Does testing with feedback help grade-school children learn key concepts in science?

Testing effects have been well-established across a variety of studies involving school-age children. Specifically, children's test performance improves when they are given the opportunity to practice retrieval prior to the final test as compared to when practice involves only study. The current investigation focused on the influence of testing with feedback on fifth graders’ learning of science concepts. Across two experiments, 65 students studied twenty key concept definitions. After study, the definitions were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: control, test only, study only, and test plus feedback. Concepts assigned to the latter three conditions were presented again (either for test only, study only, or test plus feedback) during two separate sessions, and a final test was administered during a separate session. At the final test, students were asked to provide the definition for each of the twenty key concepts. Final test performance was best for definitions that had been tested with feedback, followed by recall for those that had only been tested or only restudied, with lowest performance for those that did not receive additional practice. Despite multiple sessions spaced across several days, however, performance for all conditions was low, which may have resulted from the ineffective use of feedback. In summary, testing followed by feedback can boost younger students learning of science concepts, but mastery will require the use of other strategies as well.     

关于人工语法学习迁移效应的一项实验研究

本研究探讨了人工语法迁移效应产生的机制,着重考查了组块信息迁移理论对人工语法迁移效应机制解释的适宜性。结果发现：当学习和测验序列的表层结构不同时,被试能够学习和迁移非重复成分间的序列依存性(实验一);当被试将非重复成分间的序列依存性迁移到表层结构不同的测验序列中时,需要在学习和测验序列的分布特征上形成一种匹配(实验二)。     

Implicit Association Test (IAT) Studies Investigating Pitch-Shape Audiovisual Cross-modal Associations Across Language Groups

Previous studies have shown that Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers exhibit different patterns of cross-modal congruence for the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, depending on which features of the pitch they attend to. But is this pattern of language-specific listening a conscious cultural strategy or an automatic processing effect? If automatic, does it also apply when the same pitch contours no longer sound like speech? Implicit Association Tests (IATs) provide an indirect measure of cross-modal association. In a series of IAT studies, conducted with participants with three kinds of language backgrounds (Chinese-dominant bilinguals, Chinese balanced bilinguals, and English speakers with no Chinese experience) we find language-specific congruence effects for Mandarin lexical tones but not for matched sine-wave stimuli. That is, for linguistic stimuli, non-Chinese speakers show advantages for pitch-height congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy); no congruence effects were found for Chinese speakers. For non-linguistic stimuli, all participant groups showed advantages for pitch-height congruence. The present findings suggest that non-lexical tone congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy) is a basic congruence pattern, and the acquisition of a language with lexical tone can alter this perception.     

Phonation Types Matter in Sound Symbolism

Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary correspondence between sound and meaning. The majority of studies on sound symbolism have focused on consonants and vowels, and the sound-symbolic properties of suprasegmentals, particularly phonation types, have been largely neglected. This study examines the size and shape symbolism of four phonation types: modal and creaky voices, falsetto, and whisper. Japanese speakers heard 12 novel words (e.g., /íbi/, /ápa/) pronounced with the four types of phonation and rated the size and roundedness/pointedness each of the 48 stimuli seemed to represent on seven-point scales. The results showed that phonation types as well as consonantal and vocalic features influenced the ratings. Creaky voice was associated with larger and more pointed images than modal voice, which was in turn associated with larger and more pointed images than whisper. Falsetto was also associated with roundedness but not with smallness. These results shed new light on the acoustic approaches to sound symbolism and suggest the significance of phonation types and other suprasegmental features in the phenomenon.     

Effects of irrelevant object structure on early attention deployment

Event-related potential (ERP) studies have suggested that Gestalt principles or grouping factors in a visual scene modulate attention deployment in early visual processing. The present study examined the effects of an extrinsic grouping factor, region commonality, on early ERP spatial attention. Effects of sex were also explored, since the processing of task-irrelvant objects may differ between the sexes. Twenty-four participants were required to discriminate one side of rapidly-presented bilateral letters, and attention effects were indexed by hemispheric lateralization accroding to attended visual fields. In results, an early P1 attention effect (70–110 ms) increased when the letters were surrounded by an object, compared to the control stimulus without a complete object, and this result was more prominent in women than in men. The present study demonstrates that visual object and sex differences play a novel role at very early cortical stages of processing in attention deployment to a task-irrelevant visual structure.     

贵州少数民族儿童青少年SNARC效应的发展

采用奇偶判断任务,考察二年级至大学阶段贵州民族儿童青少年SNARC效应的发展状况。结果显示：三年级开始出现SNARC效应（包括正确率SNARC效应）;各阶段SNARC效应无显著差异;高、低年级正确率存在显著差异,六年级以后各阶段正确率无显著差异。结论：民族儿童三年级开始形成数字的空间表征。SNARC效应的大小不因年龄而发生变化;被试对奇偶知识的掌握存在发展过程,三年级可能基本理解奇偶信息,六年级后熟练掌握奇偶信息。     

Conditionals,Context, and the Suppression Effect

Modus ponens is the argument from premises of the form If A, then B and A to the conclusion B (e.g., from If it rained, Alicia got wet and It rained to Alicia got wet). Nearly all participants agree that the modus ponens conclusion logically follows when the argument appears in this Basic form. However, adding a further premise (e.g., If she forgot her umbrella, Alicia got wet) can lower participants’ rate of agreement—an effect called suppression. We propose a theory of suppression that draws on contemporary ideas about conditional sentences in linguistics and philosophy. Semantically, the theory assumes that people interpret an indicative conditional as a context‐sensitive strict conditional: true if and only if its consequent is true in each of a contextually determined set of situations in which its antecedent is true. Pragmatically, the theory claims that context changes in response to new assertions, including new conditional premises. Thus, the conclusion of a modus ponens argument may no longer be accepted in the changed context. Psychologically, the theory describes people as capable of reasoning about broad classes of possible situations, ordered by typicality, without having to reason about individual possible worlds. The theory accounts for the main suppression phenomena, and it generates some novel predictions that new experiments confirm.     

Additional considerations when measuring adaptive control in conflict tasks

A recent review article by Braem et al. (2019, Trends in Cognitive Sciences) summarises some of the major challenges associated with investigating the dynamics of cognitive control in conflict tasks and recommends steps that researchers can take to minimise these challenges. This commentary highlights two further considerations for researchers studying the dynamics of cognitive control. First, researchers should consider analysing effects stemming from trial n - 2 to identify (a) how the congruency sequence effect emerges over a longer series of trials and (b) whether residual feature-integration effects remain in confound-minimised designs. Second, data from hand-tracking studies indicates that the dynamics observed in button-press measures of response time reflect the functioning of dissociable processes. Consequently, researchers should consider how the various manipulations used to investigate the dynamics of cognitive control might impact different processes underlying performance.     

Psychological Comparison Processes and Self-Concept in Relation to Five Distinct Frame-of-Reference Effects: Pan-Human Cross-Cultural Generalizability over 68 Countries

The concept of self is central to personhood, but personality research has largely ignored the relevance of recent advances in self-concept theory: multidimensionality of self-concept (focusing instead on self-esteem, an implicit unidimensional approach), domain specificity (generalizability of trait manifestations over different domains), and multilevel perspectives in which social-cognitive processes and contextual effects drive self-perceptions at different levels (individual, group/institution, and country) aligned to Bronfenbrenner's ecological model. Here, we provide theoretical and empirical support for psychological comparison processes that influence self-perceptions and their relation to distal outcomes. Our meta-theoretical integration of social and dimensional comparison theories synthesizes five seemingly paradoxical frame-of-reference and contextual effects in self-concept formation that occur at different levels. The effects were tested with a sample of 485,490 fifteen-year-old students (68 countries/regions, 18,292 schools). Consistent with the dimensional comparison theory, the effects on math self-concept were positive for math achievement but negative for verbal achievement. Consistent with the social comparison theory, the effects on math self-concept were negative for school-average math achievement (big-fish-little-pond effect), country-average achievement (paradoxical cross-cultural effect), and being young relative to year in school but positive for school-average verbal achievement (big-fish-little-pond effect—compensatory effect). We demonstrate cross-cultural generalizability/universality of support for predictions and discuss implications for personality research. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology