Biomedical subjects
D Foulkes
Publications and source records attributed to D Foulkes.
Misrepresentation of sleep-laboratory dream research with children.
A recent article by Resnick, et al. misrepresents the methods and findings of sleep-laboratory dream research with children, and, hence, the significance of their own findings. Since these misrepresentations remain almost totally unretracted, I here undertake to correct them, so that the literature more accurately may reflect the current status of laboratory studies of children's dreaming.
Point of view in spontaneous waking thought.
In daytime thought-sampling, subjects predominantly experienced visually imagined events as if seeing through their own eyes. Own-eyes experiences were most variable in content, ranging from waking-plausible imaginings to frankly dream-like fantasies.
Point of view in nocturnal dreaming.
Most nocturnal dream reports of 4 young-adult subjects were of events reported to have been experienced from an own-eyes perspective. The alternative, see-oneself, perspective seems to be incompatible with full dream elaboration. This may help to explain the primitive form of dreaming in early development, when children are unable to imagine their own active participation in dream events.
Symposium: Normal and abnormal REM sleep regulation: Dreaming and REM sleep.
The discovery, 40 years ago, of REM sleep and of its putative association with dreaming in the adult human raised the possibility that neuroscientific investigations of REM-sleep physiology would someday 'explain' the distinctive features of dream experience. I argue here against the possibility, since replicated psychological data demonstrate that REM sleep is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for dreaming to occur. Dreaming depends, rather, upon the possession of conscious representational intelligence in conjunction with any psychophysiological state in which ideation is being driven neither volitionally nor by external stimulation.
Memory sources of REM and NREM dreams.
Sixteen male volunteers slept 4 nonconsecutive nights each in a sleep laboratory. They were awakened for one dream report per night. Awakenings were made, in counterbalanced order, from early-night and late-night rapid-eye movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM) sleep. Following dream reporting, subjects were asked to identify memory sources of their dream imagery. Two independent judges reliably rated mentation reports for temporal units and categorized memory sources as autobiographical episodes, abstract self-references, or semantic knowledge. We replicated earlier findings that semantic knowledge is more frequently mentioned as a dream source for REM than for NREM reports. However, with controls for length of reports, the REM-NREM difference disappeared, indicating that the stage difference in memory sources was not independent of stage difference in report lengths. There was a significant effect of time of night on source class, but only in REM sleep: Both without and with controls for report length, more semantic sources were cited for late than for early REM dreams.
Mental rotation, age, and conservation.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Processing of memories and knowledge in REM and NREM dreams.
Over 4 nights, 16 young-adult males each reported 2 REM and 2 nonREM dreams. They then identified possible sources of dream imagery in their waking memory and/or knowledge. A judge, naive as to conditions of data collection, reliably judged the closeness of correspondence of dream event to identified source. Correspondence was lower for REM than for nonREM reports and for longer than for shorter reports from either stage.
Phasic activity and dream recall in 5- to 8-yr.-olds.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Temporal sequence and unit composition in dream reports from different stages of sleep.
Mentation reports were collected from 23 subjects following awakenings from REM and NREM sleep and at sleep onset. Subjects organized these reports according to temporal sequence, and judges scored them for activity-based temporal units and for the composition of such units. The judgment data were subjected to analysis to determine whether reports differed systematically by state in either thematic sequencing (moment-to-moment setting and character continuity) or unit composition (density of characterization, setting articulation). Previous findings of inter-state differences in dream quantity (recall, length) were replicated. a sample of typical-length multiunit reports showed a number of stage differences, while samples of matched-length reports did not differ by stage in thematic sequence or the degree of articulation of single units. However, matched for length, REM reports continued to contain more per-unit self representation than did sleep onset reports and denser per-unit overall characterization than NREM reports. The results suggest that most inter-stage differences in dream "quality" are, in fact, by-products of inter-stage differences in dream quantity, but that there are residual stage differences that can coherently be attributed neither to differences in the continuity with which dream production processes are activated in different stages nor to differences in dream retrieval from different stages.
A cognitive-psychological model of REM dream production.
Based on the methodological assumption that cognitive-psychological study of dream processes (psychoneirics) can be pursued in like manner as in cognitive-psychological study of speech processes (psycholinguistics) and on the substantive assumption that speech and dreaming may share some common production routines, a cognitive-psychological model of dream formation is proposed. A generalized psycholinguistic model of speech production is presented, and then each sequential stage of that model is examined for its aptness to the process of dream production. It is concluded that there are major differences between speech and dream production at both the input and the output levels (message formulation in the linguistic sense is absent in the instigation of the dream; the dream itself is a multimodal perceptual simulation), but it is proposed that midrange stages of speech and dream production may be largely identical. This model is shown to be consistent with various formal properties of the dream, including its central paradox of controlled formal organization in the face of contents that may be "senseless," trivial, or obscure. The model also is shown to suggest several new research paradigms that might be employed both to test its own utility and to generate data more generally relevant to the question of how mental functions are organized during rapid eye movement sleep.
The structure of laboratory dream reports in blind and sighted subjects.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Right hemispheric mediation of dream visualization: a case study.
Our paper addresses, as did a recent study by Greenwood et al. (1977), the question of differential right vs. left hemispheric involvement in REM-sleep dreaming. A male subject with extensive lesioning of the right hemisphere and consequent contralateral homonymous hemianopia was studied for 2 nights in a sleep laboratory where a dream report was collected following each of 6 awakenings from REM sleep. The subject's dream reports were typically sequential and narrative in form, but were lacking specifically in continuous visual imagery. The occasional visual images that appeared in the subject's dreams were described as fragmentary and static in nature. The subject also was unable to perform waking tasks requiring the kinematic representation of extrapersonal space. These observations support the hypotheses that dream narratives may derive from different neurocognitive sources than do the specifically visual realizations of those narratives, and that the visual mediation of dream experience may depend on right-hemispheric processing. Differences between our findings and those of Greenwood et al. may be attributable to differences in dream interview technique.
Home and laboratory dreams: four empirical studies and a conceptual reevaluation.
Four empirical studies were presented on how the setting in which dreams are collected may influence the reporting and content of dreams of children on REM awakenings. In these studies it was shown that (1) with constant dream-sampling procedures, home and laboratory did not differ in the degree to which dream reports could be elicited from 4/5 year old children; (2) the rate of truly spontaneous reporting of dreams at home by 6/7 year olds is so minimal as to render these dreams an unfit base for generalization to typical dream life at these ages; (3) with constant dream sampling procedures, home and laboratory reports were not significantly different in content for 10/11 year olds; (4) results typically observed in uncontrolled home versus laboratory studies are replicable at the child level (ages 12/13), but probably reflect biased recall at home rather than effects of REM-monitoring procedures in the laboratory. The extant literature on home versus laboratory dream differences was reviewed, and it was concluded that even for normative dream studies, the REM-monitoring procedure is the method of choice.
Mental activity in relaxed wakefulness.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Primary visual experience and secondary cognitive elaboration in stage REM: a modest confirmation and an extension.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Long-distance, "sensory-bombardment" ESP in dreams: a failure to replicate.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Telepathy and dreams: a failure to replicate.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.