“The Story is My Life”: Bridging Symbol to Self in a Novel Creative and Reflective Writing Task

This article describes the development and testing of a novel creative and reflective writing task. Following the rationale of sand-tray and play therapies, participants were asked to meaningfully incorporate four objects from a randomly generated matrix of options into a creative short story. They then composed a second story that incorporated four possessions from home associated with important memories. Afterwards, participants produced interpretive statements or reflections on what the stories meant to them. An exploratory qualitative study was conducted based on narrative data from 15 young adult participants in Canada. Our goals were to: (a) explore the extent to which object familiarity was associated with qualitative differences in stories and interpretations, and (b) investigate for connections between features of participants’ stories and depth of interpretation. Analysis of creative stories resulted in a scheme of four response categories with ten subcategories. Participants’ interpretations of their own stories were coded based on self-described sources of inspiration, such as critical life episodes or popular media. Results are accompanied with excerpts of participants’ stories and reflections, and percentage comparisons are reported. Findings are presented in dialogue with established interpretive frameworks originating in depth psychology. Manipulation of object familiarity resulted in demonstrable differences at the levels of word length, point of view, narrative forms and features, self-disclosure, and reflection. Use of familiar objects in such a task appears to be a largely untapped resource that shows promise as a route to insight.

Human Depth Sensitivity Is Affected by Object Plausibility

Using behavioral and fMRI paradigms, we asked how the physical plausibility of complex 3-D objects, as defined by the object's congruence with 3-D Euclidean geometry, affects behavioral thresholds and neural responses to depth information. Stimuli were disparity-defined geometric objects rendered as random dot stereograms, presented in plausible and implausible variations. In the behavior experiment, observers were asked to complete (1) a noise-based depth task that involved judging the depth position of a target embedded in noise and (2) a fine depth judgment task that involved discriminating the nearer of two consecutively presented targets. Interestingly, results indicated greater behavioral sensitivities of depth judgments for implausible versus plausible objects across both tasks. In the fMRI experiment, we measured fMRI responses concurrently with behavioral depth responses. Although univariate responses for depth judgments were largely similar across cortex regardless of object plausibility, multivariate representations for plausible and implausible objects were notably distinguishable along depth-relevant intermediate regions V3 and V3A, in addition to object-relevant LOC. Our data indicate significant modulations of both behavioral judgments of and neural responses to depth by object context. We conjecture that disparity mechanisms interact dynamically with the object recognition problem in the visual system such that disparity computations are adjusted based on object familiarity.

Effect of culture on memory for binding different types of visual information

The degree of individualism or collectivism in a culture has observable effects on cognitive processing. Participants from collectivist cultures are less able to identify a previously displayed object when presented with a novel background than participants from individualist cultures. This can be interpreted as collectivist cultures more likely to process information field dependently. We tested explicitly whether collectivist or individualist cultures are more likely to bind foreground and background images and whether such binding is differentially affected for object-scene and action-scene combinations. Across three experiments participants viewed item-context composites, then completed a forced-choice recognition task. In Experiment 1, 61 UK and 57 Malaysian participants viewed object-scene composites, with UK participants significantly more accurate in correct composite recognition, with Experiment 2 demonstrating this difference was not due to cultural differences in object familiarity. In Experiment 3, 62 UK and 67 Malaysian participants viewed action-scene composites, with no significant difference between cultures in proportion of items recognised. The results of Experiment 1 suggest that the UK sample were able to store high-fidelity representations of visual features as an association between item and context, while the Malaysian sample were unable to. This result is discussed in relation to both cultural, and cognitive psychology.

Remembering the order of serially presented objects: A matter of time?

Remembering the sequence, in which stimuli are encountered or events have occurred, is a key process in episodic memory and can also facilitate recognition memory. Rodents, when presented with a sequence of objects, will explore the object encountered first; yet, whether this behaviour is because the rodents spontaneously encode the order of stimuli presentation or because of relative familiarity or temporal decay is unknown. Here, we tested sequence memory in rats using a series of spontaneous preference tasks. Experiment 1 demonstrated that when rats are presented with a sequence of four objects, with an inter-sample interval of 5 min or 1 h, they preferentially explored the object presented earlier in the list irrespective of the inter-sample interval. We then demonstrated that such memory for order was not affected by increasing or decreasing the inter-sample interval between the middle objects (Experiment 2). Finally, we showed that memory for order is not a function of absolute object familiarity, as animals showed clear discrimination between the objects presented in the sample phases and a novel object, independent of the sample objects’ position in the sequence (Experiment 3). These results show that animals are able to encode the order of objects presented in a sequence, and as such temporal order memory is not achieved using the process of relative or absolute familiarity or temporal decay.