The serial reproduction of an urban myth: revisiting Bartlett's schema theory.

Frederic Bartlett's schema theory is still widely misunderstood as claiming that remembering is inevitably unreliable. However, according to the logic of his schema theory, remembering should, in relation to certain kinds of material, be relatively . In this study we examined whether a "well-worn" urban myth (the ) could be exempt from the fate of other material used in Bartlett's own research on serial reproduction.

Publisher Correction: Groundwater Throughflow and Seawater Intrusion in High Quality Coastal Aquifers.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Groundwater Throughflow and Seawater Intrusion in High Quality Coastal Aquifers.

High quality coastal aquifer systems provide vast quantities of potable groundwater for millions of people worldwide. Managing this setting has economic and environmental consequences. Specific knowledge of the dynamic relationship between fresh terrestrial groundwater discharging to the ocean and seawater intrusion is necessary.

Increasing Perspectival Obliqueness Increases the Leaning Tower Illusion.

The leaning tower illusion is a perceptual illusion in which two identical images of a tower photographed from below appear to diverge when juxtaposed. We manipulated the perceived obliqueness of the (upright) St Mark bell tower in Venice by modifying two parameters both related to the position of the camera with respect to the tower: (a) increasing the peripherality of the tower and (b) reducing the distance between the camera and the tower. The resulting images clearly show that the illusory leaning effect increases as a function of the obliqueness.

Not Just Being Lifted: Infants are Sensitive to Delay During a Pick-Up Routine.

In the present study we observed whether infants show online adjustments to the mother's incipient action by looking at their sensitivity to changes as the pick-up unfolded. Twenty-three 3-month-old infants and their mothers were observed in the lab, where mothers were instructed (1) to pick-up their infants as they usually did (normal pick-up), and then (2) to delay the pick-up for 6 s after placing their hands on the infants' waist (delayed pick-up). In both Normal and Delayed conditions infant's body tension, affective displays and gaze shifts were coded during three phases: Approach, Contact, and Lift.

The "textbook Gibson": The assimilation of dissidence.

We examine how the textbooks have dealt with one of psychology's most eminent dissidents, James Gibson (1904-1979). Our review of more than a hundred textbooks, dating from the 1950s to the present, reveals fundamental and systematic misrepresentations of Gibson. Although Gibson continues to figure in most of the textbooks, his work is routinely assimilated to theoretical positions he emphatically rejected: cue theory, stimulus-response psychology, and nativism.

Jointly structuring triadic spaces of meaning and action: book sharing from 3 months on.

This study explores the emergence of triadic interactions through the example of book sharing. As part of a naturalistic study, 10 infants were visited in their homes from 3-12 months. We report that (1) book sharing as a form of infant-caregiver-object interaction occurred from as early as 3 months.

Changing the game: exploring infants' participation in early play routines.

Play has proved to have a central role in children's development, most notably in rule learning (Piaget, 1965; Sutton-Smith, 1979) and negotiation of roles and goals (Garvey, 1974; Bruner et al., 1976). Yet very little research has been done on early play.

Authors' response: a second-person neuroscience in interaction.

In this response we address additions to as well as criticisms and possible misinterpretations of our proposal for a second-person neuroscience. We map out the most crucial aspects of our approach by (1) acknowledging that second-person engaged interaction is not the only way to understand others, although we claim that it is ontogenetically prior; (2) claiming that spectatorial paradigms need to be complemented in order to enable a full understanding of social interactions; and (3) restating that our theoretical proposal not only questions the mechanism by which a cognitive process comes into being, but asks whether it is at all meaningful to speak of a mechanism and a cognitive process when it is confined to intra-agent space. We address theoretical criticisms of our approach by pointing out that while a second-person social understanding may not be the only mechanism, alternative approaches cannot hold their ground without resorting to second-person concepts, if not in the expression, certainly in the development of social understanding.

Toward a second-person neuroscience.

In spite of the remarkable progress made in the burgeoning field of social neuroscience, the neural mechanisms that underlie social encounters are only beginning to be studied and could - paradoxically - be seen as representing the "dark matter" of social neuroscience. Recent conceptual and empirical developments consistently indicate the need for investigations that allow the study of real-time social encounters in a truly interactive manner. This suggestion is based on the premise that social cognition is fundamentally different when we are in interaction with others rather than merely observing them.

'In sight, out of mind': the experiences of the compliantly engaged community psychiatric out-patient.

Research on engagement within community-based psychiatric services in the UK has mainly focussed on factors related to those 'at risk' of non-attendance or non-compliance, with the tacit assumption that those in regular attendance are largely content and hence not a priority. The present study systematically explored the experiences and views of 25 people with severe and enduring mental illness who had regularly attended out-patient settings for more than 5 years. Regular attendance at consultations was not synonymous with satisfaction-in fact it masked varying levels of unmet needs and 'de-humanisation'.

'These psychiatrists rate themselves as gods': disengagement and engagement discourses of people living with severe mental illness.

Positioning analysis, a variant of discourse analysis, was used to explore the narratives of 40 psychiatric patients (11 females and 29 males; mean age = 40 years) who had manifest difficulties with engagement with statutory mental health services. Positioning analysis is a qualitative method that captures how people linguistically position the roles and identities of themselves and others in their day-to-day lives and narratives. The language of disengagement incorporated the passive positioning of self in relation to their lives and treatment through the use of metaphor, the passive voice and them and us attribution, while the discourse of engagement incorporated more active positioning of self achieved through the use of the personal pronoun we and metaphoric references to balanced relationships.

Getting over "the problem of other minds": communication in context.

Theories of communication often assume that communication has a single, essential form or telos, the culmination of a one-track developmental process where precursors eventually give rise to the real thing. At one time, this essence of communication was identified with linguistic competence, whereas now it is largely defined in terms of "Theory of Mind." But the fundamental problem with "Theory of Mind" is the very problem it pretends to solve: "the problem of other minds.

'Introspectionism' and the mythical origins of scientific psychology.

According to the majority of the textbooks, the history of modern, scientific psychology can be tidily encapsulated in the following three stages. Scientific psychology began with a commitment to the study of mind, but based on the method of introspection. Watson rejected introspectionism as both unreliable and effete, and redefined psychology, instead, as the science of behaviour.

Parents' experiences of introducing everyday object use to their children with autism.

A semi-structured interview study, investigating the acquisition of everyday object use in children with autism and developmentally matched controls, is presented. Parents were asked to describe how their child currently used various everyday objects during mealtime and washing routines, the process by which this came about, and any problems encountered in attempting to introduce appropriate object use. Following transcription, the interviews were treated using a method combining phenomenological and content analysis.

False reports of childhood events in appropriate interviews.

The present study employed the "parental misinformation" paradigm to examine whether individuals report false events from their childhood even when they are interviewed in an appropriate manner by a trained interviewer. Each participant was interviewed on three occasions. By the final interview, one participant produced a "full" report, and six participants produced "partial" reports, of childhood events that did not occur.

Group differences in the mutual gaze of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).

A comparative developmental framework was used to determine whether mutual gaze is unique to humans and, if not, whether common mechanisms support the development of mutual gaze in chimpanzees and humans. Mother-infant chimpanzees engaged in approximately 17 instances of mutual gaze per hour. Mutual gaze occurred in positive, nonagonistic contexts.

A kinematic analysis of hand selection in a reaching task.

A group of left- and right-handers was tested on a task requiring them to reach out and pick up an object with either the left or the right hand. We varied the eccentricity of the target object (a small glass) and the required accuracy level, by filling the glass with liquid. We recorded (a) frequency of left or right hand use, (b) hand preference using a handedness questionnaire, and (c) the trajectories of the reaches using a movement registration system.

Drifting towards a diffuse control model of exploratory motor learning: A comparison of global and within-trial performance measures.

Accurate measurement is crucial for understanding the processes that underlie exploratory patterns in motor learning. Accordingly, measures of learning should be sensitive to the changes that take place during skill acquisition. Most studies, however, use trial-based global measures that assess performance but do not actually measure gradual changes taking place within trials.

Misremembering Bartlett: a study in serial reproduction.

According to much of the recent psychological literature on memory, Bartlett should be credited with the insight that remembering can never be accurate but is, instead, more or less of a distortion (a view to which many modern authors themselves seem to subscribe). In the present paper, we argue that Bartlett did not himself provide such an unqualified account of remembering. Although he sought to challenge the idea that remembering is largely an accurate record of past events, he did not maintain that it is always inaccurate.

Taking a closer look at functional play in children with autism.

Research evidence indicates that children with autism may experience problems with functional play, in addition to their well-documented deficits in symbolic play. However, as a result of the tendency of previous studies to group all functional play into a single category, the precise nature and extent of this deficit remains unclear. The present study undertook a more refined analysis of such play, subtyping the functional acts into various categories, in terms of the developmental progression suggested by research with typical infants.

Children with autism experience problems with both objects and people.

Kanner (1943), in his classic account, described autism as a specific impairment in interpersonal relations which leaves the child's uses of objects relatively unaffected. This combination of the difficulties in relating to people and the supposedly "excellent" relations to objects figures centrally within many of the current theories of autism, which have had relatively little to say on the question of object use. This paper draws attention to evidence of widespread impairments in relating to objects, not only in interpersonal aspects of object use but also in early sensorimotor exploration and the functional and conventional uses of objects.

Dire straits: the divisive legacy of the 1898 Cambridge anthropological expedition.

Bartlett's claim that the Cambridge anthropological expedition of 1898 to the Torres Strait "put a social and ethnological stamp upon Cambridge psychology" does not bear close examination. Rivers pursued his interests in both anthropology and psychology but came to regard them as largely independent pursuits. Myers, through the influence of Rivers, came to identify himself primarily as a psychologist.

Visual perception of lifted weight from kinematic and static (photographic) displays.

Observers of patch-light videotape displays can reliably discriminate levels of lifted weight; accuracy of judgments sometimes approximates that achieved when the observers themselves lift weighted boxes. Results of 6 studies reveal impressive levels of visual weight discrimination based on static displays (photographs) of certain action phases sampled from videos of entire lifting-carrying events. Slow and controlled actions (e.

Are theories of perception necessary? A review of Gibson's The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.

Representational theories of perception postulate an isolated and autonomous "subject" set apart from its real environment, and then go on to invoke processes of mental representation, construction, or hypothesizing to explain how perception can nevertheless take place. Although James Gibson's most conspicuous contribution has been to challenge representational theory, his ultimate concern was the cognitivism which now prevails in psychology. He was convinced that the so-called cognitive revolution merely perpetuates, and even promotes, many of psychology's oldest mistakes.