具身框架下的自我研究

具身认知理论主张自我认知是机体与环境的互动过程,基于具身认知的身体生物学特点、活动特征及自我身体表征等方面的实证性研究,不断明晰了自我经验中具身的重要作用.这些研究弥补了传统心理学关于自我-世界之间身心交互性研究的不足.具身认知作为自我认知的一种新兴解释视角,在自我研究上存在一些局限性,主要涉及具身化的对称性、双向性、自动化,以及自我研究的定性等问题.自我的具身研究应结合建构水平理论和隐喻理论来思考认知加工机制问题,并吸纳进化动机以及文化假说等观点的解释力度.     

What Does Taste Represent?

What does vision represent? What does hearing represent? Smell? Touch? Competing answers to each of these questions have been defended. The present paper argues that the issue of what taste represents is categorically more complicated. In particular, it raises two very difficult dilemmas.     

Assessing inference production in 5 to 7-year-olds: Benefits of using a pictorial task

IntroductionThis study focuses on the methodology used to assess children's inferential skills in a narrative comprehension context with children aged between 5 to 7 years.ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to test the validity of a pictorial task based on children's literature to probe children's ability to make inferences at different times during the listening of fictional stories.MethodThe task involves selecting one of three vignettes which best illustrates what is currently happening in the story (i.e., inferential vs. literal vs. off-topic). The choices expressed here are compared to those made during a preference task performed by the same students, which consists of selecting the vignette they like the most among each series presented in the comprehension task.ResultsFirst, based on the analysis of the data collected in the comprehension task, children most often select inferential vignettes. Second, the choices expressed in the comprehension task differ from those expressed in the preference task.ConclusionThese results confirm the relevance of using children's literature associated with a pictorial task to test children's inferential skills, even with preschoolers.     

Endpoints and viewpoints on spatial neglect

In this issue of the Journal of Neuropsychology, Abe and Ishiai (2022) report an experiment designed to probe the subjective experience of line bisection in neglect. A re-analysis of their data can also offer insights into how best to characterise neglect performance for this and other tasks. We show that sensitive measures of neglect can be obtained by quantifying the difference in the influence (or ‘weighting’) that each endpoint has on the response. The right endpoint is dramatically more influential than the left in people with neglect performing line bisection and endpoint reproduction tasks. This supports the view that neglect may limit the ability to simultaneously represent two locations, so that the response is determined primarily with respect to the right endpoint. We also discuss Abe and Ishiai's conclusion that bisection responses in neglect are accompanied by the subjective experience of a complete line extending equally to either side of the chosen midpoint.     

A transitory homosexual passion in the course of an analytic treatment1

Do homosexualities express a sexual confl ict originating in bisexuality or must we look for their deep determinism in the narcissistic confl ict and its vicissitudes? Two clinical sequences from the treatment of a borderline patient, which occurred during years seven and eight of treatment, a period characterised by intense drive turbulence and the unexpected occurrence of a transitory homosexual passion, will enable the reader to follow the psychical movements and evolution of the work of representation. The fi rst sequence throws light on the links between her sudden involvement in this homosexual passion and the traumatic dangers of a breakdown of her ego's capacity for representation, linked to a reactivation in the transference of early and later traumatic traces whose reverberation in the transfero/countertransference dynamic was the source of a painful transference that was responsible for this lateral transference movement. The second sequence shows the links between the strengthening of her capacity for representation, thanks to the working through of the oedipal confl ict in its two aspects, and her renunciation of this passion. The roots of this transitory homosexual passion in the deep fl aws of her psychical functioning raise metapsychological questions concerning, in particular, the dynamic of the ‘double’(‘twin’) and narcissism.     

White matter integrity and pictorial reasoning in high-functioning children with autism

The current study investigated the neurobiological role of white matter in visuospatial versus linguistic processing abilities in autism using diffusion tensor imaging. We examined differences in white matter integrity between high-functioning children with autism (HFA) and typically developing controls (CTRL), in relation to the groups’ response times (RT) on a pictorial reasoning task under three conditions: visuospatial, V, semantic, S, and V + S, a hybrid condition allowing language use to facilitate visuospatial transformations.     

文本阅读中文本表征的意识性研究

文本表征的意识性是文本阅读研究领域的一个新的热点问题,该问题研究的理论基础来自于多年以前研究者就提出的再认双加工模型,该问题研究的主要范式有记得-知道范式、独立记得-知道范式和加工分离范式,三者各有自己的特点,在很多研究中经常结合使用。当前,研究者使用最新的研究范式对文本阅读中文本表征的意识性进行了初步研究,已经初步得出了一些重要结论,但当前研究中仍存在一些问题,需研究者在未来的研究中加以关注。     

Affine representations in psychophysics and the near-miss to Weber’s law

A theoretical account for the near-miss to Weber’s law in the form of a power function, with a special emphasis on the interpretation of the exponent, was proposed by Falmagne [Falmagne, J.-C. (1985). Elements of psychophysical theory. New York: Oxford University Press] within the framework of a subtractive representation, P(x,y)=F(u(x)−g(y)). In this paper, we examine a more general affine representation, P(x,y)=F(u(x)h(y)+g(y)). We first obtain a uniqueness theorem for the affine representation. We then study the conditions that force an affine representation to degenerate to a subtractive one. Part of that study involves the case for which two different affine representations co-exist for the same data. We also show that the balance condition P(x,y)+P(y,x)=1 constrains an affine representation to be a special kind of subtractive representation, a Fechnerian one. We further show that Falmagne’s power law takes on a special form for a so-called weakly balanced system of probabilities, in which case the affine representation is Fechnerian. Finally, following Iverson [Iverson, G.J. (2006a). Analytical methods in the theory of psychophysical discrimination I: Inequalities, convexity and integration of just noticeable differences. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 50, 271-282], we generalize the Fechner method to construct the sensory scales in a weakly balanced affine representation by integrating (derivatives of) just noticeable differences.     

Number line estimation in highly math‐anxious individuals

In this study, we aimed to investigate the difficulties highly math‐anxious individuals (HMA) may face when having to estimate a number's position in a number line task. Twenty‐four HMA and 24 low math‐anxiety (LMA) individuals were presented with four lines with endpoints 0–100, 0–1,000, 0–100,000, and 267–367 on a computer monitor on which they had to mark the correct position of target numbers using the mouse. Although no differences were found between groups in the frequency of their best‐fit model, which was linear for all lines, the analysis of slopes and intercepts for the linear model showed that the two groups differed in performance on the less familiar lines (267–367 and 0–100,000). Lower values for the slope and higher values for the intercept were found in the HMA group, suggesting that they tended to overestimate small numbers and underestimate large numbers on these non‐familiar lines. Percentage absolute error analyses confirmed that HMA individuals were less accurate than their LMA counterparts on these lines, although no group differences were found in response time. These results indicate that math anxiety is related to worse performance only in the less familiar and more difficult number line tasks. Therefore, our data challenge the idea that HMA individuals might have less precise numerical representations and support the anxiety–complexity effect posited by Ashcraft and colleagues.