Feature-processing deficits following brain injury. II. Classification learning, categorical decision making, and feature production

The claim that overselectivity in feature processing underlies the disorders that aphasics display in processing both visual and verbal material was directly tested by exploring the relationships between the behavior of brain-injured subjects on three experimental tasks: classification learning, categorical decision making, and feature production. From each of these tests a score selected as being indicative of overselective responding was entered into a principal components analysis, together with measures of visual recognition and memory, visual reasoning, naming skills, and severity of aphasia. This analysis supported the assumption that feature-processing disability is a specific and separable deficit, although related both to naming ability and to severity of aphasia. The relevance of the overselectivity hypothesis to naming difficulties following brain injury is discussed.     

The interaction between reading skills and reading instruction

Research on the underlying nature of reading disability, exemplified in the present papers, is essentially correlational. Differences in acoustic memory skills, partial cue utilization, or symbol-sound knowledge may be a result rather than a cause of reading skill differences. Suggestions are made on how to untangle the cause-effect problem through longitudinal investigation and careful analysis of some possible interactions between cognitive skills and reading ability.     

Intersections of Queer art and African Indigenous Culture: The Case of Inxeba (The Wound)

ABSTRACT

This article assesses some recurrent criticisms based on respect for traditional culture levelled at artworks that thematise non-heteronormative gender positionalities in South Africa. More specifically, it reconsiders the stormy, local reception of the South African movie Inxeba (The Wound), a queer love story set in the context of the male initiation rites of the Xhosa community. The article focuses on criticisms of the movie based on the alleged misrepresentation and misappropriation of indigenous cultural practices. It aims to reflect on the complicated knot of problems that queer artists and activists have to navigate in South Africa, including entrenched heteronormative traditions, but also multiculturality and racial privilege. New ways of negotiating these problems are proposed through the development of a more complex topographical account of the intersections of multiple forms of marginality, as well as through the application of multiculturalist theories regarding ways to assist oppressed minorities in traditional cultures.     

Can public virtues be global?

ABSTRACT

An important issue within the field of global ethics is the extent or scope of moral obligation or duties. Cosmopolitanism argues that we have duties to all human beings by virtue of some common property. Communitarian ethics argue that one's scope of obligation is circumscribed by one's community or some other defining property. Public virtues, understood to be either a property that communities possess to function well or a moral excellence constitutive of that community, offer an interesting challenge to this binary by positing moral goods or excellences that are constitutive of a community yet global in application. Virtues such as tolerance, charity, moderation, or benevolence might be examples of such goods or excellences endorsed by a community but applied to individuals who are not members of the community, or, as in the case of environmental ethics, even to entities that are not moral agents. Unlike cosmopolitan ethics, the scope of the obligation does not depend on identifying universal properties, such as rationality, human dignity, or utility, but could be defined entirely by and within a community.     

Recall failure following successful generation and recognition of responses by alcoholic Korsakoff patients

Amnesic Korsakoff patients and controls were presented with twelve words, each shown individually in the presence of a weak associate. They were then asked to freely associate to 12 other words that were strong associates of the to-be-remembered (TBR) words. The Korsakoff patients generated, and were able to recognize, as many of the TBR words as the controls. Yet, in spite of this recognition ability, these same patients were subsequently unable to recall the critical TBR words when the weak cues were again presented. A follow-up study found that the same recognition results could be obtained with Korsakoffs months after initial presentation suggesting that the patients might initially have “recognized” the most highly associated words simply because they represented the most probable choices. Intermediate association prompts failed to generate correct responses. It was hypothesized that the Korsakoff patients cannot restructure their semantic associative hierarchy during input in such a way as to become sensitized to other than the strongest associates as prompts during recall.