Coordinating cognition: the costs and benefits of shared gaze during collaborative search

Collaboration has its benefits, but coordination has its costs. We explored the potential for remotely located pairs of people to collaborate during visual search, using shared gaze and speech. Pairs of searchers wearing eyetrackers jointly performed an O-in-Qs search task alone, or in one of three collaboration conditions: shared gaze (with one searcher seeing a gaze-cursor indicating where the other was looking, and vice versa), shared-voice (by speaking to each other), and shared-gaze-plus-voice (by using both gaze-cursors and speech). Although collaborating pairs performed better than solitary searchers, search in the shared gaze condition was best of all: twice as fast and efficient as solitary search. People can successfully communicate and coordinate their searching labor using shared gaze alone. Strikingly, shared gaze search was even faster than shared-gaze-plus-voice search; speaking incurred substantial coordination costs. We conclude that shared gaze affords a highly efficient method of coordinating parallel activity in a time-critical spatial task.     

SEM of another flavour: Two new applications of the supplemented EM algorithm

The supplemented EM (SEM) algorithm is applied to address two goodness‐of‐fit testing problems in psychometrics. The first problem involves computing the information matrix for item parameters in item response theory models. This matrix is important for limited‐information goodness‐of‐fit testing and it is also used to compute standard errors for the item parameter estimates. For the second problem, it is shown that the SEM algorithm provides a convenient computational procedure that leads to an asymptotically chi‐squared goodness‐of‐fit statistic for the ‘two‐stage EM’ procedure of fitting covariance structure models in the presence of missing data. Both simulated and real data are used to illustrate the proposed procedures.     

Computing inter‐rater reliability and its variance in the presence of high agreement

Pi (π) and kappa (κ) statistics are widely used in the areas of psychiatry and psychological testing to compute the extent of agreement between raters on nominally scaled data. It is a fact that these coefficients occasionally yield unexpected results in situations known as the paradoxes of kappa. This paper explores the origin of these limitations, and introduces an alternative and more stable agreement coefficient referred to as the AC₁ coefficient. Also proposed are new variance estimators for the multiple‐rater generalized π and AC₁ statistics, whose validity does not depend upon the hypothesis of independence between raters. This is an improvement over existing alternative variances, which depend on the independence assumption. A Monte‐Carlo simulation study demonstrates the validity of these variance estimators for confidence interval construction, and confirms the value of AC₁ as an improved alternative to existing inter‐rater reliability statistics.     

Locus of control and home mortgage loan behaviour

The present study investigated the impact of locus of control on home mortgage loan behaviours. The results showed that participants with stronger external control were more likely to purchase a lower priced home, have a lower ratio of mortgage loan amount to the total home value, and have a shorter term of mortgage loan. Moreover, among participants who have owned a home, those not using mortgage loans showed more external control than those using mortgage loans; among participants who have not owned a home but want to buy a home, those not planning to use mortgage loans showed more external control than those planning to use mortgage loans.     

Seeking professional help: Etiology beliefs about mental illness across cultures

In the present study, the authors examined the contributions of cultural beliefs about the etiology of mental illness to the seeking of help from mental health professionals among college students in 4 cultural groups, European Americans, Chinese Americans, Hong Kong Chinese, and Mainland Chinese. Group differences were found in help-seeking history and likelihood, with European and Chinese Americans being more likely to seek help than Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese. Multiple-group path analysis showed that lay beliefs about causes of mental illness and prior help-seeking history significantly predicted help-seeking likelihood, which was related positively to environmental/hereditary causes but negatively to social-personal causes. Our findings demonstrate the importance of understanding help-seeking patterns within specific cultural contexts and the effects of Western influences on shaping help-seeking propensities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).     

Predicting Marital Satisfaction From Self,Partner, and Couple Characteristics: Is It Me,You, or Us?

Past research on the link between personal characteristics and marital satisfaction has taken either an individual or a dyadic approach. The individual approach examines how self and/or partner characteristics are associated with satisfaction, whereas the dyadic approach focuses on couple characteristics such as couple similarity. The current research was designed to integrate both approaches. A modified Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (Kashy & Kenny, 2000) was proposed to test simultaneously the contributions of self characteristics, partner characteristics, and two types of couple similarity (level similarity measured by the absolute difference score and shape similarity measured by the profile correlation) in predicting husbands' and wives' marital satisfaction. This model was tested by structural equation modeling in two large, nationally representative, urban samples (N=536 and 537 couples) from China. The results were largely replicated across four personality domains and two value domains, suggesting that all predictors tended to make independent contributions to satisfaction except the absolute difference score.     

西非的苏非主义:历史、现状与新苏非教团

本文讨论了伊斯兰教苏非主义在西非的历史与现状,社会功能与最新发展趋势.首先探讨卡迪里教团和提加尼教团在西非的发展过程,认为以这两个苏非教团为代表的苏非主义主导了近代以来西非的伊斯兰教;其次,苏非主义与西非的政治关系密切,西非现代政治背后也有明显的苏非主义因素;第三,20世纪中期以来,西非苏非主义面临着更为复杂的宗教政治环境,瓦哈比主义的到来与世俗民族主义思潮对其构成一定的挑战,但是新苏非主义的发展趋向继续成为破解困局的手段.     

玉门吾艾斯拱北的历史解读

吾艾斯于唐初来华传教和病逝于路途的事迹为我国穆斯林世代传颂的佳话,其事迹传说具有一定可信度,至少有历史的影子在里面.在中国西北广大穆斯林中,对玉门吾艾斯及其拱北有着极大的认同感;但今天重要的不在于这种"历史记忆"完全真实,而在于长期以来其民族和群体成员集体赋予它的象征意义和文化内涵;在于其民族溯源和群体认同中的特殊功能.作为历史文化遗产,玉门惠回堡拱北应该受到学术界和社会各界的进一步关注.     

舍斯托夫对哲学定义的理解

哲学是什么？胡塞尔认为哲学是反思,俄罗斯宗教哲学家舍斯托夫却认为哲学是一种斗争。实际上,这是理性哲学思维和圣经思维的对立。理性哲学思维基于人是“理性的人”的认识,通过“逻辑”的手段来寻找事物背后的根据,哲学是“爱智慧”。圣经思维却从人是“神性的人”出发,把“雷霆和闪电”作为自己的“逻辑”,把哲学当作“生死事业”,因而哲学是斗争。舍斯托夫对理性哲学思维进行了抨击,他对哲学定义的理解是基于俄罗斯宗教存在哲学的立场。     

意见收敛定理与休谟问题

意见收敛定理是主观主义概率论的一条重要定理,它表明随着证据的增加,验前概率的主观性将被验后概率的客观性所代替。意见收敛定理被看作主观概率的动态合理性原则,因而被用来解决休谟问题,即归纳合理性问题。然而,哈金有说服力地表明,意见收敛定理证明的是条件概率Pr（h／e）的收敛,而不是验后概率Pre（h）的收敛。主观主义概率论暗中接受的一个等式是：Pre（h）=Pr（h／e）,通常称之为“条件化规则”。这样,归纳法的合理性问题变成条件化规则的合理性问题。为此,本文提出一个新的合理性原则,即“最少初始概率原则”,将它同“局部合理性”观念结合起来便可为条件化规则的合理性加以辩护。