DIVINE AGENCY AND THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY

Many contemporary thinkers seeking to integrate theistic belief and scientific thought reject what they regard as two extremes. They disavow deism in which God is understood simply to uphold the existence of the physical universe, and they exclude any view of divine influence that suggests the performance of physical work through an immaterial cause. Deism is viewed as theologically inadequate, and acceptance of direct immaterial causation of physical events is viewed as scientifically illegitimate. This desire to avoid both deism and any positing of God as directly intervening in the physical order has led to models of divine agency that seek to defend the reality of divine causal power yet affirm the causal closure of the physical. I argue, negatively, that such models are unsuccessful in their attempts to affirm both the reality of divine causal power acting in the created world and the causal closure of the physical and, positively, that the assumption that underlies these models, namely that any genuine integration of theistic and scientific belief must posit the causal closure of the physical on pain of violating well-established conservation principles, is mistaken.     

Causal attributions for behaviors consistent or inconsistent with an actor's personality traits: Differences between those offered by actors and observers

The present research was designed to investigate differences in the attributions offered from the actor's perspective and the observer's perspective. It was predicted that causal attributions for behaviors inconsistent with an actor's personality traits would be more situational when offered from the actor's perspective than when offered from the observer's perspective. In contrast, it was predicted that causal attributions for behaviors consistent with an actor's personality traits would be more dispositional when offered from the actor's perspective than when offered from the observer's perspective. Consistent with these hypotheses, extraverts explained introverted behaviors and introverts explained extraverted behaviors more situationally from the actor's perspective than from the observer's perspective. Furthermore, extraverts explained extraverted behaviors and introverts explained introverted behaviors more dispositionally from the actor's perspective than from the observer's perspective. These differences in the attributions offered by actors and observers were attenuated but not eliminated when attributors had access to useful situational information with which to apply the discounting principle.     

Attention and stuttering: Do stutterers think too much about speech?

In this investigation the ability of stutterers and nonstutterers to simultaneously perform speech and nonspeech tasks was compared. Subjects were 10 stutterers and 10 nonstutterers. Two experiments were conducted. In the first, subjects performed a non-attention-demanding gross-motor task while they read aloud. In the second, subjects performed an attention-demanding task (reading comprehension) during speech. Results indicated that there was no significant change in the disfluency values of stutterers during the motor activity or as a result of the reading comprehension task. However, stutterers were found to perform significantly poorer than nonstutterers on the reading comprehension task. This finding was taken as evidence that stutterers devote more attention to speech than do nonstutterers.     

Building theories of reading ability: On the relation between individual differences in cognitive skills and reading comprehension

To date most theories of reading ability have emphasized a single factor as the major source of individual differences in performance. However there has been little agreement on what that factor is. However, candidates have included visual discrimination, phonological and semantic recoding, short-term memory, and utilization of linguistic knowledge and context. The single- factor theories are summarized. Literature is then reviewed to show that no single-factor theory is likely to be right, because a very wide range of component skills and abilities has in fact been shown to correlate with reading success. Among them are discrimination of letter location and letter order during perceptual recognition, use of orthographic regularity as an aid to visual code formation, use of spelling-to-sound regularity in phonological recoding, memory for word order, spontaneous identification of syntactic relations, flexibility in prediction from syntactic and semantic context, and context-specificity in semantic encoding. It is concluded that more complex, multifactor models of reading ability are required, and some recent attempts to collect data conducive to such a model are described. In the process, three different approaches to identifying factors relevant to reading success are delineated. These are general abilities assessment, learning potential assessment, and component skills analysis. Two methods of conducting component skills analysis are presented, and it is recommended that they be used as converging operations. Finally, the results of a component skills analysis are used to construct a tentative example of a class of hierarchical models of reading ability that can be pursued developmentally.     

Development of the concepts of energy conservation and entropy

Development of the concepts of energy conservation and entropy was studied in children between 5 and 15 years of age. Energy conservation, as illustrated by the operation of double and colliding pendulums, was not well understood until about 15 years of age. Understanding of entropy was dependent on the particular apparatus used. When illustrated by the gradual mixing of rolling marbles of different colors, entropy was understood by 9- to 15-year-olds. But when illustrated by the eventual equalization of water levels in two interconnected containers, entropy was not well understood until about 15 years of age. Errors on a problem used to illustrate the conservation concept could often be characterized by the misapplication of the entropy concept and vice versa.     

Fluency breaks in older speakers: Implications for a model of stuttering throughout the life cycle

In order to test a model describing the occurence of fluency breaks throughout the life cycle, spontaneous speech samples of 40 nonstutterers and 4 stutterers above the age of 50 were perceptually analyzed. Fluency breaks were classified into categories of formulative or motoric breaks. The results supported research, noting an increase in formulative fluency breaks (especially fillers and interjections) for older speakers. There was, however, a significant decrease in the occurence of formulative fluency breaks during the final years of late adulthood. No change was found in the occurence of motoric fluency breaks in the nonstuttering speakers. Stuttering speakers had significantly less formulative breaks and significantly more motoric breaks than nonstuttering speakers.     

Functional cerebral lateralization in subtypes of disabled readers

This study investigated the functional cortical organization of reading-disabled boys and age-matched normal readers. Subjects were initially classified according to E. Boder's (1971a. In B. Bateman (Ed.), Learning disorders. Seattle: Special Child Publications. Vol. 4.) distinction between dysphonetic children (who make nonphonetic, bizarre spelling errors), dyseidetic children (who make phonetically acceptable errors, but do not respond to some words as “wholes”), and children who display normal error patterns (who make phonetically acceptable errors and respond to words as “wholes”). It was hypothesized that different types of reading disability would be associated with different patterns of lateralized brain function. This proposal was examined by testing subjects on three experimental neuropsychological measures—hemispheric time-sharing, conjugate lateral eye movements, and tactile directional perception. Conjugate lateral eye movements were disregarded as the control subjects failed to show predicted asymmetries on this measure. The two other measures were considered valid and demonstrated atypical lateralization in the reading-disabled groups. Lateralization of verbal and/or spatial functiosn differed among the reading-disabled groups and an attempt was made to relate these atypical patterns to the type of reading difficulties presented.     

Genetic mediation of sex differences in horizontality: A rejoinder

Neither M. G. McGee (Developmental Review, 1981, 1, 289–295) nor M. J. Allen, M. A. Wittig, and K. Butler (Developmental Review, 1981, 1, 284–288) suggest any alternative explanation for our finding that water-level performance appears to have an X-linked genetic basis. The power calculations of Allen et al. are found to be faulty, and McGee confuses the hypothesis we tested with a weaker hypothesis. Although the X-linked genetic model is not an adequate model of water-level performance the water-level data fit the X-linked model far better than color blindness and HCN data McGee presents as exemplars of X-linked characteristics.