Curiosity Is Contagious: A Social Influence Intervention to Induce Curiosity

Our actions and decisions are regularly influenced by the social environment around us. Can social cues be leveraged to induce curiosity and affect subsequent behavior? Across two experiments, we show that curiosity is contagious: The social environment can influence people's curiosity about the answers to scientific questions. Participants were presented with everyday questions about science from a popular on-line forum, and these were shown with a high or low number of up-votes as a social cue to popularity. Participants indicated their curiosity about the answers, and they were given an opportunity to reveal a subset of those answers. Participants reported greater curiosity about the answers to questions when the questions were presented with a high (vs. low) number of up-votes, and they were also more likely to choose to reveal the answers to questions with a high (vs. low) number of up-votes. These effects were partially mediated by surprise and by the inferred usefulness of knowledge, with a more dramatic effect of low up-votes in reducing curiosity than of high up-votes in boosting curiosity. Taken together, these results highlight the important role social information plays in shaping our curiosity.     

Safe driving and road-crossing tasks: A particular case of successful transfer of learning

The current study examines whether crucial safe driving skills are associated with safe road-crossing skills as pedestrians. The main research question was whether skills that are acquired from the point of view of a driver are associated with the skills of pedestrians in different platforms or settings. Furthermore, the study examines whether task performance on one platform (driving) primes an operator for task performance on another (road-crossing as a pedestrian) or vice versa. Sixty people took part in this study and completed a demographic questionnaire, a Driving Behavior Questionnaire, a Pedestrian Behavior Scale and two computerized tests – a Hazard Perception Test for Drivers and a Hazard Perception Test for Pedestrians.We found that the better the participants detect hazards on the road as drivers, the better they detect hazards as pedestrians as well, and that most of the participants’ self-reported values regarding their driving and their road-crossing as pedestrians are correlated. The study revealed an association between years of seniority in driving and the number of driving hours per week, and some behavioral variables as pedestrians – meaning that exposure to the road as a driver may be related to safer behavior as a pedestrian.     

Cognitive Evaluation of Machine Learning Agents

Advances in applying statistical Machine Learning (ML) led to several claims of human-level or near-human performance in tasks such as image classification & speech recognition. Such claims are unscientific primarily for two reasons, (1) They incorrectly enforce the notion that task-specific performance can be treated as manifestation of General Intelligence and (2) They are not verifiable as currently there is no set benchmark for measuring human-like cognition in a machine learning agent. Moreover, ML agent’s performance is influenced by knowledge ingested in it by its human designers. Therefore, agent’s performance may not necessarily reflect its true cognition. In this paper, we propose a framework that draws parallels from human cognition to measure machine’s cognition. Human cognitive learning is quite well studied in developmental psychology with frameworks and metrics in place to measure actual learning. To either believe or refute the claims of human-level performance of machine learning agent, we need scientific methodology to measure its cognition. Our framework formalizes incremental implementation of human-like cognitive processes in ML agents with an implicit goal to measure it. The framework offers guiding principles for measuring, (1) Task-specific machine cognition and (2) General machine cognition that spans across tasks. The framework also provides guidelines for building domain-specific task taxonomies to cognitively profile tasks. We demonstrate application of the framework with a case study where two ML agents that perform Vision and NLP tasks are cognitively evaluated.     

Engagement and Interaction: A Comparison Between Supported Employment and ATCs

The interaction and engagement patterns of 13 supported employees and 38 regular Adult Training Centre (ATC) attenders were compared. Data were obtained through direct observation within 13 employment sites and a representative sample of ATC organised activities. Results indicated that individual involvement was significantly higher in employment, compared to ATCs, but that the ATC group experienced significantly more social interaction, mainly due to higher levels of task specific dialogue between individuals and the service staff within ATCs. A breakdown of with whom interactions occurred revealed that individuals in ATCs tended to interact more often with care staff than anyone else. Individuals tended to interact more often during work with their non-disabled co-workers and a substantial proportion of time was spent interacting with the public. These findings suggest that the supported employment option yields advantages for individuals in some key aspects of community integration, compared to ATCs.     

Clinical Supervision of Couple and Family Therapy during COVID-19

This paper addresses the need for a swift transition from in-person clinical supervision to telesupervision during the time of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Five specific areas will be discussed in the effort to enhance the quality of clinical supervision provided to couple and family therapists in training at this time including the following: (1) COVID-19 and the structural changes and technological adaptation of supervision; (2) culturally and contextually sensitive guidelines for clinical supervision during COVID-19; (3) the supervisee’s competence and the clinical supervisory process; (4) the new set of boundaries and the supervisory role; (5) and the supervisory alliance and supervisees’ vulnerabilities in the face of COVID-19.     

Moderating Loss Aversion: Loss Aversion Has Moderators,But Reports of its Death are Greatly Exaggerated

Loss aversion, the principle that losses impact decision making more than equivalent gains, is a fundamental idea in consumer behavior and decision making, though its existence has recently been called into question. Across five unique samples (N_total = 17,720), we tested several moderators of loss aversion, which supported a preference construction account. Across studies, more domain knowledge and experience were associated with lower loss aversion, though people of all knowledge and experience levels were loss averse. Among car buyers, those who knew more about a particular car attribute (e.g., fuel economy) were less loss averse for that attribute but not other attributes (e.g., comfort), consistent with the idea that people with less attribute knowledge are more likely to construct preferences, thereby increasing loss aversion. Additionally, older consumers were more loss averse across different loss aversion measures and studies. We discuss implications for several accounts of loss aversion, including accounts rooted in status quo bias, emotion, or ownership. In addition to discovering loss aversion moderators, we cast doubt on recent claims that loss aversion is a fallacy or is fully explained by status quo bias, risk aversion, or the educated laboratory samples often used to study loss aversion.     

Environnement psycho-technologique (EPT) et comportements d’apprentissage avec les technologies (CAT) : developpement et adaptation française de deux mesures

The 4th industrial revolution and the omnipresence of technologies have largely modified the work context and more specifically the learning process. We postulate the emergence of a new psycho-technological environment, which is characterized by more opportunities to learn and more accessible technologies. To our knowledge, no measurement can capture the perception of psycho-technological environment (PTE) and learning behaviors with technologies (LBT). The aim of this study is therefore to compensate for this lack of tools with the development of French-language. Two studies that combine 389 students were conducted. In the first study, based on a sample of 151 students, two scales were developed via an explanatory factorial analysis. In the second study, based on a sample of 238 students, a confirmatory factorial analysis confirmed the psychometric qualities of our scales. This first validation study shows good validity and fiability with the good psychometric qualities of our scales.     

A secret agent? How infants learn about the identity of objects in a causal scene

Four experiments examined the role of correlations between dynamic and static parts on 12- to 16-month-olds' ability to learn the identity of agents and recipients in a simple causal event. Infants were habituated to events in which objects with a dynamic or static part acted as an agent or a recipient and then were tested with an event in which the part-causal role relations were switched. Experiment 1 revealed that 16-month-olds, but not 12-month-olds, associate a dynamic part with the role of agent and a static part with the role of recipient. Experiment 2 showed that 12- and 16-month-olds do not associate a static part with the role of agent or a dynamic part with the role of recipient. Experiment 3 demonstrated that 14-month-olds will learn the relations presented in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. Experiment 4 revealed that 12-month-olds were able to discriminate the two geometric figures in the events. The results are discussed with respect to infants' developing ability to attend to correlations between dynamic and static cues and the mechanism underlying early object concept acquisition.     

Single unit activity in the medial prefrontal cortex during Pavlovian heart rate conditioning: Effects of peripheral autonomic blockade

Electrical activity was recorded from single neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex of rabbits during differential Pavlovian heart rate (HR) conditioning. A heterogeneous population of cells were found, some of which showed CS-evoked increases and others CS-evoked decreases in discharge, while some cells were biphasic. A subset of cells also showed trial-related changes in discharge that were related to acquisition of the HR discrimination between the reinforced CS+ and non-reinforced CS-. Administration of the peripheral cholinergic antagonist, methylscopolamine, and the andrenergic antagonist, atenolol, either increased or decreased maintained baseline activity of many cells, but had little or no effect on the CS-evoked activity of these cells. Waveform changes also did not result from administration of these drugs. This finding suggests that CS-evoked mPFC activity is not being driven by cardiac afferent input to CNS cardiac control centers. Previous studies have shown that ibotenic acid lesions of this area greatly decreases the magnitude of decelerative heart rate conditioned responses; the latter finding, plus the results of the present study, suggest that processing of CS/US contingencies by the prefrontal cortex contributes to the acquisition of autonomic changes during Pavlovian conditioning.     

Strategy choices in simple and complex addition: Contributions of working memory and counting knowledge for children with mathematical disability

Groups of first-grade (mean age = 82 months), third-grade (mean age = 107 months), and fifth-grade (mean age = 131 months) children with a learning disability in mathematics (MD, n = 58) and their normally achieving peers (n = 91) were administered tasks that assessed their knowledge of counting principles, working memory, and the strategies used to solve simple (4+3) and complex (16+8) addition problems. In all grades, the children with MD showed a working memory deficit, and in first grade, the children with MD used less sophisticated strategies and committed more errors while solving simple and complex addition problems. The group differences in strategy usage and accuracy were related, in part, to the group difference in working memory and to group and individual differences in counting knowledge. Across grade-level and group, the switch from simple to complex addition problems resulted in a shift in the mix of problem-solving strategies. Individual differences in the strategy mix and in the strategy shift were related, in part, to individual differences in working memory capacity and counting knowledge.