Knowing When Help Is Needed: A Developing Sense of Causal Complexity

Research on the division of cognitive labor has found that adults and children as young as age 5 are able to find appropriate experts for different causal systems. However, little work has explored how children and adults decide when to seek out expert knowledge in the first place. We propose that children and adults rely (in part) on “mechanism metadata,” information about mechanism information. We argue that mechanism metadata is relatively consistent across individuals exposed to similar amounts of mechanism information, and it is applicable to a wide range of causal systems. In three experiments, we show that adults and children as young as 5 years of age have a consistent sense of the causal complexity of different causal systems, and that this sense of complexity is related to decisions about when to seek expert knowledge, but over development there is a shift in focus from procedural information to internal mechanism information.     

Agents of Prosociality: Agency Affirmation Promotes Mutual Prosocial Tendencies and Behavior Among Conflicting Groups

Members of conflicting groups are motivated to restore their ingroup's agency, leading to antisocial tendencies against the outgroup. The present research tested the hypothesis that affirming conflicting groups' agency would increase their members' mutual prosociality. The effectiveness of agency affirmation was demonstrated in three contexts of conflict between groups: Switzerland and the EU following the 2014 referendum (Study 1), Israelis and Palestinians (Study 2), and Israeli rightists and leftists (Study 3). Study 1 found that in a nonconflictual context Swiss participants prioritized their moral (prosocial) over agentic goals, yet in the context of conflict with the EU, they prioritized their agentic over moral goals. This “primacy‐of‐agency” effect, however, was eliminated once their ingroup's agency was affirmed. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated the positive effect of agency affirmation on prosociality among Israelis referring to Palestinians and Israeli rightists and leftists referring to the adversarial political camp. This effect was mediated by group members' readiness to relinquish some power for the sake of morality. Pointing to the importance of the affirmation's specific content, Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that morality affirmation failed to increase prosociality. As such, the present research puts forward a promising strategy to reduce hostility and promote prosociality between conflicting groups.     

Genetic Counseling in the Era of Genomics: What’s all the Fuss about?

As genomic sequencing becomes more widely available in clinical settings for diagnostic purposes, a number of genetic counseling issues are gaining precedence. The ability to manage these issues will be paramount as genetic and non-genetic healthcare professionals navigate the complexities of using genomic technologies to facilitate diagnosis and inform patient management. Counseling issues arising when counseling for diagnostic genomic sequencing were identified by four genetic counselors with 10 years of collective experience providing genetic counseling in this setting. These issues were discussed and refined at a meeting of genetic counselors working in clinical genomics settings in Melbourne, Australia. Emerging counseling issues, or variations of established counseling issues, were identified from the issues raised. Illustrative cases were selected where pre- and post-test genetic counseling was provided in clinical settings to individuals who received singleton or trio WES with targeted analysis. Counseling issues discussed in this paper include a reappraisal of how genetic counselors manage hope in the genomic era, informed consent for secondary use of genomic data, clinical reanalysis of genomic data, unexpected or unsolicited secondary findings, and trio sequencing. The authors seek to contribute to the evolving understanding of genetic counseling for diagnostic genomic sequencing through considering the applicability of existing genetic counseling competencies to managing emerging counseling issues and discussing genetic counseling practice implications.     

Reliability and plasticity of response inhibition and interference control

This study investigated the internal reliability, temporal stability and plasticity of commonly used measures of inhibition-related functions. Stop-signal, go/no-go, antisaccade, Simon, Eriksen flanker, Stroop and Continuous Performance tasks were administered twice to 23 healthy participants over a period of approximately 11 weeks in order to assess test–retest correlations, internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha), and systematic between as well as within session performance changes. Most of the inhibition-related measures showed good test–retest reliabilities and internal consistencies, with the exception of the stop-signal reaction time measure, which showed poor reliability. Generally no systematic performance changes were observed across the two assessments with the exception of four variables of the Eriksen flanker, Simon and Stroop task which showed reduced variability of reaction time and an improvement in the response time for incongruent trials at second assessment. Predominantly stable performance within one test session was shown for most measures. Overall, these results are informative for studies with designs requiring temporally stable parameters e.g. genetic or longitudinal treatment studies.     

PROFESSIONALIZING SURVIVAL: THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC MEMORY AMONG HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR-EDUCATORS IN MONTREAL

The majority of Holocaust survivors never speak publicly about their experiences, but those who do tend to find themselves at the centre of commemorative work in their communities. As Holocaust scholars, Holocaust education institutions, and members of the general public become increasingly interested in how to ethically universalize the lessons of the Holocaust, the public Holocaust survivor's role has broadened. It is no longer enough to recount one's own experience; survivors are expected to speak to current human rights abuses and genocides.In Montreal, Canada, a city which once claimed the third largest survivor population in the world, public survivors do a great deal of work. They give testimony in schools and at commemorative events, organize book clubs, write plays, direct films, teach, act as museum docents, and assume roles as community spokespeople. Given their dedication to this work, and a push to get them to speak beyond their personal experiences, we argue that there is a major shift taking place: the act of giving public Holocaust testimony is being professionalized. This professionalization raises unique questions about how people who lived through the Holocaust conceptualize themselves and their identities as survivors. By treating testimony as professional work, survivors contemplate, on a daily basis and in an applied manner, their stances on big questions regarding hierarchies of suffering, comparability, the connection between the personal and the political, blame and forgiveness, as well as many other relevant themes that are central to Holocaust and memory scholarship. All of this plays out in their testimonies.     

Development of decision making: sequential versus integrative rules

Decisions can be made by applying a variety of decision-making rules-sequential rules in which decisions are based on a sequential evaluation of choice dimensions and the integrative normative rule in which decisions are based on an integration of choice dimensions. In this study, we investigated the developmental trajectory of such decision-making rules. In the Gambling Machine Task, participants choose between options that differ in three dimensions: frequency of loss, amount of loss, and certain gain. The task was administered to 231 children and adolescents (age range=8-17 years). Latent group analysis of their performance allowed precise classification of the underlying decision rules. The majority of participants used sequential decision rules, and the number of evaluated dimensions in these rules increased with age. Integrative rule use decreased with age. We discuss these results in light of traditional developmental theories and fuzzy trace theory.     

Perceptions of Age and Creativity in the Workforce

As the workforce ages it becomes important to examine if there is misperception of creativity and age in work contexts. A laboratory experiment examined perceptions of the creativity of a team with both young and old workers and of a team composed entirely of young workers. Scripted videos portrayed such teams engaged in designing an outdoor advertising campaign. Altogether, 220 participants were randomly assigned to watch one of the video clips and complete a structured questionnaire. No significant differences were observed in the perceptions of the two teams' performance or of the quality of the resulting advertising proposal. In general, there was also no significant difference in the individual characteristics attributed to the four characters on the teams. However, participants aged 35 or above evaluated both teams and all four characters more favorably than participants aged 20–34.     

Interactive insight problem solving

Insight problem solving was investigated with the matchstick algebra problems developed by Knoblich, Ohlsson, Haider, and Rhenius (1999 Knoblich, G., Ohlsson, S., Haider, H. and Rhenius, D. 1999. Constraint relaxation and chunk decomposition in insight problem solving. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 25: 1534–1555. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). These problems are false equations expressed with Roman numerals that can be made true bymoving one matchstick. In a first group participants examined a static two-dimensional representation of the false algebraic expression and told the experimenter which matchstick should be moved. In a second group, participants interacted with a three-dimensional representation of the false equation. Success rates in the static group for different problem types replicated the pattern of data reported in Knoblich et al. (1999 Knoblich, G., Ohlsson, S., Haider, H. and Rhenius, D. 1999. Constraint relaxation and chunk decomposition in insight problem solving. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 25: 1534–1555. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). However, participants in the interactive group were significantly more likely to achieve insight. Problem-solving success in the static group was best predicted by performance on a test of numeracy, whereas in the interactive group it was best predicted by performance on a test of visuo-spatial reasoning. Implications for process models of problem solving are discussed.     

Two facets of cognitive control in analogical mapping: The role of semantic interference resolution andgoal-driven structure selection

The study used scene analogies to investigate two component processes of analogical thinking: resolution of semantic interference, which emerges when the proper mapping between analogically matching objects is incoherent with their categorical features (e.g., stereotypical functions), and goal-driven selection of the key relational structure, by directing attention to the most promising objects which constitute that structure among many other candidate objects. We manipulated interference by placing in corresponding scenes the objects from one category in different relational roles. Selection was loaded by including additional, relationally irrelevant objects in a scene. We also manipulated relational complexity and the presence of salient objects (people) in relations. Increased load on both interference resolution and selection decreased the accuracy of analogical mapping, but these factors did not interact. Moreover, the factors yielded opposite patterns of interaction with relational complexity. Finally, salience eased selection, but tended to negatively influence interference resolution. In summary, inference resolution and selection seem to constitute two relatively independent facets of cognitive control involved in analogical thinking. Selection may act before mapping occurs, while interference influences analogy making only if an interfering object takes part in mapping.