The Map and the Territory: Complexity in Biology

In business administration or in economics it is absolutely relevant not to consider indexes like profit growth rate or gross domestic product as exhaustive indexes for economic wealth. Likewise, in biology it is important not to confuse the representation of life with life itself. The most important concepts in biology are information, memory, structure, plasticity, and robustness. Information is the difference that makes the difference. Memories are information registered in an organism. Plasticity is the capacity of a living organism to change its own structure/sets of behaviors for having a competitive advantage. Robustness is the ability of a living organism to resist environmental changes without changing its own structure/sets of behavior, and fragility is when a living organism undergoes changes in its own structure without being able to resist non-adaptive changes.     

“Put the blame on…others!”: The battle of cyclists against pedestrians and car drivers at the urban environment. A cyclists’ perception study

The main hypothesis of the paper is that cyclists tend to blame primarily car drivers, for the conflict events they have experienced with cars, but they do not have the same intention for the conflict events with pedestrians. For this purpose, 306 cyclists were interviewed through a revealed questionnaire survey and 64% revealed that they had experienced a conflict with a pedestrian whereas 55% revealed that they had experienced a conflict with a car. From the responses, two linear regression models were developed, with the perceived responsibility considered as the dependent variable.The cycling–pedestrian model indicated that cyclists who also have car accessibility, tend to blame primarily the pedestrians for the incidents, compared to cyclists who do not possess a car. Further, cyclists tend to give less responsibility to pedestrians for incidents occurred at sidewalks, crosswalks, etc. compare to incidents occurred at shared use paths. In addition, cyclists do not blame pedestrians for conflicts occurred primarily at sidewalks and crosswalks; places were pedestrians are considered to have the priority. Finally, cyclists aged between 55 and 64 years old, are giving less responsibility to pedestrians for the incident, compare to cyclists aged between 25 and 39 years old.On the other hand, the cycling–car model showed that an illegal cyclist’s movement at a road segment can reduce by half the responsibility the cyclists give to the car drivers, compare to the responsibility they give when the latter have an aggressive driving behavior. It was also found that cyclists, who tend to cycle less than 1 h, do not blame so much the car drivers for the incident, compared to cyclists that cycle for longer. Finally, cyclists who prefer the bicycle lane to be located along the road instead at the sidewalk, tend to accuse less the drivers for the incident.     

The effects of driving environment complexity and dual tasking on drivers’ mental workload and eye blink behavior

The goal of the present study was to assess the effectiveness of eye blink behavior in measuring drivers’ mental workload. Previous research has shown that when mental workload increases with the primary task difficulty, blink frequency drops. On the opposite, the number of blinks increases when a cognitive secondary task has to be performed concurrently. However, the combined effects of the primary task difficulty and dual-tasking on blink rate have not been investigated. The present study was thus designed to vary systematically both the primary driving task and the cognitive secondary task demand to examine their combined effects on blink rate. The driving task was manipulated by varying the complexity of a simulated driving environment. The cognitive load was manipulated using a concurrent simple reaction time task or a complex calculation task. The results confirmed that eye blink frequency was a sensitive measure to elicit increased mental workload level coming from the driving environment. They also confirmed that blink rate increased with the introduction of a cognitive secondary task while blink duration was not affected. However, eye blink behavior did not provide a clear mental workload signature when driving task demands and dual-task conditions were varied simultaneously. The overall picture goes against the suitability of eye blink behavior to monitor drivers’ states at least when external and internal demands interact.     

One world,one environment,one vision: are we close to achieving this? An exploratory study of consumer environmental behaviour across three countries

The environment as an issue has been central to a number of conferences and debates held worldwide. This indicates the growing concern regarding environmental issues on the part of various nations. It is apparent that both public support and political efforts are required to halt environmental deterioration. Members of the public need to display a change in attitude and governments need policies and strategies to channel this change in appropriate directions. The present study concentrates on the aspect of public awareness and how this translates to their purchase of environmentally friendly products. The theoretical framework incorporates respondents from three countries. The main aim is to investigate differences in public awareness and behaviour based on individual variables, such as Cognitive style and Involvement, and broad factors, such as the economic and developmental stages of the countries included in the sample. Data has been collected from a sample of 132 respondents. The results indicate that the attitudes and behaviour of UK respondents are generally non‐committal, whereas the sample from India displays a more involved attitude, which is reflected in their purchasing behaviour. The ‘availability’ and the ‘price’ of environmentally friendly products have been identified as the most significant issues common to India, Greece and the UK. Cognitive style analysis indicates that innovators are responsible for generating a range of qualitative differences, whereas the differences highlighted by Involvement are quantitative in nature. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications.     

大学生自主学习影响因素的中介效应模型

作为大学生的主要学习方式, 自主学习受到多种因素的影响。从社会认知学派的理论出发, 结合国内外自主学习的已有成果, 本研究通过501名大学生被试考察了自我概念、学习归因、学习环境适应对自主学习的影响。结果发现, 学习归因对自主学习有直接回归效应; 学习环境适应通过学习归因这个中介变量影响自主学习; 而自我概念对自主学习不仅有直接回归效应, 同时还通过学习环境适应和学习归因的部分中介作用影响自主学习。本研究通过结构方程建模, 理清了三个变量对自主学习的作用路径, 并据此对如何提高大学生自主学习能力提供了教育建议。     

Home improvements: Within-family associations between income and the quality of children's home environments

Within-family associations between changes in income and changes in the home environment during infancy and early childhood were examined using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (n = 1364). Linear and nonlinear (i.e., semilog) specifications were estimated for family income. In addition, variations in income effects were estimated as a function of the level of developmentally stimulating resources in homes during early infancy. Increases in family income were positively associated with increases in the quality of children's home environments. The estimated effects of income were largest for families who had low incomes and low-quality early home environments. These results were evident for physical characteristics of the home that likely required monetary investments, as well as for psychosocial characteristics of the home.     

Can infrastructure improvements mitigate unsafe traffic safety culture: A driving simulator study exploring cross cultural differences

This paper presents the results of a cross-cultural study to investigate the influence of traffic safety culture and infrastructure improvements on driver behaviour. To achieve this, the driving style of UK drivers was compared with that of Nigerians with and without experience of driving in the UK. A driving simulator experiment compared the actual driving style of these three groups of drivers in different safety critical scenarios. The simulated road environment varied depending on how much infrastructure was provided (low or high infrastructure). In addition, the Driver Behaviour Questionnaire was used to collect self-reported data on violations, errors and lapses. It was hypothesised that Nigerian drivers with no experience of driving in a UK road system would report and engage in more unsafe driving behaviour compared to the other two groups, and that increasing infrastructure would have little positive benefit. Overall, the results supported these hypotheses, indicating that the behaviours of drivers are interpretable in relation to their traffic safety culture, compared to changes in their driving environment.     

Planet Braitenberg: Experiments in virtual psychology

Braitenberg vehicles are simple robotic platforms, equipped with rudimentary sensor and motor components. Such vehicles have typically featured as part of thought experiments that are intended to show how complex behaviours are apt to emerge from the interaction of inner control mechanisms with aspects of bodily structure and features of the wider (extra-agential) environment. The present paper describes a framework for creating Braitenberg-like vehicles, which is built on top of a widely used and freely available game engine, namely, the Unity game engine. The framework can be used to study the behaviour of virtual vehicles within a multiplicity of virtual environments. All aspects of the vehicle’s design, as well as the wider virtual environment in which the vehicle is situated, can be modified during the design phase, as well as at runtime. The result is a general-purpose simulation capability that is intended to provide the foundation for studies in so-called computational situated cognition—a field of study whose primary objective is to support the computational modelling of cognitive processes associated with the physically-embodied, environmentally-embedded, and materially-extended mind.     

Caregivers can implement play-based instruction without disrupting child preference

Young children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder often require systematic teaching to learn new skills, and caregivers can teach their children by embedding learning opportunities in a play-based context. However, researchers have not evaluated procedures to train caregivers how to implement a combination of strategies designed to establish rapport and early language skills while maintaining play as a preferred context. Caregiver–child dyads composed of 2 mothers and their sons were recruited to participate. A multiple-probe design across strategies was used to demonstrate the efficacy of behavioral skills training on the mothers' integration of parallel play, child-directed interaction, teaching requests (mands), and teaching labels (tacts). Both children acquired the target requests and labels as a function of their mothers' teaching. By assessing the children's preferences, we confirmed the teaching strategies did not decrease toy engagement or the value of playing with their mother. We obtained stimulus generalization of the mothers' implementation of the strategies from a clinic to their home and maintenance of mother and child performance across a month.