Healthy and chronically‐ill children's generalisation of illness to biological and non‐biological categories

Using children's naïve theory of biology as a framework, this study investigated children's developing understanding of illness by examining their generalisation of illness to biological and non‐biological categories. In addition to differences associated with age, the children's health status was investigated for any possible linkwith their understanding. Healthy and chronically‐ill children, aged 4–11 years, were randomly assigned to one of three conditions, according to which exemplar (child, dog or duck) was described as suffering from an imaginary illness. Using a card‐sorting technique, the children assessed whether each entity out of 30 entities (five representatives in each of six categories: humans, mammals, non‐mammals, birds, plants and artifacts) could be afflicted by that illness. The children's generalisations indicated a grasp of the distinctiveness of the various categories, although they seemed less certain about the biological status of plants. Furthermore, the type of exemplar on which the children had been taught influenced their responses. However, the children's reasoning appeared unaffected by their health status and largely unaffected by age or gender. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

学前儿童朴素生物学理论及其获得机制

学前儿童朴素生物学理论发展的研究近20年来一直是儿童认知发展研究的热点。Carey等主张学前儿童的生物概念系统是从心理概念系统中分离出来的由一个系统到另一个系统的根本性概念转变,儿童还没有一个包含动植物的整合的生物系统。但另一些研究主张学前儿童能够对生物现象进行本体区分并形成内在一致的生物学因果解释,拥有朴素生物学理论,该理论是在一个概念系统（生物学概念系统）中逐渐的连续性变化过程。目前整合的观点认为儿童朴素生物学理论在童年早期就独立于心理学理论,但在分离一开始的一段时间里还要受心理学的影响。     

The influence of relational complexity and strategy selection on children's reasoning in the Latin Square Task

The present study focused on children's deductive reasoning when performing the Latin Square Task, an experimental task designed to explore the influence of relational complexity. Building on Birney, Halford, and Andrew's (2006) research, we created a version of the task that minimized nonrelational factors and introduced new categories of items. The results of two experiments conducted with school-aged children yielded an apparent dilution of complexity effects and suggest that specific inferential strategies can reduce the relational complexity that children need to process. A theoretical account is proposed emphasizing the influence of adaptive selection of strategies that mediate processing capacity constraints in reasoning development.     

The mediating and moderating effects of differentiation of self on body mass index and depressive symptomatology among an American college sample

Differentiation of self – a core construct of Bowen's (Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. New York: Jason Aronson) family systems theory – was examined as a possible predictor of psychological health and physical health and as a mediator and moderator of the relation between overall functioning and psychological health and physical health. A total of 818 American college students participated (mean age?=?23.72, SD?=?4.79) in this study. Differentiation of self was correlated and was predictive of psychological health, as measured by the Beck depression inventory, and physical health, as measured by body mass index (BMI). A multivariate multiple regression model revealed that differentiation of self partially mediated the effects of overall functioning on depressive symptomatology and on BMI. Results from a hierarchical regression model showed that differentiation of self moderated the relation between overall functioning and depressive symptomatology but did not moderate the relation between overall functioning and BMI. Taken together, these preliminary findings provide initial evidence of the importance of the associations between family systemic factors (differentiation of self) and psychological and physical health factors among American college populations.     

Computational exploration of metaphor comprehension processes using a semantic space model

Recent metaphor research has revealed that metaphor comprehension involves both categorization and comparison processes. This finding has triggered the following central question: Which property determines the choice between these two processes for metaphor comprehension? Three competing views have been proposed to answer this question: the conventionality view ( Bowdle & Gentner, 2005 ), aptness view ( Glucksberg & Haught, 2006b ), and interpretive diversity view ( Utsumi, 2007 ); these views, respectively, argue that vehicle conventionality, metaphor aptness, and interpretive diversity determine the choice between the categorization and comparison processes. This article attempts to answer the question regarding which views are plausible by using cognitive modeling and computer simulation based on a semantic space model. In the simulation experiment, categorization and comparison processes are modeled in a semantic space constructed by latent semantic analysis. These two models receive word vectors for the constituent words of a metaphor and compute a vector for the metaphorical meaning. The resulting vectors can be evaluated according to the degree to which they mimic the human interpretation of the same metaphor; the maximum likelihood estimation determines which of the two models better explains the human interpretation. The result of the model selection is then predicted by three metaphor properties (i.e., vehicle conventionality, aptness, and interpretive diversity) to test the three views. The simulation experiment for Japanese metaphors demonstrates that both interpretive diversity and vehicle conventionality affect the choice between the two processes. On the other hand, it is found that metaphor aptness does not affect this choice. This result can be treated as computational evidence supporting the interpretive diversity and conventionality views.     

A phase transition model for the speed-accuracy trade-off in response time experiments

Most models of response time (RT) in elementary cognitive tasks implicitly assume that the speed-accuracy trade-off is continuous: When payoffs or instructions gradually increase the level of speed stress, people are assumed to gradually sacrifice response accuracy in exchange for gradual increases in response speed. This trade-off presumably operates over the entire range from accurate but slow responding to fast but chance-level responding (i.e., guessing). In this article, we challenge the assumption of continuity and propose a phase transition model for RTs and accuracy. Analogous to the fast guess model (Ollman, 1966), our model postulates two modes of processing: a guess mode and a stimulus-controlled mode. From catastrophe theory, we derive two important predictions that allow us to test our model against the fast guess model and against the popular class of sequential sampling models. The first prediction--hysteresis in the transitions between guessing and stimulus-controlled behavior--was confirmed in an experiment that gradually changed the reward for speed versus accuracy. The second prediction--bimodal RT distributions--was confirmed in an experiment that required participants to respond in a way that is intermediate between guessing and accurate responding.     

Lexicons, contexts, events, and images: commentary on Elman (2009) from the perspective of dual coding theory

Elman (2009) proposed that the traditional role of the mental lexicon in language processing can largely be replaced by a theoretical model of schematic event knowledge founded on dynamic context-dependent variables. We evaluate Elman's approach and propose an alternative view, based on dual coding theory and evidence that modality-specific cognitive representations contribute strongly to word meaning and language performance across diverse contexts which also have effects predictable from dual coding theory.     

A general mechanism for linking personality traits to affect, motivation, and action

This article describes a general mechanism for linking personality traits to affect, motivation, and action. It is hypothesized that personality traits confer a propensity to perceive convergences and divergences between our belief that we can attain certain goals and the importance that we place on these goals (belief-importance or belimp theory). Belief and importance are conceptualized as two coordinates, together defining the belimp plane. Four distinct quadrants can be identified within the belimp plane (Hubris, Motivation, Depression, and Apathy), broadly corresponding to the personality dimensions of trait emotional intelligence, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and introversion. Strategies and requirements for testing belimp theory are presented as are a number of important theoretical and practical advantages that it can potentially offer.