Piaget's Grouping II: The model, its assessment, and the effects of training

Although Piaget emphasized the importance of negation in equilibration theory, few data are available pertaining to children's use of Grouping II (Gr. II) logic, which relies on negation. Three approaches to assessing Gr. II capability are reviewed in light of Piaget's (1949, Traité de logique: Essai de logistique opératoire, Paris: Colin) discussion of Gr. II. The paper describes a new task to assess three aspects of Gr. II thought: (a) naming secondary classes, (b) comparing a secondary class with a primary class contained within it, and (c) reasoning about vicariance relationships. An experimental group of third graders trained to use Gr. II logic performed significantly better on post-test tasks than did an untrained control group. Training included rule instruction, evaluative and informative feedback, and manipulative activities.     

Children's selective attention with variation in amount of stimulus exposure

Selective attention in children was measured by means of a central-incidental learning paradigm. Children performed a central task requiring attention to one element in each of several stimuli, after which their incidental learning was assessed by a combination of two tests measuring: (a) recognition of the second, or incidental, element in each stimulus, and (b) association between the incidental and central elements. Principal independent variables were the age of the children (9 vs 12 years) and the amount of exposure time per trial in the central task (6 vs 12 sec). Douling the exposure time increased the incidental as well as the central scores for 9-year-olds, while it increased only the central scores for 12-year-olds. It would appear that younger children maintain a relatively nonselective orientation during an extended exposure period, distributing attention between both relevant and irrelevant stimulus elements, whereas adolescents adopt a more selective approach and concentrate exclusively on task-relevant information. The results are discussed in relation to hypotheses regarding development of selective attention.     

The League

About painting, cybernetics, and shared purpose, this article is partly a story, in part a memoir, an adventure in cybernetics, happening 30 years ago, in snow, in the small Swiss city of St. Gallen. A conference of the American Society for Cybernetics meets there. It is 1987. The author, a painter, searching for a new understanding of painting, encounters a convergence of the art of painting and the art of cybernetics through principles of second-order cybernetics in Pask, von Foerster and Maturana, dissolved in Kathleen Forsythe’s poetry. The form, as well as the content of this article, reflects cybernetics.     

Winky Dink and Me: Origins

Through early childhood experiences and then recollections of the many cyberneticians he knew in the 1970s and 1980s, the author traces his personal trajectory toward interaction design and cybernetics. He moves from fascination with technology, through disillusionment about Artificial Intelligence, to seeing that living in cybernetics is a journey of return to uncertainty, risk, and possibility.     

Introduction

The papers in this section were given as a panel on Religious Naturalism at the American Academy of Religion in Denver in November 2001. The panelists included Jerome Stone, Gordon Kaufman, Ursula Goodenough, Charley Hardwick, and Donald Crosby. This introduction briefly describes the panelists, lists three questions the panelists were asked to consider, and names other current and past religious naturalists.     

Ruse's Darwin and Design: Does It Go Far Enough?

Michael Ruse's forthcoming book gives an enjoyable history of teleology in biology, philosophy, and theology. It argues that concepts of cause, final cause, purpose, teleology, function, design, adaptation, contrivance, progress, ends, and value have all been telescoped by most writers in those three disciplines but that these concepts (and especially the concept of design) are nonetheless valid, provided only that we recognize their metaphorical nature. I agree with this basic argument, and Ruse's critiques and historical summaries of these concepts are both useful and delightful. However, I also explore one major and three minor reservations. The minor reservations are that Ruse overdoes the allegation of telescoping, does not adequately explore ways to express teleology more accurately, and erroneously denies the existence of biology–based theologians who make the same point he is making. The major reservation is that, despite all the groundwork he lays, Ruse comes to a conclusion other than the one clearly suggested by his first fourteen chapters. If he followed the evolutionary story just a bit further, to include the evolution of the human brain, he would be in a position to articulate a theologically sophisticated understanding of teleology and avoid an ending that is uncharacteristically tame.     

Lexical decision for open- and closed-class words: failure to replicate differential frequency sensitivity

Bradley and her colleagues (D. C. Bradley, Computational distinctions of vocabulary type, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1978D. C. Bradley, M. E. Garrett, &; E. B. Zurif, in D. Caplan (Ed.), Biological studies of mental processes, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980) have reported a marked difference in frequency sensitivity between open- and closed-class words on a lexical decision task. This effect was obtained with normal subjects, but not with Broca's aphasics. Their results have already influenced experimental and theoretical investigations of syntactic processing. However, in three lexical decision experiments with normal subjects, modeled on those of Bradley et al., we failed to find such a theoretically interesting difference between the two classes. Instead, both classes showed similar reaction time frequency sensitivity for word frequencies less than approximately 316/million (H. Kucera &; W. N. Francis, Computational analysis of present-day English, Providence, RI: Brown Univ. Press, 1967, count); above 399/million, the closed class had an almost-flat function of reaction time versus the logarithm of the frequency, while the open class may have had too few members for meaningful assessment. Because reaction time may be a nonlinear function of log frequency, and because there is relatively little overlap between the frequency ranges of the two classes, comparisons of the members of the two classes which might straddle the function's inflection point must be made with extreme caution.     

A stochastic theory of matching processes

A theory of matching processes is developed within which serial models and parallel models based on within-stage independent intercompletion times are defined. These models are then specialized to a class of processes possessing exponential intercompletion time densities and equivalence properties of parallel and serial models within this class are investigated. Nonequivalence theorems are proved that designate possible differences in “same” (+) and different (?) matching rates as important in testing parallel and serial models. An experimental paradigm is then derived with the property that if + rates are different from — rates, and if processing is self-terminating, then the parallel and serial models are distinguishable at the level of mean reaction times. The serial class of models that is tested by this paradigm includes a large number of stochastic distributions whose central assumption is additivity of element processing times. The corresponding parallel class of models is currently limited to those assuming exponential intercompletion times. A numerical example and an example of non-parametric relations predicted by the serial or parallel models are given. Some advantages and limitations of the present treatment are discussed.     

Distraction effects in tasks of varying difficulty: Methodological issues in measuring development of distractibility

Effects of distraction on 5- and 8-year-old children's performance on a short-term memory task were examined. Tasks at three difficulty levels were employed to determine whether a floor effect could account for the lack of an age difference reported in an earlier study. A floor effect does not appear to be a key factor; the absolute amount of performance decrement was roughly equal for the two ages here regardless of task difficulty, and performance was well above chance under all conditions. The children adapted somewhat to the presence of distraction as shown in greater performance impairment for the first trial under distraction than for remaining trials. Use of a proportional, rather than an absolute, decrement index was considered, and the relevance of the present data to this issue was discussed.