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PubMed2003

Self-perceived competence, learning conceptions and preferred learning situations in the domain of communication.

BACKGROUND: An important purpose of education in the field of social work is the development of social-communicative competence and students' individual learning theories (ILTs) concerning this domain. AIMS: Our first aim was to develop diagnostic instruments for ILT assessment and to understand the relationships between ILT variables. Our second purpose was to study the differences in ILT variables between students of three study years. SAMPLES: A total of 396 full-time social work students participated in this study: 176 first-year, 147 second-year and 73 fourth-year students (92% women and 8% men). METHOD: Based on a theoretical framework, three questionnaires have been constructed, covering three ILT variables: self-perceived competence, learning conceptions and preferred learning situations. For scale construction, principal component analyses and reliability analyses were conducted. ANOVAs and post hoc comparisons of means were used to investigate cross-sectional differences regarding ILT variables. Pearson correlations and regression analyses were performed to gain more insight into the relationships between ILT variables. RESULTS: Five aspects of self-perceived competence, four learning conceptions and five preferred learning situations were found. Learning conceptions and self-perceived competencies were found to be predictors of students' preferred learning situations. Many differences were found between the three groups of students, especially between the first-year students and the others. CONCLUSIONS: When studying the acquisition of social-communicative competence, it is important to take students' individual learning theories into account. Increased insight into the role ILTs play can be of help in improving social work education.

Choice Behavior↗
PubMed2006

Synaesthesia for reading and playing musical notes.

This study reports three cases of synaesthesia who experience colors in response to written musical notation, graphemes and heard music. The synaesthetes show Stroop-like interference when asked to name the colour of graphemes but not for written musical notes. However, reliable interference is found in two further studies that require deeper processing of the musical notation (namely playing music from colored notation, and naming the synaesthetic color of the notes whilst suppressing the veridical color). This is the first empirical demonstration of synaesthesia for musical notation. The fact that synaesthetic color influences music playing/reading (a sensory-motor transformation) but not verbal color naming suggests that synaesthetic Stroop effects can arise from processing the meaning of a stimulus and not just as a result of verbal response interference. However, it is likely that the color associations themselves have a developmental origin in the names assigned to them. In all three cases, the colors of the written notes are related to the graphemes that arbitrarily denote them (e.g., 'A' may be "red" both as a letter and when written in musical notation). The results suggest that synaesthetic associations may migrate from one representational format (e.g., graphemes) to another (e.g., musical notation).

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The concept of integration: a foundation for evaluating outcomes of nursing care.

Changes in the health care environment, an aging population, and an increase in chronic health conditions require consideration of the adequacy of concepts available for demonstrating the effectiveness of nursing care. One concept that has potential utility for nursing in this regard is the concept of integration. Analysis of the concept of integration was conducted to alleviate existing ambiguity and to explore ways in which this concept has been employed in diverse disciplines. The concept of integration is characterized primarily as a process of combination: two or more elements are merged with sufficient interaction so that unity of the newly formed entity is achieved. The attributes of the concept of integration, therefore, include process, combination, interaction, and unity. The concept of integration is useful in evaluation of reconciliation of past and present identities and altered role relationships within the environment.

Concept Formation↗
PubMed1977

Stability and oscillation in interpersonal awareness: a clinical-developmental analysis.

This paper has examined the research questions and strategies used by those who attempt to study social development from a cognitive-developmental orientation. It began by pointing to the need to integrate the descriptive work done by social-cognitive developmental researchers with some of the approaches taken by clinical and social psychologists in studying the same general phenomenon: interpersonal relations. An issue-by-stage social-cognitive map developed on the basis of both conceptual and empirical investigations was described, as were some of the properties which defined these stages. Following this, empirical evidence was cited from several ongoing studies which both supported the theoretical claims of logical coherence and pointed research in several new directions. One direction of particular importance is the naturalistic study of social and interpersonal reasoning and relating. Taken together, the interview data and the naturalistic observations appear to present a paradox. Evidence from the descriptive research appears to support the principle of stage consistency across categories of experience. On the other hand, the impact of the naturalistic findings is to point out oscillations in reasoning across varying real-life conditions. It should be noted, however, that several of the children in the classroom study did reason fairly consistently across a wide range of contexts; these children, perhaps not coincidentally, were the ones who had shown the greatest improvement in their interpersonal functioning and were soon to return to a more traditional educational milieu. Such clinical evidence points to the strong need to study better-adjusted children under similar conditions to see if real-life oscillation is as pronounced as it is in more pathological groups (Inhelder, 1943/1968). Our conclusion is that the cognitive-developmental approach, viewed in the proper perspective, can accommodate and make coherent data which suggest both variability and uniformity of reasoning, but that for such an accommodation to take place, greater attention must be paid to the critical social psychological and clinical variables which reciprocally interact with level of social-cognitive capability.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

Reduction of demand characteristics in the measurement of certainty during modeled conservation.

The purpose of the present experiment was to document the cognitive processes mediating the observational learning of conservation. Two formats for measuring certainty were contrasted among nonconservers assigned to one of give groups. Under a public format, two groups used a certainty rating scale and showed the experimenter how sure they were about the correctness of a peer model's statements. Under a private format, two groups employed the same scale but were assured that their rating was not known by the experimenter. Within each format, one group was presented with the model's conservation answers and one group with the model's opinions on arbitrary matters. Conservation was demonstrated to the fifth group which did not perform the certainty assessment. All conservation groups were post-tested immediately after modeling and 6 weeks later and all groups displayed equivalent stable learning. Whereas public certainty was constantly high, private certainty increased as the model proceeded through conservation exemplification, in accordance with a hypothesis of sequential imitation and comprehension processes. Private certainty was also higher for conservation than for opinion, although not on the first two items. Public certainty was high regardless of modeled content, and public rating latency was always found to be shorter. These results strongly suggested the presence of demand characteristics for high undifferentiated ratings under the public format of certainty appraisal. This contamination prevented valid monitoring of the course of cognitive rule processing.

Attention↗
PubMed2002

Material-specific deficits in "remembering" in patients with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy and excisions.

A growing body of research suggests that "remembering" and "knowing" may be dissociable aspects of recognition memory. Cognitive theorists have argued that the former reflects conceptual processing and is based on distinctive memory traces whereas the latter is associated with perceptual analysis and reflects fluency of processing. Here, we investigate whether this framework can account for memory deficits observed following right or left temporal lobe damage, as suggested by Blaxton and Theodore [Brain and Cognition 35 (1997) 5]. Recognition memory for faces and words was examined in patients with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy or excisions (TLE) and controls using the "remember-know" recognition paradigm. Participants studied items under conditions designed to enhance either conceptual processing or focus their attention on superficial aspects of the items. For controls, there was an increase in "remember" responses following conceptually-based encoding for both words and faces. This enhancement was eliminated in patients with left TLE for words and those with right TLE showed a diminished effect for faces. This pattern indicates an impairment in the ability to benefit from conceptual encoding that is specific to material preferentially processed by the damaged hemisphere. Furthermore, this effect was only observed for "remember" responses, which are based on the participants' ability to recollect specific contextual aspects of the original study experience. These data can be interpreted in relation to current theories of hippocampal function, which emphasize the critical role played by the hippocampus in relational memory formation and retrieval. We offer this as a novel interpretation of the "remember-know" literature.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Concept inventing: a process for creating a unitary definition of having courage.

Having courage is all-at-once inherent in being human and immeasurable. It is intertwined with what living is all about. This article discusses existing theoretical views of courage, provides examples of the importance of the phenomenon for health and quality of life, and presents a unique definition of having courage that emerged through the process of concept inventing--a multidimensional process of creating unitary concepts. The definition having courage is deliberate steadfast risking while creatively living the cherished with opportunities-restrictions is explored in relation to the human becoming theory, and suggestions for future research are made.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed2005

Infants' formation and use of categories to segregate objects.

Four- and-a-half-month-old infants' (N = 100) category formation and use was studied in a series of five experiments. For each experiment, the test events featured a display composed of a cylinder and a box. Previous research showed that this display is not clearly parsed as a single unit or as two separate units by infants of this age. Immediately prior to testing, infants were shown a set of category exemplars. Knowledge about this category could help infants disambiguate the test display, which contained a novel exemplar of this category. Clear interpretation of the test display as composed of two separate units (as indicated by infants' longer looking at the move-together than at the move-apart test event) was taken as evidence of category formation and use. In Experiments 1 and 5, infants' prior experience with a set of three different boxes that were similar to the test box facilitated their segregation of the test display. Experiment 2 showed that three different exemplars are necessary: prior experience with any two of the three boxes used in Experiment 1 did not facilitate infants' segregation of the test display. Experiment 3 showed that variability in the exemplar set is necessary: prior experience with three identical boxes did not facilitate infants' segregation of the test display. Experiment 4 showed that under these conditions of very brief prior exposure, similarity between the exemplar set and test box is necessary: prior experience with three different boxes that were not very similar to the test box did not facilitate infants' segregation of the test display. Together, these findings suggest that: (a) number of exemplars, variability, and similarity in the exemplar set are important for infants' category formation, and (b) infants use their category knowledge to determine the boundaries of the objects in a display.

Cognition↗
PubMed2002

A new approach to the formation of equivalence classes in pigeons.

Four pigeons were given simultaneous discrimination training with visual patterns arbitrarily divided into two sets, with the stimuli in one set designated A1, B1, C1, and D1 and those in the other set designated A2, B2, C2, and D2. In sequentially introduced training phases, the pigeons were exposed to a series of reversals to establish AB and then CD equivalences. In subsequent testing sessions, a subset of stimuli from one set served as positive stimuli and those from the other set as negative stimuli on training trials, and transfer of the reinforced relation to other members of the sets was tested with nonreinforced probe trials. The pigeons were trained further on AC and BD equivalences and then were tested for the emergence of untrained AD and BC equivalences. Two of the 4 pigeons exhibited the emergence of one of these untrained equivalences, evidence for the emergence of transitive relations. This finding suggests that the pigeons established three-member functional equivalence classes by incorporating separately trained multiple equivalence relations. Repeated reversal training and probe testing enabled us to explore the formation and expansion of functional equivalence classes in pigeons.

Animals↗
PubMed1994

On-line processing of textual illustrations in the visuospatial sketchpad: evidence from dual-task studies.

We present evidence that the comprehension of illustrated text makes use of the visuospatial sketchpad component of working memory. The results from three experiments demonstrate that the comprehending of texts that are accompanied by pictures interferes with the performance of a spatial short-term memory task more than does the comprehending of texts that have no pictures. A fourth experiment demonstrates that the interference is found only when there is a requirement to comprehend the text; that is, the simple presentation of the texts and their pictures did not degrade performance on the spatial task. Finally, we show that the comprehension of illustrated texts does not differentially interfere with a verbal short-term memory task. These results are consistent with the claim that illustrations accompanying a text encourage the formation of a spatial mental model with the use of the working memory's sketchpad.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Four pathways in the analysis of adult development and aging: comparing analyses of reasoning about personal-life dilemmas.

Four systems for analyzing thinking about 2 personal-life dilemmas, as discussed by 29 men and 35 women (ages 35-85), were compared. Kohlberg's (1976) moral judgment stages, Kegan's (1982) ego-development stages, Gilligan's (1982) moral orientation system, and Suedfeld and Tetlock's (1977) integrative complexity scoring were used. Subjects completed Kohlberg's (Colby & Kohlberg, 1987) standard moral judgment measure, a self-concept description, and several questionnaires. The Kohlberg, Kegan, and integrative complexity codings of the dilemmas were positively related to each other and to the standard Kohlberg moral stage scores. There were no age-group differences and few gender differences on the measures. However, education, role-taking skills, and greater sensitivity to age changes in the self positively predicted higher stage scores across maturity.

Adaptation, Psychological↗