A case of prosopagnosia with some preserved covert remembrance of familiar faces

This paper presents the detailed analysis of a case of prosopagnosia in a 54-year-old male farmer following bioccipital vascular disease. In-depth clinical investigations confirmed the diagnosis of prosopagnosia and revealed the absence of any associated defect, except for a slight aspecific disturbance of the short-term memory. Further study of this case indicated that the trouble was not concerned with the class of complex visual stimuli, was not even concerned with facial expressions or unknown faces, was not a perceptual defect, but was related mainly to the operation of individualization. The memory hypothesis was thus retained and supported. Moreover, exploration of the difficulty indicated that the deficiency was limited to defective access to conscious information concerning faces and information associated with these faces (name, context, etc.), effectively stored in memory.     

Perceptual categorization in the cerebral hemispheres

The suggestion of a functional hemispheric dissociation in performing perceptual categorization was examined in two tachistoscopic experiments with normal adults. Subjects were required to match physically identical or similar, but nonidentical, pictures of animals. The first experiment showed no hemispheric difference and indicated that both hemispheres could resort to two different types of categorization process as a function of the simultaneous or delayed mode of presentation of the stimuli. In the second experiment, the viewing conditions were manipulated so as to afford a reduced amount of stimulus energy, and a significant left-visual-field advantage was then obtained. The results are discussed with respect to models of information processing in the cerebral hemispheres, and in relation to impairments in object recognition following brain damage.     

Measuring Inconsistency

I provide a method of measuring the inconsistency of a set of sentences – from 1-consistency, corresponding to complete consistency, to 0-consistency, corresponding to the explicit presence of a contradiction. Using this notion to analyze the lottery paradox, one can see that the set of sentences capturing the paradox has a high degree of consistency (assuming, of course, a sufficiently large lottery). The measure of consistency, however, is not limited to paradoxes. I also provide results for general sets of sentences.     

Freedom and the psychoanalytic ontology of quantum physics

Jung's paper ‘Synchronicity – an acausal connecting principle’, defining the phenomenon as a ‘meaningful’ coincidence depending on archetypal activation, was published in 1952, together with a conceptually related piece by physicist and Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Pauli entitled, ‘The influence of archetypal ideas on the scientific theories of Kepler’. Slavoj ?i?ek, in The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, suggests that, in contrast to any notion of a ‘pre‐modern Jungian harmony’, the main lesson of quantum physics was that not only was the psychoanalytic, empty subject of the signifier constitutively out‐of‐joint with respect to the world, but that the Real in itself was already incomplete, out‐of‐joint, ‘not‐all’. Yet while ?i?ek frequently tries to separate Jung from his own ontology, this paper shows that his ontology is not as different as he suggests. Consistent with our earlier publications on Jung and Zizek, a closer investigation reveals an underlying congruence of both of their approaches. In this paper we show that this affinity lies in the rejection by both Jung and ?i?ek of the ideology of reductive materialism, a rejection that demonstrably draws on quantum physics in similar ways. While Jung posits an inherently meaningful universe, ?i?ek attempts to salvage the freedom of human subjectivity by opposing his Lacanian ‘dialectical materialism’ to reductive materialism.     

Freud,Jung and The Great Chain of Being

For some time, it has been clear that psychoanalytic theories are built upon the kind of master narratives Roy Schafer, a New York psychoanalyst, described in 1980. As such, psychoanalytic theories may today have lost some of their initial scientific credibility in that they can no longer be seen as summarizing findings from data collected in a research environment. As aids in participating in their patients’ process of healing, however, narratives continue to be used by practitioners and reflect allegiance to core beliefs and propositions with roots in long‐standing Western thought. In this article, the metaphors in master narratives of Freud and Jung are compared with a conceptual system identified by cognitive linguists as ‘The Great Chain of Being’. Based on this analysis, the article proposes that theoretical formulations have mainly a secondary role to play in achieving good outcomes. The most critical element is the therapist's capacity to access a specific narrative for what transpires throughout each treatment.     

Hemiretinal differences in face recognition: accuracy versus reaction time

A face-recognition task involving monocular presentation of laterally displaced stimuli yielded a nasal hemiretinal advantage for reaction time for correct identifications, but a temporal hemiretinal advantage for accuracy (d'). These hemiretinal effects, in conjunction with eye dominance, could in principle distort or obscure interpretations of hemispheric processing differences obtained with binocular stimulation.     

TEMPERAMENTAL ADAPTABILITY,PERSISTENCE, AND REGULARITY: PARENTAL RATINGS OF NORWEGIAN INFANTS AGED 6 TO 12 MONTHS,WITH SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR PREVENTIVE PRACTICE

There is a need for standardized measures of infant temperament to strengthen current practices in prevention and early intervention. The present study provides Norwegian data on the Cameron‐Rice Infant Temperament Questionnaire (CRITQ; J.R. Cameron & D.C. Rice, 1986a), which comprises 46 items and is used within a U.S. health maintenance organization. The CRITQ was filled out by mothers and fathers at 6 and again at 12 months as part of a longitudinal study of mental health during the first years of life (the “Little in Norway” study, N = 1,041 families enrolled; V. Moe & L. Smith, 2010). Results showed that internal consistencies were comparable with U.S. data. The temperament dimensions of persistence, adaptability, and regularity had acceptable or close‐to‐acceptable reliabilities in the U.S. study as well as in this study, and also were unifactorial in confirmatory factor analysis. These dimensions are the focus in this article. Findings concerning parents’ differential ratings of their infants on the three dimensions are reported, as is the stability of parents’ ratings of temperament from 6 to 12 months. In addition, results on the relation between temperament and parenting stress are presented. The study suggests that temperamental adaptability, persistence, and regularity may be relevant when assessing infant behavior, and may be applied in systematic prevention trials for families with infants. The inclusion of concepts related to individual differences in response tendencies and regulatory efforts may broaden the understanding of parent—infant transactions, and thus enrich prevention and sensitizing interventions with the aim of assisting infants’ development.