The Pedagogy of Perception and the Notion of the "Formation of Perceptual Acts"

Let us now examine the role of instruction in perceptual development, as it has been elaborated by Soviet psychologists and sketched in the previous chapters of this book under the label "the formation of perceptual acts."     

Classification of Unconscious Phenomena and The Category of Activity

For many years, the subject of consciousness has been beyond the pale of American academic psychology. Every history of psychology tells us that Wundt's structuralism sought to study the "contents of consciousness" and that the failure of this effort resulted in Watsonian behaviorism (at least, within the American context). In recent years, however, there has been a reawakening of interest among cognitive psychologists in the phenomenon of conscious awareness.     

mtDNA haplogroup X: An ancient link between Europe/Western Asia and North America?

On the basis of comprehensive RFLP analysis, it has been inferred that approximately 97% of Native American mtDNAs belong to one of four major founding mtDNA lineages, designated haplogroups "A"-"D." It has been proposed that a fifth mtDNA haplogroup (haplogroup X) represents a minor founding lineage in Native Americans. Unlike haplogroups A-D, haplogroup X is also found at low frequencies in modern European populations. To investigate the origins, diversity, and continental relationships of this haplogroup, we performed mtDNA high-resolution RFLP and complete control region (CR) sequence analysis on 22 putative Native American haplogroup X and 14 putative European haplogroup X mtDNAs. The results identified a consensus haplogroup X motif that characterizes our European and Native American samples. Among Native Americans, haplogroup X appears to be essentially restricted to northern Amerindian groups, including the Ojibwa, the Nuu-Chah-Nulth, the Sioux, and the Yakima, although we also observed this haplogroup in the Na-Dene-speaking Navajo. Median network analysis indicated that European and Native American haplogroup X mtDNAs, although distinct, nevertheless are distantly related to each other. Time estimates for the arrival of X in North America are 12,000-36,000 years ago, depending on the number of assumed founders, thus supporting the conclusion that the peoples harboring haplogroup X were among the original founders of Native American populations. To date, haplogroup X has not been unambiguously identified in Asia, raising the possibility that some Native American founders were of Caucasian ancestry.     

Glossary of Terms Frequently Encountered in Soviet Psychology

Numerous terms are used in Soviet psychology, the direct translation of which may be misleading to American psychologists because they are habitually used in a different sense from that familiar to Western psychology. For example, righteous indignation has been vented by Western psychologists over the "Russian preoccupation" with interpreting all behavior in terms of Pavlovian reflexes. To the Russian psychologist, the word refleks is no more a specific term than the word "response" is to an American psychologist. Its use does not imply the classical Pavlovian conditioning paradigm. Since interpreters are not necessarily aware that the cognates are not synonymous, it is worthwhile for any Western psychologist to become aware of the most common and easy sources of terminological confusion. The following is a glossary of terms which are so familiar to the Russian psychologist that he will seldom stop to explain them. Most of them are cognates. Some are synonymous with their usual English translations; many are not.     

Ladies Are Seen, Not Heard: Language Socialization in a Southern, African American Cosmetology School

This article examines language socialization among African American cosmetology students. To constitute themselves as hair experts, freshman and senior students learn to distinguish between specialized and lay hair terminology, avoid loud talking, and ask clients' diagnostic questions. Students also reframe textbook metacommunicative theories using personal narrative, role-play, and "mother wit." Findings from this ethnographic and discourse analytic study highlight the actual processes through which students learn to speak as and hence, become "hair experts." Data further reveal how language learning is shaped by students' cultural and communal contexts.     

After Authenticity at an American Heritage Site

This essay explores what happens to a heritage site "after authenticity." The site is Colonial Williamsburg, one of the most ambitious reconstruction projects ever undertaken and a place intended to be experienced as an objective correlate of an American national "identity." Because it makes such claims, throughout its history the site has been subject to critiques by those wishing to undermine its authority to speak as the voice of an all-encompassing America. Moreover, in the past 20 years, professional historians at Colonial Williamsburg have become articulate on-site critics of the epistemology of authenticity as they promulgate a historiography currently popular in history museums and in the academy.     

Pedagogical effectiveness of innovative teaching methods initiated at the Department of Physiology, Government Medical College, Chandigarh

Modern teaching trends in medical education exhibit a paradigm shift from the conventional classroom teaching methods adopted in the past to nonconventional teaching aids so as to encourage interactive forms of learning in medical students through active participation and integrative reasoning where the relationship of the teacher and the taught has undergone tremendous transformation. Some of the nonconventional teaching methods adopted at our department are learning through active participation by the students through computer-assisted learning (CD-ROMs), Web-based learning (undergraduate projects), virtual laboratories, seminars, audiovisual aids (video-based demonstrations), and "physioquiz."     

学习障碍儿童的弹性发展研究

学习障碍是学龄儿童较常见的问题之一。近年来,西方学者在学习障碍领域开始引人弹性发展理论,取得了大量的研究成果。本文就弹性发展理论的内容、影响学习障碍儿童弹性发展的保护性因素和危险性因素、弹性发展的作用机制以及学习障碍儿童的弹性干预作了简要的介绍,以期对我国的学习障碍研究和干预有所启发。     

The politics of pathology: how obesity became an epidemic disease

Americans' recent weight gains have been widely described as an "obesity epidemic." Such a characterization, however, has many problems: the average American weight gain has been relatively low (eight to 12 pounds over the last 20 years), and the causal linkages between adiposity, morbidity, and mortality are unclear. Nevertheless, the media and numerous health officials continue to sound dire warnings that obesity has become an epidemic disease. In this article, I examine how and why America's growing weight became an "obesity epidemic." I find the disease characterization has less to do with the health consequences of excess weight and more with the various financial and political incentives of the weight loss industry, medical profession, and public health bureaucracy. This epidemic image was also assisted by the method of displaying information about weight gain with maps in PowerPoint slides. Such characterizations, I argue, are problematic. Given the inconclusive scientific evidence and the absence of a safe and effective weight loss regimen, calling America's growing weight an epidemic disease is likely to cause more harm than good.     

Pavlov as a psychologist. A reappraisal

American psychologists are informed on Pavlov's work on conditional reflexes but not on the full development of his theory of higher nervous activity. This article shows that Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity dealt with concepts that concerned contemporary psychologists. Pavlov used the conditioning of the salivary reflex for methodological purposes. Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity encompassed overt behavior, neural processes, and the conscious experience. The strong Darwinian element of Pavlov's theory, with its stress on the higher organisms' adaptation, is described. With regard to learning, Pavlov, at the end of his scholarly career, proposed that although all learning involves the formation of associations, the organism's adaptation to the environment is established through conditioning, but the accumulation of knowledge is established by trial and error.     

Expanding the Dialogue: A Response to Bird and Godwin's "Film in the Undergraduate Anthropology Classroom"

This article is a response to S. Elizabeth Bird and Jonathan P. Godwin's article "Film in the Undergraduate Anthropology Classroom: Applying Audience Response Research in Pedagogical Practice." The intention of my response is to expand the dialogue on film use to promote cultural understanding in university classes and campus-wide. Through participant-observation and the use of surveys over a two-year period, I examine the transformation of participant viewers in various contexts, noting that by limiting our understanding of film to merely the transfer of information, we not only have a limited understanding of our viewers but also have ignored possible avenues for learning. My findings indicate that the "context" for film screening is dependent on the film, the instructor, the post-screening discussant, and the viewers, can yield dramatic results in learning, depending on the ways in which each is engaged.     

Pavlov and the Nobel Prize Award

When Pavlov was first nominated for the Nobel Prize, he was well recognized by physiologists, especially those concerned with digestion. It appears unlikely that psychological interpretations of his conditional reflex findings had begun to penetrate deeply into the discipline of psychology. The selection in 1904 of Pavlov for the award in physiology or medicine attracted the attention of a broader range of scientists. American psychologists, in particular, probably became more aware of the advantages of incorporating his "objective" conditional reflex method into their investigations. General biographical aspects relating to the award and the effect of the award upon the acceptance of the conditional reflex method by American psychologists are developed in this presentation.     

Deconstructing death in paleodemography

In 1992 in this Journal (Konigsberg and Frankenberg [1992] Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 89:235-256), we wrote about the use of maximum likelihood methods for the "estimation of age structure in anthropological demography." More specifically, we presented a particular method (the "iterated age-length key") from the fisheries literature and suggested that the method could be used in human and primate demography and paleodemography as well. In our paper (section titled "Some Future Directions"), we spelled out two broad areas that we expected to see develop over the ensuing years. First, we felt that the use of explicit likelihood methods would open up interest in basic estimation issues, such as the calculation of standard errors for demographic estimates and the formulation of tests for whether samples differed in their demographic structure. Second, we felt that the time was ripe for hazards analyses that would incorporate the uncertainty in estimation that follows from using age "indicators" rather than known ages. While some of these developments have occurred during the last decade, few have been reported in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. In this paper we resolve some issues from our 1992 paper, and attempt to redress this deficit in the literature by reviewing some recent developments in paleodemography over the past decade.     

Antipredator Behavioral Responses of Native and Exotic Tadpoles to Novel Predator

Factors related to the invasion process, such as high abundance of invaders, residence time, and functional distinctiveness, are well documented, but less attention has been given to the effects of antipredator strategy of invasive species during colonization. In this study, we explored the antipredator strategy of an introduced species by comparing the predator avoidance behaviors of two native anuran species and one introduced("exotic") species in the presence of different predators. The two native anuran species used in the study were Black-spotted Pond Frog Rana nigromaculata and Terrestrial Frog Rana limnocharis. The introduced(invasive) species used was American bullfrog Lithobates catesbeianus. Chinese pond turtle Chinemys reevesii, Red-backed rat snake Elaphe rufodorsata, and Big-headed turtle Platysternon megacephalum were used as predator species. Chinese pond turtles and Red-backed rat snakes are native predators of Black-spotted Pond Frogs and Terrestrial Frogs, while Big-headed turtles are novel("unfamiliar") to the two frogs. All three predator species are novel("unfamiliar") to the American bullfrog. The results show that tadpoles of the two native species displayed behaviors of recognizing the two native predators, but did not display the capability of identifying the novel predator. Results from our study also suggest that American bullfrog tadpoles exhibited strong antipredator behavioral responses by displaying the capability of identifying "unfamiliar" predators without cohabitation history and prior exposure to them. Such antipredator behavioral responses could have resulted in more favorable outcomes for an invading species during the invasive introductory process.     

Pediatric paradox: heterogeneity in the birth cohort

Comparisons of birth-weight-specific infant mortality indicate that low-birth-weight African American infants have lower mortality than low-birth-weight European American infants despite higher infant mortality overall-the "pediatric paradox." One explanation is heterogeneity in birth weight. Analyses of African American and European American births suggest that birth cohorts consist of two heterogeneous subpopulations. One appears to account for normal births, whereas the other may consist of compromised births. Estimates of infant mortality indicate that the compromised subpopulation has higher overall mortality but lower birth-weight-specific mortality. We attribute lower birth-weight-specific infant mortality in the compromised subpopulation to higher rates of fetal loss. Compared to European American birth cohorts, African American birth cohorts have (1) higher birth-weight-specific mortality in the normal subpopulation, (2) larger compromised subpopulations, and (3) lower birth-weight-specific mortality in the compromised subpopulation. Consequently, the pediatric paradox is attributable to greater rates of compromised pregnancies and higher fetal losses among African Americans.     

Automated discovery of food webs from ecological data using logic-based machine learning

Networks of trophic links (food webs) are used to describe and understand mechanistic routes for translocation of energy (biomass) between species. However, a relatively low proportion of ecosystems have been studied using food web approaches due to difficulties in making observations on large numbers of species. In this paper we demonstrate that Machine Learning of food webs, using a logic-based approach called A/ILP, can generate plausible and testable food webs from field sample data. Our example data come from a national-scale Vortis suction sampling of invertebrates from arable fields in Great Britain. We found that 45 invertebrate species or taxa, representing approximately 25% of the sample and about 74% of the invertebrate individuals included in the learning, were hypothesized to be linked. As might be expected, detritivore Collembola were consistently the most important prey. Generalist and omnivorous carabid beetles were hypothesized to be the dominant predators of the system. We were, however, surprised by the importance of carabid larvae suggested by the machine learning as predators of a wide variety of prey. High probability links were hypothesized for widespread, potentially destabilizing, intra-guild predation; predictions that could be experimentally tested. Many of the high probability links in the model have already been observed or suggested for this system, supporting our contention that A/ILP learning can produce plausible food webs from sample data, independent of our preconceptions about "who eats whom." Well-characterised links in the literature correspond with links ascribed with high probability through A/ILP. We believe that this very general Machine Learning approach has great power and could be used to extend and test our current theories of agricultural ecosystem dynamics and function. In particular, we believe it could be used to support the development of a wider theory of ecosystem responses to environmental change.     

Conditions Complicating Parallel Recognition Processing

The issue in this paper is currently widely debated among American experimental psychologists concerned with the general problem of "information processing": Do human adults take in and process visual information one piece at a time (serial processing), or do they "chunk" information so that several stimuli may be processed simultaneously (parallel processing)?     

Evolution of a partnership to improve K-16 science education

This article grew out of a presentation at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Pacific Division in Irvine, California in June 2001. The symposium "Sharing Science: Successful Scientist Expert-Teacher Practitioner Interactions" was organized by Drs. Nancy J. Pelaez and Barbara L. Gonzalez of California State University at Fullerton. Goodman's presentation was entitled "The Team Approach to Outreach Activities for K-12 Teachers in a Large, Rural State." This personal view report describes the development and evolution of educational outreach programs at the University of South Dakota School of Medicine (USDSM) and the support provided by the administration. The number and strength of the programs at USDSM have grown in direct proportion to the commitment that the institution has been willing to make to faculty members with interests in science education. Currently, USDSM has three Basic Science faculty members who spend significant effort working with K-12 students and teachers and who have been called upon nationally as consultants and reviewers for similar programs.     

Chronic exposure to ELF fields may induce depression

Exposure to extremely-low-frequency (ELF) electric or magnetic fields has been postulated as a potentially contributing factor in depression. Epidemiologic studies have yielded positive correlations between magnetic- and/or electric-field strengths in local environments and the incidence of depression-related suicide. Chronic exposure to ELF electric or magnetic fields can disrupt normal circadian rhythms in rat pineal serotonin-N-acetyltransferase activity as well as in serotonin and melatonin concentrations. Such disruptions in the circadian rhythmicity of pineal melatonin secretion have been associated with certain depressive disorders in human beings. In the rat, ELF fields may interfere with tonic aspects of neuronal input to the pineal gland, giving rise to what may be termed "functional pinealectomy." If long-term exposure to ELF fields causes pineal dysfunction in human beings as it does in the rat, such dysfunction may contribute to the onset of depression or may exacerbate existing depressive disorders.