The Youth Public Arts Program: Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Outcomes for At-Risk Youth

This article provides the findings of a program evaluation of the Youth Public Arts Program, a long-standing community-based art program that serves at-risk youth in eastern North Carolina. The program evaluation was undertaken to examine the art skills, social and interpersonal skills, and community involvement of the participants. The study included four focus groups and telephone surveys with a total of 38 stakeholders (program participants, parents of participants, program staff, and referral sources). Results indicated that the at-risk youth had gains in both interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, including family relationships, peer relationships, community interaction, increased art skills, confidence, and self-regulation. This article adds to the very limited literature on community-based art programs for youth.     

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.     

Effect of temporal constraints on hemispheric asymmetries during spatial frequency processing

Studies on functional hemispheric asymmetries have suggested that the right vs. left hemisphere should be predominantly involved in low vs. high spatial frequency (SF) analysis, respectively. By manipulating exposure duration of filtered natural scene images, we examined whether the temporal characteristics of SF analysis (i.e., the temporal precedence of low on high spatial frequencies) may interfere with hemispheric specialization. Results showed the classical hemispheric specialization pattern for brief exposure duration and a trend to a right hemisphere advantage irrespective of the SF content for longer exposure duration. The present study suggests that the hemispheric specialization pattern for visual information processing should be considered as a dynamic system, wherein the superiority of one hemisphere over the other could change according to the level of temporal constraints: the higher the temporal constraints of the task, the more the hemispheres are specialized in SF processing.     

Hemispheric predominance assessment of phonology and semantics: a divided visual field experiment

The aim of the present behavioural experiment was to evaluate the most lateralized among two phonological (phoneme vs. rhyme detection) and the most lateralized among two semantic ("living" vs. "edible" categorization) tasks, within the dominant hemisphere for language. The reason of addressing this question was a practical one: to evaluate the degree of the hemispheric lateralization for several language tasks, by using the divided visual presentation of stimuli, and then choose the most lateralized semantic and phonological for mapping language in patients by using fMRI in future studies. During the divided visual field experiment by using words (semantic tasks) and pseudo-words (phonological tasks) as stimuli, thirty-nine right-handed participants were examined. Our results have shown that all tasks were significantly left hemisphere lateralized. Furthermore, the rhyme was significantly more lateralized than phoneme detection and "living" was significantly more lateralized than "edible" categorization. The rhyme decision and "living" categorization will be used in future fMRI studies for assessing hemispheric predominance and cerebral substrate for semantics and phonology in patients. Our results also suggest that the characteristics of stimuli could influence the degree of the hemispheric lateralization (i.e., the emotional charge of stimuli for words and the position of the phoneme to be detected, for pseudo-words).     

Exogenous attention differentially modulates the processing of categorical and coordinate spatial relations

Carrasco and her colleagues have suggested that exogenous attention reduces the size of receptive fields at an attended location (Gobell & Carrasco, 2005; Yeshurun & Carrasco, 1998, 2000). Based on the hypothesis that categorical and coordinate spatial relations are more efficiently processed by smaller and larger receptive fields, respectively, we predicted that exogenous attention would be more beneficial to the processing of categorical spatial relations than coordinate spatial relations while it would disrupt the processing of coordinate spatial relations. To test these hypotheses, participants were tested using a variant of Posner's (1980) attentional cueing paradigm. Exogenous attention produced larger facilitative effects on categorical spatial processing than on coordinate spatial processing at a short cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (100 ms, Experiment 1, N = 28), and this result was replicated regardless of cue size in Experiment 2 (N = 24). When the coordinate judgment was sufficiently difficult, exogenous attention disrupted the processing of coordinate spatial relations (Experiment 3, N = 28). These findings indicate that exogenous attention can differentially modulate the processing of categorical and coordinate spatial relations.     

Chess as a Behavioral Model for Cognitive Skill Research: Review of Blindfold Chess by Eliot Hearst and John Knott

This multifaceted work on chess played without sight of the pieces is a sophisticated psychologist's examination of this topic and of chess skill in general, including a detailed and comprehensive historical account. This review builds on Hearst and Knott's assertion that chess can provide a uniquely useful model for research on several issues in the area of cognitive skill and imagery. A key issue is the relationship between viewing a stimulus and mental imagery in the light of blindfold chess masters' consistent reports that they do not use or have images. This review also proposes a methodology for measuring and quantifying an individual's skill shortfall from a theoretical maximum. This methodology, based on a 1951 proposal by Claude Shannon, is applicable to any choice situation in which all the available choices are known. The proposed “Proficiency” measure reflects the equivalent number of “yes—no” questions that would have been required to arrive at a best choice, considering also the time consumed. As the measure provides a valid and nonarbitrary way to compare different skills and the effects of different independent variables on a given skill, it may have a wide range of applications in cognitive skill research, skill training, and education.     

Library Instruction,Intervention and Immersion: A 5-Year Study of Religion and the Arts

A religion faculty member approached the author after he gave a presentation to the faculty at Waldorf College on integrated library instruction. She expressed disappointment at her students’ scholarly performance on a major research paper she assigns every semester. The ensuing discussion resulted in a campus collaboration among the author, the faculty member, the campus writing center, and the academic achievement center. This article reports on the results of a five-year study on intervention and immersion of library instruction for the class Religion and the Arts at a small liberal arts college.     

Finding Creativity in an Artificial Artist

Creativity is an important component of human intelligence, and imbuing artificially intelligent systems with creativity is an interesting challenge. In particular, it is difficult to quantify (or even qualify) creativity. Recently, it has been suggested that conditions for attributing creativity to a system include: appreciation, imagination, and skill. We demonstrate and describe an original computer system (called DARCI) that is designed to produce images through creative means. We present methods for evaluating DARCI and other artificially creative systems with respect to appreciation, imagination, and skill, and use these methods to show that DARCI is arguably a creative system.     

N400 and P600 or the Role of the ERP Correlates in Sentence Comprehension: Some Applications to the Italian Language

In the present study, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were applied to the study of language comprehension in the Italian language. The ERPs were recorded from 10 electrodes while the participants read (Experiment 1) or listened (Experiment 2) to sentences containing semantic or syntactic anomalies. Final words that were inconsistent with the sentence context elicited a negative wave at about 400 ms poststimulus that was more concentrated in the posterior sites of the scalp, whereas final words that were incongruous with the grammatical structure (subject-verb nonagreement) elicited a positive wave at about 600 ms poststimulus that was homogeneously distributed on the scalp. The authors found no differences based on the perceptual modality of the stimulus (visual or auditory), nor did they find different ERP correlates as a function of task relevance (explicit-implicit task induction). The available evidence indicated that the ERP response to semantic anomalies was at least partially distinct from the ERP response to syntactic anomalies, and that a syntactic parser is a plausible process included in sentence comprehension. The two semantic and syntactic effects appear as automatic processes of the decoding of the anomalies and also modality-independent processes. Cross-linguistic applications are considered in the general discussion.