No abstract

We describe a patient (GK) who shows symptoms associated with Balint's syndrome and attentional dyslexia. GK was able to read words, but not nonwords. He also made many misidentification and mislocation errors when reporting letters in words, suggesting that his word-naming ability did not depend upon preserved position-coded, letter identification. We show that GK was able to read lower-case words better than upper-case words, but upper-case abbreviations better than lower-case abbreviations. Spacing the letters in abbreviations disrupted identification, as did mixing the case of letters within words. These data cannot be explained in terms of letter-based reading or preserved holistic word recognition. We propose that GK was sensitive to the visual familiarity of adjacent letter forms.

The 'attentional blink' (AB) reflects a limitation in the ability to identify multiple items in a stream of rapidly presented information. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), applied to a site over the right posterior parietal cortex, reduced the magnitude of the AB to visual stimuli, whilst no effect of rTMS was found when stimulation took place at a control site. The data confirm that the posterior parietal cortex may play a critical role in temporal as well as spatial aspects of visual attention.

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Research understanding energy consumption is usually approached from either an engineering or social science perspective. The result is either understanding technologies and materials or understanding people. Yet, energy consumption is clearly an interaction between people, materials and technologies. So understanding them with separate studies or data that miss this interaction fails to grasp the socio-technical nature of energy consumption. Multidisciplinary studies that currently collect both social and technical data normally gather each type of data with distinct spatio-temporal properties. Typically, researchers then exploit these data streams separately at analysis stage. However, there is no discussion of the problems arising when attempting to combine data streams from such different approaches to create interdisciplinary, integrated socio-technical research. We explore these problems across three cases of research on energy use to illustrate what happens when social and technical data are analysed together in different research contexts. Issues include the possibility of Type I errors, the incommensurability of social versus technical data and the spatio-temporal alignment of data streams. We examine how and why standard multidisciplinary approaches can be problematic, and go on to examine possible solutions to address these problems including a proposed approach to designing interdisciplinary, integrated socio-technical research in energy use.