Applied Research and Zoo Education: The Evolution and Evaluation of a Public Talks Program using Unobtrusive Video Recording of Visitor Behavior

ABSTRACT

The provision of high-quality conservation education has become a priority for modern zoos. This can be delivered in a number of differing ways to account for differences in learning styles and prior knowledge of zoo visitors. At Chester Zoo (United Kingdom), a team of full-time and highly trained interpreters (known as presenters) deliver a diverse public talks program every day of the year. Although these talks attract a large audience, little was understood about their impact on the visitor. As a result, an extensive, unobtrusive study using video recording equipment was undertaken to assess visitor behavior. Results suggest that visitor attentiveness was much higher among those individuals who found themselves in a better viewing position (where they could see the animal and presenter). Visitors who were in poor-visibility positions showed less attention than visitors who were observed under control conditions, without an accompanying talk, indicating a high environmental component to learning potential. When interactive elements were included in a talk (such as an animal feed or enrichment activity) attentiveness was dramatically increased. More crucially, however, was that during talks where there was no interactivity or animals were inactive, attentiveness fell to below control levels, suggesting that heightened visitor expectations created by the anticipation for the talk were not being met—a serious barrier to learning. These findings offer a series of measures that can be taken to improve the educational impact of a zoo talks program whilst, at the same time, providing a better quality experience for zoo visitors.     

The role of similarity in the development of categorization

Early in development, humans exhibit the ability to form categories and overlook differences for the sake of generality. This ability poses several important questions: How does categorization arise? What processes underlie category formation? And how are categories mentally represented? We argue that the development of categorization is grounded in perceptual and attentional mechanisms capable of detecting multiple correspondences or similarities in the environment. We present evidence that: (a) similarity can drive categorization early in development; and (b) early in development, humans have powerful learning mechanisms that enable them to extract regularities in the environment. We conclude that, despite remaining challenges, the similarity-based approach offers a promising account of the development of categorization.     

Towards a distributed account of conceptual knowledge

How is conceptual knowledge organized and represented? Are domains (such as living things) and categories (such as tools, fruit) represented explicitly or can domain and category structure emerge out of a distributed system? Taken at face value, evidence from brain-damaged patients and neuroimaging studies suggests that conceptual knowledge is explicitly structured in independent content-based stores. However, recent analyses of the fine-grained details of semantic impairments, combined with research using connectionist modelling, suggest a different picture - one in which concepts are represented as patterns of activation over multiple semantic properties within a unitary distributed system. Within this context, category-specific deficits emerge as a result of differences in the structure and content of concepts rather than from explicit divisions of conceptual knowledge in separate stores.     

Risk Factors for Attempting Suicide in Prisoners

We wished to examine determinants of suicidal behavior in prisoners. 903 male prisoners had a psychiatric interview which included various psychometric tests. Suicide attempters were compared with prisoners who had never attempted suicide. Significantly more of the attempters had a history of psychiatric disorder, substance abuse, a family history of suicidal behavior, convictions for violent crime, had exhibited aggressive behavior in jail, and had higher BGLHA aggression scores. A similar pattern of risk factors was found for prisoners with suicidal ideation. A lifetime history of attempting suicide, or of having suicidal ideation, is frequent in prisoners. Risk factors include family, developmental, aggression, personality, psychiatric, and substance abuse factors.     

Elementary Extensions of External Classes in a Nonstandard Universe

In continuation of our study of HST, Hrbaek set theory (a nonstandard set theory which includes, in particular, the ZFC Replacement and Separation schemata in the st--language, and Saturation for well-orderable families of internal sets), we consider the problem of existence of elementary extensions of inner "external" subclasses of the HST universe.We show that, given a standard cardinal , any set R * generates an "internal" class S(R) of all sets standard relatively to elements of R, and an "external" class L[S(R)] of all sets constructible (in a sense close to the Gödel constructibility) from sets in S(R). We prove that under some mild saturation-like requirements for R the class L[S(R)] models a certain -version of HST including the principle of +-saturation; moreover, in this case L[S(R)] is an elementary extension of L[S(R)] in the st--language whenever sets R R satisfy the requirements.     

A Longitudinal Study of Vocational Maturity and Ethnic Identity Development

This study examines longitudinally the development of vocational maturity and ethnic identity in a majority and a minority group of 641 students in the Province of Québec, Canada. Ethnic identity and four components of vocational maturity were assessed in four cohorts at three times of measurement. Results show clearly different developmental trends in both ethnic identity and in vocational maturity for majority and minority groups: The minority group showed a linear increase in ethnic identity over time, while the majority group showed a decrease starting with the second time of measurement; vocational maturity components showed a more complex pattern of changes but demonstrated that minority participants matured significantly earlier than those from the majority group. There was a positive relationship between ethnic identity and vocational maturity for both groups.     

An MMPI typology of cocaine abusers.

Three types were found in a cluster analysis of scores on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) of 100 men voluntarily presenting for treatment of cocaine abuse. Type 1 (n = 59) had a mean MMPI profile consistent with the hypothesized grouping of persons who self-medicate with cocaine as a means of overcoming depression. The relatively normal mean MMPI profile obtained by Type 2 (n = 37) suggested little indication of significant psychopathology. Type 3's (n = 4) mean MMPI profile suggested either severe disturbance or profile invalidity. Types were found to differ in the nature of drug use, reactions to cocaine, education level, and social class, but not on the scales of the Adjective Check List.     

The effect of an additional task on recall accuracy in serial short term memory: Preemption of rehearsal or acquisition?

In a serial short term memory test, being either visual or auditory, Ss got the additional instruction to make immediate binary classification responses (BcRs) to those items that occured after a marker which was presented somewhere in the list. The results show a general negative effect of BcRs on recall accuracy of both visually and auditory presented lists i.e. both on items which had been classified during presentation and on those which had occured before the marker arrived. The findings are contrary to the view that BcRs preclude acquisition of the items, but the hypothesis is confirmed that BcRs preempt intra trial rehearsal.