Practice and forgetting effects on vocabulary memory: an activation-based model of the spacing effect

An experiment was performed to investigate the effects of practice and spacing on retention of Japanese–English vocabulary paired associates. The relative benefit of spacing increased with increased practice and with longer retention intervals. Data were fitted with an activation-based memory model, which proposes that each time an item is practiced it receives an increment of strength but that these increments decay as a power function of time. The rate of decay for each presentation depended on the activation at the time of the presentation. This mechanism limits long-term benefits from further practice at higher levels of activation and produces the spacing effect and its observed interactions with practice and retention interval. The model was compared with another model of the spacing effect (Raaijmakers, 2003) and was fit to some results from the literature on spacing and memory.     

初中生精神信仰现状研究

用问卷法对431名初中生的精神信仰状况进行调查,发现初中生的精神信仰特点如下:(1)总体状况表现为社会信仰最强、实用信仰次之、超自然信仰最弱。在7个信仰维度上的信仰程度由强到弱依次为国家民族、政治信仰、家庭主义、生命崇拜、宗教信仰、金钱物质、神灵崇拜;(2)男生比女生更看重政治信仰和金钱物质,女生比男生具有更高的宗教信仰;(3)初三年级学生的金钱物质和生命崇拜的信仰程度最高,初二年级次之,初一年级最弱;(4)非学生干部比学生干部具有更强的金钱物质信仰;(5)团员的政治信仰程度高于非团员;(6)学习成绩为上等的学生对国家民族的信仰程度高于学习成绩为中等和下等的学生,学习成绩为下等的学生对金钱物质的信仰程度高于学习成绩为上等和中等的学生。     

Scientists in the Swamp: Narrowing the Language–Practice Gap in Community Psychology

As a confluence of unique values and activities, the collective practice of community psychology is difficult to characterize in a simple way. Increasingly, however, professional contexts are laden with pressure to define any practice—from library work to medical interventions—in the orderly, compact language of traditional science. This trend has historically been resisted in the field by those sensing a fundamental lack of fit between the fluid, emergent aspects of community psychological practice and the fixed, precise language of classic science. In response to this “language–practice gap,” some have attempted to adapt the traditional language of science to better fit the field's practice, while others have explored alternative languages of practice seemingly more indigenous to the messy “swamp” of actual communities. While the former effort leaves some theoretical contradictions intact, the latter tends to discount scientific identity entirely. This paper proposes a potential step forward by resituating questions of disciplinary language and identity within a current philosophical discourse where the nature of social science itself remains sharply contested. This suggests shifting attention away from “should we be a science?” to “what kind of science might we be after all?”; in turn, alternative languages may be re‐cast as legitimate contributors to a kind of science more authentic to human communities—even a viable “science in the swamp.” One such language–philosophical hermeneutics—is presented as a particularly valuable supplement to traditional science. Illustrations highlight ways that hermeneutics may advance the formal language of the field towards a closer fit of what actually happens in practice, while preserving and even bolstering the empirical rigor and scientific identity of the field.     

Direct and Indirect Effects of Completion Versus Accuracy Contingencies on Practice-Exam and Actual-Exam Performance

Students in four sections of an undergraduate educational course (two large and two small sections) took out-of-class practice exams prior to actual exams for each of five course units. Each course unit consisted of five class sessions focusing on a specific developmental theme. Some sections received practice-exam credit based on the number of items completed, whereas other sections received practice-exam credit based on the number of items answered accurately. The contingencies were applied only to the practice exams. A two-way MANOVA included two independent variables (practice-exam contingency and group size) and two dependent variables (practice-exam performance and unit-exam performance). The analysis revealed a main effect for both independent variables across both dependent variables, with students performing better under the accuracy than the completion contingency and better in the small than the large groups. One exception to this overall pattern was a non-significant difference between the large and small groups on the practice exams across both contingencies.     

The Hard Issues of Life

In pastoral counseling, the practitioner and client face the most difficult human problems. An authentic encounter and subsequent connection with one's fundamental Being often occurs, creating a direct existential knowing of what is. Because there are no directions or steps in a protocol to follow in this process, it is helpful for the client to reframe his/her existential search for Being as a Rite of Passage, comprising three distinct, but not separate stages—the separation phase, the initiation phase, and the return or integration phase. Such a process permits the individual a realization of what is through his/her own life circumstances, as a meaningful progression of spiritual growth.decorated Vietnam combat veteran and a marriage, family, and child counselor specializing in treatment of PTSD     

“Things that went well — No serious injuries or deaths”: Ethical reasoning in a normal engineering design process

We argue that considering only a few ‘big’ ethical decisions in any engineering design process — both in education and practice — only reinforces the mistaken idea of engineering design as a series of independent sub-problems. Using data collected in engineering design organisations over a seven year period, we show how an ethical component to engineering decisions is much more pervasive. We distinguish three types of ethical justification for engineering decisions: (1) consequential, (2) deontological or non-consequential, and (3) virtue-based. We find that although there is some evidence for engineering designers as ‘classic’ consequentialists, a more egocentric consequentialism would appear more fitting. We also explain how the idea of a ‘folk ethics’ — a justification in the second category that consciously weighs one thing with another — fits with the idea of the engineering design process as social negotiation rather than as technological progress.     

Reveling in Complexity: Dittes' Male Metaphors and Their Bearing on the Crisis of Clergy Sexual Abuse

In Driven By Hope: Men and Meaning (1996b), James E. Dittes explores the distinctively religious character of men's experience in postindustrial modern western culture. In this article, I first explicate Dittes' developing perspective on men's experience—his middle way—by focusing on his exploration of classical and biblical metaphors of men's life experience, including Oedipus and Adam, the magi and the monarch, the pilgrim and the conquistador, and the son and father. Then, I extend Dittes' models of normative male development to reflect upon the current crisis around clergy sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.     

Expertise and the evolution of consciousness

This paper argues that expertise can be used as an indicator of consciousness in humans and other animals. The argument is based on the following observations: (1) expertise and skill acquisition require deliberate practice; and (2) the characteristics of deliberate practice such as performance evaluation against a more proficient model, retention of voluntary control over actions, self-monitoring, goal-setting, error-detection and correction, and the construction of hierarchically organized retrieval structures are outside of the currently understood bounds of unconscious processing. Thus, to the extent that evidence of expertise exists in an organism, evidence of conscious experience is also present. Two important implications arise from this conclusion: (1) evidence of expertise can be used as the basis for cross-species comparisons of consciousness; and (2) the evolution of human consciousness can be assessed using fossil evidence of skilled behavior as a measure of consciousness.     

Psychoanalysis and Eastern spiritual healing traditions

An exploration of the theory and practice of healing in the Eastern spiritual traditions reveals the centrality of the idealizing transference in the patient-seeker's interaction with the spiritual teacher or the guru although the aim and development of the idealizing transference in the spiritual traditions are quite different from those of self psychology. In its emphasis on the guru's empathy and in claiming that its meditative practices radically reduce the noise and glare produced by the sensual self which is the chief obstacle to the teacher-healer's empathic understanding of the patient, the Eastern healing discourse goes considerably beyond most traditional psychoanalytic formulations on the nature and communication of empathy in the analytic situation. The Eastern traditions' claim of a significant enhancement of the teacher-healer's empathic capacity through meditative practices, and its communication to the patient/seeker through other channels besides the verbal one, can make an important contribution to the discussion on the role of empathy in psychoanalytic discourse and, if the claim proves true, to a place for meditative practices in psychoanalytic education.     

Motor learning without physical practice: The effects of combined action observation and motor imagery practice on cup-stacking speed

In this study we explored training effects for combined action observation and motor imagery (AO + MI) instructions on a complex cup-stacking task, without physical practice. Using a Graeco-Latin Square design, we randomly assigned twenty-six participants into four groups. This counterbalanced the within-participant factor of practice condition (AO + MI, AO, MI, Control) across four cup-stacking tasks, which varied in their complexity. On each of the three consecutive practice days participants experienced twenty trials under each of the three mental practice conditions. On each trial, a first-person perspective video depicted bilateral cup-stacking performed by an experienced model. During AO, participants passively observed this action, responding only to occasional colour cues. For AO + MI, participants imagined performing the observed action and synchronised their concurrent MI with the display. For MI, a sequence of pictures cued imagery of each stage of the task. Analyses revealed a significant main effect of practice condition both at the ’surprise’ post-test (Day 3) and at the one-week retention test. At both time points movement execution times were significantly shorter for AO + MI compared with AO, MI and the Control. Execution times were also shorter overall at the retention compared with the post-test. These results demonstrate that a complex novel motor task can be acquired without physical training. Practitioners can therefore use AO + MI practice to supplement physical practice and optimise skill learning.