Learning to be Interdisciplinary: An Action Research Approach to Boundary Spanning

Objective This study explored challenges and barriers that need to be addressed in a preprofessional educational setting to provide opportunities for boundary spanning that leads to family-centred interdisciplinary service provision. Design The design employed in this study was participatory action research, an inductive approach. Setting The study took place during a semester-long, one-credit elective graduate seminar course. Method The study included five faculty members and eight graduate students from the fields of audiology, speech-language pathology, and rehabilitation counselling. Data gathering techniques used included observation, dialogue, and reflection. Results Three themes were identified as important in providing an environment conducive to collaboration between professionals and families, namely: 1 the need for acceptance of differing perspectives, 2 empowerment and its contribution to the process of inquiry, and 3 self-awareness in the learning process and the resultant increase in awareness of others. Conclusion While all participants confirmed the importance of trust, empowerment, low risk, and clear definition of process goals, both faculty and students found it extremely difficult to break out of their familiar routines. Given how difficult it was to surface and test assumptions in this context, these findings provided insight into the challenges interdisciplinary teams will face when they try to work with families as equals in the treatment decision-making process

Role of mental imagery in a property verification task: fMRI evidence for perceptual representations of conceptual knowledge

Is our knowledge about the appearance of objects more closely related to verbal thought or to perception? In a behavioural study using a property verification task, Kosslyn (1976) reported that there are both amodal and perceptual representations of concepts, but that amodal representations may be more easily accessed. However, Solomon (1997) argued that due to the nature of Kosslyn’s stimuli, subjects may be able to bypass semantics entirely and perform this task using differences in the strength of association between words in true trials (e.g., cat–whiskers) and those in false trials (e.g., mouse–stinger). Solomon found no evidence for amodal representations when the task materials were altered to include associated false trials (e.g., cat–litter), which require semantic processing, as opposed to associative strategies. In the current study, we used fMRI to examine the response of regions of visual association cortex while subjects performed a property verification task with either associated or unassociated false trials. We found reliable activity across subjects within the left fusiform gyrus when true trials were intermixed with associated false trials but not when true trials were intermixed with unassociated false trials. Our data support the idea that conceptual knowledge is organised visually and that it is grounded in the perceptual system. One of the leading theories of the organisation o

Role Of Mental Imagery In A Property

on is distributed across distinct attribute domains, such as vision, touch, and action (Allport, 1985). Numerous investigators have drawn distinctions between visual knowledge and nonvisual (e.g., functional) knowledge, in areas ranging from language acquisition (e.g., Gentner, 1978; Nelson, COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY, 2003, 20 (3/4/5/6), 525--540 # 2003 Psychology Press Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pp/02643294.html DOI:10.1080/02643290244000257 525 Requests for reprints should be addressed to Irene P. Kan, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3815 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6196, USA (Email: [email protected]). Supported by grants from National Institute of Health (NIH R01 MH60414) and Searle Scholars Program awarded to STS, and grant from National Science Foundation (SBR-9905024) awarded to LWB.We thank Jessica Pickard for assistance with data collection, Geoff Aguirre and Joseph Kable for assistance with data analysis, and two anonymous revie