The Early Window

The third edition of this book provides an updated account of the theory and research which has a direct bearing on television and children's attitudes, development, and behavior. The authors explore the social, political, and economic factors that surround the issues--TV violence integrating aggressive or antisocial behavior in children; TV portrayals of minorities and women cultivating social attitudes; television commercials and advertising content that children see and their censorship by government or private groups; and the use of TV for educating and/or socializing children. ISBN 0-08-034679-0 (pbk.): $12.95.

Cites successful examples of community-based policing.

Correct word identification and processing is a prerequisite for accurate reading, and decades of psycholinguistic and neuroscientific research have shown that the magical moments of visual word recognition are short-lived and markedly fast. The time window in which a given letter string passes from being a mere sequence of printed curves and strokes to acquiring the word status takes around one third of a second. In a few hundred milliseconds, a skilled reader recognizes an isolated word and carries out a number of underlying processes, such as the encoding of letter position and letter identity, and lexico-semantic information retrieval. However, the precise manner (and order) in which these processes occur (or co-occur) is a matter of contention subject to empirical research. There’s no agreement regarding the precise timing of some of the essential processes that guide visual word processing, such as precise letter identification, letter position assignment or sub-word unit processing (bigrams, trigrams, syllables, morphemes), among others. Which is the sequence of processes that lead to lexical access? How do these and other processes interact with each other during the early moments of word processing? Do these processes occur in a serial fashion or do they take place in parallel? Are these processes subject to mutual interaction principles? Is feedback allowed for within the earliest stages of word identification? And ultimately, when does the reader’s brain effectively identify a given word? A vast number of questions remain open, and this Research Topic will cover some of them, giving the readership the opportunity to understand how the scientific community faces the problem of modeling the early stages of word identification according to the latest neuroscientific findings. The present Research Topic aimed to combine recent experimental evidence on early word processing from different techniques together with comprehensive reviews of the current work directions, in order to create a landmark forum in which experts in the field defined the state of the art and future directions. We were willing to receive submissions of empirical as well as theoretical and review articles based on different computational and neuroscience-oriented methodologies. We especially encouraged researchers primarily using electrophysiological or magnetoencephalographic techniques as well as eye-tracking to participate, given that these techniques provide us with the opportunity to uncover the mysteries of lexical access allowing for a fine-grained time-course analysis. The main focus of interest concerned the processes that are held within the initial 250-300 milliseconds after word presentation, covering areas that link basic visuo-attentional systems with linguistic mechanisms.

Paramount in the shaping of early Byzantine identity was the construction of the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (532-537 CE). This book examines the edifice from the perspective of aesthetics to define the concept of beauty and the meaning of art in early Byzantium. Byzantine aesthetic thought is re-evaluated against late antique Neoplatonism and the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius that offer fundamental paradigms for the late antique attitude towards art and beauty. These metaphysical concepts of aesthetics are ultimately grounded in experiences of sensation and perception, and reflect the ways in which the world and reality were perceived and grasped, signifying the cultural identity of early Byzantium. There are different types of aesthetic data, those present in the aesthetic object and those found in aesthetic responses to the object. This study looks at the aesthetic data embodied in the sixth-century architectural structure and interior decoration of Hagia Sophia as well as in literary responses (ekphrasis) to the building. The purpose of the Byzantine ekphrasis was to convey by verbal means the same effects that the artefact itself would have caused. A literary analysis of these rhetorical descriptions recaptures the Byzantine perception and expectations, and at the same time reveals the cognitive processes triggered by the Great Church. The central aesthetic feature that emerges from sixth-century ekphraseis of Hagia Sophia is that of light. Light is described as the decisive element in the experience of the sacred space and light is simultaneously associated with the notion of wisdom. It is argued that the concepts of light and wisdom are interwoven programmatic elements that underlie the unique architecture and non-figurative decoration of Hagia Sophia. A similar concern for the phenomenon of light and its epistemological dimension is reflected in other contemporary monuments, testifying to the pervasiveness of these aesthetic values in early Byzantium.