Presence Of Context Research Articles

African Presence in Former Soviet Spaces

▪ Abstract This review traces accounts of African presence in the former USSR that are available in or have been cited primarily in English; many sources on this topic published in the USSR were strategically intended for Western consumption. This review tracks repetitions of tropes that link certain kinds of “blackness” to “Africa”: It observes that treating blacks in the USSR as “displaced” confirmed Soviet humanitarianism, and produced and managed anti-Western/anticapitalist forms of Soviet nationalism and federalism. We scrutinize the ways accounts of African presence use evidence of “race remnants” that implicitly position black bodies as subjects of racial dissolution and/or cultural assimilation. This leads us to question the possibility of narrating African presence in contexts ruled by logics that wed spatial displacement/placement to racial impurity/purity. More broadly, the review addresses the utility of ideals of displaced racial communities within African diasporic criticism.

Deliberate Practice and Expertise in Martial Arts: The Role of Context in Motor Recall

This study used participants from the martial arts (karate) to examine the influence of context in the acquisition of novel motor sequences and the applicability of Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer's (1993) theory of deliberate practice in this athletic domain. The presence of context did not benefit recall performance for the experts. The performance of the novice group was hindered by the presence of context. Evaluation of the role of deliberate practice in expert performance was assessed through retrospective questionnaires. The findings related to the relationship between relevance and effort, and relevance and enjoyment diverged from Ericsson et al.'s (1993) definition of deliberate practice, suggesting that adaptations should be made if it is to be considered general theory of expertise.

The effect of language production manipulations on negative thought disorder and discourse coherence disturbances in schizophrenia

This study was designed to test the following hypotheses about the mechanisms underlying language disturbances in schizophrenia: (1) negative thought disorder (reduced verbosity and syntactic complexity, increased pausing) reflects a deficit generating a discourse plan; and (2) discourse coherence disturbances (tangential responses, loss of goal, derailment, non-sequiturs, distractible speech) reflect a deficit maintaining a discourse plan. Thirty-nine participants with DSM-III-R schizophrenia listened to two stories and answered a series of questions after each story. We manipulated two factors: (1) the presence of context before the stories (to influence generating a discourse plan); and (2) question type (structured vs. unstructured; designed to influence maintaining a discourse plan). Consistent with our hypotheses, low context was associated with less verbose and syntactically complex speech. In addition, patients produced more discourse coherence disturbances when responding to unstructured than when responding to structured questions. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd.

Incidental detection of rhyming in silent reading

Abstract In order to study the availability of phonological properties of a text being processed, an incidental detection of rhyming task was used. Subjects were presented with what appeared to be two prose sentences, one of which contained six rhyming words. In Experiment 1, the subjects were asked to listen, read orally, or read silently. The rhymes were either graphemically similar or not, and the sentences were either presented in context or not. After the presentation, the subjects were questioned about whether they had noticed the rhyming. The overall percentage of subjects who noticed rhymes ranged from 6% at the worst condition to 87% at the best condition. Noticing rhymes was much poorer in silent reading. It was strongly affected by the presence of context and graphemical similarity, and this was true in all modes of presentation to the same degree. In Experiment 2, the possibility of a memory artefact was ruled out. A possible interpretation of the results is that phonological information is no...

Interference in pigeons’ long-term memory viewed as a retrieval problem

In Experiment 1, three (experimental) groups of pigeons (n=8) acquired a successive wavelength discrimination in Phase 1 and a reversal in Phase 2; then, after a 24-h delay, they received a wavelength generalization test in extinction (Phase 3). For one group (“Context Same”), the same context was present throughout; for both others, a different context was used for Phase 1 and Phase 2. One group received the generalization test in the presence of Context 1, the other in Context 2. The Context Same and Context 2 experimental groups showed “recency,” with all gradients peaking at the reversal S+ value. The Context 1 group yielded several different response patterns but never showed recency, thus revealing context-generated proactive interference. In Experiment 2, eight subjects learned the original discrimination and its reversal in different contexts, and each bird was tested alternately (within a session) in both contexts. Under this condition, the test contexts were effective retrieval cues. In every case, the gradients obtained in each context peaked sharply at the appropriate S+ value. These experiments indicate that conflicting memories may be stored along with their associated contexts such that they can be retrieved by an appropriate manipulation of contextual cues at the time of retention testing.