Why don’t well-educated adults understand accumulation? A challenge to researchers,educators, and citizens

Accumulation is a fundamental process in dynamic systems: inventory accumulates production less shipments; the national debt accumulates the federal deficit. Effective decision making in such systems requires an understanding of the relationship between stocks and the flows that alter them. However, highly educated people are often unable to infer the behavior of simple stock–flow systems. In a series of experiments we demonstrate that poor understanding of accumulation, termed stock–flow failure, is a fundamental reasoning error. Persistent poor performance is not attributable to an inability to interpret graphs, lack of contextual knowledge, motivation, or cognitive capacity. Rather, stock–flow failure is a robust phenomenon that appears to be rooted in failure to appreciate the most basic principles of accumulation, leading to the use of inappropriate heuristics. We show that many people, including highly educated individuals with strong technical training, use what we term the “correlation heuristic”, erroneously assuming that the behavior of a stock matches the pattern of its flows. We discuss the origins of stock–flow failure and implications for management and education.     

Socioeconomic Status and Health: What is the role of Reserve Capacity?

ABSTRACT— A robust, linear association between socioeconomic status (SES) and health has been identified across many populations and health outcomes. This relationship is typically monotonic, so that each step down the SES hierarchy brings increased vulnerability to disease and premature mortality. Despite growing attention to health disparities, scientists and policymakers have made little progress toward confronting their causes and implementing effective solutions. Using the reserve capacity model ( Gallo & Matthews, 2003 ) as an organizing framework, the current article examines the contribution of resilient psychosocial resources to socioeconomic disparities in physical health. Findings suggest that deficient psychosocial resources, such as low perceptions of control and social support, may be one of many factors that connect low SES with poor health. Additional research is needed to test these relationships and their underlying mechanisms, to consider interventions to enhance reserve capacity, and to evaluate the efficacy of such efforts in fostering resilience to socioeconomic hardship.     

工作记忆中有意抑制能力的发展研究

使用Reed设计的有意遗忘研究范式,以194名小学二、三、四、五年级学生和大学生为被试,考察不同年龄阶段被试工作记忆中有意抑制能力的差异,探索抑制机制随年龄增长的发展趋势及儿童工作记忆中有意抑制能力发展的敏感期。结果表明：1）大学生被试和儿童被试之间的有意抑制能力存在显著性差异;2）随年龄的增长,工作记忆中有意抑制能力呈递增趋势;3）儿童的有意抑制能力发展在三年级,9、10岁可能存在一个敏感期。     

Vocabulary learning in primary school children: Working memory and long-term memory components

The goal of this study was to investigate which working memory and long-term memory components predict vocabulary learning. We used a nonword learning paradigm in which 8- to 10-year-olds learned picture-nonword pairs. The nonwords varied in length (two vs. four syllables) and phonology (native sounding vs. including one Russian phoneme). Short, phonologically native nonwords were learned best, whereas learning long nonwords leveled off after a few presentation cycles. Linear structural equation analyses showed an influence of three constructs—phonological sensitivity, vocabulary knowledge, and central attentional resources (M capacity)—on nonword learning, but the extent of their contributions depended on specific characteristics of the nonwords to be learned. Phonological sensitivity predicted learning of all nonword types except short native nonwords, vocabulary predicted learning of only short native nonwords, and M capacity predicted learning of short nonwords but not long nonwords. The discussion considers three learning processes—effortful activation of phonological representations, lexical mediation, and passive associative learning—that use different cognitive resources and could be involved in learning different nonword types.     

Affective bias in visual working memory is associated with capacity

How does the affective nature of task stimuli modulate working memory (WM)? This study investigates whether WM maintains emotional information in a biased manner to meet the motivational principle of approaching positivity and avoiding negativity by retaining more approach-related positive content over avoidance-related negative content. This bias may exist regardless of individual differences in WM functionality, as indexed by WM capacity (overall bias hypothesis). Alternatively, this bias may be contingent on WM capacity (capacity-based hypothesis), in which a better WM system may be more likely to reveal an adaptive bias. In two experiments, participants performed change localisation tasks with emotional and non-emotional stimuli to estimate the number of items that they could retain for each of those stimuli. Although participants did not seem to remember one type of emotional content (e.g. happy faces) better than the other type of emotional content (e.g. sad faces), there was a significant correlation between WM capacity and affective bias. Specifically, participants with higher WM capacity for non-emotional stimuli (colours or line-drawing symbols) tended to maintain more happy faces over sad faces. These findings demonstrated the presence of a “built-in” affective bias in WM as a function of its systematic limitations, favouring the capacity-based hypothesis.     

Who shall be Allowed to Give? Living Organ Donors and the Concept of Autonomy

Free and informed consent is generally acknowledged as the legal andethical basis for living organ donation, but assessments of livingdonors are not always an easy matter. Sometimes it is necessary toinvolve psychosomatics or ethics consultation to evaluate a prospectivedonor to make certain that the requirements for a voluntary andautonomous decision are met. The paper focuses on the conceptualquestions underlying this evaluation process. In order to illustrate howdifferent views of autonomy influence the decision if a donor's offer isethically acceptable, three cases are presented – from Germany, theUnited States, and India. Each case features a person with questionabledecision-making capacity who offered to donate a kidney for a siblingwith severe renal insufficiency. Although the normative framework issimilar in the three countries, different or sometimes even contraryarguments for and against accepting the offer were brought forward. Thesubsequent analysis offers two explanations for the differences inargumentation and outcome in spite of the shared reference to autonomyas the guiding principle: (1) Decisions on the acceptability of a livingdonor cannot simply be deducted from the principle of autonomy but needto integrate contextual information; (2) understandings of the wayautonomy should be contextualized have an important influence on theevaluation of individual cases. Conclusion: Analyzing the conceptualassumptions about autonomy and its relationship to contextual factorscan help in working towards more transparent and better justifieddecisions in the assessment of living organ donors.     

我国城市老年群体基本医疗费用支付能力考察与研究

老年群体基本医疗费用支付能力的高低是决定其能否实现“老有所医”的关键性因素。通过对北京市、重庆市和河南省三个地区的城市老年群体的实证研究,分析老年群体基本医疗费用支付能力差异,并从社会保障制度方面分析其成因,提出了完善医疗保障制度,提高城市老年群体基本医疗费用支付能力的若干建议。     

青少年预期推理的眼动实验研究

本研究采用2(工作记忆容量:高、低)×2(语境:高预期性、低预期性)×2(靶词:一致性、不一致性)×3(年级:初中二年级、高中二年级、大学二年级)的实验设计,每个年级由高、低容量工作记忆各10人组成。用眼动仪探讨在阅读高预期材料时预期推理产生的心理机制。结果发现:(1)在阅读过程中,预期推理是延时产生的,结果支持建构主义理论;(2)在阅读过程中,被试的工作记忆容量越高,他们产生预期推理的可能性也就越大;(3)在阅读过程中,预期推理的产生有一个发展过程,具体为初中阶段还处于发展的状态,并一直延续到高中阶段,高中阶段之后预期推理能力的发展已经趋于平缓。     

文本阅读中预期推理生成的容量制约性

本研究通过操纵读者信息加工的时间量考察了工作记忆容量对预期推理生成的影响性质。结果表明,如果没有信息加工时间的限制,则工作记忆容量低的读者也能表现出在阅读中生成预期推理的证据,而如果读者的阅读加工时间受一定限制,则工作记忆容量低者建构预期推理的证据随着被允许的加工时间的缩短而逐渐消失。结果支持“工作记忆容量只影响阅读中预期推理建构速度”的观点。     

Assessment of Working Memory Capacity in Preschool Children Using the Missing Scan Task

The purpose of this study was to investigate the feasibility and validity of a modified version of Buschke's missing scan methodology, the Missing Scan Task (MST), to assess working memory capacity (WMC) and cognitive control processes in preschool children 3–6 years in age. Forty typically developing monolingual English‐speaking children between 36 and 84 months in age participated in the study. The children were tested on measures of WMC (MST), verbal and nonverbal memory (NEPSY Narrative Memory and Memory for Designs subtests), and language skills (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, fourth edition). Children showed increased working memory capacity scores with age, as measured by the MST, with significant differences between 3‐ and 5‐year‐olds and 3‐ and 6‐year‐olds. Significant correlations were also found between the MST and language and verbal and nonverbal memory scores. MST scores still remained significantly correlated with the other measures of memory even after age and global language were accounted for in a regression analysis, demonstrating that the MST captures unique variance related specifically to WMC and cognitive control processes used to retrieve and scan information in short‐term memory (STM). The results of this study demonstrate that the MST is a feasible and valid methodology for assessing WMC in preschool children as young 3 years of age. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.