Research In Cognitive Psychology Research Articles

Similarity perceptions in investor reactions to acquisition announcements

We contribute to an improved understanding of investor reactions to acquisition announcements by building on the recent research in cognitive psychology that distinguishes between the following two types of cognitive similarity assessments: taxonomic and thematic similarity. We theorize and find that investor reactions to taxonomic acquisitions, where synergies are easier to comprehend, are generally more positive than investor reactions to thematic acquisitions, which require higher cognitive processing. We argue that this effect is driven by the cognitive processing of investors, instead of “true” synergy, since the more negative announcement returns for thematic deals reverse a few days after the announcement, converging with the announcement returns of taxonomic deals. Moreover, we find that attempts by the acquiring company to help investors assess thematic acquisitions do not seem to be effective at eliminating this effect and instead appear to aggravate investor suspicion. Overall, our findings contribute to the emerging behavioral perspective of investor reactions to acquisition announcements.

The Past in the Present—The Role of Analogical Reasoning in Epistemic Learning About How to Tackle Complex Policy Problems

This article unpacks the role that analogical reasoning plays in epistemic learning, helping actors identify and evaluate what solutions can be used to fix complex, high‐stakes policy problems. Based on recent research in cognitive psychology, we develop a two‐stage analogical reasoning model of learning in which core causal lessons are transferred to the current target case, but where contextual differences are also discounted. The result is the restriction of the set of solutions considered in a policy debate to those that have positive source cases associated with them, and no compelling negative source cases. In the Banking Union case study assessed in this article, we provide evidence that analogical reasoning did play an important role in setting the parameters of the debates. The article concludes with a call for policy analysts to pay more attention to how comparisons with the past structure policy debates.

Communicative Language Teaching

The purpose of this article is to provide an introduction to communicative language teaching (CLT) and to describe methodological principles that facilitate the language learning process. CLT furthermore takes a pragmatic or performance-based approach to learning. Its goal is to promote the development of real-life language skills by engaging the learner in contextualized, meaningful, and communicative-oriented learning tasks. CLT methodologies embrace an eclectic approach to teaching, which means they borrow teaching practices from a wide array of methods that have been found effective and that are in accordance with principles of learning as suggested by research findings in research in SLA and cognitive psychology. Its open-ended or principle-based approach allows for a great deal of flexibility, which makes it adaptable to many individual programmatic and learner needs and goals.

Conversion and Self-Transformation in Christian Monasticism: A Cognitive Perspective.

Religious conversion involves changes in the convert's way of thinking and behaving. This paper focuses on the unique form that this transformative process took within the Christian monastic movement in late antiquity. Treating monastic conversion as a gradual process in which the convert is an active participant, it examines the ways in which monastic converts were able to intentionally promote such a change and influence its direction. This study draws on research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience on the cognitive underpinnings of self-transformation in order to reconstruct from the literary sources of Near Eastern monasticism the strategies and training methods that late antique monks employed in order to facilitate and sustain the transformation implicated in conversion.

Economic Guidelines for Awarding Exemplary Damages

Australian and American law both recognise that where exemplary damages are available their purpose is deterrence and punishment. In the United States the goal of exemplary damages and the effectiveness of the legal system in achieving that goal have been the subject of extensive research. The idea of exemplary damages being imposed to punish or seek retribution against an individual for a gratuitous moral wrong has been questioned due to the prevalence of the corporate form. In the case of corporate wrongdoing economic theory has been invoked to argue that the focus of exemplary damages should be optimal deterrence. According to the economic analysis of deterrence, the socially correct or optimal level of deterrence is created by compelling the responsible party to internalise the full social cost of its conduct, but nothing more than that. It further follows that the financial circumstances of a corporate defendant are irrelevant. In trying to give effect to the economics of deterrence, there has been research into the decision-making processes of jurors which concluded that placing the exemplary damages decision in the discretion of jurors leads to arbitrary awards. Accordingly, this article seeks to draw on the economics of deterrence and cognitive psychology research to provide guidance to Australian courts faced with a claim for exemplary damages.

Test-retest reliability for common tasks in vision science

Historically, research in cognitive psychology has sought to evaluate cognitive mechanisms according to the average response to a manipulation. Differences between individuals have been dismissed as “noise” with an aim toward characterising an overall effect and how it can inform human cognition. More recently, research has shifted toward appreciating the value of individual differences between participants and the insight gained by exploring the impacts of between-subject variation on human cognition. However, recent research has suggested that many robust, well-established cognitive tasks suffer from surprisingly low levels of test-retest reliability (Hedge, Powell, & Sumner, 2018). While the tasks may produce reliable effects at the group level (i.e., they are replicable), they may not produce a reliable measurement of a given individual. If individual performance on a task is not consistent from one time point to another, the task is therefore unfit for the assessment of individual differences. To evaluate the reliability of commonly used tasks in vision science, we tested a large sample of undergraduate students in two sessions (separated by 1-3 weeks). Our battery included tasks that spanned the range of visual processing from basic sensitivity (motion coherence) to transient spatial attention (useful field of view) to sustained attention (multiple-object tracking) to visual working memory (change detection). Reliabilities (intraclass correlations) ranged from 0.4 to 0.7, suggesting that most of these measures suffer from lower reliability than would be desired for research in individual differences. These results do not detract from the value of the tasks in an experimental setting; however, higher levels of test-retest reliability would be required for a meaningful assessment of individual differences. Implications for using tools from vision science to understand processing in both healthy and neuropsychological populations are discussed.

How can geologic decision-making under uncertainty be improved?

Abstract. In the geosciences, recent attention has been paid to the influence of uncertainty on expert decision-making. When making decisions under conditions of uncertainty, people tend to employ heuristics (rules of thumb) based on experience, relying on their prior knowledge and beliefs to intuitively guide choice. Over 50 years of decision-making research in cognitive psychology demonstrates that heuristics can lead to less-than-optimal decisions, collectively referred to as biases. For example, the availability bias occurs when people make judgments based on what is most dominant or accessible in memory; geoscientists who have spent the past several months studying strike-slip faults will have this terrain most readily available in their mind when interpreting new seismic data. Given the important social and commercial implications of many geoscience decisions, there is a need to develop effective interventions for removing or mitigating decision bias. In this paper, we outline the key insights from decision-making research about how to reduce bias and review the literature on debiasing strategies. First, we define an optimal decision, since improving decision-making requires having a standard to work towards. Next, we discuss the cognitive mechanisms underlying decision biases and describe three biases that have been shown to influence geoscientists' decision-making (availability bias, framing bias, anchoring bias). Finally, we review existing debiasing strategies that have applicability in the geosciences, with special attention given to strategies that make use of information technology and artificial intelligence (AI). We present two case studies illustrating different applications of intelligent systems for the debiasing of geoscientific decision-making, wherein debiased decision-making is an emergent property of the coordinated and integrated processing of human–AI collaborative teams.

Critical thinking, biases and dual processing: The enduring myth of generalisable skills.

The myth of generalisable thinking skills in medical education is gaining popularity once again. The implications are significant as medical educators decide on how best to use limited resources to prepare trainees for safe medical practice. This myth-busting critical review cautions against the proliferation of curricular interventions based on the acquisition of generalisable skills. This paper begins by examining the recent history of general thinking skills, as defined by research in cognitive psychology and medical education. We describe three distinct epochs: (a) the Renaissance, which marked the beginning of cognitive psychology as a discipline in the 1960s and 1970s and was paralleled by educational reforms in medical education focused on problem solving and problem-based learning; (b) the Enlightenment, when an accumulation of evidence in psychology and in medical education cast doubt on the assumption of general reasoning or problem-solving skill and shifted the focus to consideration of the role of knowledge in expert clinical performance; and (c) the Counter-Enlightenment, in the current time, when the notion of general thinking skills has reappeared under different guises, but the fundamental problems related to lack of generality of skills and centrality of knowledge remain. The myth of general thinking skills persists, despite the lack of evidence. Progress in medical education is more likely to arise from devising strategies to improve the breadth and depth of experiential knowledge.

Adaptación al español de cuatro instrumentos para evaluar la teoría de la mente en niños y adolescentes

Introducción: La teoría de la mente (ToM) es una de las dimensiones de la Cognición Social más relevantes y de gran interés para la investigación en psicología del desarrollo, psicología cognitiva, neuropsicología y neurociencias sociales, así como en la labor clínica. Esto ha conllevado a la generación de instrumentos validados para la evaluación de esta función; sin embargo, en español son pocos los que hay y aún menos los adaptados para población infantil y adolescente.
 Objetivo: En el presente trabajo se presenta la adaptación de la Batería de la ToM, el inventario de la ToM, el Test de Paso en Falso y el Test de la Mirada, cuatro instrumentos con tareas clásicas para evaluar la ToM.
 Método: El proceso de adaptación se hizo en dos fases, una de traducción al español y otra de adaptación cultural. Para verificar los resultados se hizo un pilotaje para todos los instrumentos con 20 participantes en edades entre 4 y 13 años y 20 participantes entre 6 y 17 años.
 Resultados: Se presentan los cuatro instrumentos adaptados en español con los principales ajustes en cada uno de ellos.
 Discusión: Se discute sobre la importancia de generar un protocolo de valoración de la ToM haciendo una validación estadística de estos instrumentos.

Botany through the Looking Glass: Cognitive Neuroscience and its Role in the Use of Art in Botanical Education

Student engagement within the discipline of Botany is not always limited to scientific content. The patterns, colours and shapes that are produced when investigating plant anatomy via sectioning are highly aesthetic and can immediately engage students. The boundaries between aesthetics and science are often blurred or, more correctly, imagined. Nurturing and developing the inspiration drawn from the integration of these two worlds provides an alternative way of engaging students in the theoretical content of the discipline. Student exposure and engagement with native Australian Flora and botanical education is too often limited and finding novel ways to engage students with Botany is critically important; even more so in this current era of Plant Blindness and climate change denial (Jacobson et al., 2016; Wandersee & Schussler, 2000). To combat this, contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology research show promise toward the use of visual mediums to enhance memory, leading to an improvement in educational outcomes (Bigelow & Poremba, 2014; Cohen, Horowitz, & Wolfe, 2009; Corballis, 1966; Gloede, 2015; Jensen, 1971; Kim & Olaciregui, 2008). Therefore, encouraging students to engage with botanical content, via microscopic imagery, scientific/artistic depictions, and more specifically, the production of drawings and artworks (Fernandes et al., 2018; Rosier, Locker, & Naufel, 2013) should be further incorporated into curricula to increase engagement and establish a deeper connection to Botanical subdisciplines such as plant taxonomy, morphology and systematics. In this paper, with reference to established research and an example of a science-art project, we discuss the ways in which the fusion of the aesthetic and scientific worlds creates a feedback loop from which the creative process inspired from scientific material develops a deeper enquiry-based understanding of the material itself

Help, I Need Somebody, Not Just Anybody? The Role of Advisors During Technology Venture Emergence

Entrepreneurs of new technology ventures often seek advice and mentoring. However, research in knowledge management and cognitive psychology have suggested that the accumulation of advice might depend on the venture's absorptive capacity and the learning capabilities of the entrepreneur receiving advice. To date, this has been poorly studied in nascent technical ventures. Through a novel quantitative study of 105 nascent technology ventures associated with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (“I-Corps”) Program, we found that in contrast to technology advice, business advice accelerates technology venture emergence, and this venture emergence is further enhanced by advice that complements rather than amplifies an entrepreneur’s prior experience. These findings offer important insights to the literature on entrepreneurial learning and advisors, and inform public policy and institutions supporting technology entrepreneurship.

Neurosciences inform second language acquisition. Upgrading EFL educational settings with social modeling and observational

Abstract – As research in cognitive psychology and neurosciences develops new models to describe the acquisition and emergence of cognitive skills, these findings call for an adjustment of EFL (and general L2) didactic approaches. The discovery of mirror neurons and social modeling theories have marked a turning point to understand the cognitive processes underlying language perception and L2 learning. This article provides an overview of the recent findings in the field of neurosciences and cognitive psychology and discusses their effects on language acquisition, with special reference to EFL learning, by taking into consideration the critical role played by emulation and the continuous improvement and spreading of technology. The article aims to provide food for thoughts in light of an interdisciplinary informed didactic approach to second language learning, with special reference to the implementation of modeling in EFL learning environments.

Image Schema Combinations and Complex Events

Formal knowledge representation struggles to represent the dynamic changes within complex events in a cognitively plausible way. Image schemas, on the other hand, are spatiotemporal relationships used in cognitive science as building blocks to conceptualise objects and events on a high level of abstraction. In this paper, we explore this modelling gap by looking at how image schemas can capture the skeletal information of events and describe segmentation cuts essential for conceptualising dynamic changes. The main contribution of the paper is the introduction of a more systematic approach for the combination of image schemas with one another in order to capture the conceptual representation of complex concepts and events. To reach this goal we use the image schema logic ISL, and, based on foundational research in cognitive linguistics and developmental psychology, we motivate three different methods for the formal combination of image schemas: merge, collection, and structured combination. These methods are then used for formal event segmentation where the changes in image-schematic state generate the points of separation into individual scenes. The paper concludes with a demonstration of our methodology and an ontological analysis of the classic commonsense reasoning problem of ‘cracking an egg.’

How feature integration theory integrated cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, and psychophysics

Anne Treisman's Feature Integration Theory (FIT) is a landmark in cognitive psychology and vision research. While many have discussed how Treisman's theory has fared since it was first proposed, it is less common to approach FIT from the other side in time: to examine what experimental findings, theoretical concepts, and ideas inspired it. The theory did not enter into a theoretical vacuum. Treisman's ideas were inspired by a large literature on a number of topics within visual psychophysics, cognitive psychology, and visual neurophysiology. Several key ideas developed contemporaneously within these fields that inspired FIT, and the theory involved an attempt at integrating them. Our aim here was to highlight the conceptual problems, experimental findings, and theoretical positions that Treisman was responding to with her theory and that the theory was intended to explain. We review a large number of findings from the decades preceding the proposal of feature integration theory showing how the theory integrated many ideas that developed in parallel within neurophysiology, visual psychophysics, and cognitive psychology. Our conclusion is that FIT made sense of many preceding findings, integrating them in an elegant way within a single theoretical account.

The Würzburg School today: The three—now four—world theory and new psychological research

Research in cognitive psychology has been by and large dominated by attempts to explain how psychological processes can be explained as products of biological ones; these processes are presumed to be causal. These theories fail to account for and be integrated with theories of non-causal mental activities. In order to bridge this gap a new theory of mental processes is needed. Karl Popper and John Eccles’s three world theory offers a promising path. According to this view there are biological entities, rational thought processes and ideas’. It is a revision of a view that Popper adopted as a member and student of the Würzburg School, which held that there are biological entities, causal psychological processes and ideas’. By going back towards the original and redoing it as a four world theory, by adding to it non-causal rational thought processes, the unfortunate widespread influence of associationist psychology and inductivist methods may be overcome and new social aspects of cognitive psychology may be opened.

Efficiency model of micro-course study based on cognitive psychology in the college

Micro-courses are characterized by short duration, multiple teaching methods, and ease of dissemination. With the increase in educational informatization, the micro-course has become a significant component of higher education in China. Based on cognitive psychology research, the present study divided the micro-course learning process into three stages: knowledge acquisition, search, and analysis. A comparative cognitive experiment was conducted, with students randomly assigned to micro-course or traditional textbook approach groups. This article proposes a cognitive model that enables a quantitative analysis of cognitive time, accuracy, and efficiency in both types of teaching methods. Compared with those exposed to traditional textbook learning, students exposed to micro-courses had a shorter cognitive time and improved cognitive accuracy. The experimental results indicated that micro-courses improved cognitive efficiency, with an average improvement of 157.51%. The improvement in cognitive efficiency in the micro-course group was much more striking at the higher cognitive stages. Similar additional experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed cognitive model. The results of these experiments were consistent with the findings reported in this article, leading to the conclusion that the proposed cognitive efficiency model is accurate, relatively universal, and well-adapted. This model could be used to inform the calculation of cognitive efficiency, micro-course design, and evaluation.

Modality and folk psychology

The connection of the modern psychology and formal systems remains an important direction of research. This paper is centered on philosophical problems surrounding relations between mental and logic. Main attention is given to philosophy of logic but certain ideas are introduced that can be incorporated into the practical philosophical logic.
 The definition and properties of basic modal logic and descending ones which are used in study of mental activity are in view. The defining role of philosophical interpretation of modality for the particular formal system used for research in the field of psychological states of agents is postulated. Different semantics of modal logic are studied. The hypothesis about the connection of research in cognitive psychology (semantics of brain activity) and formal systems connected to research of psychological states is stated.

Flipping Statistics Courses in Graduate Education: Integration of Cognitive Psychology and Technology

This article examines the integration of cognitive psychology research and technology within existing frameworks of statistics course design and implementation for a sequence of flipped graduate-level courses. Particular focus is the use of the principles of spacing and retrieval practice within the flipped classroom format as strategic approaches to curriculum design and instructional delivery within and across courses. The reporting of student perceptions regarding their engagement in learning, statistical thinking and practice, and course components that contributed to their learning serves to shed light on ways educators can bridge theory to practice in statistics education at the graduate-level.

Modern students' mental representations of success

The research is aimed at studying the success mental representations of students who are considered as the modern society members seeking for intellectual and personal resources integration. The article describes relevance and prospects of the success mental representations studying. These representations are considered to reflect personal real and potential success. Such methods as content and statistical analyses are used for the research. Quantitative analysis of signs/indices (total quantity: 555) and categories (total: 415) allowed the “success” concept cognitive structure characterizing. Categorizing the analyzed units helped to define modalities which become basic in the research and specified its conceptual scheme. Quadri classification of signs helped to find out the “success” concept organization style, having peculiarities based on the speed and accuracy of these signs selection, their structuring and integration. The summary of the research is based on the statistically significant conclusions. The level of the students’ style cognitive and personal characteristics structuredness is determinantial for the success mental representations structural organization. The more complete and integral the success cognitive image is, the more mature and integrated the students’ personal resource and experience are; in this case the students are highly motivated for reaching the success. The results of this research elaborate the idea and scientific facts about mental representations and can be informative and useful for cognitive psychology researchers and the persons working with students.

The Cognitive Phenomenology of Doors in the Book of Revelation: A Spatial Analysis

Following Rowland’s and Foucault’s respective observations that apocalypses are not necessarily temporal, and that historical analyses have diverted attention unduly from spatial phenomena, this paper examines Revelation using a spatial hermeneutic, comparing it to the semi-contemporaneous Parables of Enoch. Analyzing ostensibly similar spaces that are presented divergently, the paper focuses particular attention on “doorway” phenomena in Revelation. Recent research in cognitive psychology by Radvansky et al. suggests that passing through a doorway has a measurable cognitive effect, inducing forgetfulness of prior thoughts. Revelation employs doorway and gateway language repeatedly, while Parables of Enoch does not. The respective spatial emphases of Revelation and Parables suggest diverging engagements with a traumatized material world. References in Parables of Enoch to oppressive landowners and transformative goals for the earth suggest a continuing critical engagement with the material world. The lack of comparable language in Revelation suggests a comparatively more escapist perspective. Revelation combines polemic against all the “inhabitants of the earth”, an emphasis on the replacement of the old order, and the use of compensatory cultic language to orient the reader away from the existing material world. The parallel narrative employment of doorway language suggests an operative governing psychology of separation and forgetfulness in Revelation.