非参数认知诊断方法下诊断结果的概率化表征

非参数认知诊断分类方法非常适合课堂评估,其诊断结果采用0-1形式而缺乏概率化表征,不能精细地区分被试属性掌握程度的差异或变化,还缺乏可用于评价真实测验分类结果的信度和效度指标。要刻画被试属性掌握程度的差异,首要的问题是要为非参数认知诊断方法提供一种可以量化属性掌握概率的方法。针对此问题,基于二项分布和玻尔兹曼分布提出非参数认知诊断方法下诊断结果的概率化表征方法,并用于构建分类准确性和分类一致性指标。模拟研究与实测数据分析结果显示：概率化表征方法与非参数认知诊断方法的分类结果高度一致;概率化表征方法与认知诊断模型所得的属性掌握概率十分接近;概率化表征方法所得的属性（模式）掌握概率可用于计算属性（模式）分类准确性和分类一致性指标,在实际测验情景下可作为信度和效度指标,评价诊断结果的重测一致率和判准率。     

消极元刻板印象激活对老年人认知表现的影响

本研究以59名老年人为研究对象,采用N-back认知任务探讨在不同难度的认知负荷任务中老年人消极元刻板印象激活的认知效应。结果发现：1、消极元刻板印象激活组的正确率显著低于未激活组;高认知负荷任务组的正确率显著低于低认知负荷任务组。2、消极元刻板印象激活组的反应时显著长于未激活组;高认知负荷任务组的反应时显著长于低认知负荷任务组;组别与任务难度之间交互作用达到边缘显著,在低认知负荷任务中,消极元刻板印象激活组和未激活组的反应时差异不显著,在高认知负荷任务中,消极元刻板印象激活组的反应时显著长于未激活组。上述结果表明,老年人消极元刻板印象的激活导致了负面的认知效应。     

Therapist Interventions and Skills as Predictors of Dropout in Outpatient Psychotherapy

The current study employed machine learning to investigate whether the inclusion of observer-rated therapist interventions and skills in early sessions of psychotherapy improved dropout prediction beyond intake assessments. Patients were treated by postgraduate clinicians at a university outpatient clinic. Psychometric instruments were assessed at intake and therapeutic interventions and skills in the third session were routinely rated by independent observers. After variable preselection, an elastic net algorithm was used to build two dropout prediction models, one including and one excluding observer-rated session variables. The best model included observer-rated variables and was significantly superior to the model including intake variables only. Alongside intake variables, two observer-rated variables significantly predicted dropout: therapist use of feedback and summaries and treatment difficulty. Although not retained in the final prediction model, the observer-rated use of cognitive techniques was also significantly correlated with dropout. Observer ratings of therapist interventions and skills in early sessions of psychotherapy improve predictors of dropout from psychotherapy beyond intake variables alone. Future research could work toward personalizing dropout predictions to the specific dyad, thereby improving their validity and aiding therapists to recognize and react to increased dropout risk.     

Homework Compliance and Quality in Cognitive Behavioral Therapies for Anxiety Disorders and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Homework assignments are an integral part of cognitive behavioral therapy, providing patients with opportunities to practice skills between sessions. Generally, greater homework compliance is associated with better treatment outcomes. However, fewer studies have examined the effect of homework quality on treatment outcomes. This study examined homework compliance and quality as predictors of outcome and attrition across five CBT protocols. A sample of 179 individuals with principal diagnoses of generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder were randomized to receive a transdiagnostic CBT protocol (the Unified Protocol) or a single-diagnosis CBT protocol corresponding to their principal diagnosis. The Unified Protocol had a lower homework burden than the majority of the single-diagnosis protocols, which varied in degree of assigned homework. Despite this, there were no differences in average homework compliance or quality across principal diagnosis, treatment condition, or their interaction. Homework quality was significantly related to all symptom outcomes (self-reported and clinician-rated anxiety and depressive symptoms, clinician-rated clinical severity). Homework compliance was significantly related to clinician-rated anxiety symptom outcomes. Additionally, greater homework quality and compliance were both significantly associated with increased odds of completing treatment, suggesting homework variables can be useful and easily obtainable predictors of treatment retention.     

Dissonance and abstraction: Cognitive conflict leads to higher level of construal

This study investigated the effects of cognitive conflict on abstract thinking. According to action‐identification theory, an ambiguous and unfamiliar situation might propel an individual to a more abstract mindset. Based on this premise, cognitive conflict was hypothesized to put people in an abstract mindset. The induced compliance paradigm, in which participants are asked to write a counter‐attitudinal essay under either low choice (producing little dissonance) or high choice (producing more dissonance), was employed. Results showed that an abstract mindset was in fact activated in the induced compliance paradigm, and this effect was more pronounced for participants having a more concrete mindset to begin with. The results suggest that the experience of cognitive conflict is closely related to increased abstraction.     

Virtuous Play: The Ethics,Pleasures, and Burdens of Brain Training

Through normative appeals of cognitive enhancement, the brain has become a site of both promise and peril. Displaying oneself as ethically sound may now include showing requisite care for cognitive capacities. Moreover, enhancing our cognitive reserves is framed as aspirational means of averting neurodegenerative disease and neoliberal precarity. Such demanding labours of self-care warrant close scrutiny. Promissory discourses proclaim our ‘neuroplasticity’, encouraging subjects to work on endlessly improvable functional capacities that hold labour market value. Yet a ‘fun morality’ is equally prevalent in today’s experiential economies. Neuro-enhancement is thus sold not as an ascetic chore, but an ecstatic potential. Hope, fear, pleasure, and ethical conduct are, therefore, all closely entwined in the ‘virtuous play’ of ‘brain training’, where commercial entities use digital platforms for game-based tasks designed to enhance cognitive abilities. These services are typically promoted through appeals to our dutiful biocitizenship. This type of virtuous play is increasingly the means by which subjects produce themselves as simultaneously pleasure-seeking, productive, and resoundingly ‘well’. However, this understanding of virtuosity is often narrowly derived—reduced to ‘active ageing’, corporate-style ‘neurohacking’, and ‘brain profiles’—that threaten to foreclose other ways of imagining well-being. In failing to recognize the neoliberal underpinnings of virtuous play we entrench burdensome attachments to emerging modes of personal enhancement. Against these seductive appeals of combining pleasure with self-improvement, we must cultivate a critical reflexivity regarding exactly how ‘enhancement’ is conceived, opening room for lines of possibility outside of currently dominant frameworks.     

The effect of layout and pacing on learning from diagrams with unnecessary text

Although the presentation of extraneous (i.e., irrelevant or unnecessary) information hinders learning, it is unclear whether and how layout and pacing influence this effect. In two experiments, participants learned how the heart functions using four different layouts: a diagram presented without unnecessary text (diagram only), with unnecessary text separated from the diagram (separated) or integrated into the diagram (integrated), or with separated unnecessary text and the instruction to integrate (integration instruction). In Experiment 1, study time was self‐paced for half of the participants and system paced for the other half. There were no effects of layout and of pacing on learning, although system pacing was more effortful than self‐pacing. In Experiment 2, which was system paced and employed eye tracking, the integrated condition showed worse learning outcomes than the separated condition. Moreover, in the integrated condition, participants made more integration attempts between the unnecessary text and the diagram than in the separated condition.     

Neurocognitive outcomes in children with unilateral basal ganglia arterial ischemic stroke and secondary hemidystonia

Dystonia is a movement disorder that involves excessive, involuntary muscle contractions resulting in repetitive movements and/or abnormal posturing. One common cause of unilateral dystonia in childhood is ischemic stroke involving the basal ganglia and/or thalamus. Virtually nothing is known about neuropsychological outcomes in children who have dystonia following basal ganglia stroke. The present study explored whether or not children with secondary dystonia experience additional cognitive challenges when compared to children with similar patterns of brain injury, but no dystonia. We examined intellectual function, academics, and several aspects of executive function in children with unilateral basal ganglia stroke during childhood, comparing those with dystonia and those without. Although groups did not differ in terms of lesion size, we found significantly lower performance on measures of verbal and nonverbal reasoning, inhibitory control, and academic ability in children with secondary dystonia compared to those without. In contrast, there were no significant group differences on parent ratings of their child’s executive function in daily life. These findings suggest that maladaptive reorganization following basal ganglia stroke may contribute to the development of secondary dystonia and also to poor intellectual and academic outcomes in this group.     

Early motor development and cognitive abilities among Mexican preschoolers

Psychomotricity plays a very important role in children’s development, especially for learning involving reading–writing and mathematical calculations. Evaluate motor development in children 3 years old and its relationship with their cognitive abilities at the age of 5 years. Based on a cohort study, we analyzed the information about motor performance evaluated at 3 years old by Peabody Motor Scale and cognitive abilities at 5 years old. The association was estimated using linear regression models adjusted by mother’s intelligence quotient, sex, Bayley mental development index at 18 months, and quality of the environment at home (HOME scale). 148 children whose motor performance was determined at age 3 and was evaluated later at age 5 to determine their cognitive abilities. Cognitive abilities (verbal, quantitative, and memory) measured by McCarthy Scales. Significant positive associations were observed between stationary balance at age 3 with verbal abilities (β = 0.67, p = .04) and memory (β = 0.81, p = .02) at 5 years. Grasping and visual-motor integration were significant and positively associated with quantitative abilities (β = 0.74, p = .005; β = 0.61, p = .01) and memory (β = 2.11, p = .001; β = 1.74, p = .004). The results suggest that early motor performance contributes to the establishment of cognitive abilities at 5 years. Evaluation and early motor stimulation before the child is faced with formal learning likely helps to create neuronal networks that facilitate the acquisition of academic knowledge.     

Causes of cultural disparity: Switches,tuners, and the cognitive science of religion

Cultural disparity – the variation across cultural traits such as knowledge, skill, and belief – is a complex phenomenon, studied by a number of researchers with an expanding empirical toolkit. While there is a growing consensus as to the processes that generate cultural variation and change, general explanatory frameworks require additional tools for identifying, organizing, and relating the complex causes that underpin the production of cultural disparity. Here I develop a case study in the cognitive science of religion and demonstrate how concepts and distinctions drawn from work on contrastive explanation and manipulationist accounts of causation provide such tools for distinguishing explanatory levels, organizing causal narratives, and accounting for cross-cultural patterns.