Tic-Tac-Toe performance as a function of maturational level of retarded adolescents and nonretarded children

Two groups of retarded adolescents, differing from each other primarily in IQ (and mental age), were compared with two groups of nonretarded children, differing from each other in chronological age (and mental age), on a modified tic-tac-toe game. The mental ages of the retarded and nonretarded groups were approximately the same. It was found that the slope of performance improvement with increasing maturational level was the same for both subject groups, but the performance of the retarded adolescents was approximately 1.5 years behind mental age expectations, as derived from the performance levels of the normal children. These findings support previous suggestions of a major retardate deficit in tasks requiring logical foresight.     

Psychoanalysis and the academy: Reflections on undergraduate teaching1

Abstract

This article addresses both the rewards and the daunting complexities of teaching psychoanalysis to undergraduates in the USA, where the idea of a university as a site for the cultivation of the life of the mind is under siege. The essay recommends a close critical reading of key Freudian texts, the establishment of a classroom atmosphere of trust, genuine respect for expectable student skepticism, and the capacity to wait as dystonic ideas gradually take hold and reveal their worth. Speed, a ubiquitous feature and a questionable desideratum of twenty-first century US culture, as well as facile cleverness, a desideratum within academia, tell against the psychoanalytic process, which is long, slow, halting, laborious, and painful, but a process that can, at best, open what has heretofore been sealed.     

Visual backward masking in retardates and normals

Educable adolescent male retardates were compared with normal males of equal CA and equal MA on a visual backward masking task. Significantly shorter interstimulus intervals were required to induce a masking effect in the equal-CA group than in the retarded and equal-MA groups, who did not differ from each other. Speed of visual processing is a function of MA. It is related to CA in normals. and to IQ when retardates are compared with equal-CA normals.