Acquiring contextualized concepts: a connectionist approach

Conceptual knowledge is acquired through recurrent experiences, by extracting statistical regularities at different levels of granularity. At a fine level, patterns of feature co-occurrence are categorized into objects. At a coarser level, patterns of concept co-occurrence are categorized into contexts. We present and test CONCAT, a connectionist model that simultaneously learns to categorize objects and contexts. The model contains two hierarchically organized CALM modules (Murre, Phaf, & Wolters, 1992). The first module, the Object Module, forms object representations based on co-occurrences between features. These representations are used as input for the second module, the Context Module, which categorizes contexts based on object co-occurrences. Feedback connections from the Context Module to the Object Module send activation from the active context to those objects that frequently occur within this context. We demonstrate that context feedback contributes to the successful categorization of objects, especially when bottom-up feature information is degraded or ambiguous.     

Cultural influences on children's understanding of the human body and the concept of life

This study aimed to identify the age by which children begin to demonstrate a biological understanding of the human body and the idea that the purpose of body functioning is to maintain life. The study also explored the influence of education, culturally specific experiences and religion on knowledge acquisition in this domain. Children aged between 4 and 7 years from three different cultural backgrounds (White British, British Muslim, and Pakistani Muslim) were interviewed about the human body and its functioning. At least half of the 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds in each cultural group, and almost all 6‐ to 7‐year‐olds, referred to the maintenance of life when explaining organs' functions and so were classified as ‘life theorizers’. Pakistani Muslim children gave fewer biological responses to questions about organs' functions and the purpose of eating and breathing, but referred to life more than their British counterparts. Irrespective of cultural group, older children understood organ location and function better than younger children. These findings support Jaakkola and Slaughter's (2002, Br. J. Dev. Psychol., 20, 325) view that children's understanding of the body as a ‘life machine’ emerges around the ages of 4–5 years. They also suggest that, despite many similarities in children's ideas cross‐culturally, different educational input and culturally specific experiences influence aspects of their biological understanding.     

When more is not merrier: shared stressful experiences amplify

ABSTRACT

Sharing experiences with others, even without communication, can amplify those experiences. We investigated whether shared stressful experiences amplify. Participants completed the Cold Pressor Task at the same time as a confederate, or while the confederate completed another task. Importantly, participants in the shared (vs. unshared) condition experienced more sensory pain characteristics and reported more stress over time in relation to the task. Importantly, they reported thinking more about the confederate’s thoughts and feelings. This mentalizing sometimes mediated effects, suggesting the task amplified when participants constructed mental representations of others’ CPT experience (e.g. that it hurts) and incorporated it into their own responses.     

Effectiveness in top management group meetings: The role of goal clarity,focused communication,and learning behavior

Bang, H., Fuglesang, S. L., Ovesen, M. R. & Eilertsen, D. E. (2010). Effectiveness in top management group meetings: The role of goal clarity, focused communication, and learning behavior. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 51, 253–261. To explore the relationship between goal clarity, focused communication, learning behavior, and team effectiveness (i.e., task performance, relationship quality, and member satisfaction), self‐report and observer data from eight top management groups that processed 56 agenda items during meetings were analyzed. We found that goal clarity and focused communication was positively related to team effectiveness. The effect of goal clarity on team effectiveness was partially mediated by focused communication. Speaking up when a goal was unclear increased focused communication, task performance and relationship quality. Speaking up when the discussion was off track was not related to task performance and member satisfaction, and was negatively related to relationship quality. These findings have implications for how to conduct an effective management meeting.