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PubMed1992

The methodology of testing naive beliefs in the physics classroom.

Many undergraduates harbor a variety of misbeliefs about physical objects in motion--for instance, that a bomb will fall straight down when dropped from a moving airplane. The evidence that these misbeliefs are resistant to correction by college-level physics courses, however, has often been based on methodologies that lack adequate internal validity. We used a quasi-experimental "before and after" design to assess the impact of two college physics courses, and we examined selection-bias, test-retest, and task-format factors directly. Initial accuracy and significant improvements due to instruction varied considerably by problem category and subject group; thus, in several ways, the results refute the general conclusion that conventional physics instruction does little to correct students' misbeliefs. We conclude by advocating the quasi-experimental approach for studies of naive beliefs in physics as well as for other situations in which the impact of classroom instruction is of interest.

Concept Formation↗
PubMed2004

Stages of faith and identity: birth to teens.

In closing, some of the strengths, limitations, and criticisms of faith development theory need to be acknowledged. Fortunately, there was gender balance in the formative sample of 359 interviews from which the theory of faith development derived (50% each of male and female respondents). In the original sample, Protestants made up 45% of the interviewees, Catholics represented 36.5%, 11.2% were Jews, and 3.6% were Orthodox Christians. A remaining 3.6% were "other." Given the growth in the numbers of adherents to other major traditions in the United States, interview research needs to be conducted to widen the sample to include Muslim, Buddhist, and secular respondents. Interviewees have not been studied longitudinally. Furthermore, most of the foundational research was conducted in the 1 980s and early 1990s. A new major round of faith development interviews could shed light on the impacts on peoples' faith of "globalization" and the features of experience that have come to be called the "postmodern condition." These phenomena reflect patterns of radical secularization and the erosion of religious and moral authority on the one hand and, paradoxically, the worldwide growth of fundamentalist and conservative faith practices on the other. Add to these phenomena the interest of many "nonchurched" persons in "spirituality" and we begin to grasp the richness and diversity that faith development research encounters today. Professor Heinz Streib of the University of Bielefeld is conducting the most significant research in the faith development tradition. The research he and his colleagues are conducting in Europe and in the United States promises to yield some tangible data and insights into these issues. To date, faith development theory has not been incorporated into child, adolescent, and family psychiatric interviewing and case formulation to any appreciable or measurable degree. These perspectives and inroads into the interior lives and thought processes of young people, however, may be helpful in the understanding of normal and pathologic development and of healthy and psychiatrically ill children and adolescents. Further collaborative work in this area is needed among psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, psychologists of religion, religious educators, and theologians.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1990

Knowing the meaning, getting the point, bridging the gap, and carrying the message: aspects of discourse following closed head injury in childhood and adolescence.

Pragmatic communication or discourse was studied in 33 children and adolescents following closed head injury. Three-quarters of the sample was impaired on at least one of four discourse tests (knowing the alternate meanings of ambiguous words in context; getting the point of figurative or metaphoric expressions; bridging the inferential gaps between events in stereotyped social situations; and producing speech acts that express the apparent intentions of others). Resolution of ambiguity was correlated with word fluency and verbal domain knowledge, but not with object naming; understanding of metaphor was correlated with verbal domain knowledge, but not with literal sentence comprehension or with the formation of analogies; making inferences was correlated with working memory capacity but not with social knowledge; and producing speech acts was not correlated either with sentence construction or with social knowledge. These associations and dissociations reveal some of the correlates of impaired discourse processing after closed head injury in childhood and adolescence, as well as bearing on theoretical questions concerning the nature of normally developing discourse processes.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1991

Protocol analysis of the correspondence of verbal behavior and equivalence class formation.

In two equivalence experiments, a "think aloud" procedure modeled after Ericsson and Simon's (1980) protocol analysis was implemented to examine subjects' covert verbal responses during matching to sample. The purpose was to identify variables that might explain individual differences in equivalence class formation. The results from Experiment 1 suggested that subjects who formed equivalence classes described the relations among stimuli, whereas those not showing equivalence described sample and comparison stimuli as unitary compounds. Because Experiment 1 only demonstrated a correlation between describing stimulus compounds and the absence of equivalence classes, a second study was conducted. In Experiment 2, equivalence class formation was brought under experimental control through pretraining manipulations that facilitated responding either to stimulus compounds or to relations among stimuli. The results demonstrated that a history of describing stimulus compounds, when compared with describing the relations among the stimuli, interfered with the emergence of stimulus equivalence. These findings clarify individual differences in stimulus equivalence. They also demonstrate the utility of analyzing verbal reports to identify possible variables that can be manipulated experimentally.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

Developmental change in infants' perception of correlations among attributes.

The perception of relational information such as the correlation or co-occurrence among features should play a central role in abilities ranging from the perception and recognition of a simple pattern or object to the formation of a category. 4 experiments were conducted to examine developmental change in 4-, 7-, and 10-month-old infants' perception of correlations among attributes. The results suggested a developmental progression in infants' processing of simple correlational information, ranging from the processing of independent featural information only at 4 months, the perception of relations among features of a single pattern at 7 months, to the abstraction of invariant relations from a category at 10 months.

Child Development↗
PubMed2003

Spontaneous representations of small numbers of objects by rhesus macaques: examinations of content and format.

The project of comparative cognition benefits from common measures across species. We report here on five experiments using the violation of expectancy looking time measure with free-ranging rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), each designed to build on current knowledge concerning spontaneous representations of number. Each subject, tested in only one experimental condition, watched as eggplants were placed behind a screen one at a time, after which the screen was removed revealing an outcome that either matched or did not match the number placed there. Subjects looked longer at impossible than possible outcomes in 1+1=2 or 3, 1 small+1 small=1 big or 2 small, 2+1=2 or 3, and 2+1=3 or 4 conditions. They failed in 2+1+1=4 or 3 or 5 and in 1+1+1=2 or 3 conditions. This pattern of results closely matches that observed across several previous studies of human infants. The data allow us to test among four different proposals concerning the format and content of the mental representations underlying looking in these experiments. Object file representations are favored over: (i) low-level perceptual representations, (ii) representations of continuous variables such as volume or surface area, and (iii) analog magnitude representations of number. We conclude by considering exactly how the object tracking system revealed in these and other related experiments does and does not represent number, and how it might be one evolutionary precursor of the human specific system of number representations.

Animals↗
PubMed1994

Matching to complex samples and stimulus class formation in adults with autism and young children.

Adults with autism and young children first learned to match one-element comparison stimuli to two-element sample stimuli. Test conditions then examined whether each of the individual sample elements (a) controlled selections of the comparison stimuli to which they were related during training, (b) were interchangeable with one another as either sample or comparison stimuli, and (c) were interchangeable with the original comparison stimuli. Test data were positive and suggested the formation of three-member stimulus classes. Subsequent experiments demonstrated the formation of four-member classes by (a) adding novel stimuli by training outside the original context; (b) adding novel stimulus elements to the two-element samples used during baseline training; and (c) training with three-element rather than two-element sample stimuli from the outset. Results suggest that acquisition of stimulus classes may be one of the benefits of broad rather than restricted attention to the components of complex stimuli.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Medical neurobiology: do we teach neurobiology in a format that is relevant to the clinical setting?

During a period of unprecedented growth in technology that allows imaging of the body in elegant detail, anatomy as a discipline has, in some instances, become marginalized. This may be seen in a reduction of time allotted to anatomy, reduction or elimination of laboratory experiences, or shifting of anatomy teaching to clinical departments. One potential cause of this marginalization is the fact that anatomy is frequently taught in a format that is not useful in, or even applicable to, the clinical setting. At the University of Mississippi Medical Center, the Medical Neurobiology course stresses the functional anatomy of the brain, especially the brainstem, in a format that is directly transferable to the clinical setting. These approaches include (1) using a small neurology book as one of the required texts in the course; (2) extensive use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) as an integral part of the instructional approach; (3) teaching external and internal anatomy of the brain, particularly the brainstem and spinal cord, in a "clinical orientation" that reflects how these central nervous system (CNS) regions are viewed in the clinical setting; (4) teaching nuclei and tracts in images of stained sections and correlating this information with comparable MRI and CT images; and (5) using a large series (75 images) of vascular drawings and clinical cases, all in clinical orientation. The clinical applicability of the basic science information, therefore, is continuously reinforced and extended. It is suggested that teaching anatomy and anatomical concepts in formats that are more obviously useful in, and applicable to, the clinical setting will enhance the value of this basic science in the medical curriculum.

Curriculum↗
PubMed1996

Verbal self-reports of emergent relations in a stimulus equivalence procedure.

During a preliminary training phase, college students were taught to categorize each of their responses accurately in a conditional discrimination task as either correct or incorrect. Next, in the absence of self-reports, subjects acquired conditional discriminations (involving novel stimuli) prerequisite to the formation of two four-member equivalence classes. The self-report procedure was reinstated during probe sessions that tested for untrained relations indicative of equivalence class formation. Interspersed trials involving trained relations provided a positive control, and trials with no class-consistent comparison provided a negative control. Eight of 10 subjects demonstrated equivalence class formation; all accurately reported their performance on trained relations and on trials with no class-consistent comparison. Subjects also reported their performance on most untrained (emergent) relations accurately, but in several instances self-reports indicated failure or uncertainty despite nearly perfect emergent-relations performance. These inconsistencies add to a growing body of literature that suggests there are differences between individual types of emergent relations. We suggest that the present procedure may be helpful in understanding these differences and other equivalence-related effects.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Rational-emotive behavior therapy and the formation of stimulus equivalence classes.

Stimulus equivalence is a behavioral approach to analyzing the "meaning" of stimulus sets and has an implication for clinical psychology. The formation of three-member (A --> B --> C) stimulus equivalence classes was used to investigate the effects of three different sets of sample and comparison stimuli on emergent behavior. The three stimulus sets were composed of Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)-related words, non-REBT emotionally charged words, and a third category of neutral words composed of flower labels. Sixty-two women and men participated in a modified matching-to-sample experiment. Using a mixed cross-over design, and controlling for serial order effects, participants received conditional training and emergent relationship training in the three stimulus set conditions. Results revealed a significant interaction between the formation of stimulus equivalence classes and stimulus meaning, indicating consistently biased responding in favor of reaching criterion responding more slowly for REBT-related and non-REBT emotionally charged words. Results were examined in the context of an analysis of the importance of stimulus meaning on behavior and the relation of stimulus meaning to behavioral and cognitive theories, with special appraisal given to the influence of fear-related discriminative stimuli on behavior.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

A sampling approach to biases in conditional probability judgments: beyond base rate neglect and statistical format.

Conditional probability judgments of rare events are often inflated. Early accounts assumed a general deficit in using statistical base rates. More recent approaches predict improvement when problems are presented in frequency format or refer to natural categories. The present theory focuses on sampling processes. Experiment 1 showed that a seeming advantage of frequency over probability formats is due to a confounded factor, the need to mentally transform stimulus samples. An information search paradigm was used in Experiment 2. When sampling by the predictor, the probability to be estimated, p(criterion/predictor), was conserved in the samples and judgments were quite accurate. However, when sampling by the criterion, the low base-rate event was strongly overrepresented, accounting for the entire bias. Judgments were quite sensitive to the sampled data, but failed to take sampling constraints into account, as shown in Experiments 3 and 4.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Max Weber's methodology: an ideal-type.

Weber dealt-in contrast to the textbook image of his method-with rational and nonempathetic explanatory interpretation. His ideal-type for social action emerged in a very formative period, as a mediation between history and theory and can be characterized as releasing what was inherent in a historicist tradition in crisis. Theoretical elements from Austrian marginalism provided Weber with the prototype for developing contrafactual schemes into ideal-types. Weber as a scholar at the crossroads resolved the problem of uncontrolled value-intrusion in a way that provided rational evidence and limited objectivity, in the form of instrumental means-end analysis. His methodology was coherent over time but gradually emerged when contemporary polemics called for his voice to be heard.

Behavior↗
PubMed1997

Deductive and inductive reasoning in Parkinson's disease patients and normal controls: review and experimental evidence.

In the present study, fifty-four subjects were tested; twenty-seven with idiopathic Parkinson's disease and twenty-seven normal controls matched in age, education, verbal ability, level of depression, sex and socio-economic status. The subjects were tested on eight tasks. Five of the tasks were the classic deductive reasoning syllogisms, modus ponens, modus tollendo tollens, affirming the consequent, denying the antecedent and three-term series problems phrased in a factual context (brief scripts). Three of the tasks were inductive reasoning, including logical inferences, metaphors and similes. All tasks were presented to subjects in a multiple choice format. The results, overall, have shown nonsignificant differences between the two groups in deductive and inductive reasoning, an ability traditionally associated with frontal lobes involvement. Of the comparisons performed between subgroups of the patients and normal controls concerning disease duration, disease onset and predominant involvement of the left and/or right hemisphere, significant differences were found between patients with earlier disease onset and normal controls and between bilaterally affected patients and normal controls, demonstrating an additive effect of lateralization to reasoning ability.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Mechanisms of theory formation in young children.

Research suggests that by the age of five, children have extensive causal knowledge, in the form of intuitive theories. The crucial question for developmental cognitive science is how young children are able to learn causal structure from evidence. Recently, researchers in computer science and statistics have developed representations (causal Bayes nets) and learning algorithms to infer causal structure from evidence. Here we explore evidence suggesting that infants and children have the prerequisites for making causal inferences consistent with causal Bayes net learning algorithms. Specifically, we look at infants and children's ability to learn from evidence in the form of conditional probabilities, interventions and combinations of the two.

Bayes Theorem↗
PubMed2004

Attitude formation through exploration: valence asymmetries.

The formation of attitudes toward novel objects was examined as a function of exploratory behavior. An initial experiment, in which participants played a computer game that required them to learn which stimuli, when sampled, produced favorable or unfavorable outcomes, demonstrated learning, attitude formation, and generalization to novel objects. The findings also revealed 2 interesting valence asymmetries: a learning asymmetry involving better learning for negatively valenced than positively valenced objects and a generalization asymmetry involving stronger generalization as a function of negative than of positive attitudes. Findings from 4 experiments led to an explanation of the learning asymmetry in terms of information gain being contingent on approach behavior and related the generalization asymmetry to a negativity bias that weighs resemblance to a known negative more heavily than resemblance to a positive.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The future of infant categorization research: a process-oriented approach.

We call for a shift from a content-oriented approach to a process-oriented approach to the study of categorization in infancy. Although gains have been made in our understanding of infant categorization by evaluating the categories to which infants respond, further understanding of infant categorization, and how categorization changes with development, requires that we more directly assess infants' category formation. We argue that two directions for future research will continue to enhance our understanding of categorization in infancy (and beyond). First, contextual variations (e.g., the effects of task, stimuli, and other factors) on infants' categorization must be better understood. Second, we must more directly evaluate the kinds of information infants use when forming categories, as well as how their use of such information changes with age, task, and so forth. We argue that these two foci will provide clearer understanding of the origins and early development of categorization.

Child Development↗
PubMed2005

Young children have difficulty ascribing true beliefs.

Using the format of a false belief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983), we investigated the ability of 88 3- and 4-year-olds to ascribe a previously held true belief to a story protagonist. In an unexpected transfer task, children found true belief ascription as difficult as false belief ascription even though they could answer memory questions about story details. Results are discussed in relation to theoretical accounts of theory of mind development that stress the importance of understanding the falsity of belief, and those accounts that stress the importance of information or executive processes.

Chi-Square Distribution↗
PubMed1989

Amnesia and memory for modality information.

In this study, lists of words were used in a mixed-modality fashion (some read aloud by the subject, others read only by the experimenter). They were presented in this format to both Korsakoff amnesics and matched controls, with subjects only told to remember the words themselves. Controls and amnesics were matched on item-memory (forced-choice recognition) by using longer lists, tested at longer delays, for the controls. Despite this, however, the controls performed significantly better than the amnesics at modality-identification judgements about the items chosen during recognition. Whether the reported result reflects the memory deficit which causes amnesia, or whether it is more properly attributed to additional (frontal lobe) pathology present in only certain amnesics, is discussed.

Adult↗