Does movement proficiency impact on exergaming performance?

There is growing interest in the use of consumer level exergames in movement skill acquisition. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between movement proficiency and performance in virtual exergaming. Twenty seven children, aged 10–15 years participated in an experiment completing the Movement Assessment Battery for Children 2 (MABC-2) and a series of XBOX360 Kinect Sports exergaming tasks. Significant correlations were observed between MABC-2 aiming and catching percentile and exergame javelin and target kick, where the more proficient movers tended to perform better in the exergame. Statistically significant correlations were observed between MABC-2 balance percentile and exergaming sprint and target kick performance. In this study children who scored better in real life gross motor movement tasks performed better in most related exergaming activities. This suggests current exergaming technology has advanced to a point where body movement unencumbered by a physical or remote game device tether can extract movements resembling real life tasks, translate them into game play and reward proficient movers with higher in-game performance. It is possible that benefit gained in an exergaming environment by more proficient movers was a result of either their more proficient movement, or a greater ability to adapt to the exergame.     

Children Use Temporal Cues to Learn Causal Directionality

The ability to learn the direction of causal relations is critical for understanding and acting in the world. We investigated how children learn causal directionality in situations in which the states of variables are temporally dependent (i.e., autocorrelated). In Experiment 1, children learned about causal direction by comparing the states of one variable before versus after an intervention on another variable. In Experiment 2, children reliably inferred causal directionality merely from observing how two variables change over time; they interpreted Y changing without a change in X as evidence that Y does not influence X. Both of these strategies make sense if one believes the variables to be temporally dependent. We discuss the implications of these results for interpreting previous findings. More broadly, given that many real‐world environments are characterized by temporal dependency, these results suggest strategies that children may use to learn the causal structure of their environments.     

The Effects of Prior Learned Strategies on Updating an Opponent's Strategy in the Rock,Paper, Scissors Game

To explore how model building adapts to changing environments, we had participants play “rock‐paper‐scissors” against a computer that played a frequency bias or a player‐dependent bias and then switched. Participants demonstrated their use of prior experience in how quickly they recognized and exploited changes in the computer's play strategy; in general, the more similar the strategies, the more efficient the updating. These findings inform our understanding of previously reported updating impairments in right‐brain damaged patients.     

Pan-Islamism in Afghanistan in the Early Twentieth Century: From Political Discourse to Government Policy, 1906–22

The idea of pan-Islamism in Afghanistan emerged after the foundation of the Constitutional Party in the early 1900s. The party was an underground organization which had cells in an educational institution, the royal court and among the foreign group (Indians) employed in government departments. Pan-Islamism served to unite various political forces toward certain political and cultural goals. After the accession of Amanullah to the throne in 1919, pan-Islamism became a state policy. It served as the key to the government's foreign policy, especially towards the two imperial powers in the region, Britain and Russia. Amanullah used it as a means to fulfil his political expansionist ambitions. This article examines what pan-Islamism meant to the Constitutional Party and to King Amanullah, the reasons behind their approaches, and the political context that made pan-Islamism the most appealing ideological and political strategy for them. The article also explores the means the party and Amanullah used to propagate pan-Islamism.     

多级评分模型下的题库结构对CAT的影响分析

在多级评分模型下,项目的难度参数或步骤参数有多个,在对多级评分模型进行选题时,通常对项目的多个难度参数用一个综合的指标来概括.当对每个项目的难度参数进行有效的综合后,综合后的难度参数分布发生了改变,这时如果增加适量的平均难度较难或较易的项目进入题库,测验的精度和项目的曝光率都有一定的改善.     

大学生的基本兴趣及其与专业承诺的关系

该研究调查了1304名来自18个不同专业领域的大学生的基本兴趣和专业承诺,并用回归法分析了特定基本兴趣与专业承诺之间的关系.结果发现：（1）大学生的31种基本兴趣在二维空间中呈现近似圆形的排列,且基本兴趣结构上的性别差异不明显;（2）在14个专业领域内大学生的特定基本兴趣能显著预测其专业承诺,所解释的变异量平均为20％,接近中等水平的效果大小;（3）在不同专业领域内基本兴趣对专业承诺的影响效果大小有所不同.     

The driver behaviour questionnaire in South-East Europe countries: Bulgaria,Romania and Serbia

Using data from three samples and more than 1000 participants, this study have examined the psychometric properties of the Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ) in three countries from South-East Europe. Differences in driving behaviour between countries were also investigated. Exploratory factor analysis results supported the distinction between errors and violations in all three countries. Furthermore, the positive associations of both errors and violations with self-reported traffic accidents were also consistent in all three samples. In terms of differences in driving behaviour, Romanian drivers scored higher on many error and violation items in comparison to the other two countries. Also, speeding violations were the most common violations in all three countries. Overall, our results provide further support for using the DBQ to measure aberrant (i.e. errors and violations) driver behaviour.     

Bidirectional feature selection with global and local structure preservation for small size samples

Collecting samples is a challenging task for face recognition, especially for some real-world applications such as law enhancement and ID card identification, where there is usually single sample per person (SSPS) used to train a face recognition system. To extract discriminative features from the small size samples, in this paper we propose virtual samples via bidirectional feature selection with global and local structure preservation (VS-BFS-GL) to augment the number of training samples. In VS-BFS-GL, bidirectional feature selection is developed, which introduces L_2,1 norm to explore the face variations from both horizontal and vertical directions. Further, to include more variations in the virtual images, the global structure information and sample-specified local structure information of the SSPP training set are considered. By integrating bidirectional feature selection, global and local structure, the limited training samples are fully utilized and more knowledge are mined. To further improve the effectiveness of VS-BFS-GL, an auxiliary database containing different face variations can be used to explore the local structure information. We extensively evaluated the proposed approach on AR and FERET database. The promising recognition results demonstrate that VS-BFS-GL is robust to expression, pose and partial occlusion variations in the faces.     

School Perceptions of Children Raised by Grandparents

Increasing numbers of children raised by grandparents are students in schools. Their substitute family structure and precursors to the emergence of this family structure have implications for the children's school performance. Research suggests teachers view these children as at risk for difficult school functioning. The aforementioned judgment is problematic because teacher expectations, attributions, and biases are associated with stereotype threat that impacts student performance adversely. The author compares children raised by grandparents with children raised by parents and foster parents. The author examines the children's perceptions of their teachers' views of their school performance. He also examines the children's general feelings about school. Participants in the study were 6,550 students in Grades 6–8 from the nationally representative Health Behaviour in School-aged Children survey. Nonparametric statistical analyses reveal children raised by grandparents believe teachers' view their school performance negatively when compared with children living with both parents. Strategies are described to improve the children's performance in school and to foster favorable teacher perceptions.     

国外儿童词汇识别发展眼动研究的新进展

近年来,国外儿童阅读发展的眼动研究已逐渐成为阅读研究热点领域。本文就国外儿童阅读的眼动研究成果进行概述,从儿童阅读眼动研究的基本问题、字词、句子、篇章和相关理论等方面对儿童的阅读过程进行考察,总结其阅读发展的一般规律和特点。最后,文章从阅读材料、统计方法以及研究设计几个方面对儿童阅读研究的方法性问题进行展望,以期为中文阅读发展的眼动研究提供借鉴