Efficacy of the program "Testas's (mis)adventures" to promote the deep approach to learning

This paper provides information about the efficacy of a tutorial training program intended to enhance elementary fifth graders' study processes and foster their deep approaches to learning. The program "Testas's (mis)adventures" consists of a set of books in which Testas, a typical student, reveals and reflects upon his life experiences during school years. These life stories are nothing but an opportunity to present and train a wide range of learning strategies and self-regulatory processes, designed to insure students' deeper preparation for present and future learning challenges. The program has been developed along a school year, in a one hour weekly tutorial sessions. The training program had a semi-experimental design, included an experimental group (n=50) and a control one (n=50), and used pre- and posttest measures (learning strategies' declarative knowledge, learning approaches and academic achievement). Data suggest that the students enrolled in the training program, comparing with students in the control group, showed a significant improvement in their declarative knowledge of learning strategies and in their deep approach to learning, consequently lowering their use of a surface approach. In spite of this, in what concerns to academic achievement, no statistically significant differences have been found.     

Language acquisition meets language evolution

Recent research suggests that language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms. This paper draws out the implications of this viewpoint for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new, and much more tractable, form. In essence, the child faces a problem of induction, where the objective is to coordinate with others (C-induction), rather than to model the structure of the natural world (N-induction). We argue that, of the two, C-induction is dramatically easier. More broadly, we argue that understanding the acquisition of any cultural form, whether linguistic or otherwise, during development, requires considering the corresponding question of how that cultural form arose through processes of cultural evolution. This perspective helps resolve the "logical" problem of language acquisition and has far-reaching implications for evolutionary psychology.     

A Clinical Model in Action in Intensive Residential Treatment: Meeting the Needs of Adolescent Boys who have Experienced Domestic Violence

The Habitat Program at Wood’s Homes, Calgary, Alberta, is an eight bed residential treatment program for conduct-disordered youth who have been exposed or subjected to high levels of violence in their family home. The program was based on the assumption that working effectively with such youth requires consideration of the background experiences of family violence, yet traditional treatment models often ignore or minimize the importance of these experiences. We present a clinical model which incorporates aspects of milieu treatment, relationship-based daily interventions and elements of Jenkins’ invitational approach to working with men and boys who use violence as well as Wade’s response-based approach to counseling with victims and perpetrators of violence. The model also incorporates ideas based on Maruna’s research into recidivism and excuse-making. The purpose of the model is twofold: to be broad enough to structure an overall treatment strategy based on the assumption that successful treatment results from the cumulative effect of many interactions over time, and to be specific enough to guide staff in developing strategies for specific situations that typically arise in daily interaction with the youth. We use a case example format to illustrate how staff has utilized the model to engage youth in exploring both their experiences of violence in the family home and in developing new ways of thinking and talking about behavioural choices.     

Discriminant analysis in career studying "decision/indecision": the Career Factors Inventory (CFI) as a diagnostic measure

Literature has shown that, nowadays, a multidimensional approach to decision-making has become prioritized. The Careers Factor Inventory (CFI) is, in fact, a multidimensional measurement instrument for evaluating career indecision, which may be useful in the diagnosis of adaptation behaviors in terms of career decision versus indecision. This study emerges as a follow-up to a previous study which used the CFI on a sample of university students in which this measurement instrument was found to be capable of distinguishing Low decided vs. Highly decided groups and to evaluate the discriminatory capacity of the CFI scales. It is the aim, here, to further analyse the results obtained in such study with a view to grounding the importance of the use of this Inventory as an instrument for distinguishing people who present different decision levels in relation to their careers. In this study, 494 university students from a number of higher education establishments and courses are part of the afore mentioned Low decided and Highly decided groups. The collected data were analysed by means of Discrete Discriminant Analysis models and corroborate the discriminant power of the Inventory and its use as a diagnostic instrument in the psychological intervention of career counseling and development.     

A new consequence of Simpson's paradox: stable cooperation in one-shot prisoner's dilemma from populations of individualistic learners

Theories of choice in economics typically assume that interacting agents act individualistically and maximize their own utility. Specifically, game theory proposes that rational players should defect in one-shot prisoners' dilemmas (PD). Defection also appears to be the inevitable outcome for agents who learn by reinforcement of past choices, because whatever the other player does, defection leads to greater reinforcement on each trial. In a computer simulation and 4 experiments, the authors show that, apparently paradoxically, when players' choices are correlated by an exogenous factor (here, the cooperativeness of the specific PD chosen), people obtain greater average reinforcement for cooperating, which can sustain cooperation. This effect arises from a well-known statistical paradox, Simpson's paradox. The authors speculate that this effect may be relevant to aspects of real-world human cooperative behavior.     

From universal laws of cognition to specific cognitive models

The remarkable successes of the physical sciences have been built on highly general quantitative laws, which serve as the basis for understanding an enormous variety of specific physical systems. How far is it possible to construct universal principles in the cognitive sciences, in terms of which specific aspects of perception, memory, or decision making might be modelled? Following Shepard (e.g., 1987 ), it is argued that some universal principles may be attainable in cognitive science. Here, 2 examples are proposed: the simplicity principle (which states that the cognitive system prefers patterns that provide simpler explanations of available data); and the scale‐invariance principle, which states that many cognitive phenomena are independent of the scale of relevant underlying physical variables, such as time, space, luminance, or sound pressure. This article illustrates how principles may be combined to explain specific cognitive processes by using these principles to derive SIMPLE, a formal model of memory for serial order ( Brown, Neath, & Chater, 2007 ), and briefly mentions some extensions to models of identification and categorization. This article also considers the scope and limitations of universal laws in cognitive science.     

Differential effects of beta-adrenergic receptor blockade in basolateral amygdala or insular cortex on incidental and associative taste learning

The importance of central β-adrenergic system has been essentially investigated in aversive/emotional learning tasks. However, recent data suggest that the β-adrenergic system is also required for incidental taste learning. In the present study we evaluated in rats whether β-adrenergic receptor activity is required for taste habituation, an incidental taste learning, and also for conditioned taste aversion (CTA) learning, an associative learning. To address this issue, a low dose of the β-adrenergic antagonist propranolol was infused before learning in either the basolateral amygdala (BLA) or the insular cortex (IC), two forebrain areas reported to play a key role in taste memory formation. Incidental taste learning was assessed using a single presentation of the sweet taste saccharin 0.1%, which is sufficient to increase saccharin consumption (relative to water baseline) during a second presentation. CTA was assessed by pairing the first saccharin 0.1% presentation with a delayed gastric malaise, thus causing a decrease in saccharin consumption (relative to water baseline) during a second presentation. Propranolol infusion in BLA (1 μg/0.2μl) or IC (2.5 μg/0.5 μl) before the first taste exposure impaired incidental taste learning but did not affect CTA. These results highlight the important role played by the β-adrenergic receptor activation in cortical and amygdaloid structures during taste learning. Moreover, they are the first to suggest that incidental learning is more sensitive to blockade of noradrenergic system than associative learning.     

Structural priming: a critical review

Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is structural priming, a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced ("prime") sentence (J. K. Bock, 1986). The recent explosion of research in structural priming has made it the dominant means of investigating the processes involved in the production (and increasingly, comprehension) of complex expressions such as sentences. This review considers its implications for the representation of syntax and the mechanisms of production and comprehension and their relationship. It then addresses the potential functions of structural priming, before turning to its implications for first language acquisition, bilingualism, and aphasia. The authors close with theoretical and empirical recommendations for future investigations.