Effects of encoding strategy,presentation modality,and scoring method on STM performance with the Peterson and Peterson technique

The Peterson and Peterson (1959) STM experiment was replicated with variation of presentation modality and encoding strategy. The effect of various scoring criteria was also analyzed. The recall data showed that a Peterson and Peterson type forgetting curve was obtained using auditory presentation and instructions to rehearse vocally the trigrams when scoring only completely correct recall within the first 3 sec of the recall interval. With visual presentation and instructions to find meaningful trigram interpretations, the forgetting curve was higher and much more flat, especially when scoring position correct recall within the total 0-10-sec recall interval. In a buildup of PI experiment, no buildup of PI could be detected when visual presentation was used together with instructions to find meaningful trigram interpretations. The importance of the different encoding activities for recall performance was discussed.     

Pop-out and pop-in: Visual working memory advantages for unique items

Attentional control is thought to play a critical role in determining the amount of information that can be stored and retrieved from visual working memory (VWM). We tested whether and how task-irrelevant feature-based salience, known to affect the control of visual attention, affects VWM performance. Our results show that features of a task-irrelevant color singleton are more likely to be recalled from VWM than non-singleton items and that this increased memorability comes at a cost to the other items in the display. Furthermore, the singleton effect in VWM was negatively correlated with an individual’s baseline VWM capacity. Taken together, these results suggest that individual differences in VWM storage capacity may be partially attributable to the ability to ignore differences in task-irrelevant physical salience.     

Acculturation,Economic Stress,Social Relationships and School Satisfaction Among Migrant Children in Urban China

Rural to urban migration has become a prominent phenomenon in China. In linking migration to children’s school trajectories, this mixed-methods study explored a range of cultural and contextual factors that contribute to Chinese children’s school wellbeing in the migratory process. The key variables included acculturative attitudes, economic stress, and relationships with family, teachers and peers. The study drew upon survey data from a sample of 301 Chinese migrant students (4th–9th grade) together with in-depth interviews involving ten selected students focusing on how migrant children’s school happiness and productivity are influenced by acculturation, economic hardship, and social relationships. The quantitative analysis indicated the critical role of integrative states in promoting school satisfaction and achievement. Migrant children with better social relations scored higher levels of hope, which in turn contributed to better school outcomes. Contrary to previous findings, economic stress did not hinder school outcomes for these Chinese migrant children, but appeared to act as a positive motivational factor for pursing academic success. The qualitative analysis echoed the quantitative findings, and provided further explanations for the complexity and particularity of these phenomena.     

Effects of product portfolios and recommendation timing in the efficiency of personalized recommendation

Personalized recommendation has important implications in raising online shopping efficiency and increasing product sales. There has been wide interest in finding ways to provide more efficient personalized recommendations. Most existing studies focus on how to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the recommendation algorithms or are more concerned on ways to reduce perceived risks and thus increase consumer satisfaction. Unlike these studies, our study begins from the decision‐making process of consumers, using consumers' two‐stage decision‐making system and preference inconsistency theory as a basis, to reveal the mechanisms involved in consumers' acceptance of recommendations. This paper analyzes the effect of personalized recommendations from two angles, recommendation timing and product portfolio, tries to point out differences in consumer preferences between similar products and related products, and verifies that consumers demand diversity in the recommended content. The study analyzes differences in the acceptance of personalized recommendations between practical products and hedonic products and discovers that recommendations of hedonic products are more effective than that of practical products. Based on the research earlier, the study provides suggestions on how to better plan and operate a personalized recommendation system. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How the Validity of the Parallel Inference is Possible: From the Ancient Mohist Diagnose to a Modern Logical Treatment of Its Semantic-Syntactic Structure

The purpose of this paper is to explore the issue of how the validity of the parallel inference (as a type of deductive reasoning) is possible in view of its deep semantic-syntactic structure. I first present a philosophical interpretation of the ancient Mohist treatment of the parallel inference concerning its semantic-syntactic structure. Then, to formally and accurately capture the later Mohist point in this connection for the sake of giving a general condition for the validity of the parallel inference, I suggest a modern logical treatment via an expanded predicate logic account.     

Differences in the micromechanical properties of dendrites and interdendritic regions in superalloys

Statistical analysis of white-light interferometry (WLI) experiments performed on Ni-based single-crystal superalloys (SX) have revealed a different height distribution between the dendritic cores (DCs) and the interdendritic regions (IRs) of the polished samples. The micromechanical property difference is largely ascribed to the uneven distribution of the alloying elements. In this context, possible reasons for this difference are discussed by comparing with different experiment results obtained by previous researchers, and a proposal forecasting the hardness ratio of IRs/DCs is put forward.     

The centroid paradigm: Quantifying feature-based attention in terms of attention filters

This paper elaborates a recent conceptualization of feature-based attention in terms of attention filters (Drew et al., Journal of Vision, 10(10:20), 1–16, 2010) into a general purpose centroid-estimation paradigm for studying feature-based attention. An attention filter is a brain process, initiated by a participant in the context of a task requiring feature-based attention, which operates broadly across space to modulate the relative effectiveness with which different features in the retinal input influence performance. This paper describes an empirical method for quantitatively measuring attention filters. The method uses a “statistical summary representation” (SSR) task in which the participant strives to mouse-click the centroid of a briefly flashed cloud composed of items of different types (e.g., dots of different luminances or sizes), weighting some types of items more strongly than others. In different attention conditions, the target weights for different item types in the centroid task are varied. The actual weights exerted on the participant’s responses by different item types in any given attention condition are derived by simple linear regression. Because, on each trial, the centroid paradigm obtains information about the relative effectiveness of all the features in the display, both target and distractor features, and because the participant’s response is a continuous variable in each of two dimensions (versus a simple binary choice as in most previous paradigms), it is remarkably powerful. The number of trials required to estimate an attention filter is an order of magnitude fewer than the number required to investigate much simpler concepts in typical psychophysical attention paradigms.     

团体心理咨询对提高大学生自信心的效果研究

本研究探讨了团体心理咨询在提高大学生自信心方面的作用。我们精心设计了团体心理咨询活动的过程,并在活动前后用五种量表对团体成员进行了测量。通过分析量表测量结果及其他定性研究方法,我们发现：（１）团体心理咨询可以有效地提高大学生的自信心。（２）团体心理咨询在发展性目标上也是有效的。本研究结果对今后的团体心理咨询研究及其应用具有一定的参考价值。     

Bird on Dispositions and Antidotes

In The Philosophical Quarterly , 48 (1998), Alexander Bird raises an objection against the conditional analysis of dispositions: where an 'antidote' is present all the supposed conditions for manifestation of a disposition are fulfilled but the manifestation does not occur. But Bird's argument suffers from equivocation. If we spell out properly whether the disposition's conditions are to include the presence of the antidote or not, the apparent counter-examples disappear. So his examples do not undermine the conditional analysis of dispositions; they show merely that we need to be careful about describing the examples consistently.