The development and analysis of tutorial dialogues in AutoTutor Lite

The goal of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) that interact in natural language is to emulate the benefits that a well-trained human tutor provides to students, by interpreting student answers and appropriately responding in order to encourage elaboration. BRCA Gist is an ITS developed using AutoTutor Lite, a Web-based version of AutoTutor. Fuzzy-trace theory theoretically motivated the development of BRCA Gist, which engages people in tutorial dialogues to teach them about genetic breast cancer risk. We describe an empirical method to create tutorial dialogues and fine-tune the calibration of BRCA Gist’s semantic processing engine without a team of computer scientists. We created five interactive dialogues centered on pedagogic questions such as “What should someone do if she receives a positive result for genetic risk of breast cancer?” This method involved an iterative refinement process of repeated testing with different texts and successively making adjustments to the tutor’s expectations and settings in order to improve performance. The goal of this method was to enable BRCA Gist to interpret and respond to answers in a manner that best facilitated learning. We developed a method to analyze the efficacy of the tutor’s dialogues. We found that BRCA Gist’s assessment of participants’ answers was highly correlated with the quality of the answers found by trained human judges using a reliable rubric. The dialogue quality between users and BRCA Gist predicted performance on a breast cancer risk knowledge test completed after exposure to the tutor. The appropriateness of BRCA Gist’s feedback also predicted the quality of answers and breast cancer risk knowledge test scores.     

Conceptual constraints and mechanisms in children's selective learning

Although we can support Heyes’ call for more research on mechanisms, we disagree that the problem has been ignored as Heyes suggests. We also doubt that basic learning mechanisms are alone sufficient to account for the broad range of findings in the selective social learning literature. Although phylogenetically shared learning mechanisms must support selective social learning, we believe that they must also be guided by top‐down conceptual considerations that may be special to humans. Research to date has been focused on establishing the boundary conditions on selective social learning, with the goal of making generalizations that will constrain theorizing about the character of that special knowledge. This is critical to our understanding of both why and how selective social learning manifests in children.     

Women in the midluteal phase of the menstrual cycle have difficulty suppressing the processing of negative emotional stimuli: An event-related potential study

Emotion regulation deficits have been implicated in anxiety and depressive disorders, and these internalising disorders are more prevalent in women than men. Few electrophysiological studies have investigated sex differences in emotional reactivity and emotion regulation controlling for menstrual phase. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 28 early follicular women, 29 midluteal women, and 27 men who completed an emotion regulation task. A novel finding of increased N2 amplitude during suppression was found for midluteal women compared with men. These findings suggest midluteal women may be significantly less able to suppress cortical processing of negative stimuli compared to men. This ERP finding was complemented by behavioral ratings data which revealed that while both early follicular and midluteal women reported more distress than men, midluteal women also reported greater effort when suppressing their responses than men. P1 and N1 components were increased in midluteal women compared to men regardless of instructional set, suggesting greater early attentional processing. No sex or menstrual phase differences were apparent in P3 or LPP. This study underscores the importance of considering menstrual phase when examining sex differences in the cortical processing of emotion regulation and demonstrates that midluteal women may have deficits in down-regulating their neural and behavioural responses.     

Racialized physical space as cultural product

We argue for incorporating physical space into the psychological study of race. Specifically, we review historical and sociological work explaining how physical space (e.g., houses, rivers, neighborhoods, and nations) has been used to construct race and racial hierarchy, leaving physical space structurally racialized. This structural racialization, we propose, has led people to think of physical space in racial terms, creating mental images of race that include physical space characteristics. We explain how these mental images may influence race‐related psychological processes (e.g., person perception and social identity threat). We also detail evidence that these mental images of racialized space shape how people perceive and interact with space, in ways that likely reinforce its structural racialization. We therefore frame physical space as a cultural product, situating it within the mutually constitutive nature of culture and psyche. This expanded approach to studying race can facilitate a fuller understanding of all the ways in which psychological processes contribute to racial inequality.     

In the Same Ballpark or a Whole New Ball Game? Staff as Raters of Youth Behavior

There is a lack of psychometrically sound tools for measuring youth outcomes in out-of-school time (OST) settings. Consequently, behavior ratings completed by OST staff are being scored as though the raters were teachers, even though cross-informant correlations are notoriously low (meta-analysis r?=?.27). Across 26 schools, 227 students were assessed by both teachers and OST staff using the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment (DESSA) to measure Social Emotional Competence. These 4th and 5th grade students were 50% male; 53% 5th graders; and 51% Latino, 20% Mixed/Other, 11% Black, 11% Asian, and 7% White. In the full sample, OST staff rated children’s behavior more harshly than teachers (p?<?.001; d?=?.32), although the scores were associated (r?=?.31, p?<?.001). Among the ratings completed within the same week, teacher and staff distributions were not statistically different. Teacher and staff ratings had a “medium” correlation (r?=?.42; p?=?.01) and a classification consistency (88%) that exceeded chance by a “moderate” amount (κ?=?.43). Few, if any, studies have previously compared the ratings of the same children by teachers and OST providers. Cross-informant inter-rater reliability between teachers and OST staff was higher than expected on the DESSA.     

Intuition, reason, and metacognition

Dual Process Theories (DPT) of reasoning posit that judgments are mediated by both fast, automatic processes and more deliberate, analytic ones. A critical, but unanswered question concerns the issue of monitoring and control: When do reasoners rely on the first, intuitive output and when do they engage more effortful thinking? We hypothesised that initial, intuitive answers are accompanied by a metacognitive experience, called the Feeling of Rightness (FOR), which can signal when additional analysis is needed. In separate experiments, reasoners completed one of four tasks: conditional reasoning (N = 60), a three-term variant of conditional reasoning (N = 48), problems used to measure base rate neglect (N = 128), or a syllogistic reasoning task (N = 64). For each task, participants were instructed to provide an initial, intuitive response to the problem along with an assessment of the rightness of that answer (FOR). They were then allowed as much time as needed to reconsider their initial answer and provide a final answer. In each experiment, we observed a robust relationship between the FOR and two measures of analytic thinking: low FOR was associated with longer rethinking times and an increased probability of answer change. In turn, FOR judgments were consistently predicted by the fluency with which the initial answer was produced, providing a link to the wider literature on metamemory. These data support a model in which a metacognitive judgment about a first, initial model determines the extent of analytic engagement.     

Developmental reversals in false memory: now you see them, now you don't!

A developmental reversal in false memory is the counterintuitive phenomenon of higher levels of false memory in older children, adolescents, and adults than in younger children. The ability of verbatim memory to suppress this age trend in false memory was evaluated using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Seven and 11-year-old children studied DRM lists either in a standard condition (whole words) that normally produces high levels of false memory or in an alternative condition that should enhance verbatim memory (word fragments). Half the children took 1 recognition test, and the other half took 3 recognition tests. In the single-test condition, the typical age difference in false memory was found for the word condition (higher false memory for 11-year-olds than for 7-year-olds), but in the word fragment condition false memory was lower in the older children. In the word condition, false memory increased over successive recognition tests. Our findings are consistent with 2 principles of fuzzy-trace theory's explanation of false memories: (a) reliance on verbatim rather than gist memory causes such errors to decline with age, and (b) repeated testing increases reliance on gist memory in older children and adults who spontaneously connect meaning across events.     

Perceived risk of female infidelity moderates the relationship between objective risk of female infidelity and sexual coercion in humans (Homo sapiens)

Female extrapair copulation (EPC) can be costly to a woman's long-term romantic partner. If a woman has copulated recently with a man other than her long-term partner, her reproductive tract may contain the sperm of both men, initiating sperm competition (whereby sperm from multiple males compete to fertilize an egg). Should the woman become pregnant, her long-term partner is at risk of cuckoldry-investing unwittingly in offspring to whom he is not genetically related. Previous research in humans (Homo sapiens) and in nonhuman animals suggests that males have evolved tactics such as partner-directed sexual coercion that reduce the risk of cuckoldry. The current research provides preliminary evidence that mated men (n = 223) at greater risk of partner EPC, measured as having spent a greater proportion of time apart from their partner since the couple's last in-pair copulation, more frequently perform partner-directed sexually coercive behaviors. This relationship is moderated, however, by men's perceived risk of partner EPC, such that the correlation between the proportion of time spent apart since last in-pair copulation and sexually coercive behaviors remains significant only for those men who perceive themselves to be at some risk of partner EPC. Discussion addresses limitations of this research and highlights directions for future research investigating the relationship between female EPC and men's partner-directed sexual coercion.     

Using negative reinforcement to increase self-feeding in a child with food selectivity

We examined the effects of a negative reinforcement-based treatment on the self-feeding of 1 child with food selectivity by type and texture. Self-feeding increased when the child could choose to either self-feed 1 bite of a target food or be fed 1 bite of the target food and 5 bites of another food. Possible mechanisms that underlie the effectiveness of the intervention and implications for future research are discussed.     

How to keep on keeping on: Framing civil rights accomplishments to bolster support for egalitarian policies

Drawing attention to historic increases in equality carries the risk of encouraging complacency about the need to further advance equality. This risk may be reduced by carefully framing the interpretation of increased equality. We apply an influential goal-framing model (Fishbach and Zhang, 2008) to test whether framing the accomplishments of the American Civil Rights Movement in terms of progress toward equality vs. commitment to equality influences white Americans' support for further egalitarian policies. In two experiments, we manipulated whether progress or commitment was in mind when participants considered civil rights accomplishments. As hypothesized, participants more strongly supported egalitarian policies when civil rights accomplishments were framed as evidence of commitment to equality than when these same accomplishments were framed as evidence of progress toward equality. We discuss implications for applying the goal-framing model to political goals and the advantages of using experimental methods to study framing processes in social movements.