Cultivating expertise in informal reasoning.

People generally develop some degree of competence in general informal reasoning and argument skills, but how do they go beyond this to attain higher expertise? Ericsson has proposed that high-level expertise in a variety of domains is cultivated through a specific type of practice, referred to as "deliberate practice." Applying this framework yields the empirical hypothesis that high-level expertise in informal reasoning is the outcome of extensive, deliberate practice. This paper reports results from two studies evaluating the hypothesis. University student participants completed 12 weeks of deliberate practice in informal reasoning. Quantity of practice was recorded by computer, and additionally assessed via self-report. The hypothesis was supported: Students in both studies showed a large improvement, and practice, as measured by computer, was related to amount of improvement in informal reasoning. These findings support adopting a deliberate practice approach when attempting to teach or learn expertise in informal reasoning.     

The I of the storm-relations between self and conscious emotion experience: comment on Lambie and Marcel (2002)

J. A. Lambie and A. J. Marcel (2002) outlined a framework for understanding varieties of conscious emotion experience. In their analysis, the self plays an important role in conscious emotion experience. In this critique, however, the authors propose that Lambie and Marcel's presentation of the self needs further specification if it is to account for varieties of conflicted emotional experience, particularly those characteristic of dissociative states. The authors propose that a more elaborated self-construct is necessary to account for these phenomena involving either the "splitting off of significant self-related concerns or the existence of multiple self-constructs. These arguments are illustrated by clinical and subclinical case examples.     

Perceptions of Ethical Behaviour among Business Faculty in Canada

Faculty members at Canadian business schools were surveyed regarding their ethical perceptions of behaviours related to undergraduate instruction. Fifty-five behavioural statements were listed and respondents were asked to rate the extent to which they felt each behaviour was ethical or unethical. The only item that respondents endorsed as unequivocally unethical (90% indicated it was definitely unethical) was Becoming sexually involved with an undergraduate in one of your classes. We also compared the results of our sample to those of an American sample. Overall, an interesting pattern of differences emerged between the responses obtained in Canada and the U.S. In general, the direction of the significant differences was such that Canadian professors viewed the behaviours in question as less ethical than did their American counterparts.     

A recurrent connectionist model of group biases

Major biases and stereotypes in group judgments are reviewed and modeled from a recurrent connectionist perspective. These biases are in the areas of group impression formation (illusory correlation), group differentiation (accentuation), stereotype change (dispersed vs. concentrated distribution of inconsistent information), and group homogeneity. All these phenomena are illustrated with well-known experiments, and simulated with an autoassociative network architecture with linear activation update and delta learning algorithm for adjusting the connection weights. All the biases were successfully reproduced in the simulations. The discussion centers on how the particular simulation specifications compare with other models of group biases and how they may be used to develop novel hypotheses for testing the connectionist modeling approach and, more generally, for improving theorizing in the field of social biases and stereotype change.     

Underemployment in America: Measurement and Evidence

An important way in which employment hardship has come to be conceptualized and measured is as underemployment. Underemployment goes beyond mere unemployment (being out of a job and looking for work), to include those who have given up looking for work, part-time workers whose employer(s) cannot give them full-time work, and the working poor. To provide needed background for the other articles in this special issue, we trace the history of the concept of underemployment, review existing empirical literature, offer a critique of the measurement of underemployment as conventionally operationalized, and provide up-to-date evidence on the trends and correlates of underemployment in the United States.     

Inflated and contradictory category naming deficits in Alzheimer's disease?

Although some studies have documented category-specific deficits in patients with Alzheimer's disease, others have not. One possible reason is that where control groups have been used in previous studies, they have performed at ceiling; and this may spuriously affect the incidence and type of deficit reported (especially with common statistical techniques such as z-scores). We examined this issue in 18 Alzheimer's patients and 26 elderly controls, who named two picture sets: a simple set that typically produces ceiling effects (Set 1) and one that produces a normal distribution in controls (Set 2). Sets 1 and 2 produced inconsistent and even contradictory deficits in the same patients. The results also show that ceiling effects may inflate the number of living thing deficits and hence, distort the reported ratio of living to nonliving cases.     

Differentiating location- and distance-based processes in memory for time: An ERP study

Memory for the time of events may benefit from reconstructive, location-based, and distance-based processes, but these processes are difficult to dissociate with behavioral methods. Neuropsychological research has emphasized the contribution of prefrontal brain mechanisms to memory for time but has not clearly differentiated location- from distance-based processing. The present experiment recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while subjects completed two different temporal memory tests, designed to emphasize either location- or distance-based processing. The subjects’ reports of locationbased versus distance-based strategies and the reaction time pattern validated our experimental manipulation. Late (800–1,800 msec) frontal ERP effects were related to location-based processing. The results provide support for a two-process theory of memory for time and suggest that frontal memory mechanisms are specifically related to reconstructive, location-based processing.     

Visual perspective taking for avatars in a Simon task

In modern digital applications, users often interact with virtual representations of themselves or others, called avatars. We examined how these avatars and their perspectives influence stimulus–response compatibility in a Simon task. Participants responded to light/dark blue stimuli with left/right key presses in the presence of a task-irrelevant avatar. Changes in stimulus–response compatibility were used to quantify changes in the mental representation of the task and perspective taking toward this avatar. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that perspective taking for an avatar occurred in orthogonal stimulus–response mappings, causing a compatibility effect from the avatar’s point of view. In the following two experiments we introduced a larger variety of angular disparities between the participant and avatar. In Experiment 3, the Simon effect with lateralized stimulus positions remained largely unaffected by the avatar, pointing toward an absence of perspective taking. In Experiment 4, after avatar hand movements were added in order to strengthen the participants’ sense of agency over the avatar, a spatial compatibility effect from the avatar’s perspective was observed again, and hints of the selective use of perspective taking on a trial-by-trial basis were found. Overall, the results indicate that users can incorporate the perspective of an avatar into their mental representation of a situation, even when this perspective is unnecessary to complete a task, but that certain contextual requirements have to be met.     

Knowledge level learning and the power law: A soar model of skill acquisition in scheduling

Zusammenfassung. Das hier vorgestellte Modell lernt graduell, Planungsaufgaben aus der Klasse der Maschinenbelegungsprobleme (job-shop-scheduling problems) zu lösen. Mit Hilfe des Chunking-Mechanismus von Soar wird episodisches Wissen über die Belegungsreihenfolge von Aufträgen auf Maschinen memoriert. Bei der Entwicklung des Modells wurden zahlreiche qualitative (z. B. Transfereffekte) und quantitative Befunde (z. B. Bearbeitungszeiten) aus einer früheren empirischen Untersuchung berücksichtigt. In einer Validierungsstudie wurden dieselben Aufgaben von 14 Probanden und dem Modell bearbeitet. Die Passung von Simulationsdaten und empirischen Ergebnissen fiel insgesamt gut aus. Allerdings löst das Modell die Aufgaben schneller und zeigt auch einen etwas besseren Lernverlauf als die Probanden. Das Modell liefert eine Erklärung für das Rauschen, das typischerweise bei Bearbeitungszeiten zu beobachten ist: es handelt sich um erworbenes Wissen, das mehr oder weniger gut und auch unterschiedlich häufig auf neue Situationen übertragen wird. Der Lernverlauf der Probanden entspricht nur für aggregierte Daten einer Potenzfunktion (power law). Der vorgestellte Mechanismus zeigt, wie ein symbolisches Modell der Informationsverarbeitung graduelle Verhaltensänderungen generiert und wie der offensichtliche Erwerb allgemeiner Prozeduren ohne explizites Lernen von deklarativen Regeln erfolgen kann. Es wird nahegelegt, daß es sich hier um die Modellierung einer Form impliziten Lernens handelt. Summary. The model presented here gradually learns how to perform a job-shop scheduling task. It uses Soar's chunking mechanism to acquire episodic memories about the order to schedule jobs. The model was based on many qualitative (e.g., transfer effects) and quantitative (e.g., solution time) regularities found in previously collected data. The model was tested with new data where scheduling tasks were given to the model and to 14 subjects. The model generally fit these data with the restrictions that the model performs the task (in simulated time) faster than the subjects, and its performance improves somewhat more quickly than the subjects' performance. The model provides an explanation of the noise typically found in problem solving times - it is the result of learning actual pieces of knowledge that transfer more or less to new situations but rarely by an average amount. Only when the data are averaged (i.e., over subjects) does the smooth power law appear. This mechanism demonstrates how symbolic models can exhibit a gradual change in behavior and how the apparent acquisition of general procedures can be performed without resorting to explicit declarative rule generation. We suggest that this may represent a type of implicit learning.