The Abduction of Disorder in Psychiatry

The evolutionary cornerstone of J. C. Wakefield's (1999) harmful dysfunction thesis is a faulty assumption of comparability between mental and biological processes that overlooks the unique plasticity and openness of the brain?s functioning design. This omission leads Wakefield to an idealized concept of natural mental functions, illusory interpretations of mental disorders as harmful dysfunctions, and exaggerated claims for the validity of his explanatory and stipulative proposals. The authors argue that there are numerous ways in which evolutionarily intact mental and psychological processes, combined with striking discontinuities within and between evolutionary and contemporary social/cultural environments, may cause non-dysfunction variants of many widely accepted major mental disorders. These examples undermine many of Wakefield's arguments for adopting a harmful dysfunction concept of mental disorder

The Phenomenology of REM-sleep Dreaming: The Contributions of Personal and Perspectival Ownership, Subjective Temporality and Episodic Memory

Although the dream narrative, of (bio)logical necessity, originates with the dreamer, s/he typically does not know this. For the dreamer, the dream world is the real world. In this article I argue that this nightly misattribution is best explained in terms of the concept of mental ownership (e.g., Albahari, 2006; Klein, 2015a; Lane, 2012). Specifically, the exogenous nature of the dream narrative is the result of an individual assuming perspectival, but not personal, ownership of content s/he authored (i.e., “The content in my head is not mine. Therefore it must be peripherally perceived”). Situating explanation within a theoretical space designed to address questions pertaining to the experienced origins of conscious content has a number of salutatory consequences. For example, it promotes predictive fecundity by bringing to light empirical generalizations whose presence otherwise might have gone unnoticed (e.g., the severely limited role of mental time travel within the dream narrative)

Exposing piaget's scheme: Empirical evidence for the ontogenesis of coordination in learning a mathematical concept

The combination of two methodological resources-natural-user interfaces (NUI) and multimodal learning analytics (MMLA)-is creating opportunities for educational researchers to empirically evaluate seminal models for the hypothetical emergence of concepts from situated sensorimotor activity. 76 participants (9-14 yo) solved tablet-based non-symbolic manipulation tasks designed to foster grounded meanings for the mathematical concept of proportional equivalence. Data gathered in task-based semi-structured clinical interviews included action logging, eye-gaze tracking, and videography. Successful task performance coincided with spontaneous appearance of stable dynamical gaze-path patterns soon followed by multimodal articulation of strategy. Significantly, gaze patterns included uncued non-salient screen locations. We present cumulative results to argue that these 'attentional anchors' mediated participants' problem solving. We interpret the findings as enabling us to revisit, support, refine, and elaborate on central claims of Piaget's theory of genetic epistemology and in particular his insistence on the role of situated motor-action coordination in the process of reflective abstraction

Spatial Encoding Strategy Theory: The Relationship between Spatial Skill and STEM Achievement

Learners’ spatial skill is a reliable and significant predictor of achievement in STEM, including computing, education. Spatial skill is also malleable, meaning it can be improved through training. Most cognitive skill training improves performance on only a narrow set of similar tasks, but researchers have found ample evidence that spatial training can broadly improve STEM achievement. We do not yet know the cognitive mechanisms that make spatial skill training broadly transferable when other cognitive training is not, but understanding these mechanisms is important for developing training and instruction that consistently benefits learners, especially those starting with low spatial skill. This paper proposes the spatial encoding strategy (SpES) theory to explain the cognitive mechanisms connecting spatial skill and STEM achievement. To motivate SpES theory, the paper reviews research from STEM education, learning sciences, and psychology. SpES theory provides compelling post hoc explanations for the findings from this literature and aligns with neuroscience models about the functions of brain structures. The paper concludes with a plan for testing the theory’s validity and using it to inform future research and instruction. The paper focuses on implications for computing education, but the transferability of spatial skill to STEM performance makes the proposed theory relevant to many education communities

Distinct neural substrates of visuospatial and verbal-analytic reasoning as assessed by Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices

Recent studies revealed spontaneous neural activity to be associated with fluid intelligence (gF) which is commonly assessed by Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, and embeds two types of reasoning: visuospatial and verbal-analytic reasoning. With resting-state fMRI data, using global brain connectivity (GBC) analysis which averages functional connectivity of a voxel in relation to all other voxels in the brain, distinct neural correlates of these two reasoning types were found. For visuospatial reasoning, negative correlations were observed in both the primary visual cortex (PVC) and the precuneus, and positive correlations were observed in the temporal lobe. For verbal-analytic reasoning, negative correlations were observed in the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and temporoparietal junction, and positive correlations were observed in the angular gyrus. Furthermore, an interaction between GBC value and type of reasoning was found in the PVC, rIFG and the temporal lobe. These findings suggest that visuospatial reasoning benefits more from elaborate perception to stimulus features, whereas verbal-analytic reasoning benefits more from feature integration and hypothesis testing. In sum, the present study offers, for different types of reasoning in gF, first empirical evidence of separate neural substrates in the resting brain

Personality attributes that predict cadet performance at West Point

Using data from the United States Military Academy at West Point (N = 1102 and N = 1049) from two successive years, we examined psychological measures of cadets and the correlations of those measures with consequential outcomes such as cadet performance and leadership potential. We examined four broad intelligences, two of which were thing-focused (spatial and mathematical) and two people-focused (verbal and personal intelligences) and their predictions to thing- and people-centered courses (e.g., chemistry versus psychology). We found support for a thing-people differential in reasoning. The broad intelligences and the Big Five personality traits also predicted academic and other performance criteria at consequential levels