工作记忆、加工速度和推理能力对小学儿童策略适应性的影响

研究选取89名小学三~五年级学生,探讨工作记忆、加工速度、推理能力以及年龄对小学儿童策略适应性的影响。通过路径分析发现:(1)工作记忆和推理能力对策略适应性有直接效应;工作记忆通过推理能力对策略适应性产生间接效应;加工速度通过"加工速度→工作记忆→策略适应性"和"加工速度→工作记忆→推理能力→策略适应性"两条路径对策略适应性起间接作用;在三个因素中,工作记忆对策略适应性的总效应最大,而推理能力对策略适应性的直接效应最大。(2)年龄对加工速度和推理能力有直接效应,但对工作记忆的效应不显著;年龄对策略适应性不产生直接效应,年龄通过"年龄→加工速度→工作记忆→策略适应性"、"年龄→加工速度→工作记忆→推理能力→策略适应性"和"年龄→推理能力→策略适应性"三条路径对策略适应性产生间接影响。     

Moving Toward Comprehensiveness and Sustainability in a Social Ecological Approach to Youth Violence Prevention: Lessons from the Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center

Youth violence is a serious public health problem affecting communities across the United States. The use of a social ecological approach has helped reduce its prevalence. However, those who have put the approach into practice often face challenges to effective implementation. Addressing social ecology in all its complexity presents one obstacle; the ability of private non-profit and public agencies to sustain such comprehensive efforts presents another. Here, we provide an example of our efforts to prevent youth violence. We worked with the Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center (APIYVPC) and two communities on O`ahu. We provide a case example from the Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center (APIYVPC) of our work, in collaboration with two communities on O`ahu, to develop and implement a youth violence prevention initiative that is becoming both comprehensive and sustainable. We illustrate the incremental nature of what it means to be comprehensive and we underscore the importance of reaching sustainability as the project unfolds.     

Elephant psychology: What we know and what we would like to know

Although elephants are well-known and one of the most popular species among people, their behavior and cognitive abilities have not been studied very extensively. But recently, more and more researchers are becoming interested in studying their cognition, particularly their general intelligence, including causal reasoning and mirror self recognition, memory, and numerical cognition. Although genetically elephants are more closely related to the small-brained aardvarks and manatees than to primates, they hold enormous potential in their cognitive skills. Also, studying their cognition is important from the point of view of animal welfare in captivity.     

Uncovering deterministic causal structures: a Boolean approach

While standard procedures of causal reasoning as procedures analyzing causal Bayesian networks are custom-built for (non-deterministic) probabilistic structures, this paper introduces a Boolean procedure that uncovers deterministic causal structures. Contrary to existing Boolean methodologies, the procedure advanced here successfully analyzes structures of arbitrary complexity. It roughly involves three parts: first, deterministic dependencies are identified in the data; second, these dependencies are suitably minimalized in order to eliminate redundancies; and third, one or—in case of ambiguities—more than one causal structure is assigned to the minimalized deterministic dependencies.     

Evaluating the multiple proposition strategy

Contextualism about many expressions faces a common objection: in some discourses it appears that there is no single interpretation which can explain how a speaker is justified in making her assertion and how a hearer with different information or standards is justified in negatively evaluating what the speaker said. According to the Multiple Proposition Strategy, contextualists may attempt to explain these competing features pragmatically in terms of different propositions in play. In this paper I argue against the Multiple Proposition Strategy, first focusing on epistemic modals and then generalising the results to other expressions. I show how when purportedly contextualist terms are embedded in belief reports, we get similar problems but that the Multiple Proposition Strategy does not provide a satisfactory explanation of such cases. I suggest, therefore, that we reject the Multiple Proposition Strategy in favour of a theory that explains the unembedded and embedded cases in similar ways.     

How Political Scandals Affect the Electorate. Tracing the Eroding and Spillover Effects of Scandals with a Panel Study

Political scandals are highly relevant for political decision-making and democratic processes more generally. While most prior research employed experimental and cross-sectional survey studies, we tested the effects of a political scandal in the context of the 2017 Austrian Parliamentary Elections using panel data (N = 559, both waves). Importantly, we used a unique data set collected before and just after a major scandal broke in the final election phase. Drawing on a motivated reasoning perspective, attribution theory, and the inclusion/exclusion model, our results revealed a scandal-eroding effect particularly damaging a candidate's own base of supporters and leaving followers in disappointment. The findings also showed a negative scandal-spillover effect for candidate supporters high in scandal knowledge decreasing political trust toward other politicians. Importantly, the results revealed that negative candidate evaluations are not a necessary precondition for negative spillover effects on political trust more generally.     

内容和形式对毒品成瘾者条件推理的影响

本研究通过比较推理内容与推理形式对毒品成瘾者推理成绩的影响,以探究影响毒品成瘾者能力成绩的主要内在机制。实验采用了2(四卡片形式vs选择项形式)×2(描述性规则vs社会契约规则)混合设计,以240名男性戒毒人员为研究对象,考察他们在不同推理内容与不同推理形式下的条件推理作业成绩。结果发现:(1)就规则内容来看,描述性规则内容在选择项形式上的得分好于四卡片形式,社会契约规则内容在两种呈现形式下的成绩没有显著差异;(2)就规则呈现形式来看,四卡片形式下的描述性规则得分显著地低于社会契约规则得分; 选择项形式下两类规则内容得分无显著差异。结果表明:毒品成瘾者的条件推理行为既受到推理内容的影响,也受到逻辑规则呈现形式的影响。     

The teleological stance: Past,present, and future

We review the support for, and criticisms of, the teleological stance theory, often described as a foundation for goal‐directed action understanding early in life. A major point of contention in the literature has been how teleological processes and assumptions of rationality are represented and understood in infancy, and this debate has been largely centered on three paradigms. Visual habituation studies assess infant's abilities to retrospectively assess teleological processes; the presence of such processes is supported by the literature. Rational imitation is a phenomenon that has been questioned both theoretically and empirically, and there is currently little support for this concept in the literature. The involvement of teleological processes in action prediction is unclear. To date, the ontology of teleological processes remains unspecified. To remedy this, we present a new action‐based theory of teleological processes (here referred to as the embodied account of teleological processes), based on the development of goal‐directed reaching with its origin during the fetal period and continuous development over the first few months of life.