The tunnel effect,Gibson's perception theory,and reflective seeing

Summary Subjects can have continuous visual experience of an object's movement across a display though the movement's middle phase takes place behind an opaque screen. The present article considers explanatory issues pertaining to this so-called, tunnel effect, with special reference to Gibson' s perception theory and the visual activity that I have been calling reflective seeing. Among the issues discussed are the following. (a) In the tunnel experiments, I suggest, there occur both persisting perception, as Michotte held, and persistence perception, as Gibson held. The subjects pick up stimulus information that allows visually experiencing the object's going out of sight at one edge of the screen and coming back into sight at another edge of the screen; the subjects have visual experience of the continued existence and movement of the object while it is out of sight. Moreover, persistence of perceptual experience is involved: when the object goes out of sight, the subjects' visual experience of its movement goes on. (b) I also argue that the tunnel effect is a phenomenon of both straightforward and reflective seeing. Adopting a phenomenal attitude, as one does when reporting one's perceptual experience, one still sees movement taking place on the other side of the screen, as one does in straightforward seeing. However, whereas straightforward seeing does not give inner awareness of visual experience, the subjects in the tunnel experiments report visually experiencing the object's movement while also visually experiencing the opaque screen in front of it as opaque. I argue that these reports, and those about the object's going out of and coming back into sight, must be based on the kind of visual experience that is part and product of reflective seeing.     

Neighborhood frequency effects and letter visibility in visual word recognition

Two experiments are described that measured lexical decision latencies and errors to five-letter French words with a single higher frequency orthographic neighbor and control words with no higher frequency neighbors. The higher frequency neighbor differed from the stimulus word by either the second letter (e.g.,astre-autre) or the fourth letter (chope-chose). Neighborhood frequency effects were found to interact with this factor, and significant interference was observed only tochope-type words. The effects of neighborhood frequency were also found to interact with the position of initial fixation in the stimulus word (either the second letter or the fourth letter). Interference was greatly reduced when the initial fixation was on the critical disambiguating letter (i.e., the letterp inchope). Moreover, word recognition was improved when subjects initially fixated the second letter relative to when they initially fixated the fourth letter of a five-letter word, but this second-letter advantage practically disappeared when the stimulus differed from a more frequent word by its fourth letter. The results are interpreted in terms of the interaction between visual and lexical factors in visual word recognition.     

Context effects in stroop-like word and picture processing

Presents a series of 6 experiments in which Stroop-like effects were generated by modally pure color-color, picture-picture, and word-word stimuli instead of the usual modally mixed color-word or picture-word stimuli. Naming, reading, and categorization tasks were applied. The Stroop inhibition was preserved with these stimuli but unexpectedly showed a semantic gradient only in the naming and not in the reading task. Word categorizing was slower and more interference prone than picture categorizing. These and other results can be captured by a model with two main assumptions: (a) semantic memory and the lexicon are separate, and (b) words have privileged access to the lexicon, whereas pictures and colors have privileged access to the semantic network. Such a model is developed and put to an initial test.     

On believing,saying and expressing

Examines the connections among believing, saying, and expressing in situations where the sentence used is a declarative sentence containing at least one proper name. Proposes a new way of understanding these connections. Develops an argument for the thesis that, although we typically believe the singular propositions expressed by our uses of name sentences, we rarely use such sentences because we believe those propositions.     

Linguistic encoding in short-term memory as a function of stimulus type

In this study, we investigated bases for encoding linguistic stimuli in short-term memory. Past research has provided evidence for both phonological (sound-based) and cherological (sign-based) encoding, the former typically found with hearing subjects and the latter with deaf users of sign language. In the present experiment, encoding capabilities were delineated from encoding preferences, using 58 subjects comprising six groups differing in hearing ability and linguistic experience. Phonologically related, cherologically related, and control lists were presented orally, manually, or through both modalities simultaneously. Recall performance indicated that individuals encode flexibly, the code actually used being biased by incoming stimulus characteristics. Subjects with both sign and speech experience recalled simultaneous presentations better than ones presented orally or manually alone, which reveals the occurrence of enhanced encoding as a function of linguistic experience. Total linguistic experience appeared to determine recall accuracy following different types of encoding, rather than determining the encoding basis used.     

Attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity and methylphenidate: The effects of dose and mastery level on children's learning performance

This investigation examined the relationship between methylphenidate (MPH) and the learning and recall of paired associations by children with attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity (ADDH). Forty-five children with ADDH were randomly assigned to one of three groups (novel, partial mastery, and mastery learning) that varied in the amount of previous learning of paired associations and participated in a double-blind, placebo-control, repeated-measures-across-dose (crossover) design. Each child received four doses of MPH (5 mg, 10 mg, 15 mg, and 20 mg) and a placebo in a random, counterbalanced sequence. The results indicated that both the rate of acquisition and accuracy in learning paired associations were significantly, but differentially, affected by MPH dose and the degree of learning mastery. The implications of these results for psychopharmacological research and the monitoring of psychostimulant effects on children's learning performance in academic settings are discussed.The authors wish to acknowledge and express their sincere appreciation to the graduate and undergraduate student members of the Children's Learning Clinic.     

Are words represented by nodes?

Semantic priming in a lexical decision task was investigated with concurrent pretarget and posttarget primes. The posttarget prime also served as a pattern mask of the lexical decision target. Forward priming is defined as the presence of a semantically related pretarget prime and an unrelated posttarget prime. Backward priming is defined as the presence of a semantically related posttarget prime and an unrelated pretarget prime. Forward and backward priming were compared both when the nonword foils were "legal" and when they were "illegal" with respect to English orthography. Predictions were derived for two general approaches to word recognition: spreading-activation and expectancy-set theories. Both approaches assume that word representations occupy distinct, nonoverlapping locations in memory. Backward-prime facilitation was equivalent to forward-prime facilitation when nonword foils were illegal; however, backward-prime facilitation was not significant when nonword foils were legal. These results challenge both approaches. The proposed solution uses semantic-space (distributed) representations that are functionally unitized by a resonant matching (verification) process.     

Mary McLeod bethune and the education of black girls

Traditional definitions of feminism do not hold for some black women like Mary McLeod Bethune who had to overcome the dual burdens of race and sex in order to build a school for black girls in the racially tense South during the early part of the 20th century. Ever a pragmatist, Bethune seized the opportunity offered by the rhetoric of domesticity and certain stereotypical views of blacks in order to advance the higher cause of uplift and self-sufficiency for black women through education.