Knowledge that Transforms

Beginning with an analysis of a famous quotation from James’ Principles, this essay details some of the highlights of James’ treatment of sensation and perception. The primary source is a chapter on discrimination and comparison, in which emphasis is placed on the way people react to difference and sameness, reactions that may be fundamental to the psychophysical methods developed by Fechner and to later techniques, such as stimulus scaling and signal detection procedures, as well as to recent methods (preferential looking and habituation-dishabituation) for investigating perception in human infants. One can see considerable continuity between many of the issues raised in the Principles and those that have been addressed by perceptionists over the ensuing century, but James seems not to have had the direct impact in this domain that he has had, for example, on current conceptions of emotional processes. His associationist and functionalist positions may find contemporary expression in the seemingly disparate approaches known as connectionism and ecological psychology.

This article discusses the application of psychological theory and research on attributions, interpersonal relationships, and human territorial functioning to issues and assumptions in the law of searches and seizures, in particular, searches not based on a warrant, but on consent by the suspect or an appropriate third party, such as the suspect's spouse.

Like many other early psychologists, William James was fascinated by hypnosis and related phenomena. For James, hypnosis was both an experimental technique for creating divisions of consciousness, and a laboratory model of naturally occurring disorders of awareness. James’ treatment of consciousness in hypnosis presages contemporary interests in dissociation and implicit cognition, and underscores the role of the self in conscious mental life. At the same time, James recognized the complexity of hypnosis as an interpersonal process. In the end, James’ views suggest how a rapprochement between the cognitive and social approaches to hypnosis might be achieved.

Although many aspects of James’ theorizing about the self have been enormously influential, his notion of the self as the central object in mental life has been largely ignored. He believed that the fundamental psychological processes-attention, perception, emotion, conception, reasoning, will, consciousness-could not be understood without an appreciation of the nature and functioning of the self. The value of reclaiming this idea is discussed.

One major class of evidence indicating that associative processes contribute significantly to the development of morphine tolerance is based on the context specificity of the phenomenon: Changing the stimulus context correlated with drug administration diminishes tolerance. If this outcome is analogous to stimulus generalization decrement in traditional learning studies, then the flattening of generalization gradients over time may modulate the traditional test for tolerance. Accordingly, the effect of retention interval on context specificity of tolerance in rats was investigated. A hot-plate pain sensitivity test indicated that a context shift disrupted tolerance after a short, but not a long, retention interval. Methodological implications for assessment of learning processes in tolerance are noted.

Support was found for the hypothesis that recipients of persuasive messages who are set to transmit the contents to others will exhibit attitude change that persists over time. In four studies, 208 students and 300 nonstudent adults were given either a transmitter set or a control set (a set to receive more information or no set instructions) prior to reading a persuasive message. Transmitters consistently exhibited more attitude change persistence at delays ranging from two to five months, across different populations, and for attitude issues evoking varying degrees of initial agreement. The practical implications for public health and education are discussed.

A retrospective survey of attention research from 1990 back to 1890 gives us, not the uncovering of startlingly new principles of attention, but rather the refinement in both conceptualization and laboratory measurement of the ideas set forth vividly by William James. Were he a witness to our times, he would undoubtedly applaud the renaissance of attention over the past three decades, and he would surely exhibit as much interest in the findings emerging from neuroscience laboratories as he would in the findings emerging from psychological laboratories.

When items are read out of storage during unconstrained recall, how should their memory strengths affect recall order? Commonsense argues that items will present themselves to consciousness in the order of their relative memory strength and that, hence, the read out sequence will be stronger to weaker. In experiments with 6- to 13-year-olds, however, this sequence was never obtained. Dichotomous measures of memory strength (strong vs. weak) showed that weak items were always recalled before strong items. Continuous measures of memory strength showed that the sequence was weaker to stronger to weaker. This pattern, which we term the cognitive triage effect, occurred at all age levels, for a variety of material, with different definitions of memory strength, and became more pronounced with age. Three results suggested that the pattern was not due to a deliberate strength-based ordering strategy: The pattern was observed in children as young as age 6; it was present at the earliest stages of recall; and adults (who also exhibited the pattern) were unaware of what they were doing.

I offer a description and rationale for an electronic journal publishing program for psychologists, called the electonic archive. Three principles are critical. First, electronic publishing must retain the readability of a traditional printed journal. Second, it must be both accessible and attractive to all members of the discipline, whether they use computers or not. Most importantly, it must provide improved facilities for retrieving information, while continuing to serve as a permanent archive of the Society. I argue that the primary advantage of electronic publishing is not the inexpensive delivery of text, but the use of a centralized archive to concentrate resources for discovering and utilizing information. The archive would provide a platform for programs embodying knowledge about the field and the intellectual goals of individual users to facilitate the intelligent retrieval of text. By using the dynamic branching and graphical display capacities of the computer, the archive can present texts in ways that cannot be rendered in print. These facilities can give scholars personalized access to information with increased scope and depth.