Emily Mason

American football is played in a chaotic visual environment filled with relevant and distracting information. We investigated the hypothesis that collegiate football players show exceptional skill at shielding their response execution from the interfering effects of distraction ( interference control ). The performances of 280 football players from National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I football programs were compared to age-matched controls in a variant of the Eriksen flanker task ( Eriksen and Eriksen, 1974 ). This task quantifies the magnitude of interference produced by visual distraction on split-second response execution. Overall, football athletes and age controls showed similar mean reaction times (RTs) and accuracy rates. However, football athletes were more proficient at shielding their response execution speed from the interfering effects of distraction (i.e., smaller flanker effect costs on RT). Offensive and defensive players showed smaller interference costs compared to controls, but defensive players showed the smallest costs. All defensive positions and one offensive position showed statistically smaller interference effects when compared directly to age controls. These data reveal a clear cognitive advantage among football athletes at executing motor responses in the face of distraction, the existence and magnitude of which vary by position. Individual differences in cognitive control may have important implications for both player selection and development to improve interference control capabilities during play.

This discussion locates the doctrine of grace as one way of negotiating Barthes’ references to Christianity in his late writings. The dynamic influence of the divine experienced by the believer through faith, grace has the capacity to transform suffering into a meditative or ‘neutral’ thinking analogous to meditation or prayer. For the grieving Barthes, grace promises relief without negating the course of bereavement and so enables the act of writing. In recalling the maternal, grace also allows a focus on the mother Barthes develops in relation to the work of George Bernanos and Blaise Pascal, as well as Marcel Proust. After establishing Barthes’ interest in grace in Mourning Diary as well as A Lover’s Discourse, The Neutral and Camera Lucida, the essay discloses the working or movement of grace in three ideas current to these writings: ‘twinklings’, the ‘punctum’ and tears. These terms not only map the way to Barthes’ projected ‘new life’, or Vita Nova, but reveal an attentive engagement with Christianity and mysticism through which he discovers his neutral or non-egoic way of mediating grief. If ‘literature is like religion’, as Barthes claimed, then his writing is like grace, moving him and his reader towards an equanimity framed by, if not faithful to, Christian discourse.

This article reads Peter Larkin’s poem “praying // firs \\ attenuate” as a way to think the divine in relation to the ecological as a mutual poetic giving. It suggests that the poem entangles the reader in a series of relational imaginings that complicates the modern commodification of the nonhuman and questions a secular fatigue with the divine. Through a Catholic metaphysics in which all things—human, nonhuman, holy—are entangled, Larkin’s religious ecology maps the way to horizons promising that which cannot yet be imagined. In an entangled, layered, rhythmic, and echoing poetic form, Larkin reveals the intimate relationship between plenitude and the attenuated, gift and scarcity.