Review Essay: The Divided Church and its Theology

Book reviewed in this article:
Ephraim Radner, The end of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West     

Between-dimension flanker effects: A clarification with encouraging implications

Models of selective and divided attention have evolved to be remarkably similar (e.g., Cohen & Shoup, 1997; Mordkoff & Yantis, 1993). One remaining difference between these models is the inclusion of all-or-none gates within a recent model of selective attention; the existence of these gates is supported by the absence of a between-dimension flanker effect. However, the existence of these gates is also inconsistent with a recent model of divided attention. In the present experiment, the evidence in favor of all-or-none gates was explored, with the following result: When the task involves colors and letters as the stimuli, and when display features are presented at equal rates, no evidence of these gates is observed. Although other issues remain to be resolved, these findings bode well for the general goal of a unified model of divided and selective attention.     

Patterns of paralexia: A psycholinguistic approach

A sample of the literature on acquired dyslexia is reviewed with special reference to the nature of paralexic errors. Linguistic studies of six cases of dyslexia are presented, with appropriate neurological and psychological details; there are two cases of each of three hypothesized types of impairment, visual dyslyxia, surface (grapheme-phoneme) dyslexia, and deep (syntactico-semantic) dyslexia. Finally, a scheme for acquired dyslexia is proposed and related to the error patterns observed in normal adult readers and in children learning to read; our approach to lexical look-up is one that the diagram makers may have found sympathique.This is a revised version of paper presented at the International Neuropsychology Symposium, Engelberg, Switzerland, June 1971.     

Liberating Behavior from Time-Bound Control: Expanding the Present Through Hypnosis1

Temporal perspective was experimentally manipulated by verbal instructions to expand the present while minimizing the significance of past and future. The reactions of trained hypnotic subjects to this induction were compared with hynotic simulators and nonsimulating controls. In a fourth group, time sense was made salient but no suggestion given to alter it. Across a variety of tasks, self-report measures, and behavioral observations, this modification of the boundaries between past, present, and future resulted in profound consequences among the hypnotic subjects. Changes in affect, language, thought processes, sensory awareness, and susceptibility to social-emotional contagion, accompanied an expanded present orientation. Nonreactive measures distinguished simulators from hypnotic subjects who apparently were better able than control subjects to incorporate the induced time distortion and perceive it as a viable alternative to their traditional time perspective. Some implications of time as a pervasive, non-obvious, independent variable in the social control of cognition and behavior are outlined.     

The perception of eye contact

Ss made judgments of whether or not they were being looked in the eye as an E fixated several points on and off their faces.Distance between sender and receiver, sex, and whether the sender made a sequence of fixation sprior to the terminal fixation were variables of interest. The sender-receiver distance produced less effect than predicted from the hypothesis that receiver judgments were determined solely by the discrepancy between the sender’s iris/sclera configuration (ISC) during true eye contact and the current fixation point. There was no stable differencein accuracy as a function of whether the sender’s terminal fixation was preceded by other fixations or not. These findings cast doubt on the belief expressed in recent studies that the ISC can be used to accurately discriminate eye gazes from other gazes. The results also suggest that fixations on some portions of the face yield a judgment of eye contact which might be predicted on the basis of social experience.     

Fairness and futility

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - William Lane Craig argues that both God and immortality are required for life to have meaning; life is futile without either of the two. I argue...