Perceiving self-motion in depth: The role of stereoscopic motion and changing-size cues

During self-motions, different patterns of optic flow are presented to the left and right eyes. Previous research has, however, focused mainly on the self-motion information contained in a single pattern of optic flow. The present experiments investigated the role that binocular disparity plays in the visual perception of self-motion, showing that the addition of stereoscopic cues to optic flow significantly improves forward linear vection in central vision. Improvements were also achieved by adding changingsize cues to sparse (but not dense) flow patterns. These findings showed that assumptions in the heading literature that stereoscopic cues facilitate self-motion only when the optic flow has ambiguous depth ordering do not apply to vection. Rather, it was concluded that both stereoscopic and changingsize cues provide additional motion-in-depth information that is used in perceiving self-motion.     

Illusions of familiarity caused by cohort activation

Subjects took part in an auditory lexical decision task followed by an auditory test of recognition memory for words presented in this task. Subjects categorized their recognition judgments as based on either recollection (“remember” responses) or familiarity (“know” responses). Distractor items in the recognition test included the base words from which the nonwords used in the lexical decision task were derived. Consistent with the findings of Wallace, Stewart, Sherman, and Mellor (1995), more false alarms were made to “late” base words (where the corresponding nonwords were created by changing a phoneme near the end of the word) than to “early” base words (corresponding nonwords were created by changing a phoneme at the beginning of the word). However, this effect was found in “know” responses but not in “remember” responses. The findings are attributed to enhanced fluency with which the base words are processed following their implicit activation at encoding.     

Hemispheric asymmetries in the identification of band-pass filtered letters

Processing of band-pass filtered letters in the left versus right cerebral hemispheres (LH vs. RH) was examined. The present experiments constituted a partial replication of a study in which Peterzell, Harvey, and Hardyck (1989) found no hemispheric differences in accuracy or reaction time (RT) as a function of spatial frequency. However, methodological limitations of their study (e.g., the possibility that subjects were engaged in a detection, not identification, task) may have obscured possible hemispheric differences. We addressed these problems in the present study, obtaining significant hemisphere × spatial frequency interactions for RT andd', with RH advantages at low frequencies and LH advantages at high frequencies; however, these effects were not large in magnitude and were often restricted to particular dependent variables, stimulus sizes, and so forth. Hemispheric differences in response bias were also found.     

Questions of criteria: Reply to Peterzell (1997)

In a reply to our report on hemispheric differences in processing band-pass filtered letters (Christman, Kitterle, & Niebauer, 1997), Peterzell (1997) argues that our results are not attributable to hemispheric asymmetries in spatial frequency processing. Rather, Peterzell argues that factors such as response criteria and stimulus visibility can account for our results. We argue that our results are attributable (at least in part) to hemispheric asymmetries in spatial frequency processing, while at the same time we acknowledge the potential influence of other factors in the determination of hemispheric differences.     

The Bahá'í Global Vision

The Bahá'í faith made a formal presentation to the Rio de Janeiro summit in 1992; this developed into the internationally published policy statement on global development issues, published in 1995, entitledThe Prosperity of Humankind. This article explores aspects of Bahá'í teaching on global development and conflict resolution highlighted both in this document, in the earlier The Promise of World Peace (1985), and in other writings. It examines key concepts such as consultation, justice, trusteeship, the unity in diversity of humankind, equality and equity, and planetisation. It explores the relevance of the Bahá'í vision to contemporary society, politics, business and religion, finding parallels in contemporary secular writings; and it questions whether dogmatic belief helps or hinders the process of global consultative development, that is whether future developments will be BaháY initiatives.     

Commentary on high-performance computing and human vision II: Virtual reality and eyeball tracking

Visualization of scientific data that are not normally visible can be greatly enhanced by understanding human visual perception. Mars the Movie illustrated the use of stereo resolution for producing realistic vistas of the Mars surface. The real-time recording and analysis of eyeball-tracking data is another example of human vision research which benefits from high-performance computing. Currently the bottleneck is not in the hardware but in the available software to transform data efficiently.     

HOME ACCESS MODIFICATIONS: EFFECTS ON COMMUNITY VISITS BY PEOPLE WITH PHYSICAL DISABILITIES

We examined the effects of access modifications to home entrances of people with physical disabilities on their reported community outings. An interrupted time-series design was used, in which the introduction of ramps was staggered across the homes of 6 people with moderate to severe mobility impairments. Four participants reported increases in weekly outings following installation of ramps at their entrances, and 2 reported a small decrease. These findings suggest that reducing the response requirements of access to and from the residence of people with mobility impairments may increase community visits, but may be insufficient given other environmental barriers in the community.     

Subordinate Performance, Leader-Subordinate Compatibility, and Exchange Quality in Leader-Member Dyads: A Field Study

A model examining factors related to quality of exchange in leader-member dyads was developed and tested. Subordinates and supervisors in 223 dyads in a manufacturing setting provided demographic data and completed measures of performance and attitude towards work. Results found organization citizenship behaviors, leader-member attitude similarity, and similarity of education to be related to quality of leader-member exchange.     

Configurational approach to manifest dream analysis: Possible acceleration of the patient's communication in psychoanalytic psychotherapy

This paper presents an approach to dream analysis utilizing the manifest content of a number of consecutive dreams from the same patient. Following a review of the literature, it is noted that in once-a-week psychotherapy there is often very little time for exhaustive dream analysis to unravel the buried meanings within the latent dream content. Twenty categories have been established for the configurational analysis, which is applied to the analysis of the first eleven dreams of a patient in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The authors independently analyzed the patient's dreams using each of the 20 categories with high reliability, then combined their contributions. This data was then compared with the treating analyst's independent clinical observations about the twenty categories.