4~8年级学生分数数量表征的准确性及形式

在分数学习中,分数数量表征是非常重要的方面。本研究利用数字线估计任务对四到八年级学生分数数量表征的情况进行探索。研究结果表明：随着年级升高,被试分数数量表征的准确性也随之提高;被试对单位分数和非单位分数表征的准确性存在显著差异,表现为对单位分数表征的准确性显著高于对非单位分数的表征,这种差异在低年级显著,随着年级的增长,差异逐渐消失;四到八年级学生在0~3数字线上,对分数数量的表征表现为线性形式而非对数形式,且这种线性表征形式是在六年级开始出现并随着年龄增长逐渐发展起来的。中西方儿童在分数数量表征的准确性和形式上有相似的发展路径,但是在表征准确性上中国儿童更高、线性形式出现年级上中国儿童可能更早。     

Adaptive warning signals adjusted to driver passenger conversation: Impact of system awareness on behavioral adaptations

The study investigated behavioral adaptation caused by warning signals that adaptively support drivers engaged in a passenger conversation. Novel advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) could monitor the driver state to provide warnings adjusted to the driver’s current need for support. While first research indicates positive effects of dynamically adjusting ADAS, the overall safety potential of such adaptive systems remains unclear as little is known about adverse behavioral effects. Occasional inappropriate support due to an incorrect prediction of the current driver state might lead to critical situations when drivers are aware of the adaptive nature of the system and thus rely on the expected system behavior. To better understand behavioral adaptation to dynamically adjusting warnings, 46 participants driving on a test track reacted to two types of warnings (auditory, vibrotactile-auditory) while engaging in driver-passenger conversation or not. In a compensating warning strategy, vibrotactile-auditory warnings were displayed during conversations and auditory warnings in situations without conversation. This strategy was compared to a non-compensating warning strategy in which these assignments were reversed. The impact of behavioral adaptation was measured by considering reactions to simulated failures of these strategies. The role of system awareness for behavioral adaptation was investigated by manipulating awareness of these warning strategies across groups. We found that vibrotactile-auditory warnings reduced the detrimental effects of conversation on reaction times. Crucially, adverse behavioral adaptation was observed whenever an expected vibrotactile-auditory warning was replaced by an auditory warning but this effect was restricted to drivers in the awareness group. The results show that adaptive warning signals optimize the effectiveness of warnings during driver-passenger conversation but adverse behavioral adaptation develops when drivers are aware of the underlying warning strategy. This implies that future adaptive systems are less likely to be associated with behavioral adaptation if the adaptive nature of the system remains unnoticeable to the driver. Our findings could be used for developing and optimizing user-centered ADAS.     

时间赋义对数字空间表征的影响：来自数字线估计任务的证据

数字线估计任务的大量研究以纯数字为研究对象而忽视了赋义数字。本研究以Siegler等的数字线估计任务为原型,探讨在对数字时间赋义条件下小学二、四和六年级儿童的数字表征形式是否发生变化。结果表明,小学二年级是0-1000范围内数字表征从对数形式转换为线性形式的转折点,对数字赋予时间含义后,三个年级均出现了赋义效应。在线性模型和对数模型中时间赋义的作用相反,时间赋义表现出抑线升对（抑制线性模型提升对数模型解释力）的效果。     

Do people treat missing information adaptively when making inferences?

When making inferences, people are often confronted with situations with incomplete information. Previous research has led to a mixed picture about how people react to missing information. Options include ignoring missing information, treating it as either positive or negative, using the average of past observations for replacement, or using the most frequent observation of the available information as a placeholder. The accuracy of these inference mechanisms depends on characteristics of the environment. When missing information is uniformly distributed, it is most accurate to treat it as the average, whereas when it is negatively correlated with the criterion to be judged, treating missing information as if it were negative is most accurate. Whether people treat missing information adaptively according to the environment was tested in two studies. The results show that participants were sensitive to how missing information was distributed in an environment and most frequently selected the mechanism that was most adaptive. From these results the authors conclude that reacting to missing information in different ways is an adaptive response to environmental characteristics.     

An age-related view of the role of object and spatial cognitive styles in distance estimation

Distance estimations require identifying characteristics of the object and its spatial surroundings. With the present study, we examined the relationship between visual object and spatial (cognitive) styles and distance estimations in children and adults. Participants were administered the Object-Spatial Imagery Questionnaire (OSIQ) and two distance estimation tasks—one required estimating reach distance (reach task [RT]) from the self and the other required estimating distance between targets (perceptual task[PT]). Overall, our findings indicated that age was the best predictor of estimation for RT and PT tasks, and individuals were more accurate in the task requiring an egocentric frame of reference (RT) compared to tasks that require allocentric judgements (PT). In addition, children had higher ratings on cognitive styles in comparison to adults, but both object and spatial styles only related to RT accuracy in adults. Cognitive styles seem to be associated to distance estimation accuracy, but only when there is a clear preference.     

Cognitive distance of stairways: a multi-stairway investigation

The present study had two major purposes. First it sought to determine to what extent in an earlier study of distance estimation in stairways (Hanyu & Itsukushima, 1995) would generalize to other types of stairway. Second, it sought to examine which hypothesis, information storage or effort, better explain the earlier results, in which people overestimated distance and traversed time estimates. We obtained four distance and time measures: distance estimate, traversal time estimate, mental walking time and actual traversal time. To measure information, we had participants rate each stairway for complexity (simple-complex) and effort (effortless-effortful) before and after the distance and time measurement tasks. The results revealed that the earlier findings (Hanyu & Itsukushima, 1995) did not fully generalize. The results also did not support either the information storage or the effort hypothesis.     

The Isolation, Primacy, and Recency Effects Predicted by an Adaptive LTD/LTP Threshold in Postsynaptic Cells

An item that stands out (is isolated) from its context is better remembered than an item consistent with the context. This isolation effect cannot be accounted for by increased attention, because it occurs when the isolated item is presented as the first item, or by impoverished memory of nonisolated items, because the isolated item is better remembered than a control list consisting of equally different items. The isolation effect is seldom experimentally or theoretically related to the primacy or the recency effects—that is, the improved performance on the first few and last items, respectively, on the serial position curve. The primacy effect cannot easily be accounted for by rehearsal in short-term memory because it occurs when rehearsal is eliminated. This article suggests that the primacy, the recency, and the isolation effects can be accounted for by experience-dependent synaptic plasticity in neural cells. Neurological empirical data suggest that the threshold that determines whether cells will show long-term potentiation (LTP) or long-term depression (LTD) varies as a function of recent postsynaptic activity and that synaptic plasticity is bounded. By implementing an adaptive LTP-LTD threshold in an artificial neural network, the various aspects of the isolation, the primacy, and the recency effects are accounted for, whereas none of these phenomena are accounted for if the threshold is constant. This theory suggests a possible link between the cognitive and the neurological levels.     

On the Exclusivity Implicature of ‘Or’ or on the Meaning of Eating Strawberries

This paper is a contribution to the program of constructing formal representations of pragmatic aspects of human reasoning. We propose a formalization within the framework of Adaptive Logics of the exclusivity implicature governing the connective ‘or’.Keywords: exclusivity implicature, Adaptive Logics.     

High-dimensional maximum marginal likelihood item factor analysis by adaptive quadrature

Although the Bock–Aitkin likelihood-based estimation method for factor analysis of dichotomous item response data has important advantages over classical analysis of item tetrachoric correlations, a serious limitation of the method is its reliance on fixed-point Gauss-Hermite (G-H) quadrature in the solution of the likelihood equations and likelihood-ratio tests. When the number of latent dimensions is large, computational considerations require that the number of quadrature points per dimension be few. But with large numbers of items, the dispersion of the likelihood, given the response pattern, becomes so small that the likelihood cannot be accurately evaluated with the sparse fixed points in the latent space. In this paper, we demonstrate that substantial improvement in accuracy can be obtained by adapting the quadrature points to the location and dispersion of the likelihood surfaces corresponding to each distinct pattern in the data. In particular, we show that adaptive G-H quadrature, combined with mean and covariance adjustments at each iteration of an EM algorithm, produces an accurate fast-converging solution with as few as two points per dimension. Evaluations of this method with simulated data are shown to yield accurate recovery of the generating factor loadings for models of upto eight dimensions. Unlike an earlier application of adaptive Gibbs sampling to this problem by Meng and Schilling, the simulations also confirm the validity of the present method in calculating likelihood-ratio chi-square statistics for determining the number of factors required in the model. Finally, we apply the method to a sample of real data from a test of teacher qualifications.     

Probabilistic Subset Conjunction

The authors introduce subset conjunction as a classification rule by which an acceptable alternative must satisfy some minimum number of criteria. The rule subsumes conjunctive and disjunctive decision strategies as special cases. Subset conjunction can be represented in a binary-response model, for example, in a logistic regression, using only main effects or only interaction effects. This results in a confounding of the main and interaction effects when there is little or no response error. With greater response error, a logistic regression, even if it gives a good fit to data, can produce parameter estimates that do not reflect the underlying decision process. The authors propose a model in which the binary classification of alternatives into acceptable/unacceptable categories is based on a probabilistic implementation of a subset-conjunctive process. The satisfaction of decision criteria biases the odds toward one outcome or the other. The authors then describe a two-stage choice model in which a (possibly large) set of alternatives is first reduced using a subset-conjunctive rule, after which an alternative is selected from this reduced set of items. They describe methods for estimating the unobserved consideration probabilities from classification and choice data, and illustrate the use of the models for cancer diagnosis and consumer choice. They report the results of simulations investigating estimation accuracy, incidence of local optima, and model fit. The authors thank the Editor, the Associate Editor, and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions, and also thank Asim Ansari and Raghuram Iyengar for their helpful comments. They also thank Sawtooth Software, McKinsey and Company, and Intelliquest for providing the PC choice data, and the University of Wisconsin for making the breast-cancer data available at the machine learning archives.