outlined, with particular attention paid to themes of grief and loss. Suggestions for future work in this area are given.     

The kinematics,movement phasing and timing of a skilled action in response to varying conditions of uncertainty

This study was designed to provide a detailed analysis of the parameters which interact to produce a field hockey drive. The drive was performed by an elite performer under two conditions of uncertainty (Blocked and Random). The subject was asked to drive a field hockey ball toward a specified target. In the Blocked condition the speed of the approaching ball remained constant (20, 30 and 40 m.p.h.) while in the Random condition these speeds were randomly assigned to each trial. Cine analysis of the subject's successful responses under the two experimental conditions led to an investigation of the kinematics, phasing, and timing of the stroke. The subject placed emphasis upon varying the initial phases of the stroke (i.e., backswing and preparatory phases) in order to produce a temporally consistent ballistic downswing to ball contact. It seemed likely that the subject appraised the ball speed that was being delivered and then incorporated additional stick movement to ‘mark time’ before initiating temporally consistent movement phases, as spatial uncertainty increased, the subject delayed her response initiation, but then tended to respond in intervals of one reaction time for each stroke phase. Consistency was evident for displacement and initiation point values, but to a lesser extent than existed for the other variables. However, as a result of this adjustment in spatial location and displacement of the stick end during the preliminary phases of the response, the subject was able to produce a consistent and accurate ballistic downswing.     

Spatial frequency content of visual imagery

Three experiments employing the McCollough paradigm were conducted to determine the spatial-frequency content of visual imagery. In Experiment 1, large and reliable pattern-contingent color aftereffects were obtained after adaptation to visual imagery. The direction of the aftereffects indicated that subjects were adapting to higher spatial frequencies in their imagery. These results contrast with the data of Experiment 2, which demonstrate that color aftereffects obtained with adaptation to physically present stimuli are mediated by the fundamental spatial frequency components. The magnitude of the imagery-induced aftereffects in Experiment 1 equaled the magnitude of the externally induced aftereffects obtained in Experiment 2 with the same subjects. By blurring the to-be-imaged patterns (Experiment 3), the fundamental Fourier components became the salient perceptual features of the stimuli, and the direction of the imagery-induced aftereffects was reversed from that of Experiment 1, indicating that the spatial frequency content of the imagery had changed from higher to lower frequencies. Under normal viewing conditions, subjects use the higher spatial frequencies associated with the perceptually salient edges of stimuli to construct their images. The results of Experiments 1 and 3 are discussed in light of a current controversy over the nature of information representation in imagery, and it is concluded that support has been obtained for the analog model of visual imagery.     

Figurai vs. configural effects in the filled duration illusion

Patterns varying in form goodness and size were presented for 15, 30, and 45 msec. The experiment included three independent groups of subjects. Half of the first group were presented size variations with good figures, while the other half were shown size variations with poor figures. Half of the second group were presented goodness variations with small figures, while the other half were shown goodness variations with large figures. A third group experienced variations in both goodness and size. The major findings were: (1) poor figures and large figures were judged “longer” than good or small figures when varied within a session; (2) this effect vanished when the different levels of size or goodness were presented to separate groups of subjects; (3) the magnitude of the difference in temporal estimation was the same for size and goodness when each was varied in isolation; (4) when size and form goodness were varied orthogonally in the same session, both dimensions produced reliable changes in temporal estimation. These data are discussed in light of current theoretical explanations of the filled duration illusion.     

Incorporating inferences in narrative representations: A study of how and why

Four experiments examined the conceptual organization of narrative passages and the extent to which these representations were explanatory in a variety of experimental tasks. The conceptual representation of a passage consisted of a graph of labeled nodes and labeled, directed arcs which were adopted from the Conceptual Dependency Theory. These representations included both explicitly stated information and inferences which had been empirically extracted by a question-answering procedure. Symbolic procedures for answering how- and why-questions were also delineated. The conceptual representations and the symbolic procedures that operate on these representations together accounted for 91% of the answers generated from question-answering protocols in Experiment 1, and also the rated quality of specific answers to specific questions in Experiment 2. Experiments 3 and 4 supported the hypothesis that structural properties of the representations can predict recall of explicitly stated nodes and verification ratings of inference nodes. The results provide encouraging support for the proposed graphic representations and also for the use of question-answering protocols in uncovering prose inferences.