Building on the ideas of others: An examination of the idea combination process

Two experiments were conducted to explore the process of building on ideas in brainstorming. Although this is presumed to be an important role of brainstorming, this has never been explored experimentally. In one experiment individual and group brainstormers generated ideas which were subsequently presented to these same individuals and groups to combine and build on for additional ideas, either as groups or individuals. The combination process was influenced by whether the participants had previously brainstormed alone or in groups and the phase of the combination period (early vs. late). In a second study participants were presented lists of rare or common ideas to combine and build on either as individuals or groups. Although groups generated fewer combinations than nominal groups, they generated more novel and feasible combinations when combining rare ideas. These findings indicate that groups are able to benefit from the exchange process in building on each other's ideas and are interpreted in the context of past research on idea generation and evaluation in groups.     

Exploring and Promoting the College Attendance and Success of Racial/Ethnic Minority Students

Using consensual qualitative research methodology and being mindful of both challenges and successes, the authors explored diverse students’ experiences with higher education. The authors used semistructured interviews with 7 students with racial/ethnic minority backgrounds to investigate the circumstances under which these students decided to attend college and experienced success. Multiple factors that were reported to contribute to students’ college attendance and success emerged, including individual factors, psychological factors, social factors, and cultural/environmental factors. Utilizando una metodología de investigación cualitativa consensuada y teniendo en cuenta tanto los desafíos como los éxitos, los autores exploraron las experiencias de estudiantes diversos en la educación superior. Los autores usaron entrevistas semiestructuradas con 7 estudiantes de minorías raciales/étnicas para investigar las circunstancias en las que estos estudiantes decidieron cursar estudios universitarios y tuvieron éxito. Surgieron múltiples factores reportados que contribuyeron a la asistencia y al éxito de los estudiantes en la universidad, incluyendo factores individuales, factores psicológicos, factores sociales y factores culturales/del entorno.     

Beyond subgoaling: A dynamic knowledge generation framework for creative problem solving in cognitive architectures

In this paper we propose a computational framework aimed at extending the problem solving capabilities of cognitive artificial agents through the introduction of a novel, goal-directed, dynamic knowledge generation mechanism obtained via a non monotonic reasoning procedure. In particular, the proposed framework relies on the assumption that certain classes of problems cannot be solved by simply learning or injecting new external knowledge in the declarative memory of a cognitive artificial agent but, on the other hand, require a mechanism for the automatic and creative re-framing, or re-formulation, of the available knowledge. We show how such mechanism can be obtained trough a framework of dynamic knowledge generation that is able to tackle the problem of commonsense concept combination. In addition, we show how such a framework can be employed in the field of cognitive architectures in order to overcome situations like the impasse in SOAR by extending the possible options of its subgoaling procedures.     

Conceptual blending of high-level features and data-driven salience computation in melodic generation

Conceptual Blending (CB) theory describes the cognitive mechanisms underlying the way humans process the emergence of new conceptual spaces by blending two input spaces. CB theory has been primarily used as a method for interpreting creative artefacts, while recently it has been utilised in the context of computational creativity for algorithmic invention of new concepts. Examples in the domain of music include the employment of CB interpretatively as a tool to explain musical semantic structures based on lyrics of songs or on the relations between body gestures and music structures. Recent work on generative applications of CB has shown that proper low-level representation of the input spaces allows the generation of consistent and sometimes surprising blends. However, blending high-level features (as discussed in the interpretative studies) of music explicitly, is hardly feasible with mere low-level representation of objects. Additionally, selecting features that are more salient in the context of two input spaces and relevant background knowledge and should, thus, be preserved and integrated in new interesting blends has not yet been tackled in a cognitively pertinent manner. The paper at hand proposes a novel approach to generating new material that allows blending high-level features by combining low-level structures, based on statistically computed salience values for each high-level feature extracted from data. The proposed framework is applied to a basic but, at the same time, complicated field of music, namely melodic generation. The examples presented herein allow an insightful examination of what the proposed approach does, revealing new possibilities and prospects.     

一图抵千言：多媒体学习中的自我生成绘图策略

自我生成绘图是指学生使用可视化的学习方法绘制一幅能反映每一段文字中重要观点的图画, 通过图文结合的方式来促进学习的一种策略。综述以往研究发现, 先前研究通过操纵文本、动画等学习材料来考察自我生成绘图在学习中的作用, 发现自我生成绘图的效果并不稳健：一方面它可以通过提高学生的认知和元认知能力、激发积极的情感状态而提高学习效果, 得到了绘图建构生成理论和多媒体学习认知理论的支持; 另一方面也可以通过增加认知负荷而阻碍学习, 得到了认知负荷理论的支持。整体而言, 自我生成绘图策略还是有利于学习的, 已有研究在学习效果上的效应量中值为d_保持 = 0.13, d_理解 = 0.46, d_迁移 = 0.38。未来的研究仍需要关注自我生成绘图策略的材料操纵、效果评定以及潜在变量等等。     

Pathways of Religious Assimilation: Second‐Generation Asian Americans’ Religious Retention and Religiosity

We explore the religious assimilation of different Asian American second‐generation religious groups by examining their rates of religious retention and levels of religiosity relative to the first generation and the general American population. In general, Asian Americans exhibit a pattern of generational religious decline: the second generation tend to have lower levels of both religious retention and religiosity compared to the immigrant generation. The second generation do not necessarily conform to the religious patterns of the general population. Rather, they follow different trajectories of retention and religiosity depending on the religion. We identify four different pathways of religious change among the second generation, and discuss how racial and religious differences mediate assimilation into American religion.     

The role of the executive system in visuo-spatial memory functioning

Participants were presented with a spatial sequence in which between 4 and 10 cells were highlighted. On each trial list length was unknown to the participant who was required to serially recall the last four cells. Processing of longer lists is assumed to call upon the executive system, which is thought to be involved in updating the contents of the short-term visuo-spatial store. Study 1 revealed that loading the executive system with concurrent random letter generation impaired performance on the spatial task especially recall of the early serial positions. However, contrary to expectation the degree of impairment was no greater on the longer lists, where it had been assumed that updating would be occurring. Study 2 confirmed this finding and demonstrated that relative to sequences of known length, under conditions of uncertainty when the list length was unknown, spatial recall was impaired even on short sequences. The present results support the growing consensus, which is suggestive of closer links between visuo-spatial and executive processes. However, it remains unclear whether or not updating is actually occurring on the longer sequences, and if it is, what specific executive processes are involved.     

Energy management solutions in the Internet of Things applications: Technical analysis and new research directions

By advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) technology in smart life such as smart city, smart home, smart healthcare and smart transportation, interconnections between smart things are growing that complicate evaluation of efficiency factors on the intelligent systems. Energy consumption as one of the most challenging issues is increasing with the growing IoT devices and existing interconnections between cloud data centers, mobile applications and human activities. Managing energy efficiency and power consumption is one of the important issues in green IoT-enabled technologies. This paper presents an overview on the energy management solutions in the IoT based on Systematic Literature Review (SLR). The main goal of this SLR-based overview is to recognize significant research trends in the field of energy management and power consumption techniques which need additional consideration to highlight more efficient and effective methods in IoT. Also, a taxonomy is proposed to categorize the existing research studies on energy management solutions. A statistical and technical analysis of reviewed existing papers are provided, and evaluation factors and attributes are discussed. We observed that variety of published research papers in smart home have highest percentage to evaluate energy management in the IoT. Also, deep learning and clustering methods are must popular techniques that were applied to evaluate the energy management in IoT case studies. Finally, new challenges and forthcoming issues of the energy management and efficient power consumption methods are presented.