Fitting in: How the intergroup context shapes minority acculturation and achievement

ABSTRACT

Children of immigrants are at risk of underachieving in school with long-lasting consequences for future life-chances. Our research contextualises the achievement gap by examining minority acculturation experiences in daily intergroup contact across different intergroup contexts. Acculturation researchers often find an adaptive advantage for minority youth with an integration-orientation (combining both cultures). But findings from Europe are inconclusive. Looking beyond individual differences in acculturation-orientations, this review shifts focus to the intergroup context of minority acculturation and achievement. We discuss longitudinal, multi-group, multi-level and experimental evidence of the up- and downsides of integration for minority inclusion and success in European societies. Our studies show that both (1) intergroup contact experiences and (2) intergroup ideologies affect achievement – either directly or through the interplay of (3) acculturation-norms, defined as shared views on acculturation in social groups, with individual acculturation-orientations. The findings suggest how schools can reduce achievement gaps through improving intergroup relations.     

Concurrent intramodal learning enhances multisensory responses of symmetric crossmodal learning in robotic audio-visual tracking

Tracking an audio-visual target involves integrating spatial cues about target position from both modalities. Such sensory cue integration is a developmental process in the brain involving learning, with neuroplasticity as its underlying mechanism. We present a Hebbian learning-based adaptive neural circuit for multi-modal cue integration. The circuit temporally correlates stimulus cues within each modality via intramodal learning as well as symmetrically across modalities via crossmodal learning to independently update modality-specific neural weights on a sample-by-sample basis. It is realised as a robotic agent that must orient towards a moving audio-visual target. It continuously learns the best possible weights required for a weighted combination of auditory and visual spatial target directional cues that is directly mapped to robot wheel velocities to elicit an orientation response. Visual directional cues are noise-free and continuous but arising from a relatively narrow receptive field while auditory directional cues are noisy and intermittent but arising from a relatively wider receptive field. Comparative trials in simulation demonstrate that concurrent intramodal learning improves both the overall accuracy and precision of the orientation responses of symmetric crossmodal learning. We also demonstrate that symmetric crossmodal learning improves multisensory responses as compared to asymmetric crossmodal learning. The neural circuit also exhibits multisensory effects such as sub-additivity, additivity and super-additivity.     

Developmental Changes in Strategies for Gathering Evidence About Biological Kinds

How do people gather samples of evidence to learn about the world? Adults often prefer to sample evidence from diverse sources—for example, choosing to test a robin and a turkey to find out if something is true of birds in general. Children below age 9, however, often do not consider sample diversity, instead treating non-diverse samples (e.g., two robins) and diverse samples as equivalently informative. The current study (N = 247) found that this discontinuity stems from developmental changes in standards for evaluating evidence—younger children chose to learn from samples that best approximate idealized views of what category members are supposed to be like (e.g., the fastest cheetahs), with a gradual shift across age toward samples that cover more within-category variation (e.g., cheetahs of varying speeds). These findings have implications for the relation between conceptual structure and inductive reasoning, and for the mechanisms underlying inductive reasoning more generally.     

浅论伊儒会通——以王岱舆、刘智为观察点

从明末至清末,中国伊斯兰教界发起了一场以译撰为特点,以会通儒家与伊斯兰教为内容的自觉文化活动,期间涌现了许多思想家,而王岱舆、刘智是其中的杰出代表。王岱舆首开了会通活动,而刘智则将会通活动推向了最高潮,他们的著作,无论在会通立场、会通方法、乃至理论体系构建方面,都进行了积极探索,为同时代乃至后代学者提供了有益的借鉴,为伊斯兰教中国化做出了巨大贡献。     

Feature centrality and property induction

A feature is central to a concept to the extent that other features depend on it. Four studies tested the hypothesis that people will project a feature from a base concept to a target concept to the extent that they believe the feature is central to the two concepts. This centrality hypothesis implies that feature projection is guided by a principle that aims to maximize the structural commonality between base and target concepts. Participants were told that a category has two or three novel features. One feature was the most central in that more properties depended on it. The extent to which the target shared the feature’s dependencies was manipulated by varying the similarity of category pairs. Participants’ ratings of the likelihood that each feature would hold in the target category support the centrality hypothesis with both natural kind and artifact categories and with both well-specified and vague dependency structures.     

The Paradox Between Integration and Perceived Discrimination Among American Muslims

Muslim Americans are increasingly integrated into American life, displaying high socioeconomic status, political participation, and adherence to American values. However, they are evaluated more negatively than many other racial, ethnic, and religious minorities and are frequent targets of discrimination. This article examines the mismatch between the integration of Muslims and their poor reception. Drawing on theories of cultural fluency and cognitive dissonance, we argue that cultural integration can exacerbate, rather than mitigate, perceived discrimination because integrated individuals are socialized to expect fair treatment and can recognize and decode even subtle forms of discrimination due to high levels of cultural and language fluency. Using three nationally representative surveys and an opt-in, online study of American Muslims between 2007 and 2017, we find that integrated Muslims are consistently more likely than their counterparts to report individual- and group-level societal and political discrimination. The paradox between adopting the host culture and feeling marginalized poses a challenge to the assumption that integration naturally leads to a sense of belonging among minorities, with important implications for liberal democracies.     

Conceptual Knowledge,Procedural Knowledge,and Metacognition in Routine and Nonroutine Problem Solving

When, how, and why students use conceptual knowledge during math problem solving is not well understood. We propose that when solving routine problems, students are more likely to recruit conceptual knowledge if their procedural knowledge is weak than if it is strong, and that in this context, metacognitive processes, specifically feelings of doubt, mediate interactions between procedural and conceptual knowledge. To test these hypotheses, in two studies (Ns = 64 and 138), university students solved fraction and decimal arithmetic problems while thinking aloud; verbal protocols and written work were coded for overt uses of conceptual knowledge and displays of doubt. Consistent with the hypotheses, use of conceptual knowledge during calculation was not significantly positively associated with accuracy, but was positively associated with displays of doubt, which were negatively associated with accuracy. In Study 1, participants also explained solutions to rational arithmetic problems; using conceptual knowledge in this context was positively correlated with calculation accuracy, but only among participants who did not use conceptual knowledge during calculation, suggesting that the correlation did not reflect “online” effects of using conceptual knowledge. In Study 2, participants also completed a nonroutine problem-solving task; displays of doubt on this task were positively associated with accuracy, suggesting that metacognitive processes play different roles when solving routine and nonroutine problems. We discuss implications of the results regarding interactions between procedural knowledge, conceptual knowledge, and metacognitive processes in math problem solving.