The emotional experience of K

The author raises the question of the emotional experience of K in Bion's schema of affective links, L, H, and K, suggesting that it is the emotional experience of feeling curious. He explores the central role curiosity has in 'On arrogance' and 'Attacks on linking' and hypothesizes that in Learning from experience the more complex notion of K is introduced in its place. Thus, Bion's affective schema is taken to be a version of Freud's account of experience in terms of instinctual impulses recast in terms of emotional experience. Freud's primary developmental dichotomy, the tensions between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, can be seen as the dichotomy of tensions between the emotional experience of L/H and the emotional experience of K. This suggests that the potential tension between K and L/H is critical to what happens in the consulting room. Finally the author argues that containing as a developmental dynamic is an expression of a K-state-of-mind and thus the container is thus a container-in-K. It concludes that one important aspect of what Bion called -K is an attack on a K-state-of-mind by an intrusion of L/H which has the effect of contaminating and dominating the urge to know.     

Dimensional separability or flexibility of attention? Age trends in perceiving configural stimuli

The hypothesis that perceptual development proceeds from less to greater dimensional separability was tested by giving a speeded classification task to first and fouth graders. In Experiment 1, children sorted line drawings of a cartoon figure into two piles according to his eyes (open or closed) or his mouth (smiling or frowning). First graders exhibited the pattern characteristic of integral dimensions: An interference effect was found when dimensions were combined orthogonally and a facilitation effect when dimensions were correlated, relative to a condition in which only one dimension varied. Fourth graders exhibited an optional separable pattern: There was facilitation in the correlated condition but no interference in the orthogonal condition. These results support the hypothesis that development proceeds toward greater flexibility of attention rather than simply toward increasing separability. A flexible field hypothesis of visual attention was suggested to explain how older children can exercise such optional separability. This hypothesis correctly predicted the asymmetrical relation between dimensions found in Experiments 2 and 3: For both first and fourth graders, the eyes of a cartoon figure (open or closed) and his location (right or left) were nonseparable when the eyes were relevant and separable (or optional separable) when location was relevant.