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Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
How/Can Gestalt Therapy Promote Liberation From Anti-Black Racism?, Michelle Billies
How/Can Gestalt Therapy Promote Liberation From Anti-Black Racism?, Michelle Billies
Publications and Research
Anti-Black racism is an interruption of contact that often takes place out of awareness, and is continuously enacted through innumerable fixed gestalts at every level of human experience. Gestalt therapy as a movement does not leverage its great potential for undoing fixed gestalts of anti-Black racism, or supporting fluid gestalts of racial liberation; this article explores GT theories and practices that do so. I first discuss how concepts of the field, ground, awareness, consciousness, and contact can be informed by ideas such as intersectionality and double consciousness from Black liberation history as well as theorists such as Crenshaw, DuBois, Fanon, …
Competitive Frontoparietal Interactions Mediate Implicit Inferences, Martijn E. Wokke, Tony Ro
Competitive Frontoparietal Interactions Mediate Implicit Inferences, Martijn E. Wokke, Tony Ro
Publications and Research
Frequent experience with regularities in our environment allows us to use predictive information to guide our decision process. However, contingencies in our environment are not always explicitly present and sometimes need to be inferred. Heretofore, it remained unknown how predictive information guides decision-making when explicit knowledge is absent and how the brain shapes such implicit inferences. In the present experiment, 17 human participants (9 females) performed a discrimination task in which a target stimulus was preceded by a predictive cue. Critically, participants had no explicit knowledge that some of the cues signaled an upcoming target, allowing us to investigate how …
Barack Obama Blindness (Bob): Absence Of Visual Awareness To A Single Object, Marjan Persuh, Robert D. Melara
Barack Obama Blindness (Bob): Absence Of Visual Awareness To A Single Object, Marjan Persuh, Robert D. Melara
Publications and Research
In two experiments, we evaluated whether a perceiver’s prior expectations could alone obliterate his or her awareness of a salient visual stimulus. To establish expectancy, observers first made a demanding visual discrimination on each of three baseline trials. Then, on a fourth, critical trial, a single, salient and highly visible object appeared in full view at the center of the visual field and in the absence of any competing visual input. Surprisingly, fully half of the participants were unaware of the solitary object in front of their eyes. Dramatically, observers were blind even when the only stimulus on display was …
Quality-Space Theory In Olfaction, Benjamin D. Young, Andreas Keller, David Rosenthal
Quality-Space Theory In Olfaction, Benjamin D. Young, Andreas Keller, David Rosenthal
Publications and Research
Quality-space theory (QST) explains the nature of the mental qualities distinctive of perceptual states by appeal to their role in perceiving. QST is typically described in terms of the mental qualities that pertain to color. Here we apply QST to the olfactory modalities. Olfaction is in various respects more complex than vision, and so provides a useful test case for QST. To determine whether QST can deal with the challenges olfaction presents, we show how a quality space (QS) could be constructed relying on olfactory perceptible properties and the olfactory mental qualities then defined by appeal to that QS of …
Can Enlightenment Be Traced To Specific Neural Correlates, Cognition, Or Behavior? No, And (A Qualified) Yes, Jake H. Davis, David R. Vago
Can Enlightenment Be Traced To Specific Neural Correlates, Cognition, Or Behavior? No, And (A Qualified) Yes, Jake H. Davis, David R. Vago
Publications and Research
The field of contemplative science is rapidly growing and integrating into the basic neurosciences, psychology, clinical sciences, and society-at-large. Yet the majority of current research in the contemplative sciences has been divorced from the soteriological context from which these meditative practices originate and has focused instead on clinical applications with goals of stress reduction and psychotherapeutic health. In the existing research on health outcomes of mindfulness-based clinical interventions, for example, there have been almost no attempts to scientifically investigate the goal of enlightenment. This is a serious oversight, given that such profound transformation across ethical, perceptual, emotional, and cognitive domains …
Iconic Memory Requires Attention, Marjan Persuh, Boris Genzer, Robert D. Melara
Iconic Memory Requires Attention, Marjan Persuh, Boris Genzer, Robert D. Melara
Publications and Research
Two experiments investigated whether attention plays a role in iconic memory, employing either a change detection paradigm (Experiment 1) or a partial-report paradigm (Experiment 2). In each experiment, attention was taxed during initial display presentation, focusing the manipulation on consolidation of information into iconic memory, prior to transfer into working memory. Observers were able to maintain high levels of performance (accuracy of change detection or categorization) even when concurrently performing an easy visual search task (low load). However, when the concurrent search was made difficult (high load), observers' performance dropped to almost chance levels, while search accuracy held at single-task …
Attention And Olfactory Consciousness, Andreas Keller
Attention And Olfactory Consciousness, Andreas Keller
Publications and Research
Understanding the relation between attention and consciousness is an important part of our understanding of consciousness. Attention, unlike consciousness, can be systematically manipulated in psychophysical experiments and a law-like relation between attention and consciousness is waiting to be discovered. Most attempts to discover the nature of this relation are focused on a special type of attention: spatial visual attention. In this review I want to introduce another type of attention to the discussion: attention to the olfactory modality. I will first clarify the position of attention to smells in a general taxonomy of attention. I will then review the mechanisms …