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Using imaginative literature to foster cultural sensitivity.

Readings from two novels, Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, were included in maternal-child clinical courses as part of a pilot project to identify potentially effective strategies for increasing student cultural sensitivity and reflective thinking skills. The authors analyzed student journals to determine student values and beliefs during maternal-child clinical experiences. The study sample consisted of 40 young women enrolled in a baccalaureate nursing program in a private, liberal arts university. These young women consistently interpreted ;the other' in their own image. They responded most strongly to themes of belonging, including the struggles of immigrants to ;fit in,' the ways of being acceptable and valued in U.S. society, and the process through which students as nurses learn to accept and care for others who are different.

Adult↗

Information processing in imagination using nonverbalizable visual stimuli.

In groups of 20 to 25, 146 undergraduates were tested as to their ability to mentally combine two shapes. They were to pick the correct choice from 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, or 15 alternatives. The shapes were previously proven to be effectively unverbalizable but recognizable and discriminable. Contrary to expectation, there was no negative decrement in performance with increasing numbers of incorrect alternatives.

Discrimination Learning↗

Imagined test situations produce contextual memory enhancement.

Two groups of 12 undergraduates learned a 26-item list of medium-imagery words. Those who visualized an examination-hall scored better at 1-wk. recall than those who visualized countryside during learning, thereby providing confirmation of the context-dependency effect.

Adult↗

Right-left orientation, mental rotation, and perspective-taking: when can children imagine what people see from their own viewpoint?

Right-left orientation, mental rotation, and perspective-taking were examined in a group of 406 subjects ranging from 5 to 11 yr. of age with equal numbers of children in each age group. Immediate recognition was not a difficult task as even young children succeeded adequately on the three tasks involving different images. Right-left identification, where right and left terms are used, was harder even for the oldest subjects when associated with mental rotation. When children had to identify which image a person would see from another viewpoint, they succeeded when the person was looking away in the same direction as they were looking. When the person was facing the children (in the opposite direction of "forward"), three different behaviors emerged which indicated absence or presence of mental rotation in perspective-taking. Young subjects chose images as if the figures in the image were seeing from the subject's viewpoint; this percentage diminished slowly across increased ages. As subjects' ages increased, more chose the correct image. Even at 11 years of age, however, only half of the subjects chose correctly. Finally, an equal percentage of subjects among the different age groups understood that the person was seeing a different orientation of the persons but did not associate this with the correct right-left position of the persons on the image. This transition most probably reflects the slow evolution of cognitive processes which determine the way the child will use references to internal or external frameworks. It illustrates as well the passage from egocentrism to geocentrism with the ability to consider viewpoints other than one's own.

Child↗

Object-related knowledge and the production of gestures with imagined objects by preschool children.

Previous research suggests that the gestural representation of preschool age children has a symbolic quality in the absence of real objects. It has shown a developmental progression from use of concrete body parts to more abstract imaginary-object gestural representations during the preschool years. The present study examined whether object-related knowledge is involved in the production of imaginary-object gestures. 35 children (12 3-, 11 4-, and 12 5-yr.-olds) performed gestural tasks in which they were asked to pretend to use common objects, e.g., "pretend to brush your teeth with a toothbrush." In addition, they were asked to describe the relationship between the performed gesture and object when they were pretending. Analysis indicated that, when an imaginary-object gesture was performed, it was through an evoked prior knowledge of the function and context of the use of objects. This may suggest that object-related knowledge is a key factor involved in developmental changes from body part to imaginary-object gestures and that it is involved in freeing preschool children from object substitution, which is prescribed by perceptual support.

Child, Preschool↗

Imagined events with specific emotional valence produce specific patterns of facial EMG activity.

36 subjects' facial electromyographic (EMG) activity at the zygomatic, corrugator, and levator labii (superioris/alaeque nasi) muscle regions were recorded while they were acting self-generated emotions of happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise. Analysis showed that the EMG activity at the levator labii region generated significantly higher power than those at the corrugator region while acting out disgust, the EMG activity at the zygomatic region generated significantly higher power than those at corrugator region while acting out happiness and surprise, and the EMG activity at the corrugator region generated significantly higher power than those at zygomatic and levator labii regions while acting out anger, sadness, and fear. It was concluded that the negative self-generated emotions were associated with increased EMG activity of corrugator muscles and positive self-acting emotions with increased EMG activity of zygomatic muscles.

Adult↗

Spatial frameworks in imagined navigation.

The spatial framework model proposes that people use the extensions of their body axes as a reference frame for encoding spatial layouts in memory, and that the physical and functional properties of our bodies and the world determine the accessibility of egocentric locations from memory representations. The present experiment provides evidence that spatial framework results can be obtained even with perceptual scenes that contain no objects to be held in memory. Using a paradigm in which participants interpreted direction and distance information to follow a mental path within a checkerboard grid, the present study shows that spatial framework results are obtained when reasoning occurs from a perspective that is misaligned with respect to the physical reference frame of the participant. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed.

Humans↗