The effects of autonomy-supportive versus controlling environments on self-talk

Based within a self-determination theory framework (SDT: Deci and Ryan, Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behaviour. Plenum Publishing Co., New York, 1985), the present study examined the effects of manipulating social-contextual conditions on the content of individuals’ self-talk. Seventy student volunteers were randomly assigned to a controlling or autonomy-supportive experimental condition. Participants were instructed to ‘think-aloud’ throughout a 10-min computerized task during which self-verbalizations were recorded. Audio recordings were transcribed verbatim, and then analysed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Program (LIWC; Pennebaker et al., LIWC2001; Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (software and manual). Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 2001). Inductive content analyses were also conducted. Triangulation of the quantitative and qualitative findings revealed that in the autonomy-supportive condition, individuals’ self-talk was more informational and less controlling, with participants using more positive emotional words and assents, and fewer negative emotional words, swear words, and first person references than in the controlling condition. The findings suggest that social-context can affect cognitive factors such as self-talk and further support the promotion of autonomy-supportive environments.     

Effects of decision-phase time constraints on emotion-based learning in the Iowa Gambling Task

Research employing the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) has frequently shown that learning is impaired in various clinical populations. However, precisely what constitutes "unimpaired" control group learning remains unclear. In order to understand some of the possible factors underlying variability in control group IGT performance, the present study sought to manipulate features of the task to intentionally disrupt learning. Specifically, the present study investigated the effects of time constraints on emotion-based learning during automated administration of the IGT. For two groups of participants, a time-constraint of either 2-s or 4-s was implemented during the critical decision making period, while a control group received no time constraint. We also evaluated participants' subjective experience after every block of 20 trials. Results demonstrated that the 2-s group differed significantly from the control group. Subjective experience measures revealed rapid development of awareness of the advantageous and disadvantageous decks among all three groups. Overall, our findings demonstrate, for the first time, the effects of decision-phase time constraints on emotion-based learning and indicate that the IGT reward/punishment schedules are to some extent cognitively penetrable.     

Effects of directionality in deductive reasoning: II. Premise integration and conclusion evaluation

Previous research (Oberauer & Wilhelm, 2000) has shown an inherent directionality between the two terms linked in premises of typical deductive reasoning tasks. With three experiments we investigated the effect of inherent directionality on the time to integrate two premises and for the derivation of a conclusion. We varied figure (i.e., order of terms in the premises) and direction of inference (i.e., order of terms in the conclusion) in deduction tasks from various domains (propositional reasoning, syllogisms, spatial, temporal, and linear order reasoning). Effects of figure on premise reading times varied with the directionality of the relations. Effects of direction of inference reflected the same directionality for a subset of relations. We propose that two factors are jointly responsible for a large part of observed directionality effects in premise integration: the inherent directionality of relational statements and a general advantage for a given-new order of terms in the second premise. Difficulty of deriving a conclusion is affected by the directionality or relations if and only if the relation is semantically asymmetric, so that the directionality must be preserved in the integrated mental model.     

On Tacit Knowledge for Philosophy of Education

This article offers a detailed reading Gascoigne and Thornton’s book Tacit Knowledge (2013), which aims to account for the tacitness of tacit knowledge (TK) while preserving its status as knowledge proper. I take issue with their characterization and rejection of the existential-phenomenological Background—which they presuppose even as they dismiss—and their claim that TK can be articulated “from within”—which betrays a residual Cartesianism, the result of their elision of conceptuality and propositionality. Knowledgeable acts instantiate capacities which we might know we have and of which we can be aware, but which are not propositionally structured at their “core”. Nevertheless, propositionality is necessary to what Robert Brandom calls, in Making It Explicit (1994) and Articulating Reasons (2000), “explicitation”, which notion also presupposes a tacit dimension, which is, simply, the embodied person (the knower), without which no conception of knowledge can get any purchase. On my view, there is no knowledgeable act that can be understood as such separately from the notion of skilled corporeal performance. The account I offer cannot make sense of so-called “knowledge-based” education, as opposed to systems and styles which supposedly privilege “contentless” skills over and above “knowledge”, because on the phenomenological and inferentialist lines I endorse, neither the concepts “knowledge” nor “skill” has any purchase or meaning without the other.     

The role of landmarks and boundaries in the development of spatial memory

It has been suggested that learning an object's location relative to (1) intramaze landmarks and (2) local boundaries is supported by parallel striatal and hippocampal systems, both of which rely upon input from a third system for orientation. However, little is known about the developmental trajectories of these systems' contributions to spatial learning. The present study tested 5- and 7-year-old children and adults on a water maze-like task in which all three types of cue were available. Participants had to remember the location of an object hidden in a circular bounded environment containing a moveable intramaze landmark and surrounded by distal cues. Children performed less accurately than adults, and showed a different pattern of error. While adults relied most on the stable cue provided by the boundary, children relied on both landmark and boundary cues similarly, suggesting a developmental increase in the weighting given to boundary cues. Further, adults were most accurate in coding angular information (dependent on distal cues), whereas children were most accurate in coding distance, suggesting a developing ability to use distal cues to orient. These results indicate that children as young as 5 years use boundary, intramaze landmark, and distal visual cues in parallel, but that the basic accuracy and relative weighting of these cues changes during subsequent development.     

Perception as interacting psychophysical functions. Could the configuring of features replace a specialised receptor?

This paper illustrates how perception is achieved through interactions among the psychophysical functions of judged features of an object. The theory is that the perceiver places processed features in a multidimensional space of discriminal processes. Each dimension is scaled in units of discrimination performance. The zero coordinate of each feature is its level in an internal standard (norm) established by previous experience of that category of object in context. Experiments are reported which show that one, two, or three concurrent single-featured objects matched the multiple features of another object in two ways. Either stimulation from the two objects had discrimination distances from norm that added, or the stimulation by one object was processed through a concept describing stimulation by the other object. It follows that, in this case, perception via a receptor for the multi-featured object can be replaced by a point of balance among receptors for each single feature. The object with its own receptor is the gustatory stimulant L-glutamic acid as its monosodium salt. The features that stimulate diverse gustatory receptors of their own are sodium chloride, citric acid, sucrose, and caffeine. A more complex approach to dimensional coding was developed earlier for photoreceptors in colour judgments. The present approach is modality independent, mathematically simple, and economical in experimental data.