Generative Neo‐Cyberculture in the Modern Seminary

Four faculty discuss how their institution's launching of a program to implement instructional technology across the campus influenced their teaching and broadened their understanding of student learning. Examples of their first attempts at online projects for classes in homiletics and ecclesiology are described.     

Impact of perceived value on casual mobile game loyalty: The moderating effect of intensity of playing

The retention rate of mobile game players is one of the subjects that spark most interest in the industry, as many abandon the games only a few hours after downloading them. This study examines the antecedents of loyalty towards mobile games from the perspective of perceived value and explores the moderating effect of intensity of playing. The results revealed that hedonic value (i.e., perceived enjoyment and perceived attractiveness) and, to a lesser extent, utilitarian value (i.e., effort expectancy and perceived usefulness) are crucial in the loyalty that players feel towards mobile games. Intensity of playing weakens the relationship between perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment and loyalty intention. Based on the findings, theoretical and practical implications are provided.     

Fine motor skills enhance lexical processing of embodied vocabulary: A test of the nimble-hands,nimble-minds hypothesis

Research suggests that fine motor skills (FMS) are linked to aspects of cognitive development in children. Additionally, lexical processing advantages exist for words implying a high body–object interaction (BOI), with initial findings indicating that such words in turn link to children’s FMS—for which we propose and evaluate four competing hypotheses. First, a maturational account argues that any links between FMS and lexical processing should not exist once developmental variables are controlled for. Second, functionalism posits that any link between FMS and lexical processing arises due to environmental interactions. Third, the semantic richness hypothesis argues that sensorimotor input improves lexical processing, but predicts no links between FMS and lexical processing. A fourth account, the nimble-hands, nimble minds (NHNM) hypothesis, proposes that having greater FMS improves lexical processing for high-BOI words. In two experiments, the response latencies of preschool children (n?=?90, n?=?76, ages?=?5;1) to 45 lexical items encompassing high-BOI, low-BOI, and less imageable words were measured, alongside measures of FMS, reasoning, and general receptive/expressive vocabulary. High-BOI words appeared to show unique links to FMS, which remained after accounting for low-BOI and less imageable words, general vocabulary, reasoning, and chronological age. Although further work is needed, the findings provide initial support for the NHNM hypothesis.     

New perspectives on binding in visual working memory

How does visual working memory (WM) store the binding between different features of a visual object (like colour, orientation, and location), and does memorizing these bindings require additional resources beyond memorizing individual features? These questions have traditionally been addressed by comparing performance across different types of change detection task. More recently, experimental tasks such as analogue (cued) recall, combined with analysis methods including Bayesian hypothesis testing and formal model comparison, have shed new light on the properties of WM. A significant new perspective is that noise in neural representation limits the precision of recall, and several recent models incorporate this view to account for failures of binding in WM. We review the literature on feature binding with a focus on these new developments and discuss their implications for the interpretation of classical findings.     

Are country level prevalences of rule violations associated with knowledge overclaiming among students?

Cultural norms of behaviour influence desirable and problematic behaviours of individuals. In particular, cultural norms should influence individuals' dishonesty. In a recent Nature study, prevalence of rule violations was introduced as a new country‐level measure of behavioural norms. However, information on individuals' actual honesty was not available due to characteristics of the experimental design. Overcoming this limitation, we show that country‐level behavioural norms are related to individual‐level knowledge overclaiming behaviour (i.e., claiming to know concepts that do not exist, a measure of individuals' actual behavioural dishonesty) among 290,954 students from 57 countries (from the 2012 PISA study). Our study represents a crucial test of the argument that cultural norms influence individual's behaviour and of the validity of the measurement of countries' prevalences of rule violations. These results imply that shaping the behaviour of today's students may result in new behavioural norms that emphasise honesty and rule adherence more strongly.     

Personal and parents’ life stories in patients with borderline personality disorder

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) display disturbances in understanding self and others. We examined whether these disturbances extended to how patients described their personal and parents’ life stories and to measures of identity, alexithymia, empathy, and emotional intelligence. Thirty BPD patients and 30 matched control participants described personal and parents’ life stories and completed measures of identity disturbance, alexithymia, empathy, and emotional intelligence. Compared to the controls, patients with BPD described their personal and their parents’ life stories more negatively and with fewer themes of agency and communion fulfillment. Patients and controls showed equally complex reasoning about their personal life stories, but patients displayed less complexity and more self‐other confusion, when reasoning about their parents’ stories. Patients also differed from controls on identity disturbance, alexithymia, and empathy. The results suggest that patients’ storied understanding of themselves and others are disturbed and should be taken into account to better understand BPD.