The use of partial temporal information in dating personal events

Memory & Cognition - The use of different types of partial temporal information is shown to affect dating accuracy and the distribution of errors in event dating. Several different types of...     

The relationship of sex and sex role to trait and situationally specific anxiety types

While considerable research has investigated the relationship of sex and/or sex role to general or trait anxiety, little is known about their relationship to more specific anxiety types. Based on the postulate that sex and sex-role differences may depend on the extent to which an anxiety-producing situation represents a sex-stereotypic domain, the present study compared their relationships to four measures of anxiety: Math anxiety, test anxiety, and two measures of trait anxiety. Subjects were 180 undergraduate students enrolled in introductory psychology courses. Although females reported higher levels of anxiety on all four scales than did males, a discriminant function analysis indicated that math anxiety was the strongest contributor to the separation of the sexes. Significant score differences as a function of sex role were found using the STAI A-Trait scale, and a significant sex × sex-role interaction was found for scores on the S-R Inventory of Anxiousness. Feminine-typed males and undifferentiated females reported highest anxiety levels in comparison to same-sex individuals. Implications for the understanding and treatment of both general and situationally specific anxiety are discussed.     

The relationship of mathematics self-efficacy expectations to the selection of science-based college majors

The major purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship of mathematics self-efficacy expectations to the selection of science-based majors in college males and females. Based on results obtained from a pilot sample of college students, an instrument assessing mathematics self-efficacy expectations was developed. The items used in the mathematics self-efficacy scale included everyday math tasks, math problems, and math-based college courses. Subjects, 153 female and 109 male undergraduates, completed the mathematics self-efficacy scale, the Bem Sex Role Inventory, an adapted version of the Fennema-Sherman Mathematics Attitudes Scales, and a questionnaire concerning their college major choices. Results indicated that mathematics self-efficacy expectations were significantly related to the extent to which students selected science-based college majors, thus supporting the postulated role of cognitive mediational factors in educational and career choice behavior. In addition, the math-related self-efficacy expectations of college males were significantly stronger than were those of college females. Implications of the findings for the process of educational and career decision-making are discussed.     

A hybrid model of categorization

Category learning is often modeled as either an exemplar-based or a rule-based process. This paper shows that both strategies can be combined in a cognitive architecture that was developed to model other task domains. Variations on the exemplar-based random walk (EBRW) model of Nosofsky and Palmeri (1997b) and the rule-plus-exception (RULEX) rule-based model of Nosofsky, Palmeri, and McKinley (1994) were implemented in the ACT-R cognitive architecture. The architecture allows the two strategies to be mixed to produce classification behavior. The combined system reproduces latency, learning, and generalization data from three category-learning experiments--Nosofsky and Palmeri (1997b), Nosofsky et al., and Erickson and Kruschke (1998). It is concluded that EBRW and ACT-R have different but equivalent means of incorporating similarity and practice. In addition, ACT-R brings a theory of strategy selection that enables the exemplar and the rule-based strategies to be mixed.     

Evaluating dialectical structures with Bayesian methods

This paper shows how complex argumentation, analyzed as dialectical structures, can be evaluated within a Bayesian framework by interpreting them as coherence constraints on subjective degrees of belief. A dialectical structure is a set of arguments (premiss-conclusion structure) among which support- and attack-relations hold. This approach addresses the observation that some theses in a debate can be better justified than others and thus fixes a shortcoming of a theory of defeasible reasoning which applies the bivalence principle to argument evaluations by assigning them the status of being either defeated or undefeated. Evaluation procedures which are based on the principle of bivalence can, however, be embedded as a special case within the Bayesian framework. The approach developed in this paper rests on the assumptions that arguments can be reconstructed as deductively valid and that complex argumentation can be reconstructed such that premisses of arguments with equivalent conclusions are pairwise independent.     

EFFECTS OF VIDEO MODELING ON TEACHING BIDS FOR JOINT ATTENTION TO CHILDREN WITH AUTISM

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of video modeling to teach children with autism to initiate bids for joint attention. The video model consisted of a child demonstrating three components of a bid for joint attention with an adult conversational partner: orienting toward the object, emitting a vocal statement, and eye gaze shift toward unique objects in the environment. Results indicated that video modeling alone was effective in teaching all components of joint attention for two of the three children, whereas video modeling plus in vivo prompting was effective for the third participant. Further, bids for joint attention did not generalize across novel items for any of the participants. Results are discussed in terms of the social relevance and validity of the use of video modeling to teach a complex social behavior such as bids for joint attention. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.