Showing papers on "Perspective (graphical) published in 2004"

The present moment in psychotherapy and everyday life

Abstract: PART I. Exploring the Present Moment PART II. Contextualizing the Present Moment PART III. Views from a Clinical Perspective APPENDIX. The Micro-Analytic Interview

The human visual cortex

Abstract: The discovery and analysis of cortical visual areas is a major accomplishment of visual neuroscience. In the past decade the use of noninvasive functional imaging, particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), has dramatically increased our detailed knowledge of the functional organization of the human visual cortex and its relation to visual perception. The fMRI method offers a major advantage over other techniques applied in neuroscience by providing a large-scale neuroanatomical perspective that stems from its ability to image the entire brain essentially at once. This bird's eye view has the potential to reveal large-scale principles within the very complex plethora of visual areas. Thus, it could arrange the entire constellation of human visual areas in a unified functional organizational framework. Here we review recent findings and methods employed to uncover the functional properties of the human visual cortex focusing on two themes: functional specialization and hierarchical processing.

An historical perspective

Abstract: In 1881, President James A. Garfield was shot in the back and died 79 days later. During this time, many controversies arose that had repercussions for years to come. Who was to manage the President’s care? A prominent local physician took on the case, but after Garfield’s death, he was highly criticized for inappropriate care and for excluding more highly qualified surgeons. Where was the bullet? Multiple opinions were given including that of Alexander Graham Bell. The correct suggestion turned out to be that of a young, unknown assistant demonstrator of anatomy. What was the proper treatment? Local wound care, removal of the bullet, and laparotomy all were considered. Many have felt that the choice of treatment may have proved to be worse than the injury itself. What did the autopsy show? Even this was controversial, with different observers claiming different results. This historical perspective reviews the case as well the controversies that surrounded it. [

How Would You Feel versus How Do You Think She Would Feel? A Neuroimaging Study of Perspective-Taking with Social Emotions

Abstract: Perspective-taking is a complex cognitive process involved in social cognition. This positron emission tomography (PET) study investigated by means of a factorial design the interaction between the emotional and the perspective factors. Participants were asked to adopt either their own (first person) perspective or the (third person) perspective of their mothers in response to situations involving social emotions or to neutral situations. The main effect of third-person versus first-person perspective resulted in hemodynamic increase in the medial part of the superior frontal gyrus, the left superior temporal sulcus, the left temporal pole, the posterior cingulate gyrus, and the right inferior parietal lobe. A cluster in the postcentral gyrus was detected in the reverse comparison. The amygdala was selectively activated when subjects were processing social emotions, both related to self and other. Interaction effects were identified in the left temporal pole and in the right postcentral gyrus. These results support our prediction that the frontopolar, the somatosensory cortex, and the right inferior parietal lobe are crucial in the process of self/other distinction. In addition, this study provides important building blocks in our understanding of social emotion processing and human empathy.

A Critique of Conventional CSR Theory: An SME Perspective

Abstract: Over the last couple of decades Small and Medium Sized Enterprises [1] (SMEs) have become more important both numerically and economically, a trend that is set to be maintained. SMEs make up over 90 per cent of businesses worldwide and account for between 50 and 60 per cent of employment [2]. A report by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor shows that Chile, Korea, New Zealand, Uganda and Venezuela are emerging as among the most entrepreneurial countries in the world, and that more than 80 per cent of entrepreneurs throughout the 41 countries studied expect to create new jobs within the next five years [3]. Given the significant scale of small business in nearly every economy, their aggregate achievements have a major effect worldwide. SMEs have multiple roles; they may be seen as innovators (or laggards) in the life-cycle of particular technologies, as a mechanism for privatisation of state-owned enterprises, as a response to global competition, or as a device for economic regeneration [4].

The seller's side of the story: Acquisition as courtship and governance as syndicate in entrepreneurial firms

Abstract: In contrast to the prior acquisitions literature, which has emphasized the buyer's perspective, we examine the seller's perspective. This has important implications for understanding both the acqui...

Temporal Construal Effects on Abstract and Concrete Thinking: Consequences for Insight and Creative Cognition.

Abstract: Six studies investigate whether and how distant future time perspective facilitates abstract thinking and impedes concrete thinking by altering the level at which mental representations are construed. In Experiments 1-3, participants who envisioned their lives and imagined themselves engaging in a task 1 year later as opposed to the next day subsequently performed better on a series of insight tasks. In Experiments 4 and 5 a distal perspective was found to improve creative generation of abstract solutions. Moreover, Experiment 5 demonstrated a similar effect with temporal distance manipulated indirectly, by making participants imagine their lives in general a year from now versus tomorrow prior to performance. In Experiment 6, distant time perspective undermined rather than enhanced analytical problem solving.

Neural Correlates of First-Person Perspective as One Constituent of Human Self-Consciousness

Abstract: Taking the first-person perspective (1PP) centered upon one's own body as opposed to the third-person perspective (3PP), which enables us to take the viewpoint of someone else, is constitutive for human self-consciousness. At the underlying representational or cognitive level, these operations are processed in an egocentric reference frame, where locations are represented centered around another person's (3PP) or one's own perspective (1PP). To study 3PP and 1PP, both operating in egocentric frames, a virtual scene with an avatar and red balls in a room was presented from different camera viewpoints to normal volunteers (n = 11) in a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment. The task for the subjects was to count the objects as seen either from the avatar's perspective (3PP) or one's own perspective (1PP). The scene was presented either from a ground view (GV ) or an aerial view (AV ) to investigate the effect of view on perspective taking. The factors perspective (3PP vs. 1PP) and view (GV vs. AV ) were arranged in a two-factorial way. Reaction times were increased and percent correctness scores were decreased in 3PP as opposed to 1PP. To detect the neural mechanisms associated with perspective taking, functional magnetic resonance imaging was employed. Data were analyzed using SPM'99 in each subject and non-parametric statistics on the group level. Activations common to 3PP and 1PP (relative to baseline) were observed in a network of occipital, parietal, and prefrontal areas. Deactivations common to 3PP and 1PP (relative to baseline) were observed predominantly in mesial (i.e., parasagittal) cortical and lateral superior temporal areas bilaterally. Differential increases of neural activity were found in mesial superior parietal and right premotor cortex during 3PP (relative to 1PP), whereas differential increases during 1PP (relative to 3PP) were found in mesial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and superior temporal cortex bilaterally. The data suggest that in addition to joint neural mechanisms, for example, due to visuospatial processing and decision making, 3PP and 1PP rely on differential neural processes. Mesial cortical areas are involved in decisional processes when the spatial task is solved from one's own viewpoint, whereas egocentric operations from another person's perspective differentially draw upon cortical areas known to be involved in spatial cognition.

Animal Spirits: Affective and Deliberative Processes in Economic Behavior

Abstract: The economic conception of human behavior assumes that a person has a single set of well-defined goals, and that the person's behavior is chosen to best achieve those goals. We develop a model in which a person's behavior is the outcome of an interaction between two systems: a deliberative system that assesses options with a broad, goal-based perspective, and an affective system that encompasses emotions and motivational drives. Our model provides a framework for understanding many departures from full rationality discussed in the behavioral-economics literature, and captures the familiar feeling of being "of two minds." And by focusing on factors that moderate the relative influence of the two systems, our model also generates a variety of novel testable predictions.

The Treatment of History in Organisation Studies: Towards an ‘Historic Turn’?

Abstract: There is an increasing call for an historical perspective in organisation studies. In this essay we want to assess the major research programmes in organisation studies in relation to the ‘historic...

A Model for Sustainable Student Retention: A Holistic Perspective on the Student Dropout Problem with Special Attention to e-Learning

Abstract: 13:5 A Model for Sustainable Student Retention: A Holistic Perspective on the Student Dropout Problem with Special Attention to e-Learning Editorial Increasingly, the focus in higher education is on outcomes, rather than structures. “Student success” has become one of the primary factors in discussions of higher education quality, especially the quality of online programs. Although student success has been defined in a variety of ways, most definitions include the idea of persistence to the completion of the student’s program. Thus, increased retention becomes the goal of many of an institution’s quality assessment and improvement efforts. In this month’s article Drs. Berge and Haung propose a customizable model of student retention that takes into account personal, circumstantial, and institutional factors, as well as the interconnectedness of these factors. The authors suggest that the model can provide useful guidance for institutional—and to some extent students’ personal—decision making.

Time, Change, and Development The Temporal Perspective on Groups

Abstract: This article reviews literature that takes a temporal perspective on groups, focusing particularly on the theories that guide such work. The temporal perspective is a process-focused view that treats groups as systems in which change occurs across multiple time scales. The review is organized around six themes that have been especially generative: (a) Time is socially constructed; (b) time is a resource; (c) time is a fundamental issue for theory and research; (d) groups change systematically over time; (e) group processes have temporal patterns; and (f) groups are complex systems characterized by nonlinear dynamics. The article closes by identifying the need for continued theory development and testing to better integrate the disparate theories and findings found in literature inspired by the temporal perspective.

The ‘New Wars’ Debate: A Historical Perspective is Needed

Abstract: In recent years, a number of analysts have argued that qualitative changes have occurred in the nature of violent conflict and that it is now possible to think in terms of ‘new wars’ that are disti...

Collaborative Filtering: A Machine Learning Perspective

Abstract: Collaborative Filtering: A Machine Learning Perspective Benjamin Marlin Master of Science Graduate Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 2004 Collaborative filtering was initially proposed as a framework for filtering information based on the preferences of users, and has since been refined in many different ways. This thesis is a comprehensive study of rating-based, pure, non-sequential collaborative filtering. We analyze existing methods for the task of rating prediction from a machine learning perspective. We show that many existing methods proposed for this task are simple applications or modifications of one or more standard machine learning methods for classification, regression, clustering, dimensionality reduction, and density estimation. We introduce new prediction methods in all of these classes. We introduce a new experimental procedure for testing stronger forms of generalization than has been used previously. We implement a total of nine prediction methods, and conduct large scale prediction accuracy experiments. We show interesting new results on the relative performance of these methods.

Probing the Neural Basis of Body Ownership

Abstract: How do we distinguish our bodies from other objects and know that our body parts belong to us? In his Perspective, Botvinick explains intriguing new data ( Ehrsson et al.) showing that the feeling of body ownership depends on activation of premotor cortex neurons and their ability to integrate diverse sensory information (visual, tactile, and proprioceptive) from our body parts.

A Systems-Level Perspective on Attention and Cognitive Control: Guided Activation, Adaptive Gating, Conflict Monitoring, and Exploitation versus Exploration.

Abstract: An understanding of attention is arguably one of the most important goals of the cognitive sciences and yet also has proven to be one of the most elusive. Most attention researchers will agree that a major problem has been agreeing on a definition of the term and the scope of the phenomena to which it applies. There are no doubt as many explanations for this state of affairs as there are those who consider themselves “attention researchers.” However, most will probably agree that, in large measure, this is because attention is not a unitary phenomenon—at least not in the sense that it reflects the operation of a single mechanism, or a single function of one or a set of mechanisms. Rather, attention is the emergent property of the cognitive system that allows it to successfully process some sources of information to the exclusion of others, in the service of achieving some goals to the exclusion of others. This begs an important question: If attention is so varied a phenomenon, how can we make progress in understanding it? There are two simple answers to this question: Be precise about the specific (aspects of the) phenomena to be studied, and be precise about the mechanisms thought to explain them. In this chapter, we address a particular type of attentional phenomenon—that associated with cognitive control. Furthermore, we focus on an account that addresses not only the functional characteristics of this form of attention but also how it is implemented in neural machinery. This neurally oriented approach is attractive not only because it is intrinsically interesting to understand how the mechanisms of the brain give rise to the processes of the mind but more specifically because this exercise has proven useful in generating insights into how controlled attention operates at the systems level. By assuming that information is

Classroom climate and motivated behaviour in secondary schools

Abstract: For some children, school failure is attributed to a lack in motivation. This article reports a study of motivation from an ecological perspective, considering the individual in interaction with the meaningful environment. Unlike much of the motivational literature that measures motivation in terms of constructs that are assessed largely via self-report, the dependent variables used in this study were three measures of more immediate classroom behaviours: participation, self-reported engagement, and task completion. The results show that aspects of classroom climate are significantly related to all of these measures of motivation. Implications for practice are discussed.