Toy Dog Research Articles

Visual Field in Beckett's Late Plays

Samuel Beckett, we know, is an author deeply interested in the visual arts. A frequenter of museums, at home in the company of painters than that of writers, he has revealed this passion through a wealth of textual allusions. 1 But Beckett's temperament is more profoundly visual than the study of influence might suggest, his investigation of the visual image more original and direct. To appreciate this directness, we look to the plays, for the theater's dual status as literary and visual medium allows Beckett to counterpoint his exploration of language with a parallel study of vision, as it is actualized within the theatrical mise-en-scene. Few dramatists have assumed such control over the theatrical image, the arrangement of its elements and the articulation of its form. The minimalist stage specifications of Waiting for Godot (A country road. A tree. [p. 6a]) 2 relinquish much to the discretion of director and designer, but with Endgame Beckett appropriated a supervision of stage image that he has retained throughout his dramatic career and exercised with a painter's sensitivity to visual composition. 3 Framed in tableau, the opening set of this play represents a performance field conceived with pictorial precision: its contours boldly rectangular, with walls, door, symmetrical windows, and reversed picture; its frontal plane laterally weighted by the trash bins and the stationary figure of Clov, both flanking the centric chair covered with an old sheet. Coherent in its spatial conception, the set of Endgame opposes two visual principles: on one hand, a geometric strictness of line and plane, arranged with an almost chessboard regularity of grid; and, on the other hand, the entropie scatteredness of object (toque, rug, toy dog, gaff), the muting grey light, and the bent shapelessness of human

Infant discrimination of dynamic emotional expressions

This study examines 7- and 9-month-olds’ ability to categorize cats as separate from dogs, and dogs as separate from cats in an object examination task. In Experiment 1, 7- and 9-month-olds (N=30) familiarized with toy cat replicas were found to form a category of cat that included novel cats but excluded a dog and an eagle. In Experiment 2, 7- and 9-month-olds (N=30) familiarized with toy dog replicas were found to form a category of dog that included a novel dogs and a novel cat but excluded an eagle. These results mirror those of 3- to 4-month-olds tested with visual preference methods and stand in contrast to previously reported object examination results. Analyses of the distribution of features in the exemplars used to familiarize infants suggest that, like the 3- to 4-month-olds, the 7- and 9-month-olds in these studies form categories within the task, and on the basis of feature distributions.

子どもの空間判断における親しみのある大きさの手がかり効果

The present study is concerned with the effects of familiar-size cue on the judgments of size and distance for the children of an elementary school. Thirty-two 1st-, 3rd-, and 6th-grade children served as subjects. The experiment consisted of repeating alternations of the two steps: A judgmental step in which the subject judged the size and distance of transparencies of familiar objects, and an informational step in which the subject was acquainted visually or haptically with the real sizes of a toy car and a toy dog from which the transparencies were made. The results revealed that: (1) The younger children tended to make judgments resulted from the normal sizes of the familar objects that they encounter in their daily life, while the older children based their judgments on the size information given by looking on or touching the real toys. (2) Visual size information was superior to haptic size information both in size and distance judgments. (3) Familiar-size cue may be effective in relative rather than absolute size and distance judgments.

Pathological mourning after the death of a domestic pet.

Pathological bereavement reactions following the death of a close relative or friend have been well documented in the literature. Similar grief reactions have been described following other personal losses, such as the loss of a limb or the loss of one's homes. The cases of three women are described in whom pathological grief followed another category of loss, that represented by the death of a much loved domestic pet. The patients suffered disabling psychiatric symptoms following the death of their pet dogs. The dogs were all of the toy dog variety and had been at least 13 years of age at the time of their death. Institution of psychiatric treatment resulted in rapid recovery and at follow-up after a year there had been no recurrence of symptoms.

Factors governing the changes in strength of a partially inborn response, as shown by the mobbing behaviour of the chaffinch ( Fringilla coelebs ) III. The interaction of short-term and long-term incremental and decremental effects

When a chaffinch is shown a predator, the response (as indicated by the chink calls) increases for the first few minutes, and then slowly wanes. Some recovery occurs during about the first 30 min after the stimulus is removed, but it then virtually ceases. This suggests that two groups of processes are involved in the waning, one producing temporary effects, and the other more permanent ones. The experiments reported here were aimed at a further analysis of these processes. Two stimuli (a stuffed owl and a toy dog) were presented in all possible combinations (dog-dog, owl-owl, owl-dog and dog-owl) to wild-caught chaffinches. The lengths of the initial presentation and the rest interval were varied. The effects of the first presentation on four parameters of the second response were assessed in each case. The four parameters were the latency, the number of calls in the first 6 min, the minute in which the maximum number of calls occurred, and a measure of the rate at which the response waned. Owl was found to be a stronger stimulus than dog, but the relations between the various response characteristics were similar for both stimuli. For every stimulus sequence, the number of calls given in a second presentation after a long rest interval was smaller than the number given to the same stimulus by experimentally naïve birds. The decrement was greater in sequences where the same stimulus was repeated, the stimulus-specificity increasing with the length of the initial presentation. Increase in the length of the initial presentation resulted in a progressive decrease in the second response with owl-owl and dog-dog sequences, but an increase with the owl-dog sequence. The interrelations between the response characteristics were different on second presentations after a long rest interval from those found for initial responses. In particular, the latency decreased although the number of calls also decreased. The results can be understood in terms of an interaction between long-term incremental and decremental effects. The evidence for the incremental effect comes from three independent sources—from the changes in latency, from the increase in the response to dog presented 24 h after owl with lengthening of the initial presentation, and from some additional experiments with owl models. With short rest intervals the response decrement was greater than with long ones, and was also different in kind (as indicated by differences in the relations between the response charac­teristics). There was no clear evidence that the short-term effects were stimulus-specific. Here again there appear to be incremental effects interacting with the decremental ones, the evidence for the former coming from the initial warming up phase of all responses, irregulari­ties in the recovery curves, and additional experiments with a very short initial presentation. It is concluded that concepts like habituation, extinction, adaptation and fatigue, while useful in a descriptive sense, must not be taken to imply a unitary underlying process.

The classification of social stimuli: “Social” and “non-social” distraction in the albino rat

Rats were trained on a vertical vs. horizontal stripe discrimination with hunger drive and food reward. After a very stable level of performance was reached, both stimulus doors were unlocked and various distracting stimuli were introduced in the vicinity of the previously incorrect doorway. Three distracting stimuli were used: ( a) a stationery white cardboard rat, ( b) a small toy dog moving through the incorrect doorway, and ( c) a live rat moving through the incorrect doorway. All three distracting stimuli increased errors. The distracting effects were monotonically related to the complexity of the distracting stimuli, increasing in effectiveness from the cardboard rat, to the toy dog, to the live rat. The results are interpreted in terms of the increasing complexity of the distracting stimuli. Two dimensions making up this gradient of complexity are suggested; the amount of stimulus movement and thè number of activated sense modalities. Krech & Crutchfield's suggestions that a continuum of social stimulation should vary in mobility, capriciousness, and unpredictability are also applied in discussing the results.

Dog Breeding for Show Points

“WE have bred dogs for all sorts of show points, but we have never considered whether our principles of breeding have been to the advantage of the dog itself. We have thought only of our own profit.” So concludes the editor of the Countryman, who asks whether or not our dog breeding principles so far, judged entirely from the dog's point of view, are not a bit ‘low down’ and, further, why should not some breeding now be done for intelligence—In a series of articles now appearing in this quarterly review, these questions are considered by a number of people. Dr. Darling expends most of his space in proving to his own satisfaction that he is quite unable to decide as to what could be regarded as intelligence in the dog, and argues that in any event the experiment suggested has already been carried out with the working hill collie. But he agrees with the editor of the Countryman in stating that there can be no defence for many show points. The standard of the St. Bernard is merely acromegaly, that of the bulldog achondroplasia; the toy dog is hyper-thyroidic, and terriers microcephalic. Prof. L. C. Dunn, of Columbia University, in a very well-written article, suggests that it is not intelligence that is being discussed but educability, and that this, possibly, is not associated with originality and critical judgment. He then outlines the sort of experimental procedure which might be adopted if the experiment suggested were undertaken. Prof. Tait, of McGill University, following the lead of Prof. Dunn, replies without answering, which is perhaps just as well.