Imagined Perspective Research Articles

Creating entrepreneurial opportunities: an organisational and social constructive phenomenon in the creation of new businesses

This conceptual study approaches the creation process of new businesses from the perspective of organisational creativity and imagination in entrepreneurial opportunity process. Currently, organisational creativity and imagination have been linked to the creative view or creation theory in the entrepreneurial opportunity process field of research. We argue that our theoretical illustration concerning the dialectical creation process of entrepreneurial opportunities describes an early phase of the creation of new businesses. According to our theoretical illustration, entrepreneurs create new unknown effects from the given means or tools (the logic of effectuation) in the creative space (called in-between). In this manner, the creative space including subject, object and community (i.e., neutral opportunities) is empty at the beginning of the entrepreneurial opportunity process, and it is completed by elements of business environment (i.e., intension-driven entrepreneurial opportunities) such as rules, tools, signs and division of labour.

Differences in Perspective and the Influence of Charitable Appeals: When Imagining Oneself as the Victim is not Beneficial

Advertisements often stimulate consumers to imagine themselves in a situation in which they would personally benefit from using the product being advertised. However, when an advertisement is intended to induce consumers to benefit someone else (e.g., to donate money for relief of disaster victims), stimulating them to imagine themselves in the situation confronting the beneficiary can sometimes conflict with the image they form of themselves as a potential helper. This conflict in imagined perspective can decrease the advertisement's effectiveness. Five studies confirm this hypothesis. When participants took the perspective of the beneficiary at the time they read an appeal for help, characteristics of the appeal that increased the ease with which they could imagine the situation from this perspective (e.g., a picture of the victim) had a positive effect on both their urge to help and the amount of money they donated. However, when they had an a priori disposition to take the perspective of a potential donor at the time they read the appeal, these same characteristics decreased the appeal's effectiveness.

Facilitated pointing to remembered objects in front: Evidence for egocentric retrieval or for spatial priming?

Recent spatial memory theories propose that long-term spatial memories are retrieved egocentrically. One source of evidence comes from imagined perspective taking, in which participants learn an object layout, later imagine standing at one object and facing a second (orienting) object, and then point to a third (target) object from the imagined perspective. Pointing is faster for target objects in the anterior than in the posterior half of imaginal space. This "front facilitation" is consistent with asymmetric sensory and biomechanical body properties (favoring the anterior half of body space), supporting claims of egocentric retrieval. However, front facilitation might actually result from spatial priming: Proximity differences might cause orienting objects to prime target objects more in the anterior than in the posterior half of imagined space. Using a modified perspective-taking task that unconfounded front facilitation and spatial priming, two experiments identified separate influences of front facilitation and spatial priming when participants imagined perspectives within the surrounding environment or a remote environment.

Legion No More

A first-person narrative tells the story of Mark 5:1-20 from an imagined perspective of the man from whom Jesus cast out thousands of demons. The retelling reflects the author's desire to allow the biblical story to speak to contemporary experiences of mental illness and trauma. This interpretation attempts to incorporate understandings of demon possession and faith that ancient readers might have held while respecting the ongoing hard work required of modern believers coping with mental illness.

Locating targets from imagined perspectives: Comparing labelling with pointing responses

Participants in two experiments adopted imagined perspectives in a perceptually available spatial scene and located targets by using either verbal terms (labelling) or arrows (pointing). Results revealed that performance was faster and more accurate for labelling than for pointing and more so when the adopted perspectives were misaligned with the physical orientation of the participant. This finding was obtained even when an orientation cue allowed participants to adopt the imagined perspective in advance of target presentation. A third experiment replicated these findings using traditional pointing and verbal responding. We argue that performance from misaligned perspectives in perspective-taking tasks suffers due to reference frame conflicts and that these conflicts are more pronounced with pointing and other manual responses that rely more on the reference frame of the physical body.

Measuring Stigma Toward Mental Illness: Development and Application of the Mental Illness Stigma Scale1

Guided by theory on stigma, a Likert‐type scale was developed to measure 7 factors of attitudes toward people with mental illness: interpersonal anxiety, relationship disruption, poor hygiene, visibility, treatability, professional efficacy, and recovery. The scale was validated among college students and community members, measuring attitudes toward people with mental illness, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. In a second application, college students completed the scale from their own perspective, then from an imagined perspective of someone with mental illness, while psychiatric patients completed the scale from their own perspective, then from an imagined viewpoint of someone without mental illness. Psychiatric patients assumed that they were stigmatized to a greater extent than was admitted by the student sample.

Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century. By Jonathan Zimmerman. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. xii, 300 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-674-02361-1.)

In Innocents Abroad, Jonathan Zimmerman provides both an important contribution to historical scholarship and a fascinating glimpse at the lives of a unique group of Americans. This book examines Americans in the twentieth century who went overseas to teach, whether under the auspices of missionary groups or as members of secular groups, most especially the Peace Corps. This is a gracefully written, thoroughly researched, and creatively organized study. It provides a thoughtful and imaginative perspective on how Americans who served as teachers overseas conceived of the American project overseas. By looking deeply at a wide range of sources and the entire century, Zimmerman is the first to historicize the attitudes of American teachers abroad in the twentieth century. He effectively illustrates that “the logic and implications of American exceptionalism changed dramatically over time,” shifting significantly during the 1940s (p. 221). Zimmerman concludes that at the beginning of the century, “teachers rarely paused to consider” how they were impacting local cultures, while after World War II such considerations dominated their thinking and actions (p. 22).

Attitude of Students and Parents towards the Teaching of Sex Education in Secondary Schools in Cross Rivers State.

This paper has been developed on the basis of research conducted in two projects. A special emphasis is however given to one of the projects concerning an evaluation of a drama pedagogical project. The evaluation is specifically aimed at the efficiency, intensity and depth of the educational drama input in mediating cultural messages from the play, The hat is Yours played by a professional Theatre group. The play was shown to all students of a junior high school during the autumn term of 2002. Data were gathered from 16 students (7 girls and 9 boys), 6 teachers, 5 performers, the director of the play and the playwright. Classroom observations were conducted during post play/performance sessions held at the specified school in classroom settings with all in all 60 students. The findings suggest that both the play and the project were viewed positively. All the students interviewed loved the performance and appreciated the efforts to instil drama as a discipline and broaden understandings of ‘cultural messages’ through imaginative learning and perspective taking and from the students’ responses and active engagement in the sessions it may be safely inferred that some form of emotional and intellectual processes are being triggered, sparked by the unique nature of the play itself. However, the pedagogical reconstructions of the play in classroom sessions also offer moments for reflection and the students’ voices are unanimously supportive of the educational drama efforts in the classroom. There were mixed opinions among the professional actors/actresses about moralising dramatic scenes and solving problems in a manner believed to be ‘right’ by one group of people or ‘civilisation. This is a thorny issue that should be debated further as should the number of issues that the play purposely left unsolved. We are also of the opinion that the effort should be further nurtured and extended to actively engage the whole school community on a regular basis. Our observation of several schools in Goteborg where the majority of the students are minority pupils and socially disadvantaged children testifies to the fact that these groups of students may genuinely benefit from drama not only as a form of aesthetic expression but also as a medium to interest them in other subjects. Key words: Honour crimes (murder), drama pedagogy, alienation, segregation, intercultural mediation.

Father and Son: A Nativity Story (review)

Reviewed by: Father and Son: A Nativity Story Elizabeth Bush McCaughrean, Geraldine Father and Son: A Nativity Story; illus. by Fabian Negrin. Hyperion, 2006 [32p] ISBN 1-4231-0344-0$16.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad 6-10 yrs As Mary lies sleeping after giving birth to her son Jesus, her husband, Joseph, has an anxious night worrying about how he can possibly fill his role as earthly father to a divine child: "How can I teach him the Scriptures? It will be like reading a book he wrote himself!"; "What games shall we play, boy, you and I? I mean, how can you rough-and-tumble with someone who pinned the ocean in place with a single, tack-headed moon?" Joseph's concerns are ordinary and specific, citing just the activities that children will recognize as parental responsibilities and pleasures, and McCaughrean's poetic phrasing perfectly befits the image of the man so many will come to call Saint. Negrin's illustrations, though, impair the text's effectiveness. The page design is appealing, with a wide side panel enclosing the narration and subtle motifs of birds and flowers above and below, but the drafting is awkward and the color choice tends toward overilluminated garishness. A golden blaze of holiness nearly obliterates Joseph and jaundices the Baby; limbs are often too bulky and heavy to support the lighthearted activities the scenes depict. Still, Joseph is too frequently relegated to the back of the stable in Christmas observations, and McCaughrean offers a refreshing, imaginative perspective on the carpenter entrusted to raise a King. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Spatial updating in virtual reality: the sufficiency of visual information

Robust and effortless spatial orientation critically relies on "automatic and obligatory spatial updating", a largely automatized and reflex-like process that transforms our mental egocentric representation of the immediate surroundings during ego-motions. A rapid pointing paradigm was used to assess automatic/obligatory spatial updating after visually displayed upright rotations with or without concomitant physical rotations using a motion platform. Visual stimuli displaying a natural, subject-known scene proved sufficient for enabling automatic and obligatory spatial updating, irrespective of concurrent physical motions. This challenges the prevailing notion that visual cues alone are insufficient for enabling such spatial updating of rotations, and that vestibular/proprioceptive cues are both required and sufficient. Displaying optic flow devoid of landmarks during the motion and pointing phase was insufficient for enabling automatic spatial updating, but could not be entirely ignored either. Interestingly, additional physical motion cues hardly improved performance, and were insufficient for affording automatic spatial updating. The results are discussed in the context of the mental transformation hypothesis and the sensorimotor interference hypothesis, which associates difficulties in imagined perspective switches to interference between the sensorimotor and cognitive (to-be-imagined) perspective.

Imaginal repositioning in everyday environments: effects of testing method and setting

Two experiments examined spatial knowledge access after imagined perspective switches in everyday environments. Blindfolded volunteers had to point to target objects in a well-known surrounding while imagining being repositioned into different spatial perspectives defined as self-rotations of the observer in the horizontal plane (0 degrees , 45 degrees , and 135 degrees ). Testing was either conducted in the space the target locations had been learned in (actual room testing), or while participants were away from this room, but should imagine being situated there (remote room testing). Experiment 1, in which perspective switches were tested on a trial-to-trial basis, revealed increases in pointing latency and error as a function of the amount of angular disparity between real and imagined perspective under actual and remote room conditions. Experiment 2, in which knowledge access was tested in blocks of multiple trials per perspective, showed increases in pointing latency with angular disparity for actual space testing, and to a much lesser degree for remote space testing. Implications of both findings for theoretical accounts of knowledge access after imaginal perspective switches are discussed, and recommendations for using different testing methods and settings are given.

The effects of sensorimotor cues on spatial reasoning performance

A typical result in the spatial updating and the perspective-taking literature is that performance suffers when a target needs to be localized from a perspective which is misaligned with the actual perspective of the participant. In spatial updating studies, this result has been traditionally attributed to the lack of vestibular and proprioceptive cues during the imagined movement which is required to adopt the imagined perspective. In perspective-taking studies inferior performance is often assumed to result from the construction of viewpointspecific memories. The fact that the vast majority of these studies have used pointing as the response mode creates the possibility that the inferior performance from imagined perspectives is inherent to the response modality itself. Pointing is by definition strongly dependent on one’s physical body and this may create difficulties when the task entails using pointing from a perspective other than that of the physical body. Results from several experiments will be reported in support of this hypothesis.

Creative Thought as a non Darwinian Evolutionary Process

Selection theory requires multiple, distinct, simultaneously-actualized states. In cognition, each thought or cognitive state changes the ‘selection pressure’ against which the next is evaluated; they are not simultaneously selected amongst. Creative thought is more a matter of honing in on a vague idea through redescribing successive iterations of it from different real or imagined perspectives; in other words, actualizing potential through exposure to different contexts. It has been proven that the mathematical description of contextual change of state introduces a non-Kolmogorovian probability distribution, and a classical formalism such as selection theory cannot be used. This paper argues that creative thought evolves not through a Darwinian process, but a process of context-driven actualization of potential.

Saving Southern History in Caroline Gordon's Penhally

In the half-century following the Civil War, affluent white southern women realized that they had a view of gender conventions which no longer merged seamlessly with that of white southern men. As Anne Goodwyn Jones notes, this meant that, [c]aught between white supremacy and inferiority, for the first time their to [their] race might well conflict with [their] loyalties to [their] sex (24). Postbellum upper-middle and upper-class white southern women gradually became aware, on an unprecedented scale, not only of their as female in terms closer to those employed by bourgeois New Women of the North, but also that they confronted a cultural image of themselves that served someone else's needs (Jones 25) rather than their own. And the spirit of innovation and challenge to old mores particular to the early twentieth century helped clear the path for many women to explore that feminine image in more critical terms than they had ever been able to do before. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw argues that a significant element of the historical consciousness which helps characterize the writers of the Southern Renaissance is the to understand and to terms with the dominating image of the (74). For upper-middle and upper-class white southern women writers in particular, the image of the southern lady was an entity which had to be examined in order for each of them to be able to situate herself as a person in history, ... who has been shaped by images and myths she only partly apprehends and controls, and, at last, who in her turn will be ... a shaper of myths to come (Prenshaw 83). Like their male contemporaries, many white southern women writers sought both a personal and a cultural identity in the stuff of southern history, and although some of them fundamentally were in sympathy with Agrarian assumptions, many times they perceived the Civil War, the loss of the Old Order, and the fallout of southern defeat somewhat differently in both cultural and personal terms. The material history they examined, the imaginative perspective from which they viewed it, and the literary and cultural conclusions they drew often differed radically from what has to be perceived as the quintessential Southern Renaissance confrontation between old and new. At the core of this difference in approach lay a fundamental breach between how white men and women perceived the downfall of that culture in the first place: male writers and critics often have tended to see the advent of the southern tragedy in a single, abrupt moment of apocalypse that changed their region forever and produced an inertia that made them backward-looking and loyally adherent to the old ways. In contrast, women writers more often have perceived southern history as an unfocused, unproductive clinging to a social order continually crumbling away, which prevented anyone from prospering--intellectually, spiritually, and often materially. For many white southern women writers, the conflict between old and new has been double-edged. The Civil War set in motion a drawn out, often uncomfortable process of remaking personal as well as regional identity, which demanded setting aside the old assumptions and treading on unfamiliar territory; but in addition-what might be the real crux of the tragedy for white women--this meant a continual fight against masculine cultural nostalgia if women and, ultimately, the South were to forge a viable new sense of self. While affluent white women, too, regretted the loss of their familiar ways of life, finally they could afford to be more forward-looking and optimistic about putting aside the vestiges of the old order than could the men, who felt themselves to have had much more at stake in the plantation system and hence much more to lose with its final demise. Caroline Gordon embraced the opportunity offered by modernism to grapple with remaking white southern feminine identity in the context of values and beliefs inherited from the Old South, along the way confronting the blockade to that effort thrown up by intense masculine nostalgia for the Old Order. …

Touching stories in biblio-poetry therapy and personal development

The contribution of stories in biblio-poetry therapy practice and in enhancing personal development is the focus of this paper. Writing, telling and listening to stories open up possibilities for change and new learning windows. Through expressive and communicative stories, therapeutic and developmental dia- and polylogism can expand one's imaginative space and perspectives of action in a “holding framework” and even in virtual communities. Rewriting previous “truth stories” moves and modifies one's conceptions of self, others and life relations. The inhibitions, failures and dislocations inherent in storytelling also provide valuable experiential and experimental touching/moving knowledge. The presence of the “imagined reader” and the “internal supervisor” in the writing process can help in reflecting, evaluating and steering, through meta-emotional and metacognitive processes, one's own and others’ needs, aspirations and goals.

Differentiating explanations of attitude‐consistent behavior: The role of perspectives and mode of perspective taking

We examined whether participants could differentiate between explanations of attitude-consistent behavior related to EU membership given from two perspectives (EU supporter and EU opponent) by means of three perspective taking modes (the explainer's own perspective, imagined in-group members' perspective, and imagined out-group members' perspective). Participants were presented with explanations provided from different perspectives and perspective taking modes, and they were asked to judge the extent to which they agreed with each explanation, to guess the attitude of the provider of each explanation, and to rate the quality of each explanation in various respects. Participants could not differentiate between explanations given by in-group members and out-group members who imagined the same perspective. They responded more favorably to explanations given from own perspective than from the imagined perspectives. The results suggest that there exists a shared understanding about how both sides should explain attitude-consistent behavior, but this understanding is measurably different from the actual explanations.

Action, verbal response and spatial reasoning

Studies have shown that perception of distance, orientation and size can be dissociated from action tasks. The action system seems to possess more veridical, unbiased information than the perceptual/verbal system. The current study examines the nature of the distinction between action and verbal responses in a spatial reasoning task. Participants imagined themselves facing different orientations and either pointed to where other objects would be, or verbally reported their egocentric directions (e.g., “50 degrees to my left”). When using pointing responses, RT and error increased as a function of the angular disparity between the imagined heading and their actual heading. However, when using verbal responses, performance was not affected by angular disparity, suggesting that participants knew the direction of the targets from the imagined perspective but could not point to them directly. The verbal and action systems have fundamentally different information or processes rather than quantitatively different ones.

Imaginal perspective switches in remembered environments: Transformation versus interference accounts

Imaginal perspective switches are often considered to be difficult, because they call for additional cognitive transformations of object coordinates (transformation hypothesis). Recent research suggests that problems can also result from conflicts between incompatible sensorimotor and cognitive object location codes during response specification and selection (interference hypothesis). Three experiments tested contrasting predictions of both accounts. Volunteers had to point to unseen object locations after imagined self-rotations and self-translations. Results revealed larger pointing latencies and errors for rotations as compared to translations, and monotic latency and error increases for both tasks as a function of the disparity of object directions between real and imagined perspective. Provision of advance information about the to-be-imagined perspective left both effects unchanged. These results, together with those from a systematic error analysis, deliver clear support for an interference account of imaginal perspective switches in remembered surroundings.

Switching imagined viewpoints: the effects of viewing angle and layout size.

The study examined the cognitive processes involved in switching from familiar to novel points of observation. Participants studied a single view of a small (table-top model) or large (laboratory) spatial display that was presented from a horizontal or vertical viewing angle. In a reaction-time task, spatial judgments were then made from imagined perspectives that were either the original perspective or a parallel, novel perspective. Familiar views resulted in decreased response latencies relative to novel views only for those participants who had been presented with a horizontal viewing angle, an effect that was independent of display size. The results indicate that viewing angle is a variable influencing people's ability to switch imagined perspectives.

Prang's Civil War pictures: the complete battle chromos of Louis Prang with full "descriptive texts"

During the 1880s, a German-born, Boston-based picture publisher successfully commissioned the most ambitious series of battle prints ever published. Louis Prang, best known as the father of the Christmas card,hired noted military and marine artists to create original scenes of combat, and then reproduced their works in a wildly popular portfolio of chromolithographs. He called the set Prang's War Pictures.They were offered to an eager public accompanied by descriptive textsthat told the story of each engagement through eyewitness recollection by the heroes of each action. The set proved both appealing and influential, selling vigorously in various editions for a generation, and elevating the stature of military illustration in America. For 20 years, Civil War prints for the masses had featured uninspired, one-dimensional views of armies in hand-to-hand combat.Prang and his artists demonstrated genuine skill and imaginative perspective. They showed both real carnage and important technological advances, revealing both the broad sweep of panoramic battlefields and the intimate action of individual combatants.These famously sepia-toned chromos went on to become familiar illustrations in books and magazines-often offered as definitive examples of Civil War art. But until now, the complete set of 18 chromos has never been collected in a single volume. And the original Descriptive Textsfirst offered Prang's customers as marketing brochures to boost sales-a priceless historical archive in and of themselves-have never been published since, anywhere.Holzer reunites pictures and texts in an authoritative, milestone volume orchestrating prints and descriptions that resurrect Prang's original conception of battle art for the masses for a new generation. The book also features reproductions of the original works of art that inspired the prints, created on commission by battle painter Thure de Thulstrup and naval specialist Julian Oliver Davidson-now housed in art collections around the country-but seldom seen since they were commissioned by Prang as models for his ambitious chromolithographs. This long-needed complete Prang portfolio will undoubtedly become an essential collectible for Civil War aficionados in the country, as well as for libraries and university collections increasingly aware of the importance of art and iconography in defining the Civil War experience and the impact of Civil War memory.