The relationship between mental rotation and arithmetic: do number line estimation,working memory,or place-value concept matter?

Mental rotation is positively related to arithmetic ability; however, the mechanism underlying this relationship remains unclear. The possible roles of working memory, place-value concept, and number line estimation in the correlation between mental rotation and whole-number computation were investigated. One hundred and fifty-five first-grade students were tested to determine their mental rotation ability, arithmetic ability, and non-verbal intelligence. One year later, their working memory, place-value concept, number line estimation, and overall arithmetic ability were assessed. After controlling for age, gender, and prior arithmetic ability, we found that mental rotation uniquely predicted arithmetic ability after one year. Further mediation analyses demonstrated that number line estimation significantly mediated the relationship between mental rotation and arithmetic ability. In contrast, neither working memory nor place-value concept significantly mediated the relationship between mental rotation and arithmetic ability. This study highlights that mental number line estimation is the most important element explaining the influence of a dynamic spatial skill, that is, mental rotation, on arithmetic ability among young Chinese children.     

Do Programmers Prefer Predictable Expressions in Code?

Source code is a form of human communication, albeit one where the information shared between the programmers reading and writing the code is constrained by the requirement that the code executes correctly. Programming languages are more syntactically constrained than natural languages, but they are also very expressive, allowing a great many different ways to express even very simple computations. Still, code written by developers is highly predictable, and many programming tools have taken advantage of this phenomenon, relying on language model surprisal as a guiding mechanism. While surprisal has been validated as a measure of cognitive load in natural language, its relation to human cognitive processes in code is still poorly understood. In this paper, we explore the relationship between surprisal and programmer preference at a small granularity—do programmers prefer more predictable expressions in code? Using meaning-preserving transformations, we produce equivalent alternatives to developer-written code expressions and run a corpus study on Java and Python projects. In general, language models rate the code expressions developers choose to write as more predictable than these transformed alternatives. Then, we perform two human subject studies asking participants to choose between two equivalent snippets of Java code with different surprisal scores (one original and transformed). We find that programmers do prefer more predictable variants, and that stronger language models like the transformer align more often and more consistently with these preferences.     

A parameter analysis method for the weight‐set to satisfy preference orders of alternatives in additive multi‐criteria value models

In the context of the additive multi‐criteria value model, this paper investigates how the set of criteria weights (weight‐set hereafter) can be determined according to the preference orders of alternatives given by the decision maker. A construction method is proposed for the weight‐set for different intervals of β, where β is a differential amount of value between the preference information on two alternatives. The results of this paper are important for sensitivity analysis in multi‐criteria decision making (MCDM) problems and multi‐criteria group decision analysis. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

马王堆帛书《周易》卦爻辞校札九则

本文就帛书《周易》部分疑难卦爻辞的训释作了探讨,认为:《剥》六二“辩”读作“蹁(髌)”,膝端也,“辩”及初爻“足”均非床体；《赣》九五“塭”即“堤”之形讹,读作“疷”,“祗”读作“疷”,训“病”,或以“柢”为语词,或写作“柢”,皆误；《屯》六三“鹿”读为“麓”,山足也,不训禽鹿,“几”,词也,“如”,往也,“舍”者舍置也；《归妹》六五“日月既望(望)”,“日”字衍文,“既”,今本、帛书《昭力》均作“几”,“既”读作“几”,几者辞也,或如字作解,或以“近望”实解,均非；《泰》初九“胃”读作“(曹)”,“(曹)”为“(彝)”或体,“(羹)(汇)”为“(曹)”之假借字,“(曹)”者类也；《鼎》九四“屋”读作“屋剭”,“刑剭”者厚刑也,此汉人古义通训,今本作“形渥”,“握”训“渥沾”,疑非；等.     

Intelligence and Extraversion in the neural evaluation of delayed rewards

Temporal discounting (TD), the preference for earlier, smaller rewards over delayed, larger rewards, is a pervasive phenomenon that covaries with Big Five personality traits and Intelligence (IQ). This study provides novel insight by identifying correlates for IQ and Extraversion in the neural representation of TD preferences. An intertemporal choice task was employed, where offers were sequentially presented, distinguishing between one evaluation phase (first offer is presented) and one comparison phase (second offer is presented and values are compared). IQ correlated with responses of caudate nucleus to the subjective values of the offers, suggesting a role of cognitive abilities in modulating reward responses. Extraversion correlated with the strength of functional connectivity of a reward evaluation network centered on ventromedial prefrontal cortex.     

Comparing stimulus preference and response force in a conjugate preparation

Researchers used a conjugate preparation to evaluate how response force changed based on participants' preferences for visual stimuli. First, researchers used a verbal preference assessment to evaluate each participant's preference for viewing for five object categories of visual stimuli; this process identified high preference (HP) stimuli and low preference stimuli for most participants. Thereafter, researchers exposed each participant to the five stimulus categories in a randomized order while using a force dynamometer to measure their response force to increase visual clarity of each stimulus. Results indicate the majority of participants' HP stimuli corresponded to the stimulus category for which they exerted the highest mean force. These preliminary findings suggest conjugate preparations involving response force may provide another option for measuring the relative value of some stimulus events.     

Relative importance of criteria: a quantitative approach

A mathematical definition for the assertion ‘a group of criteria A is more important than a group of criteria B’ is introduced. It is shown how quantitative information on relative importance of criteria allows us to obtain a more precise upper estimate for a set of all non-dominated solutions than the well-known Pareto set. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Experimental consideration of preference in decision making under certainty

This paper describes an experiment in decision making under certainty with multiple, conflicting objectives and continuous decision variables. Two techniques for analysing such problems are considered: one taken from the paradigm of multicriteria decision making (MCDM), a non-directed approach called the NAIVE technique, and one from the paradigm of multiattribute decision analysis (D/A), the SMART technique. While the two techniques seek and are throught to arrive at the same end—a solution which is in some sense optimal for the decision maker (DM)—the former approach implicitly incorporates DM preferences while the latter approach considers preferences explicitly. The setting is a laboratory study using a sample of university students on a three-criteria problem which is designed to study the extent to which value functions implied/assessed by the techniques are consistent with DMs' holistic ranking of alternatives. Results show that (1) the two techniques of interest show significantly better rank order correlation with holistic judgement compared with other techniques, (2) DMs prefer the non-directed MCDM approach and (3) subjects break down into two groups: those that use assessable value functions when ranking and those that do not. This implies that for small-dimensioned problems DMs may first need to be classified as to the assessability of their value functions before a solution method is chosen.