Migration of identity of a counsellor educator: using writing as a method of inquiry to explore the in-between spaces.

This paper examines the space between familiar and new storying of professional identity in the author’s migration from counsellor/psychologist to lecturer/researcher. Value is given to reflecting on the complexities and multiplicities which exist in this in-between space, particularly at points of difference and discomfort. Reflective practices of writing as inquiry and autoethnography are used to examine this migration of professional identity and are suggested as useful processes for undertaking socially responsive research. In this context, writing as inquiry and subsequent meaning-making/deconstruction leads me to places not yet known, and gives per(form)ance to the complex and multiple possibilities that open up in this process. The benefit of autoethnographic writing and meaning-making as a pre-cursor to participant-observation research is also discussed

Auditory Spatial Acuity Approximates the Resolving Power of Space-Specific Neurons

The relationship between neuronal acuity and behavioral performance was assessed in the barn owl (Tyto alba), a nocturnal raptor renowned for its ability to localize sounds and for the topographic representation of auditory space found in the midbrain. We measured discrimination of sound-source separation using a newly developed procedure involving the habituation and recovery of the pupillary dilation response. The smallest discriminable change of source location was found to be about two times finer in azimuth than in elevation. Recordings from neurons in its midbrain space map revealed that their spatial tuning, like the spatial discrimination behavior, was also better in azimuth than in elevation by a factor of about two. Because the PDR behavioral assay is mediated by the same circuitry whether discrimination is assessed in azimuth or in elevation, this difference in vertical and horizontal acuity is likely to reflect a true difference in sensory resolution, without additional confounding effects of differences in motor performance in the two dimensions. Our results, therefore, are consistent with the hypothesis that the acuity of the midbrain space map determines auditory spatial discrimination