The influence of a career group experience on the vocational maturity of college students

The effects of a career group experience on the vocational maturity of theoretically grouped college freshmen and sophomores were investigated using Super's Career Development Inventory as the dependent measure. The dimensions of consistency/inconsistency and differentiation/nondifferentiation, as identified utilizing Holland's Vocational Preference Inventory, were investigated along with the dimensions of treatment/nontreatment and interaction effects. Predictions related to change in vocational maturity as a result of treatment were made for each dimension. The analysis sample was a group of 68 volunteer freshman and sophomore college students. Results indicated that students did significantly increase their vocational maturity as a result of the group experience. Furthermore, it was found, as predicted, that within experimental groups inconsistent and nondifferentiated students improved significantly more on some vocational maturity measures than consistent or differentiated students. Students who were both inconsistent and nondifferentiated showed consistently greater increases on virtually all vocational maturity measures than all other theoretical groups.     

Task relevant effects on the assessment of cerebral specialization for facial emotion

Hemispheric specialization for processing different types of rapidly exposed stimuli was examined in a forced choice reaction time task. Four conditions of recognition were included: tacial emotion, neutral faces, emotional words, and neutral words. Only the facial emotion condition produced a significant visual field advantage (in favor of the left visual field), but this condition did not differ significantly from the neutral face condition's left visual field superiority. The verbal conditions produced significantly decreased latencies with RVF presentation, while the LVF presentation was associated with decreased latencies on the facial conditions. These results suggested that facial recognition and affective processing cannot be separated as independent factors generating right hemisphere superiority for facial emotion perception, and that task parameters (verbal vs. nonverbal) are important influences upon effects in studies of cerebral specialization.     

Re-framing the characteristics of concepts and their relation to learning and cognition in artificial agents

In this work, the problems of knowledge acquisition and information processing are explored in relation to the definitions of concepts and conceptual processing, and their implications for artificial agents.The discussion focuses on views of cognition as a dynamic property in which the world is actively represented in grounded mental states which only have meaning in the action context. Reasoning is understood as an emerging property consequence of actions-environment couplings achieved through experience, and concepts as situated and dynamic phenomena enabling behaviours.Re-framing the characteristics of concepts is considered crucial to overcoming settled beliefs and reinterpreting new understandings in artificial systems.The first part presents a review of concepts from cognitive sciences. Support is found for views on grounded and embodied cognition, describing concepts as dynamic, flexible, context-dependent, and distributedly coded.That is argued to contrast with many technical implementations assuming concepts as categories, whilst explains limitations when grounding amodal symbols, or in unifying learning, perception and reasoning.The characteristics of concepts are linked to methods of active inference, self-organization, and deep learning to address challenges posed and to reinterpret emerging techniques.In a second part, an architecture based on deep generative models is presented to illustrate arguments elaborated. It is evaluated in a navigation task, showing that sufficient representations are created regarding situated behaviours with no semantics imposed on data. Moreover, adequate behaviours are achieved through a dynamic integration of perception and action in a single representational domain and process.     

Are mothers of stutterers different? An investigation of social-communicative integration

Many speech-language pathologists assume that parent-child communicative interactions are critical precipitating or maintaining factors in the onset and development of stuttering. Although parents are frequently counseled to alter their attitudes or behaviors, no studies have pinpointed specific parental behaviors as increasing children's disfluency. The purpose of this study was to analyze differences between 12 mothers of stutterers and 12 mothers of nonstutterers in their social-communicative interactions with their own child, an unfamiliar stutterer, and an unfamiliar nonstutterer. Ten minutes of free-play interaction between each mother and child were video recorded from behind a one-way mirror. Results indicate that the two groups of mothers differed significantly only in their use of routine statements. Other findings indicate that stuttering children used significantly more positive and imperative statements than nonstuttering children. All children asked significantly more questions of their own mothers than of unfamiliar mothers.     

Phonemic imperception in aphasia

This study investigated characteristics of 14 aphasics with impaired phoneme discrimination identified from a population of 100 patients with left hemisphere lesions. All patients with impaired phoneme discrimination were significantly impaired in aural comprehension, but many showed intact sound recognition and some showed normal reading comprehension. Defects in phoneme discrimination were typically seen in the acute stage of aphasia resulting from stroke; and in most instances, defects in phoneme discrimination were no longer apparent 4 months postonset. All patients who recovered normal phoneme discrimination also made significant improvement in aural comprehension. The findings support the concept that some aural comprehension defects result from a specific disturbance in phoneme discrimination.     

Acquisition and transfer effects of cued and noncued double alternation schedules with rats

In an attempt to establish patterning, rats were administered eight daily runway trials in a double alternation schedule with distinctive goal events in either a consistent or a varied sequence. Different magnitudes of reward differentiated the reinforced trials, whereas different lengths of confinement in the empty goal box distinguished the nonreinforced trials. During acquisition, rats given the consistent cue sequence “patterned”, whereas the group presented varied cues did not. Subsequently, the Consistent and Varied Cue Groups were subdivided and were administered for 2 days only one of the four acquisition training goal events. During the final 5 days of transfer testing, all subgroups were switched to receiving four daily trials with a second and then a third goal event. In agreement with expectations derived from stimulus aftereffects theory, performance was immediately in accord with the reinforcement contingencies previously established during acquisition training and not the goal event actually presented during testing.