Temporality and the torments of time

Immersion in time gives birth to consciousness, as well as conflict and torment. When human beings developed a sense of future, they also gained the ability to anticipate threats from nature or their fellow beings. They thereby created cultures that are bastions of survival, as well as places of poetry, art and religion where they could band together and reflect upon their common plight. The practice of psychoanalysis is in many ways a temporal process, a process of remembering, for owning and elaborating a past that gives us substance, thereby providing a basis for reflective consciousness. Stimulated by Freud's early writings, Lacan, Laplanche and their successors in particular have focussed extensively on time and psychoanalysis, and their views are a central point of this discussion. A substantial case study is offered that provides concrete examples of these perspectives. A multi‐faceted view of temporality emerges, one that is more syncopated than linear or teleological. In conclusion, I will briefly discuss recent findings in the neuroscience of memory and ‘time travel’ that underpin contemporary psychoanalytic ideas in surprising ways. It is important to remember that acceptance of the contradictory nature of temporal experience can open space for increased freedom and playfulness.     

First‐time viewers' comprehension of films: Bridging shot transitions

Which perceptual and cognitive prerequisites must be met in order to be able to comprehend a film is still unresolved and a controversial issue. In order to gain some insights into this issue, our field experiment investigates how first‐time adult viewers extract and integrate meaningful information across film cuts. Three major types of commonalities between adjacent shots were differentiated, which may help first‐time viewers with bridging the shots: pictorial, causal, and conceptual. Twenty first‐time, 20 low‐experienced and 20 high‐experienced viewers from Turkey were shown a set of short film clips containing these three kinds of commonalities. Film clips conformed also to the principles of continuity editing. Analyses of viewers' spontaneous interpretations show that first‐time viewers indeed are able to notice basic pictorial (object identity), causal (chains of activity), as well as conceptual (links between gaze direction and object attention) commonalities between shots due to their close relationship with everyday perception and cognition. However, first‐time viewers' comprehension of the commonalities is to a large degree fragile, indicating the lack of a basic notion of what constitutes a film.     

Choosing housemates and justifying age,gender, and ethnic discrimination

This study examines the explanations and justifications offered by those engaged in selecting housemates. The rationale for the research follows the recent housing demographic, whereby shared living has become increasingly popular among young adults in Western countries. This study sought to address the surprising lacuna in the extant research through the application of discursive psychology to understanding prejudice and discrimination within the context of contemporary social and political sanctions against openly discussing prejudice. Data were drawn from interviews with young New Zealanders aged from early twenties to early thirties who were experienced with house sharing. Detailed results are presented involving discrimination based on age, gender, and ethnicity. The study found that rigid narrow preferences were stated with respect to age, gender was less important, and ethnicity was talked about cautiously, especially if there was the possibility of significant cultural differences or language barriers.     

Modeling response signal and response time data

The diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) and the leaky competing accumulator model (LCA, Usher & McClelland, 2001) were tested against two-choice data collected from the same subjects with the standard response time procedure and the response signal procedure. In the response signal procedure, a stimulus is presented and then, at one of a number of experimenter-determined times, a signal to respond is presented. The models were fit to the data from the two procedures simultaneously under the assumption that responses in the response signal procedure were based on a mixture of decision processes that had already terminated at response boundaries before the signal and decision processes that had not yet terminated. In the latter case, decisions were based on partial information in one variant of each model or on guessing in a second variant. Both variants of the diffusion model fit the data well and both fit better than either variant of the LCA model, although the differences in numerical goodness-of-fit measures were not large enough to allow decisive selection between the models.     

The effects of a high-probability instruction sequence and response-independent reinforcer delivery on child compliance

We compared the effects of a high-probability (high-p) instruction sequence and a fixed-time (FT) schedule of reinforcement on the compliance of 2 typically developing children. A multielement experimental design with a reversal component was implemented according to a multiple baseline across participants arrangement. Both the high-p and FT conditions resulted in increased compliance for both participants during the multielement sessions. These results suggest that it may be possible to increase compliance without a response requirement of the type arranged in the high-p instruction sequence.     

The effect of encoding time on retention by infants and young children

Using a Visual Recognition Memory (VRM) procedure, we examined the effect of encoding time on retention by 1- and 4-year olds. Irrespective of age, shorter familiarization time reduced retention, and longer familiarization time prolonged retention. The amount of familiarization that yielded retention after a given delay decreased as a function of age.     

With the future behind them: convergent evidence from aymara language and gesture in the crosslinguistic comparison of spatial construals of time

Cognitive research on metaphoric concepts of time has focused on differences between moving Ego and moving time models, but even more basic is the contrast between Ego‐ and temporal‐reference‐point models. Dynamic models appear to be quasi‐universal cross‐culturally, as does the generalization that in Ego‐reference‐point models, FUTURE IS IN FRONT OF EGO and PAST IS IN BACK OF EGO. The Aymara language instead has a major static model of time wherein FUTURE IS BEHIND EGO and PAST IS IN FRONT OF EGO; linguistic and gestural data give strong confirmation of this unusual culture‐specific cognitive pattern. Gestural data provide crucial information unavailable to purely linguistic analysis, suggesting that when investigating conceptual systems both forms of expression should be analyzed complementarily. Important issues in embodied cognition are raised: how fully shared are bodily grounded motivations for universal cognitive patterns, what makes a rare pattern emerge, and what are the cultural entailments of such patterns?     

Training to use voice onset time as a cue to talker identification induces a left-ear/right-hemisphere processing advantage

We examined the effect of perceptual training on a well-established hemispheric asymmetry in speech processing. Eighteen listeners were trained to use a within-category difference in voice onset time (VOT) to cue talker identity. Successful learners (n=8) showed faster response times for stimuli presented only to the left ear than for those presented only to the right. The development of a left-ear/right-hemisphere advantage for processing a prototypically phonetic cue supports a model of speech perception in which lateralization is driven by functional demands (talker identification vs. phonetic categorization) rather than by acoustic stimulus properties alone.     

USING COMPLEX AUDITORY—VISUAL SAMPLES TO PRODUCE EMERGENT RELATIONS IN CHILDREN WITH AUTISM

Six participants with autism learned conditional relations between complex auditory‐visual sample stimuli (dictated words and pictures) and simple visual comparisons (printed words) using matching‐to‐sample training procedures. Pre‐ and posttests examined potential stimulus control by each element of the complex sample when presented individually and emergence of additional conditional relations and oral labeling. Tests revealed class‐consistent performance for all participants following training.