Assessment of successful smoking cessation by psychological factors using the Bayesian network approach

The association between psychological factors and smoking cessation is complicated and inconsistent in published researches, and the joint effect of psychological factors on smoking cessation is unclear. This study explored how psychological factors jointly affect the success of smoking cessation using a Bayesian network approach. A community-based case control study was designed with 642 adult male successful smoking quitters as the cases, and 700 adult male failed smoking quitters as the controls. General self-efficacy (GSE), trait coping style (positive-trait coping style (PTCS) and negative-trait coping style (NTCS)) and self-rating anxiety (SA) were evaluated by GSE Scale, Trait Coping Style Questionnaire and SA Scale, respectively. Bayesian network was applied to evaluate the relationship between psychological factors and successful smoking cessation. The local conditional probability table of smoking cessation indicated that different joint conditions of psychological factors led to different outcomes for smoking cessation. Among smokers with high PTCS, high NTCS and low SA, only 36.40% successfully quitted smoking. However, among smokers with low pack-years of smoking, high GSE, high PTCS and high SA, 63.64% successfully quitted smoking. Our study indicates psychological factors jointly influence smoking cessation outcome. According to different joint situations, different solutions should be developed to control tobacco in practical intervention.     

分类研究中的原型与样例观

该文具体分析了现代认知心理学对分类问题的主要看法,指出了当前分类研究范式存在的问题及今后进一步研究的主要方向。     

工作记忆中央执行功能的特异性和可分离性

采用3种中央执行功能,对中央执行功能的特异性和可分离性进行研究。选取青年和老年被试各31名。每位被试都要参加3种中央执行功能2个难度水平的任务和瑞文标准推理测验。结果发现：记忆刷新的年龄效应不能完全由液态智力的年龄差异来解释;虽然同种执行功能内不同难度任务的年龄效应类似,但不同执行功能的年龄效应不同,从大到小依次为记忆刷新、随机生成和选择性注意;控制液态智力的影响后,同种执行功能内不同难度任务间的相关仍然显著,而不同中央执行功能之间的相关不显著;另外,本实验条件下选择性注意与液态智力相关不显著,且不存在年老化现象。研究结果表明中央执行功能相对于液态智力具有一定的特异性,并且可以进一步分离为一些相互独立的子功能。     

Evidentiality in language and cognition

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3- and 4-year-old Korean children's knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children's source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable problems for learners; however, these problems are not (necessarily) conceptual in nature. Our data also suggest that, contrary to relativistic expectations, children's ability to reason about sources of information proceeds along similar lines in diverse language-learning populations and is not tied to the acquisition of the linguistic markers of evidentiality in the exposure language. We discuss implications of our findings for the relationship between linguistic and conceptual representations during development.     

Re-thinking stages of cognitive development: an appraisal of connectionist models of the balance scale task

The present paper re-appraises connectionist attempts to explain how human cognitive development appears to progress through a series of sequential stages. Models of performance on the Piagetian balance scale task are the focus of attention. Limitations of these models are discussed and replications and extensions to the work are provided via the Cascade-Correlation algorithm. An application of multi-group latent class analysis for examining performance of the networks is described and these results reveal fundamental functional characteristics of the networks. Evidence is provided that strongly suggests that the networks are unable to acquire a mastery of torque and, although they do recover certain rules of operation that humans do, they also show a propensity to acquire rules never previously seen.     

小学生系列回忆中移动和重复错误特征的研究

以小学一、三、五年级学生为被试,以同音汉字为实验材料,要求被试完成系列回忆任务。实验发现：移动错误随年级的增高而减少,年级差异显著;移动错误出现最多的是在移动距离为1个和2个的时候,移动距离差异显著;重复错误年级差异和移动距离差异均不明显。     

Opposing effects of stimulus-driven and memory-driven attention in visual search

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - When one searches for a specific target in a cluttered visual scene, a perceptually salient stimulus or a stimulus that matches working memory’s contents...     

Curiosity-driven recommendation strategy for adaptive learning via deep reinforcement learning

The design of recommendation strategies in the adaptive learning systems focuses on utilizing currently available information to provide learners with individual-specific learning instructions. As a critical motivate for human behaviours, curiosity is essentially the drive to explore knowledge and seek information. In a psychologically inspired view, we propose a curiosity-driven recommendation policy within the reinforcement learning framework, allowing for an efficient and enjoyable personalized learning path. Specifically, a curiosity reward from a well-designed predictive model is generated to model one's familiarity with the knowledge space. Given such curiosity rewards, we apply the actor–critic method to approximate the policy directly through neural networks. Numerical analyses with a large continuous knowledge state space and concrete learning scenarios are provided to further demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.     

Critical Thinking Disposition and Scientific Creativity: The Mediating Role of Creative Self-Efficacy

This study explores the relationship between critical thinking disposition and scientific creativity and examines the hypothesized mediating role played by creative self-concept (trait-like creative self-efficacy). A large sample (N = 1,153) of Chinese high school students filled the Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory and revised trait-like creative self-efficacy scale, and then solved Scientific Creativity Test for Adolescent. Structural equation modeling has demonstrated that students’ critical thinking disposition was positively related to their creative self-concept and scientific creativity, and creative self-concept fully mediated the link between critical thinking disposition and scientific creativity. We discuss these findings in terms of the hypothetical role played by creative self-concept for creative functioning.