The ability to plan and search ahead is essential for problem solving in most situations in everyday life. To investigate the development of planning and related processes, a sample of four- and five-year-old children was examined in a variant of the Tower of London, a frequently used neuropsychological assessment tool of planning abilities. The applied problems either required searching ahead for optimal solution or were solvable by pure step-by-step forward processing. Furthermore, the ambiguity of subgoal ordering was varied.Results revealed an age-related effect of search depth: the four-year olds’ planning accuracy was particularly decreased in problems demanding search ahead, while five-year olds mastered both problem types equally well. Interestingly, this interaction between age and search depth could not be accounted for by measures of working memory and inhibition. Differential effects of age were also found for subgoal ordering with respect to initial planning and movement execution times. In sum, planning abilities showed considerable development during late kindergarten age that appeared to be specifically associated with the integration and back-validation of the anticipated consequences of internally modeled actions. The present study demonstrates that a careful consideration of problem structure may greatly enhance the insights gained from the application of a routinely used assessment tool, the Tower of London. This may be especially advantageous when addressing specific subpopulations such as children or clinical samples. 相似文献
We resume an exchange of ideas with Uta Frith that started before the turn of the century. The curious incident responsible for this exchange was the finding that children with autism fail tests of false belief, while they pass Zaitchik's (1990) photograph task (Leekam & Perner, 1991). This finding led to the conclusion that children with autism have a domain-specific impairment in Theory of Mind (mental representations), because the photograph task and the false-belief task are structurally equivalent except for the nonmental character of photographs. In this paper we argue that the false-belief task and the false-photograph task are not structurally equivalent and are not empirically associated. Instead a truly structurally equivalent task is the false-sign task. Performance on this task is strongly associated with the false-belief task. A version of this task, the misleading-signal task, also poses severe problems for children with autism (Bowler, Briskman, Gurvidi, & Fornells-Ambrojo, 2005). These new findings therefore challenge the earlier interpretation of a domain-specific difficulty in inferring mental states and suggest that children with autism also have difficulty understanding misleading nonmental objects. Brain imaging data using false-belief, "false"-photo, and false-sign scenarios provide further supporting evidence for our conclusions. 相似文献
This study examines the relationship between DSM-cluster B personality disorders (PDs) and psychopaths according to Hare's criteria as detected by the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL:SV) in 299 violent offenders. To clarify some contradictions among several previous studies on this issue, individual cluster B PDs were looked at alone, excluding any cases of comorbidity with other PDs of this cluster. We found highly significant relationships between antisocial and borderline PD and Factor II of the PCL and a highly significant correlation between narcissistic PD and Factor I of the PCL. These results were to be expected from the theoretical basis of the development of the PCL and provide a contribution to the construct validity of the PCL, which until now has not been validated on such a large sample in Germany. 相似文献
DEWEX is a server-based environment for developing Web-based experiments. It provides many features for creating and running
complex experimental designs on a local server. It is freeware and allows for both using default features, for which only
text input is necessary, and easy configurations that can be set up by the experimenter. The tool also provides log files
on the local server that can be interpreted and analyzed very easily. As an illustration of how DEWEX can be used, a recent
study is presented that demonstrates the system’s most important features. This study investigated learning from multiple
hypertext sources and shows the influences of task, source of information, and hypertext presentation format on the construction
of mental representations of a hypertext about a historical event. 相似文献
The Emacs authoring environment for Mizar (MizarMode) is today the authoring tool of choice for many (probably the majority of) Mizar authors. This article describes the MizarMode and focuses on the proof assistance functions and tools available in it.
We start with the explanation of the design principles behind the Mizar system, and show how these design principles—mainly the concentration on simple and intuitive human-oriented proofs—have helped Mizar in developing and maintaining a very large body of formalized mathematics.
Mizar is a non-programmable and non-tactical verifier: the proofs are developed in the traditional “write—compile—correct” software programming loop. While this method is in the beginning more laborious than the methods employed in tactical and programmable proof assistants, it makes the “proof code” in the long-run more readable, maintainable and reusable. This seems to be a crucial factor for a long-term and large-scale formalization effort.
MizarMode has been designed with the aim to facilitate this kind of proof development by a number of “code-generating”, “code-browsing” and “code-searching” methods, and tools programmed or integrated within it. These methods and tools now include, e.g., the automated generation of proof skeletons, semantic browsing of the articles and abstracts, structured viewing, proof advice using trained machine learning tools like the Mizar Proof Advisor, deductive tools like MoMM, etc. We give an overview of these proof-assistance tools and their integration in the MizarMode, and also discuss some emerging and future extensions such as integration of external theorem proving assistance. 相似文献