Movement cues and body orientation in recall of locations by blind and sighted children

Experiment 1 tested blind children's recall of locations with repeated and changed recall movements under normal and out-of-line body-to-target orientation. Changed movements produced target undershooting and inaccurate path-keeping by the older blind, particularly for horizontal directions. Errors by the younger blind depended more on body orientation.

Experiment 2 tested blindfolded sighted children under the same conditions, with four forms of coding instructions. The sighted showed no effect of body orientation, but changed movements had similar effects on target localization as for the older blind, regardless of instructions. Different forms of instructions affected bias from movement directions in near and far sectors of the display differently, and instructions to code by reference to the shape of the display surround eliminated the differences.

It was argued that blind and sighted children use extent and direction cues from the positioning movement in locating targets, and that these are not automatic effects but result from children's assessment of the informational conditions.     

Books received

I argue that there are phenomenological constraints on what it is to see an object, and that these are overlooked by some theories that offer allegedly sufficient causal and counterfactual conditions on object-seeing.     

BRIEF REPORT

Fascination for extremely negative scenes was examined by exposing 152 students to pictures of September 11 attacks 8 months after their occurrence. Participants rated their orientation toward the pictures, their felt emotions, and their self and world views. Factor analysis of the orientation items yielded three clusters. Fascination characterized 32.9% of respondents; it was related only to attention and interest. Rejection (23%) involved aversion for the pictures and related thoughts; it was correlated to dysphoric emotions and to motivational depletion. Ambivalence (20.4%) was related to attention and interest, to most specific negative emotions, to an inclination to process the pictures cognitively and interpersonally, and to indices of enhanced social reliance and personal growth. These results are discussed in reference to various relevant theoretical models.     

Love for a Marriage Story: The Association Between Love and Marital Satisfaction in Middle Adulthood

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The present study examined the associations between perceptions of love and marital satisfaction and gender moderations among Korean middle-aged married men...     

Analytic attitude – focus or embodiment? Subtle communications in the transference/countertransference relationship

The paper considers a ‘befallment’ that occurred in the course of analysis at a time when the focus of work was too much at a conscious level, dissociated from the patient’s embodied and visceral depths. A rigidly held attitude of focal attention is considered as potentially a defence against embodied experiences of overwhelm and vulnerability that may haunt shadowy realms which remain unlit by the narrow beam of conscious awareness. Rather as a dream drifts in from the unconscious, an enactment by the analyst brought neglected aspects of the transference and countertransference relationship into the room. Later, the patient’s own dreaming mind offered images that suggested an underlying dynamic. These subtle communications, alongside the patient’s attitude toward the analyst’s lapse, are considered as factors in the achievement of greater embodied integration. The analyst’s difficulty in arriving at a formulation of such events is discussed, along with the necessity of holding such ‘befallments’ in mind over long periods of time before any explanation can be adumbrated.     

Trait anxiety,visuospatial processing,and working memory

This experiment assessed the components of Baddeley's working memory system impaired by anxiety during performance of the Corsi Blocks Test. The Corsi task was performed concurrently with different secondary tasks (i.e., articulatory suppression; counting backwards; spatial tapping; simple tapping). Results showed Corsi performance depended mainly on the central executive and visuospatial sketchpad components of working memory. Adverse effects of trait anxiety on the Corsi task were observed on the central executive but not on the phonological loop or the visuospatial sketchpad. These effects were not mediated by state anxiety. The findings indicate for the first time that trait anxiety impairs central executive functioning on a nonverbal task, and that anxiety does not impair functioning of the “slave” systems (i.e., phonological loop; visuospatial sketchpad). Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.