The third-space professional: a reflective case study on maintaining relationships within a complex higher education institution

This paper showcases the work of Third Space professionals in a complex higher education (HE) setting, and specifically its impact on the building of trust relationships and innovative approaches. It makes use of a case-study methodological approach, reflecting on the experiences of various stakeholders within pilot phases. The findings reveal challenges related to maintaining trust relationships, which can be threatened by technicist approaches. The reflective case study explores an innovative live-streaming project and the related pedagogical approaches by Instructional Design experts, as Third Space professionals, who have carved out a critical space within a HE setting. This investigation, and its related lessons, highlights that learning-and-teaching aspects, training and support, reconciliation of trust relationships, can be applied to Third Space professionals in other HE institutions.     

Time estimation: does the reference memory mediate the effect of knowledge of results?

This study presents evidence for the role of knowledge of results (KR) in the estimation of medium time intervals (4-12 s durations). Experiment 1 tested the hypothesis that KR operates at the same stage of temporal processing as attention. The absence of an interaction of attention and KR is taken as evidence against this hypothesis. Experiments 2 and 3 further studied the effects of KR in a reproduction and a production task, respectively. The effects of KR were small in the reproduction and substantial in the production task. The results are interpreted in terms of a clock-based timing model and the findings taken together converge on the interpretation that KR affects the reference memory (RM), rather than the other components of the model.     

The contextual modulation of conditioned taste aversions by the physical environment and time of day is similar

In a pair of experiments, we have compared the ability of changes of place (Exp. 1) and changes of time of day (Exp. 2) to separately modulate learned saline-aversion memory phenomena in rats. Neither a spatial nor a temporal change disrupted latent inhibition using the present behavioral procedure. However, pre-exposure to the taste increased the contextual control of the learned aversion expression. The aversion reappeared in the place or at the time of conditioning after extinction in a different context. The results indicate that environmental and temporal contexts can independently, but similarly modulate taste aversion learning.     

Directed forgetting in working memory: age-related differences

This study explored the effects of ageing on working memory by means of the directed forgetting procedure designed by Reed (1970). Memory for a letter trigram was compared in conditions where it was either presented alone (single-item), or followed by a second trigram to be recalled (interference), or followed by a second trigram to be forgotten (directed forgetting). The results clearly indicated that elderly participants inhibited the no-longer-relevant information less efficiently (recall in the single-item condition - recall in the directed forgetting condition), as predicted by the model of Hasher and Zacks (1988). However, the results also demonstrated that sensitivity to interference (recall in the single-item condition - recall in the interference condition) increased in the condition in which no inhibition was directly required.     

Perseverative responding in a violation-of-expectation task in 6.5-month-old infants

In the present research, 6.5-month-old infants perseverated in a violation-of-expectation task designed to examine their reasoning about width information in containment events. After watching a familiarization event in which a ball was lowered into a wide container, the infants failed to detect the violation in a test event in which the same ball was lowered into a container only half as wide as the ball (narrow-container test event). This negative result (which was replicated in another experiment) was interpreted in terms of a recent problem-solving account of infants' perseverative errors in various means-end tasks (Aguiar, A., & Baillargeon, R. (2000). Perseveration and problem solving in infancy. In H. W. Reese (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 27, pp. 135-180). San Diego, CA: Academic Press). It was assumed that the infants in the present experiments (1) did not attend to the relative widths of the ball and container in their initial analysis of the narrow-container test event, (2) categorized the event as similar to the familiarization event shown on the preceding trials, and (3) retrieved the expectation they had formed for that event ("the ball will fit into the container"), resulting in a perseverative error. This interpretation was supported by additional experiments in which different modifications were introduced that led to non-perseverative responding, indicating that 6.5-month-old infants could detect the violation in the narrow-container test event. The present findings are important for several reasons. First, they provide the first demonstration of perseverative responding in a violation-of-expectation task. Second, they make clear the breadth and usefulness of the problem-solving account mentioned above. Finally, they add to the evidence for some degree of continuity between infants' and adults' problem-solving abilities.     

Inhibition and working memory: effect of acute sleep deprivation on a random letter generation task]

The literature contains inconsistent data on the effects of acute sleep deprivation on the superior cognitive functions. The primary purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness of inhibition, one of the functions of the working memory executive centre (EC), over an extended, 36-hour waking period. Inhibition is a cognitive mechanism whereby individuals ignore non-relevant information recorded in their working memory. We also tested the effects of a 36-hour period of acute sleep deprivation on simple reaction time. Twelve young, healthy volunteers (M = 21.5 years, sigma = 2.3) performed a random generation task involving letters and a simple reaction time psychomotor test over four sessions held at 10-hour intervals. Each participant was assigned a "constant routine." Participants were kept awake in a prone position within a room whose environment was held strictly constant (light, noise, temperature, meals, etc.). This control procedure provided assurance that any variation in participant performance was solely caused by sleep deprivation. The random generation task, nearly two minutes in length, consisted in verbally producing a sequence of 100 letters in a random fashion (i.e. by inhibiting, for example, alphabetical order) and by keeping to a set rhythm. Our assumption was that capacity for inhibition diminished as the number of hours of sleep deprivation increased. The simple reaction test, 10 minutes in length, involved pressing a button as swiftly as possible to cause a black square to disappear from a screen. In this case our assumption was that acute sleep deprivation alters simple reaction time. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) through repeated measures using the "sessions" factor as an intra-subject variable showed no significant changes in randomization indices of the random generation task, contrary to analysis of average simple reaction times. Participants' reaction times deteriorated over the first two minutes of the test during the night they were deprived of sleep. It would seem that the contradictory results of previous studies of the effects of acute sleep deprivation on the inhibition function would be due to errors in factor identification. In conclusion, the inhibition function, as measured during the performance of a brief task, seems to remain intact during an extended, 36-hour waking period. Simple reaction time assessed by means of a brief psychomotor test is affected during a night of sleep deprivation. The working-memory inhibition executive function shows greater resistance to acute sleep deprivation than does psychomotor reaction time for the performance of short tasks.     

The experience of spirituality in the psycho-social adaptation of cancer survivors

This article presents the results of a retrospective, phenomenological study of the experience of spirituality in the psychosocial adaptation of cancer survivors. The experience of illness for the participants in the study is one which promotes greater personal and spiritual growth. The study demonstrates that illness provokes personal growth and transformation in the individual. While making use of pre-existing coping resources, the person with cancer reevaluates and restructures her or his life, integrating new values, priorities, and perspectives which lead the patient to invest her or his life in something meaningful and beneficial to others.     

When Hyperpropositions Meet ...

With each proposition P we associate a set of proposition (a hyperproposition) which determines the order in which one may retreat from accepting P, if one cannot fully hold on to P. We first describe the structure of hyperpropositions. Then we describe two operations on propositions, subtraction and merge, which can be modelled in terms of hyperpropositions. Subtraction is an operation that takes away part of the content of a proposition. Merge is an operation that determines the maximal consistent content of two propositions considered jointly. The merge operation gives rise to an inference relation which is, in a certain sense, optimally paraconsistent.