John Dewey's impact on Turkish education

Conclusion The cultural characteristics of any country generally give shape to the educational system. However, no country can assert its own educational system to be wholly indigenous. All the systems come into being as a synthesis of various ingredients of the home country and other countries. And it is quite natural to make use of the experiences and stock of knowledge of the others. This fact is indispensable especially when education is concerned. The curicial problem is to what extent the borrowing process should be used. When the process of borrowing ideas become to take the form of imitation or copy, unexpected results and failure are unavoidable.     

Biased information search in group decision making

Research has shown that people prefer supporting to conflicting information when making decisions. Whether this biased information search also occurs in group decision making was examined in three experiments. Experiment 1 indicated that groups as well as individuals prefer supporting information and that the strength of this bias depends on the distribution of the group members' initial decision preferences. The more group members had chosen the same alternative prior to the group discussion (group homogeneity), the more strongly the group preferred information supporting that alternative. Experiment 2 replicated these results with managers. Experiment 3 showed that the differences between homogeneous and heterogeneous groups reflect group-level processes. Higher commitment and confidence in homogeneous groups mediated this effect. Functional and dysfunctional aspects of biased information seeking in group decision making are discussed.     

Perceptual integration of motion and form information: evidence of parallel-continuous processing

In three visual search experiments, the processes involved in the efficient detection of motion-form conjunction targets were investigated. Experiment 1 was designed to estimate the relative contributions of stationary and moving nontargets to the search rate. Search rates were primarily determined by the number of moving nontargets; stationary nontargets sharing the target form also exerted a significant effect, but this was only about half as strong as that of moving nontargets; stationary nontargets not sharing the target form had little influence. In Experiments 2 and 3, the effects of display factors influencing the visual (form) quality of moving items (movement speed and item size) were examined. Increasing the speed of the moving items (> 1.5 degrees/sec) facilitated target detection when the task required segregation of the moving from the stationary items. When no segregation was necessary, increasing the movement speed impaired performance: With large display items, motion speed had little effect on target detection, but with small items, search efficiency declined when items moved faster than 1.5 degrees/sec. This pattern indicates that moving nontargets exert a strong effect on the search rate (Experiment 1) because of the loss of visual quality for moving items above a certain movement speed. A parallel-continuous processing account of motion-form conjunction search is proposed, which combines aspects of Guided Search (Wolfe, 1994) and attentional engagement theory (Duncan & Humphreys, 1989).     

Causal cognition in a non-human primate: field playback experiments with Diana monkeys

Crested guinea fowls (Guttera pucherani) living in West African rainforests give alarm calls to leopards (Panthera pardus) and sometimes humans (Homo sapiens), two main predators of sympatric Diana monkeys (Cercopithecus diana). When hearing these guinea fowl alarm calls, Diana monkeys respond as if a leopard were present, suggesting that by default the monkeys associate guinea fowl alarm calls with the presence of a leopard. To assess the monkeys' level of causal understanding, I primed monkeys to the presence of either a leopard or a human, before exposing them to playbacks of guinea fowl alarm calls. There were significant differences in the way leopard-primed groups and human-primed groups responded to guinea fowl alarm calls, suggesting that the monkeys' response was not directly driven by the alarm calls themselves but by the calls' underlying cause, i.e. the predator most likely to have caused the calls. Results are discussed with respect to three possible cognitive mechanisms - associative learning, specialized learning programs, and causal reasoning - that could have led to causal knowledge in Diana monkeys.     

Correspondence effects with manual gestures and postures: a study of imitation

In this study, the authors applied methods and theories from research of stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) to action imitation. In 6 experiments, they adopted the logic of the Simon paradigm (B. Hommel & W. Prinz, 1996) to explore interference between task-relevant symbolic stimulus features (color) and task-irrelevant iconic stimulus features (2 hand gestures and 2 postures). The same 2 hand gestures served as responses. Pronounced correspondence effects for both gestures and postures showed up throughout. In line with theories of SRC, the authors account for these correspondence effects in terms of overlap arising between stimulus and response features in a common representational domain. As a specific extension of this approach, they propose 2 functionally independent mechanisms: One operates movement-based when dynamic information is provided, and the other operates state-based with static postures as stimuli. Implications for theories of both SRC and action imitation are discussed.     

Qualitative Analyse von Gruppeninteraktionen in offenen verteilten Lernumgebungen

Summary. Open learning environments support on the one hand a constructive approach to potentially open tasks and on the other hand social interaction by means of distributed systems. Beyond that they enable a detailed data acquisition and thus the focusing on the process of interaction in groups. On the basis of a distributed system with shared workspaces and structured visual representations, an approach has been developed for the analysis of collaboration on the basis of group interactions (action based collaboration analysis). This approach was implemented in a system for the automatic analysis of group interactions which uses formalizations of interaction events in predicate logic as indicators for action sequences. Tests with different groups of participants indicate the applicability of the approach and give first insights into cooperations and conflicts in shared problem solving situations. Zusammenfassung. Offene Lernumgebungen unterstützen auf der einen Seite einen konstruktiven Zugang zu potentiell offenen Aufgabenstellungen und auf der anderen Seite soziale Interaktion durch verteilte Systeme. Darüber hinaus ermöglichen sie eine detaillierte Datenerhebung und damit die Fokussierung auf den Prozeß der Interaktion in Gruppen. Auf der Grundlage eines verteilten Systems mit gemeinsamen Arbeitsbereichen und strukturierten visuellen Repräsentationen wurde ein Ansatz zur Analyse von Zusammenarbeit auf der Basis von Gruppeninteraktionen (action-based collaboration analysis) entwickelt. Dieser wurde in einem System zur automatischen Analyse von Gruppeninteraktionen implementiert, wobei prädikatenlogische Formalisierungen von Interaktionsereignissen als Indikatoren auf Aktionssequenzen dienen. Untersuchungen mit verschiedenen Versuchsgruppen zeigen die Anwendbarkeit des Ansatzes und liefern erste Einsichten in Kooperationen und Konflikte beim gemeinsamen Problemlösen.     

Mindfulness,General Trust,and Social Support Among Trauma-Exposed College Students

The purpose of the present study was to examine whether mindfulness predicts general trust and social support among trauma-exposed college students, as well as to examine the potential moderating effect of posttraumatic stress on these relationships. Participants consisted of 536 trauma-exposed college students attending a public university in the southeast United States. After controlling for PTSD symptoms and type of trauma, mindfulness was positively associated with general trust and social support at low and mean levels of PTSD symptomatology; however, the relationships between mindfulness and these variables were nonsignificant at high levels of PTSD symptomatology.     

Does P3 Reflect Attentional or Memory Performances,or Cognition more Generally?

The study evaluated the off-line relationship of attention, memory and other cognitive performances with the auditory event-related potentials P3 (P300) and N2. The sample comprised 200 middle-aged construction workers. Verbal, visuomotor and memory tests were administered. Attentional domains were examined using CogniSpeed software. Slowed reaction times in the test of sustained attention (vigilance) were associated with delayed P3 latency (p < 0.001) and decreased P3 amplitude (p = 0.005), as well as with delayed N2 latency (p < 0.001). Visuomotor slowing in Digit Symbol was also related to delayed P3 latency (p = 0.030) and decreased P3 amplitude (p = 0.014). In contrast, mild cognitive impairment, short- and long-term memory, and concentrating or sharing attention with high working memory demands were not related to P3. The results suggest that P3 is linked to attentional performance with low working memory demands rather than to effortful working memory updating, retrieval from memory stores, or mild cognitive impairment.