Cognition and the Planning Process: An Investigation of Stability of Effects and Decision Makers' Insights

According to Hartman, White, and Crino (1986), planning situations differ in environmental volatility, system adaptation, and the nature of planning requirements, different combinations of which can generate 12 distinct planning situations and 8 information processing aids to be used as planning tools. Each information processing aid has been prescribed to be more appropriate for use in some planning situations than in others (Hartman et al.). In the first part of this study, we tested the hypothesis that a planner in a specific situation would prefer to use the information processing aid(s) prescribed for that situation. We developed 12 different cases and used 456 student subjects. Results indicated that preference did not correspond closely to the Hartman et al. theory but that some other form of implicit theory may be operating. The second part of the research replicated the first part and also examined how 57 subjects viewed their planning problems and weighed the factors involved. Part 2 was also designed to determine the nature of any implicit theory the subjects may have used. Results suggest that the pattern of preferences, although not corresponding to available theory, represents a stable phenomenon.     

Coping with examinations: Exploring relationships between students' coping strategies,implicit theories of ability,and perceived control

Background Relatively little is known about the contribution of students' beliefs regarding the nature of academic ability (i.e. their implicit theories) on strategies used to deal with examinations. Aims This study applied Dweck's socio‐cognitive model of achievement motivation to better understand how students cope with examinations. It was expected that students' implicit theories of academic ability would be related to their use of particular coping strategies to deal with exam‐related stress. Additionally, it was predicted that perceived control over exams acts as a mediator between implicit theories of ability and coping. Sample Four hundred and ten undergraduate students (263 males, 147 females), aged from 17 to 26 years old (M = 19.73, SD = 1.46) were volunteers for the present study. Methods Students completed measures of coping, implicit theories of academic ability, and perception of control over academic examinations during regular classes in the first term of the university year. Results Multiple regression analyses revealed that incremental beliefs of ability significantly and positively predicted active coping, planning, venting of emotions, seeking social support for emotional and instrumental reasons, whereas entity beliefs positively predicted behavioural disengagement and negatively predicted active coping and acceptance. In addition, analyses revealed that entity beliefs of ability were related to coping strategies through students' perception of control over academic examinations. Conclusions These results confirm that exam‐related coping varies as a function of students' beliefs about the nature of academic ability and their perceptions of control when approaching examinations.     

The Embodied Nature of Implicit Theories: The Consistency of Ideas About the Nature of Matter

Recent research has revealed the existence of intuitive representations strongly rooted in diverse knowledge domains and the difficulties of modifying those representations through instruction by means of conceptual change processes (Carey, 1995; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Vosniadou, 1994). According to some interpretations, these representations are organized in the form of intuitive or implicit theories, among whose features would be representational consistency across different contexts or tasks. Other authors, however, have argued in favor of the partial or situated nature of these representations so that we cannot talk about authentic theories (Caravita & Hallden, 1994; diSessa, 1993, 1994). In this research, we analyzed the consistency of the representations on the nature of matter held by people with diverse levels of instruction from adolescents aged 12 to students with advanced studies in chemistry. Our objective was to analyze the consistency of these representations with respect to the core concepts of chemistry, the intrinsic movement of particles, and the discontinuous nature of matter, which would be constituted by particles separated by empty space. However, these two core concepts would be in contradiction to our embodied representation of matter based on its macroscopic or sensorial properties according to which matter is static and continuous. The results confirm a majority and consistent use of intuitive representations as against scientific ones, confirming that at least from the point of view of consistency, these representations constitute authentic implicit theories. Moreover, it is those representations that correspond to the macroscopic properties of matter that are used in the most consistent way, which also supports the hypothesis of the embodied nature of these theories. Although the corpuscular theory of matter, when used appropriately, provides more consistent representations, our data show a quite limited use of this theory, even among students with advanced studies in science, which once more shows the difficulties of achieving, through instruction, a change in these implicit, embodied theories. In the article, we discuss the implications of these data for science teaching.     

Cognitive Assessment With Disabled Readers

This paper describes an approach to cognitive assessment that involves a synthesis of traditional psychometric approach and the more recent information-processing approaches. In this combined approach, psychometric tests are supplemented by tasks adapted from information-processing research. The paper focuses on the use of the approach with disabled readers, although the approach may be generalized to many different populations. The Test of Syllable and Phoneme Counting, a measure of awareness of the sound structure of speech, is described, as an example of an information-processing task that would be useful with younger disabled readers. Guidelines for using information-processing measures are also discussed.     

The spontaneous use of memory aids at different educational levels

Three groups of students in different educational levels: 8th–9th grade students (average age 15); 10th–11th grade students (average age 16); and college students (average age 21), completed a metamemory questionnaire on the use of external, general, and formal memory aids in everyday life and study situations. Short-term repetition, mental rehearsing, and summary elaboration were the most frequent aids. The least frequently used were those that require a special training to be used effectively (e.g. Digit-letters and method of loci). There were differences in the use of general memory aids due to education level, but not in the case of external and formal memory aids. Results showed also that women used memory aids more frequently than men.     

广告干预对消费者品牌态度和信任的影响

为了探讨广告干预对危机品牌的消费者品牌态度和信任的影响,采用实验组与控制组对照的前测后测设计,其中实验组采用2×2因素型被试间实验设计。结果表明:广告干预对被试的内隐品牌态度发生了一定程度的影响,对被试的外显品牌态度和品牌信任则发生了很大程度的影响;高渗透广告相较于低渗透广告能驱使消费者对危机品牌产生更为正向的外显品牌态度;理性诉求广告相较于感性诉求广告能驱使消费者对危机品牌产生更为正向的外显品牌态度;广告的渗透程度和诉求方式对内隐品牌态度的影响存在交互作用;品牌信任受双重态度驱动。     

Rational Thought And Rational Behavior: A Review Of Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox.

Standard economic theory says that the rational approach to a decision is to weigh all alternatives on all relevant dimensions and then to select the one with the highest weight. Such a procedure would maximize subjective expected utility. But, because of constraints on time and available information, people and other animals often bypass this process by using “fast and frugal” heuristics to make decisions. Rationality is thus said to be “bounded” by time and information constraints. The articles in this book describe and organize common heuristics. They show that use of such heuristics is generally the best approach to many real world problems and therefore not irrational. Heuristics evolved, they say, not as deviations from rationality but as aids to rationality in cases where the standard model would have proved to be too slow or inefficient. Although the approach of almost all of the authors of these papers is that of cognitive psychology—a focus on internal cognitive mechanisms—their findings and even their theories may be interpreted in terms of reinforcement and punishment acting on behavioral patterns.     

Mediation models of implicit theories and achievement goals predict planning and withdrawal after failure

Dweck posits that implicit theories of intelligence provide a meaning system that organizes goal-based patterns of response in achievement situations. Goals of increasing competence or demonstrating competence provide purposes for engaging in achievement tasks and frameworks for interpreting and responding to outcomes. Despite suggestions that within an implicit theory framework, attributions and emotions should mediate associations between goals and post-failure responses, such models have rarely been explicitly tested. We obtained questionnaire data from college students (N = 261) on implicit theories, goals, and attributions, as well as emotions and behavior after a hypothetical failure. Path analysis showed that learning goal and effort attribution mediated the association between incremental theory and post-failure intention to plan remedial action. Theory-consistent indirect effects that predicted intention to withdraw were also identified. Findings provide support for Dweck’s theory and extend our understanding of the roles of goals, attributions, and emotions in explaining responses to achievement setbacks.     

Evaluating organizational stress-management interventions using adapted study designs

The evaluation of organizational stress management interventions has proved challenging for researchers and practitioners alike. Traditionally, researcher designed quasi-experiments have been regarded as the method for evaluating such interventions. However, relatively few such studies have been satisfactorily completed in organizations, and many of those that have did not adequately take account of intervention processes. This article presents an approach to evaluation that can help to overcome these problems. Two empirical studies are presented that demonstrate that measurement of the intervention process can be used to adapt and shape the design of the evaluation. In both studies, process evaluation incorporating the measurement of intervention exposure was used to partition participant samples (into intervention and control groups). This approach has the potential to enable and strengthen quantitative outcome evaluation in situations where controlled quasi-experimentation is not possible.     

Freud,Jung and The Great Chain of Being

For some time, it has been clear that psychoanalytic theories are built upon the kind of master narratives Roy Schafer, a New York psychoanalyst, described in 1980. As such, psychoanalytic theories may today have lost some of their initial scientific credibility in that they can no longer be seen as summarizing findings from data collected in a research environment. As aids in participating in their patients’ process of healing, however, narratives continue to be used by practitioners and reflect allegiance to core beliefs and propositions with roots in long‐standing Western thought. In this article, the metaphors in master narratives of Freud and Jung are compared with a conceptual system identified by cognitive linguists as ‘The Great Chain of Being’. Based on this analysis, the article proposes that theoretical formulations have mainly a secondary role to play in achieving good outcomes. The most critical element is the therapist's capacity to access a specific narrative for what transpires throughout each treatment.     

Learning for Life: An Ecological Approach to Pedagogical Research

ABSTRACT— The trend to convert laboratory findings on the conditions associated with optimal memory into recommendations for teaching strategies and learning aids will harm students if findings fail to generalize to students' usual learning environments. Moreover, it is likely that pedagogies function differently for students with different degrees of background knowledge, time, and interest in the subject matter; that some support activities will prevent students from honing their ability learn from narrative material without guided learning; and that an overuse of learning aids will tax students' ability to use them effectively. We contrast two approaches to developing pedagogy—memory first and pedagogical ecology—and explain how the human factors approach of pedagogical ecology could be a more satisfying model for the scholarship of teaching and learning.     

Implicit self-esteem is associated with higher levels of trait gratitude in women but not men

ABSTRACT

Higher levels of trait gratitude have been associated with measures of greater self-reported self-esteem. However, such self-report measures may be influenced by self-report biases. In this study we investigated for the first time whether implicit measures of self-esteem would be associated with greater trait gratitude in a sample of 88 undergraduate students (41 female). We observed that, in women (but not men), higher levels of trait gratitude were associated with higher implicit self-esteem (r = .26, p = .05), even when accounting for depressive symptoms. This finding may be of particular importance, as implicit measures of self-esteem have been more strongly associated with psychological health than explicit measures. Future research should further investigate whether the experience of gratitude affects self-esteem differently in men and women, as this knowledge may be important in informing the design of future gratitude interventions aimed at improving psychological health in men and women.     

Developmental Analysis of Understanding Language About Quantities and of Solving Problems

We present information-processing models of different levels of knowledge for understanding the language used in texts of arithmetic word Problems, for forming semantic models of the situations that the texts describe, and for making the inferences needed to answer the questions in the problems. In the simplest cognitive models, inferences are limited to properties of sets that exist in a semantic model. In more complex cognitive models, relations between sets are represented internally and support more complex reasoning. Performance on three sets of problems by kindergarten through third-grade students was used to test the models. Global tests provided support for the models. These included measures of scalability and frequencies of individual children's patterns of solutions that agreed with predictions of the models. Performance on problems involving combinations and changes of sets was explained better by the cognitive models than performance on problems involving comparisons. Comparisons may require more advanced understanding of numbers as values of operators rather than only as cardinalities of sets.     

Planning ability across ranges of intellectual ability: An examination of the Luria-Das information-processing model

According to the Luria-Das information-processing theory, impaired planning ability is the source of more generalized cognitive deficits in mentally retarded populations. Also, the model suggests the possibility of relative independence between unit 2 (planning) and unit 3 (coding) abilities for mentally retarded individuals. Consequently, it was predicted that 26 educable mentally retarded (EMR) children would score significantly less well on relatively pure measures of planning ability than 13 younger average-ability children after the children were matched on cognitive processing ability (Mental Age of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children). Moreover, it was predicted that teaching an optimal planning strategy to randomly selected individuals of both groups would improve the EMR group's scores relative to the average-ability group. Neither prediction was supported. The results are not inconsistent with the model, but can be explained parsimoniously by neurodevelopmental stage theories also.     

Meta-planning: Representing and using knowledge about planning in problem solving and natural language understanding

This paper is concerned with those elements of planning knowledge that are common to both understanding someone else's plan and creating a plan for one's own use. This planning knowledge can be divided into two bodies: Knowledge about the world, and knowledge about the planning process itself. Our interest here is primarily with the latter corpus. The central thesis is that much of the knowledge about the planning process itself can be formulated in terms of higher-level goals and plans called meta-goals and meta-plans. These entities can then be used by the same understanding and planning mechanisms that process ordinary goals and plans. However, the meta-planning knowledge now enables these mechanisms to handle much more complicated situations in a uniform manner. Systems based on meta-planning would have a number of advantages over existing problem solving and understanding systems. The same knowledge could be shared by both a planner and understander, and both would be able to handle complex situations elegantly. In addition, in planning, the use of meta-planning has several advantages over more traditional methods involving constraints or critics. Meta-planning allows the full power of a problem solver to be applied to situations that are generally amenable only to special purpose processing. In addition, meta-planning facilitates the representation of some situations that are difficult to express otherwise. We have begun to introduce meta-planning knowledge into two systems: PAM, a story understanding program, and PANDORA, a problem solving and plannin?g system.     

Children's and adolescents' aggressive behavior in context: The development and application of aggressive problem-solving strategies

Social-cognitive information-processing models have frequently been used as a reference in studying children's and adolescents' aggressive behavior. According to these models, aggressive behavior is considered to be one way for children and adolescents to cope with the social problems of everyday life. A high level of aggressive behavior is traced to deficiencies in processing social information (e.g., in encoding social cues, interpreting situations, adopting goals, producing strategies, and evaluating responses), leading to an increased likelihood of employing aggressive problem-solving strategies. Emotions and physiological factors are also suggested to contribute to the social-cognitive information-processing activities promoting aggression. The development of aggressively biased ways of processing social information is seen to be related to numerous biological and environmental factors.     

A case report of compensation in daily life of a person with memory problems: detailed functional use of memory aids over a five-year period

Numerous studies have been conducted on memory aids for memory-impaired people. However, it is not known how they use these memory aids in a functional, practical way. A 20-year-old patient (MH) was monitored for five years to identify what memory aids or other means she used and how she used them to compensate for her memory problems, e.g., forgetting what was said by others in a few minutes and getting lost or turning in the wrong direction on a walk or in a building. Results indicated MH did not necessarily always use memory aids such as a notebook or calendar to compensate for her memory problems, although MH and her mother reported that she frequently used them in daily life. She coped with memory problems by using various "resources" besides the memory aid. These facts suggest that it may be necessary to redefine functionally useful compensations, which include both memory aids and resources in daily life.     

Investigating the predictive validity of implicit and explicit measures of motivation on condom use,physical activity and healthy eating

The literature on health-related behaviours and motivation is replete with research involving explicit processes and their relations with intentions and behaviour. Recently, interest has been focused on the impact of implicit processes and measures on health-related behaviours. Dual-systems models have been proposed to provide a framework for understanding the effects of explicit or deliberative and implicit or impulsive processes on health behaviours. Informed by a dual-systems approach and self-determination theory, the aim of this study was to test the effects of implicit and explicit motivation on three health-related behaviours in a sample of undergraduate students (N?=?162). Implicit motives were hypothesised to predict behaviour independent of intentions while explicit motives would be mediated by intentions. Regression analyses indicated that implicit motivation predicted physical activity behaviour only. Across all behaviours, intention mediated the effects of explicit motivational variables from self-determination theory. This study provides limited support for dual-systems models and the role of implicit motivation in the prediction of health-related behaviour. Suggestions for future research into the role of implicit processes in motivation are outlined.     

Memory aids people use: Two interview studies

In two interview studies subjects were asked what memory aids they used and how often. In particular, the reported frequencies of use of external aids such as shopping lists and memos were compared with those of internal aids that have been investigated by psychologists, such as the method of loci. Subjects in the first study were 15 male and 15 female university students, and in the second, a group of 30 adult women, most of whom were housewives. In both studies the aids reported to be used most were external ones. However, it is pointed out that the most commonly used methods of remembering must be internal, although these are not usually considered to be aids. Some difficulties that arise in the assessment of memory in interview and questionnaire studies are discussed.     

Investigating the predictive validity of implicit and explicit measures of motivation on condom use, physical activity and healthy eating

The literature on health-related behaviours and motivation is replete with research involving explicit processes and their relations with intentions and behaviour. Recently, interest has been focused on the impact of implicit processes and measures on health-related behaviours. Dual-systems models have been proposed to provide a framework for understanding the effects of explicit or deliberative and implicit or impulsive processes on health behaviours. Informed by a dual-systems approach and self-determination theory, the aim of this study was to test the effects of implicit and explicit motivation on three health-related behaviours in a sample of undergraduate students (N?=?162). Implicit motives were hypothesised to predict behaviour independent of intentions while explicit motives would be mediated by intentions. Regression analyses indicated that implicit motivation predicted physical activity behaviour only. Across all behaviours, intention mediated the effects of explicit motivational variables from self-determination theory. This study provides limited support for dual-systems models and the role of implicit motivation in the prediction of health-related behaviour. Suggestions for future research into the role of implicit processes in motivation are outlined.