Action Schemas Research Articles

Schémas d'action et types de procès

Action schemata and types of processes Our research focusses on the analysis of knowledge representation structures required in building natural language interfaces, for man/machine dialogue. In particular, for dialogues aimed at performing some "actions" on a computer system, e.g. expert system or data base mainly. Cooperative natural language interfaces must be able to reconstruct the implicit meaning of the user's message on the basis of its linguistic formulation. In this paper we focus on knowledge extraction from verbal expressions. Linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge involved in the use of verbs have been analysed. Linguistic knowledge is given both by a classification of verbs complements, at the syntactic level, and by a definition of verbs categories, at the semantic level. Three verbs categories have been identified : resultative processes, non-resultative processes and states. Extra-linguistic knowledge underlying the use of the different verbs categories is described in terms of action schemata (AS). An (AS) is a representation structure containing several kinds of informations. Those informations are about : the roles played by the actors surrounding the verb, the aimed-result and the pre-conditions for the existence of the state or for triggering the process to which the verb may refer.

Social action theory for a public health psychology.

Many illnesses can be prevented or limited by altering personal behavior, and public health planners have turned to psychology for guidance in fostering self-protective activity. A social theory of personal action provides an integrative framework for applying psychology to public health, disclosing gaps in our current understanding of self-regulation, and generating guidelines for improving health promotion at the population level. A social action view emphasizes social interdependence and interaction in personal control of health-endangering behavior and proposes mechanisms by which environmental structures influence cognitive action schemas, self-goals, and problem-solving activities critical to sustained behavioral change. Social action theory clarifies relationships between social and personal empowerment and helps explain stages of self-change.

Development of an Expert Explanation: An Analysis of a Sequence of Subtraction Lessons

This article documents the teaching and learning that occurred during an 8-day unit on subtraction with regrouping in an expert teacher's second-grade classroom. Students in this study were found to be not only highly skilled in computation at the end of the sequence, but also to have, in some cases, unusual skill in solving problems beyond the range of instruction. Detailed analyses of the expert lessons that led to such high levels of student performance and understanding focused both on the explanations the teacher provided and on students' knowledge growth throughout the sequence. Two aspects of the teacher's explanations were analyzed: the subject-matter content and the explanational plan. Semantic nets were used to portray the teacher's subject-matter knowledge displayed in each lesson and were compared with corresponding nets of student knowledge for each day. All explanations were structurally analyzed to develop a network of goal states and action schemas, similar to other cognitive planning nets...

The Actor and the Experiencer: Divergent Patterns of Causal Attribution

We examined people's causal attributions for their own actions and experience. Following Brown and Fish (1983), we hypothesized that people tend to attribute their actions to themselves and their experiences to external circumstances. Nineteen undergraduates kept a diary during spring vacation in which they were asked to describe an important event they took part in each day and to apportion causality for that event between dispositional and situational factors. Whether subjects themselves categorized the events as actions or experiences, or whether the events were coded by judges, the predicted results were obtained. Brown and Fish attribute this pattern to people's use of general action and experience schemas; we present data in support of our own analysis, which stresses the differential degree of choice involved in actions and experiences.

Conceptual competence and children's counting

A framework is presented for characterizing competence for cognitive tasks, with a detailed hypothesis about competence for counting by typical 5-year-old children. It is proposed that competence has three main components that are called conceptual, procedural, and utilizational competence. Conceptual competence, which is discussed in greatest detail in this article, is the implicit understanding of general principles of the domain. Procedural competence is understanding of general principles of action and takes the form of planning heuristics. Utilizational competence is understanding of relations between features of a task setting and requirements of performance. A characterization of conceptual competence for counting is presented, in the form of action schemata that constitute understanding of counting principles such as cardinality, one-to-one correspondence, and order. This hypothesis about competence is connected explicitly to a detailed analysis of performance in counting tasks. The connection is provided by derivations of planning nets for procedures that are included in process models that simulate children's performance.

Categorization of action slips.

A slip is the error that occurs when a person does an action that is not intended. In this article I examine several collections of slips, primarily of actions, with the aim of devising a theoretical explication. A theory of action is outlined in which an action sequence is represented by a parent schema and numerous child schemas, in which several action schemas can be active at any one time, and in which each schema has a set of triggering conditions and an activation value. The path from intention to action consists of the activation of the parent schema that corresponds to the intention, the activation of child schemas for the component parts of the action sequence, and then the appropriate triggering of schemas when the conditions match those required for their operations. This action system allows slips to be organized into three major categories and a number of subcategories. The three major categories of slips are: (a) errors in the formation of the intention (which includes the subcategories of mode and description errors); (b) faulty activation of schemas (which includes the subcategories of capture errors, data-driven and associative activations, loss of intention, and misordering of action components); and (c) faulty triggering (which includes the subcategories of spoonerisms, blends, intrusions of thoughts, and premature triggering).

Picture memory: How the action schema affects retention

When an action scene is viewed, an action schema guides the formation of an episodic representation. Within episodic memory, items of high relevance to the theme of the action schema are represented in a prototypical form closely connected to the action theme. In contrast, items of low relevance are represented in detail but their representation is unconnected to that of the action. The action schema is used as a retrieval framework for both recalling and recognizing whether or not an item was depicted in a scene (i.e., item presence), but is not used for recognition of figurative detail (i.e., item appearance). Four experiments confirmed these hypotheses. Children, aged 7- and 9-years, and adults organized pictured scenes around themes from action schemata. The appearance of high relevant items was recognized poorly, while their presence was recalled well. Memory for the presence of high relevant items surpassed that for low relevant items even when recognition of item names was assessed. Conversely, the appearance of low relevant items was recognized accurately, but memory for their presence was difficult to retrieve.