Priming productive study strategies with preparatory quizzes in an engineering course

One approach to encourage productive study strategies is to incorporate preparatory quizzes (or pre‐quizzes) in which students are required to submit answers to questions before the underlying material is covered in class. In the present study, students took an introductory mechanical engineering class that either included pre‐quizzes (treatment group) or did not (control group). Students in the treatment group visited the online textbook more often and earlier in advance of deadlines, indicating better management of their study time—behaviors that have been shown to be productive study strategies. They also performed better in the course, indicating that techniques intended to prime productive study strategies can pay off. Finally, measures of productive learning strategies correlated with measures of course performance for both groups. These findings support the pretesting principle, which holds that students study more effectively and learn better when they take practice tests before a lesson.     

Personality Pathology and Substance Misuse in Later Life: Perspectives from Interviewer-, Self-, and Informant-Reports

Research indicates a robust association between personality and substance use and misuse. The high prevalence and pervasive detrimental impacts of alcohol use disorder (AUD) and smoking of tobacco necessitate more studies designed to identify factors closely associated with these outcomes in specific populations. The analyses reported in the present paper concern the relative utilities of five measures of personality and personality pathology rated by three sources (self, informant, and interviewer) in predicting AUD and regular smoking in a representative sample of 987 older adults, an understudied and uniquely vulnerable population. All measures and sources contributed to the predictions, with notable parallels as well as some important differences identified across substances and sources of information. In particular, low agreeableness robustly predicted AUD and smoking across self- and informant-reports. High interviewer-rated borderline personality pathology also strongly predicted AUD. Model fit indices suggested that measures of personality and personality pathology have stronger utility in predicting AUD as compared to regular smoking. These findings have important implications for the assessment of older adults in research and clinical settings and for the understanding of enduring risk factors for substance misuse later in life. Multi-source personality information is valuable for generating a complete picture of the relationship between personality and substance misuse.

     

Female Offenders Under Community Supervision: A Phenomenological Analysis

In this phenomenological study, we examined the lived experiences of 10 female offenders under community supervision. Findings include five essential themes. We propose clinical implications and actionable service recommendations for clinical mental health counselors working with this population.     

Selective Mutism and Its Relations to Social Anxiety Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder

In current classification systems, selective mutism (SM) is included in the broad anxiety disorders category. Indeed, there is abundant evidence showing that anxiety, and social anxiety in particular, is a prominent feature of SM. In this article, we point out that autism spectrum problems in addition to anxiety problems are sometimes also implicated in SM. To build our case, we summarize evidence showing that SM, social anxiety disorder (SAD), and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are allied clinical conditions and share communalities in the realm of social difficulties. Following this, we address the role of a prototypical class of ASD symptoms, restricted and repetitive behaviors and interests (RRBIs), which are hypothesized to play a special role in the preservation and exacerbation of social difficulties. We then substantiate our point that SM is sometimes more than an anxiety disorder by addressing its special link with ASD in more detail. Finally, we close by noting that the possible involvement of ASD in SM has a number of consequences for clinical practice with regard to its classification, assessment, and treatment of children with SM and highlight a number of directions for future research.

     

Pigeons are attracted to a perceived gain without an actual gain

Reference dependence refers to the reduced value of a reward that is less than expected, or the added value of a reward that is greater than expected. There is evidence that when pigeons are offered an alternative that has 1 pellet versus an alternative that has 2 pellets, but one of the two pellets offered will be removed, the pigeons prefer the originally presented 1 pellet (loss aversion). In the present research, we tested for the opposite effect (gain attraction). In Experiments 1 and 2, pigeons could choose between 2 pellets, each one on a distinctive background. If they chose the optimal alternative, they received a second pellet. In Experiment 2, the second pellet obtained was the one not initially chosen (a task sometimes referred to as the ephemeral reward task). Pigeons learned to choose optimally in both experiments. In Experiment 3, we tested the pigeons for reference dependence. Pigeons were given an alternative that offered them one pellet or two pellets, if they chose the one-pellet alternative, they received an additional pellet, and if they chose the two-pellet alternative, they received the two pellets. In keeping with the reference dependence hypothesis, the pigeons preferred the 1-pellet alternative that gave them an extra pellet. These effects are related to similar findings with humans, including the endowment effect.

     

The Relativistic Car: Applying Metaethics to the Debate about Self-Driving Vehicles

Almost all participants in the debate about the ethics of accidents with self-driving cars have so far assumed moral universalism. However, universalism may be philosophically more controversial than is commonly thought, and may lead to undesirable results in terms of non-moral consequences and feasibility. There thus seems to be a need to also start considering what I refer to as the “relativistic car” — a car that is programmed under the assumption that what is morally right, wrong, good, bad, etc. is determined by the moral beliefs of one’s society or culture. My investigation of this idea involves six steps. First, I explain why and how the moral universalism/relativism debate is relevant to the issue of self-driving cars. Second, I argue that there are good reasons to consider accident algorithms that assume relativism. Third, I outline how a relativistic car would be programmed to behave. Fourth, I address what advantages such a car would have, both in terms of its non-moral consequences and feasibility. Fifth, I address the relativistic car’s disadvantages. Finally, I qualify and conclude my considerations.

     

Introduction to the Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spatial Cognition: Cognition and Action in a Plurality of Spaces (ICSC 2021)

Cognitive Processing -     

Academic Dishonesty or Academic Integrity? Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) Techniques to Investigate Positive Integrity in Academic Integrity Research

Journal of Academic Ethics - Is academic integrity research presented from a positive integrity standpoint? This paper uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to explore a data set of...     

Gamma is a Measure of the Accuracy of Predicting Performance on One Item Relative to Another Item,not of the Absolute Performance on an Individual Item Comments on Schraw (1995)

The recent paper by Schraw ( Measures of feeling-of-knowing accuracy: a new look at an old problem , Applied Cognitive Psychology, 1995, 9, 321—332) is flawed by several inaccuracies and by Schraw's failure to distinguish between two fundamentally different aspects of the accuracy of metacognitive predictions: (1) calibration (aka absolute accuracy, defined in terms of whether the predicted value assigned to a single item is followed by the occurrence of that value on the criterion test), and (2) resolution (aka relative accuracy, defined in terms of whether the predicted performance on one item relative to another item is followed by the occurrence of that ordering of the two items on the criterion test). Because of these (and other) problems, his recommendations seem misleading and counterproductive.