Application of Yoga as a Spiritual Practice to Enhance Counselor Wellness and Effectiveness

In this article, we explore potential benefits of yoga, an ancient Indian tradition for spiritual growth and development, for counselors. Counselors use themselves as instruments to support clients and are constantly exposed to the traumatic experiences of clients, which may leave them susceptible to secondary traumatic stress or compassion fatigue (Shallcross, 2011). Yoga can help counselors not only in achieving holistic wellness but also in developing a way of being consistent with the characteristics of an effective counselor. Furthermore, yoga, as a spiritual practice, can empower counselors to embark on a spiritual journey driven by their own personal experiences.     

Acquiring verbal reference: The interplay of cognitive,linguistic, and general learning capacities

Verbal reference is the ability to use language to communicate about objects, events, or ideas, even if they are not witnessed directly, such as past events or faraway places. It rests on a three-way link between words, their referents, and mental representations of those referents. A foundational human capacity, verbal reference extends the communicative power of language beyond the here-and-now, enabling access to language-mediated learning and thus fueling cognitive development. In the current review, we consider how and when verbal reference develops. The existing literature suggests that verbal reference emerges around infants’ first birthdays and becomes increasingly robust by their second. In discussing the powerful developmental advantages of acquiring verbal reference we propose that this achievement requires a dynamic interplay among infants’ cognitive and language development, fueled by general learning capacities. We close by describing new research directions, aimed at advancing our understanding of how verbal reference emerges.     

Tapping into the interplay of lexical and number knowledge using fast mapping: A longitudinal eye-tracking study with two-year-olds

Language skills and mathematical competencies are argued to influence each other during development. While a relation between the development of vocabulary size and mathematical skills is already documented in the literature, this study further examines how children’s ability to map a novel word to an unknown object as well as their ability to retain this word from memory may be related to their knowledge of number words. Twenty-five children were tested longitudinally (at 30 and at 36 months of age) using an eye-tracking-based fast mapping task, the Give-a-Number task, and standardized measures of vocabulary. The results reveal that children’s ability to create and retain a mental representation of a novel word was related to number knowledge at 30 months, but not at 36 months while vocabulary size correlated with number knowledge only at 36 months. These results show that even specific mapping processes are initially related to the acquisition of number words and they speak for a parallelism between the development of lexical and number-concept knowledge despite their semantic and syntactic differences.     

The Persistence of Priming: Exploring Long-lasting Syntactic Priming Effects in Children and Adults

The implicit learning account of syntactic priming proposes that the same mechanism underlies syntactic priming and language development, providing a link between a child and adult language processing. The present experiment tested predictions of this account by comparing the persistence of syntactic priming effects in children and adults. Four-year-olds and adults first described transitive events after hearing transitive primes, constituting an exposure phase that established priming effects for passives. The persistence of this priming effect was measured in a test phase as participants described further transitive events but no longer heard primes. Their production of passives was compared to a baseline group who described the same pictures without any exposure to primes. Neither immediate nor long-term priming effects differed between children and adults but both children and adults showed significant immediate and persistent effects of the priming when the test phase occurred immediately after the exposure phase and when a short delay separated the exposure and test phase. The implications of these results for an implicit learning account of syntactic priming are discussed.     

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.     

SC-IAT范式下中学生良心的内隐性

目的:研究探讨了单类内隐联想测验(Single Category Implicit Association Test,SC-IAT)测量中学生良心的可行性,并分析内隐良心和外显良心的关系。方法:采用E-prime3.0软件编制SC-IAT良心测量程序,测量了中学生内隐良心; 采用青少年良心问卷测量了中学生的外显良心,并运用相关技术分析两者之间的关系。结果:SC-IAT实验中,中学生良心的内隐效应显著,且不存在性别、独生与否、学段、家庭结构、家庭所在地等人口统计学指标上的显著差异; 内隐良心与外显良心之间的相关不显著。结论:(1)中学生良心存在积极内隐效应;(2)外显良心和内隐良心相互分离,是两个不同的建构。     

States of curiosity and interest enhance memory differently in adolescents and in children

Curiosity – broadly defined as the desire to acquire new information – enhances learning and memory in adults. In addition, interest in the information (i.e., when the information is processed) can also facilitate later memory. To date, it is not known how states of pre‐information curiosity and post‐information interest enhance memory in childhood and adolescence. We used a trivia paradigm in which children and adolescents (N = 60, 10–14 years) encoded trivia questions and answers associated with high or low curiosity. States of high pre‐answer curiosity enhanced later memory for trivia answers in both children and adolescents. However, higher positive post‐answer interest enhanced memory for trivia answers beyond the effects of curiosity more strongly in adolescents than in children. These results suggest that curiosity and interest have positive effects on learning and memory in childhood and adolescence, but might need to be harnessed in differential ways across child development to optimize learning.     

Bridging ears and eyes when learning spoken words: On the effects of bilingual experience at 30 months

From the very first moments of their lives, infants selectively attend to the visible orofacial movements of their social partners and apply their exquisite speech perception skills to the service of lexical learning. Here we explore how early bilingual experience modulates children's ability to use visible speech as they form new lexical representations. Using a cross‐modal word‐learning task, bilingual children aged 30 months were tested on their ability to learn new lexical mappings in either the auditory or the visual modality. Lexical recognition was assessed either in the same modality as the one used at learning (‘same modality’ condition: auditory test after auditory learning, visual test after visual learning) or in the other modality (‘cross‐modality’ condition: visual test after auditory learning, auditory test after visual learning). The results revealed that like their monolingual peers, bilingual children successfully learn new words in either the auditory or the visual modality and show cross‐modal recognition of words following auditory learning. Interestingly, as opposed to monolinguals, they also demonstrate cross‐modal recognition of words upon visual learning. Collectively, these findings indicate a bilingual edge in visual word learning, expressed in the capacity to form a recoverable cross‐modal representation of visually learned words.     

Autonomous vehicle safety: Understanding perceptions of pedestrians and bicyclists

Autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies have been rapidly advancing. One benefit of AVs is that the technology could eliminate many driver errors and also mitigate many pedestrian and bicyclist collisions. Real-world AVs have been tested in many cities. Five companies are running around 50 AVs in Pittsburgh, following the autonomous testing guidelines. BikePGH, a non-profit organization located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania conducted a follow-up survey in 2019 (the first survey was conducted in 2017) to understand non-motorists’ opinions of AVs. This study examined how pedestrians and bicyclists perceived AV safety based on their understanding and experiences. At first, this study performed a comparison group test to determine which questions vary by participants’ AV safety rating. The responses were later analyzed with a data mining method known as ‘association rules mining.’ A new performance measure, known as the rule power factor, was then used to identify the significant patterns in the form of rules. The participants also provided their thoughts in responses to the open-ended questions. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modeling algorithm, 40 topic models were developed based on five open-ended questions. The findings show that the non-motorists showed comparatively fewer negative opinions towards AVs than positive assessments. The results also show that perception patterns vary by the participant’s rating on AV safety. Findings of this study would be beneficial for the AV stakeholders in making AVs and roadways safer for non-motorists.     

Multilevel metric rank match for person re-identification

Metric learning is one of the important ways to improve the person re-identification (ReID) accurate, of which triplet loss is the most effect metric learning method. However, triplet loss only ranks the extracted feature at the end of the network, in this paper, we propose a multilevel metric rank match (MMRM) method, which ranks the extracted feature on multilevel of the network. At each rank level, the extracted features are ranked to find the hard sample pairs and the backward dissemination triplet loss. Each rank level has different penalize value to adjust the network, in which the value is bigger with the deeper level of the whole network. Experiment results on CUHK03, Market1501 and DukeMTMC datasets indicate that The MMRM algorithm can outperform the previous state-of-the-arts.