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This chapter examines the theory that the individual's current satisfaction will depend on his or her own past experience and expected future. The study assumes that both the past and the future have an effect, and that the impact distribution is described by a mass-density function on the time axis. Estimates of this function show that its position and shape depend on age and other individual variables. The young and elderly place more weight on the past, while those in mid-life give more weight to the future.

This chapter examines the theory that the individual’s current satisfaction will depend on his or her own past experience and expected future. The study assumes that both the past and the future have an effect, and that the impact distribution is described by a mass-density function on the time axis. Estimations of the function showed that it varies its position and shape depending on age and other individual variables. The young and elderly place more weight on the past, while those in mid-life give more weight to the future.

This chapter begins with an overview of the vestibular system. It then discusses visual acuity and the vestibulo-ocular reflex, the air-righting reflex in the cat, post-rotational reactions, positional alcohol nystagmus, motion sickness, vection illusions, the subjective visual vertical, adaptive plasticity, path finding and spatial orientation, and postural control. Many functions involve the cooperation of vestibular, visual, and somatosensory/proprioceptive inputs. One becomes aware of vestibular and other proprioceptive sensations only when they are in conflict with vision or the expectations arising from past experience. The vestibular system contributes to several levels of nervous function, including reflexes designed to keep vision clear during head motion or to maintain blood pressure when one quickly goes from a supine to an erect posture, more complicated strategies required in maintaining an upright posture, and higher perceptual functions involved in our conscious awareness of our position in our environment and our ability to navigate through it.

This chapter examines the childhood accounts and experiences of case-study informants, suggesting that childhood is a key reference point for many care workers in beginning their life stories. It examines the narratives that care workers give in explaining their ethic of care. In interpreting informants' accounts, researchers also took into account questions such as: When did you first feel you wanted to work with children? Such questions provoked the process of making connections between past experience and present motivations to care.

Chapter Two further develops the theoretical and conceptual framework introduced in Chapter One, illustrating this in more depth through the qualitative data from interviews with service users and professionals. Sections investigate how these respondents – especially service-users – reconciled broader assumptions regarding the motivations and competencies of actors (based on institutional context, profession and other ideal-types) with more individualised ‘signs’ expressed through face-to-face communication. This chapter thus considers how trust in individuals is possible despite more problematic institutional contexts and related uncertainties and vulnerabilities which emerge from negative past experiences. At the heart of the analysis is the development of understandings of how inter-personal interactions are able to override negative perceptions of the abstract system within the formation of trust.

The purpose of this chapter is to emphasize the background of variables within the functioning brain against which the experiments that are to be reported have been designed, for these introduce yet another consideration, namely, variation with serial time. The results are presented to emphasize that the response of the brain to a stimulus whose parameters are held constant is modified by the past experience of the organism. In other words, the output of the black box depends on its past history. The initial recognition of these serial changes came essentially from electroencephalographers skilled in the recognition of pattern in the records of both animal and man. Some method or methods of automatic analysis, which would exclude or reduce the factor of human judgment, are needed to define these changes more accurately.

This chapter presents accounts concerning family and friends, which are marked by an ebb and flow of precise detail, hazy recollection, and a muted nostalgia. In examining Sōseki's upbringing in the early years of Meiji Japan, the chapter reflects on the shifting complementarity of the past and present, the youthful persona and the older storyteller, searching for what might be revealed even within the comparatively vague conventions of the shōhin vignettes recounted here. Ultimately, the chapter attempts to understand both the Sōseki of the narrative present as well as the Sōseki from family remembrance, highlighting the ways in which these disparate elements have come to associate with one another in the shōhin vignettes.