自然事物认知偏好的初步实验研究

本研究从认知心理学角度采用实验方法探索自然科学学习的影响因素。发现：1自然事物的认知偏好中存在内隐学习现象。2．自然事物认知偏好的表现非常复杂：年龄的影响并不显著,经验的影响不可忽视;3．性别差异十分明显,男生比女生的自然事物认知偏好更为肯定更为积极,很可能社会性别角色是造成自然科学学习结果差异的重要原因;4．内隐组学习坦率好奇,倾向于把自然事物看得更熟悉更容易,具有更强的探究兴趣：外显组学生矜持审慎,倾向于把自然事物看得更陌生更难以理解,探究兴趣较弱。因此,科学教育要创设情境让学生潜移默化地学以致用;要帮助学生利用经验并从中获取乐趣、增长兴趣、树立志趣;要鼓励女孩子大胆挑战科学。     

Job Satisfaction as a Mediator of the Relationship Between Job Stressors and Affective, Continuance, and Normative Commitment: A Path Analytical Approach

This article investigates the potential mediating role of job satisfaction between job stressors—namely, role overload-quantitative, role overload-qualitative, and lack of career development—as sources of stress on the one hand, and various facets of organizational commitment—namely, affective, continuance, and normative—on the other hand. A sample of 361 employees in a number of organizations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was used. Path analysis revealed that role overload-quantitative directly and negatively influences both job satisfaction and affective commitment and that lack of career development as a source of stress directly and negatively influences job satisfaction. Findings also suggest that job satisfaction mediates the influences of role overload-quantitative on various facets of organizational commitment. Implications, future lines of research, and limitations are discussed.     

Situation Awareness and Workload in Aviation

A pilot faces special challenges imposed by the need to control a multivariate lagged system in a heterogeneous multitask environment. The time lags between critical variables require prediction in an uncertain world. The interrelated concepts of situation awareness and workload are central to aviation psychology. Three components of situation awareness are spatial awareness, system awareness, and task awareness. Each of these components has real–world implications, spatial awareness for instrument displays, system awareness for keeping the operator informed about actions that have been taken by automated systems, and task awareness for attention and task management. Task management is directly related to mental workload, as the competing demands of tasks for attention exceed the operator's limited resources.     

脑认知功能及其哲学思考

近年来,国内外形成了脑认知功能的新热潮。从哲学思维的角度,分析了脑认知功能研究的发展概况。首先,在科学实践基础上,人们对大脑功能侧化问题进行了研究;其次,从联系的观点出发,现在人们更倾向于双脑协同是完成心理活动的神经学基础;最后,从系统的、发展的观点出发,赫曼提出了“全脑概念”,增加了边缘系统与神经心理功能的关系研究。     

Infants' Grasp of Others' Intentions

ABSTRACT— The perception of others as intentional agents is fundamental to human experience and foundational to development. Recent research reveals that this cornerstone of social perception has its roots early in infancy, and that it is influenced by the universal, early-emerging human experience of engaging in goal-directed action. Infants' own action capabilities correlate with their emerging tendency to view others' actions as organized by goals. Moreover, interventions that facilitate new goal-directed actions alter infants' perception of those same actions in others. These effects seem to depend on the first-person aspects of infants' experience. These findings open new questions about how doing leads to knowing in the social domain.     

Social understanding through direct perception? Yes,by interacting

This paper comments on Gallagher’s recently published direct perception proposal about social cognition [Gallagher, S. (2008a). Direct perception in the intersubjective context. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(2), 535–543]. I show that direct perception is in danger of being appropriated by the very cognitivist accounts criticised by Gallagher (theory theory and simulation theory). Then I argue that the experiential directness of perception in social situations can be understood only in the context of the role of the interaction process in social cognition. I elaborate on the role of social interaction with a discussion of participatory sense-making to show that direct perception, rather than being a perception enriched by mainly individual capacities, can be best understood as an interactional phenomenon.     

Introduction to This Special Issue: Complex Thought and Construction of Identity

This Introduction summarizes the rationale for three Special Issues in the Journal of Adult Development. The first, the present Special Issue, is on the themes of complex thought and the construction of identity. Summaries of the six empirical and theoretical articles in this first Special Issue appear below. The argument is made that work in this area adds to our knowledge about the complex network of factors present in and intersecting with adult development.     

Haybron on Mood Propensity and Happiness

Daniel Haybron has made an original contribution to philosophical discussions of happiness. He has put forward a theory that identifies happiness with moods and the propensity to experience moods. Haybron’s contribution deserves a critical examination. The first section of my paper is interpretive. I show how Haybron uses the concepts of ‘central affective states’ and ‘mood propensity’ to define happiness. The second and third sections of the paper are critical. They focus on the inclusion of mood propensity in Haybron’s theory. In the second section I argue that his theory fails because there is an example that shows a subject can be happy even when that subject does not have a positive mood propensity. In the third section of the paper, I consider Haybron’s objection that the case in question is ‘object-specific’ and that it is not ‘emotionally-based’. I discuss both of these technical terms in detail. Moreover, I argue that a modified version of the counter example accommodates these technical terms while retaining the persuasiveness of the original example.

Who knows best? Preschoolers sometimes prefer child informants over adult informants

Do preschoolers think adults know more about everything than children? Or do they recognize that there are some things that children might know more about than adults? Three‐, four‐, and five‐year olds (N=65) were asked to decide whether an adult or child informant would better be able to answer a variety of questions about the nutritional value of foods and about toys. Children at all ages chose to direct the food questions to the adult and the toy questions to the child. Thus, there are some kinds of information for which preschoolers expect that a child would be a better informant than an adult. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How to reason without words: inference as categorization

The idea that reasoning is a singular accomplishment of the human species has an ancient pedigree. Yet this idea remains as controversial as it is ancient. Those who would deny reasoning to nonhuman animals typically hold a language-based conception of inference which places it beyond the reach of languageless creatures. Others reject such an anthropocentric conception of reasoning on the basis of similar performance by humans and animals in some reasoning tasks, such as transitive inference. Here, building on the modal similarity theory of Vigo [J Exp Theor Artif Intell, 2008 (in press)], we offer an account in which reasoning depends on a core suite of subsymbolic processes for similarity assessment, discrimination, and categorization. We argue that premise-based inference operates through these subsymbolic processes, even in humans. Given the robust discrimination and categorization abilities of some species of nonhuman animals, we believe that they should also be regarded as capable of simple forms of inference. Finally, we explain how this account of reasoning applies to the kinds of transitive inferences that many nonhuman animals display.