Contrived Situations Research Articles

Avoidance of altruistic punishment: Testing with a situation-selective third-party punishment game

Third-party punishment games have consistently shown that people are willing to bear personal costs to punish others who act selfishly, even as uninvolved observers. However, the traditional third-party punishment game places participants in contrived situations that mandate direct punishment decisions, potentially inflating the prevalence of such actions compared to those observed in more naturalistic settings. In light of this obligatory nature, one might speculate that if given the autonomy to step aside, people could be inclined to forgo punishment rather than penalize unfairness. The present study developed the Situation-Selective Third-Party Punishment Game (SS-TPPG), an experimental paradigm, to investigate whether avoidance of witnessing unfairness stems from a reluctance to make punitive decisions or a desire to avoid observing unfairness altogether. Three studies (total N = 810) consistently revealed that avoidance was driven by both a reluctance to witness unfair treatment and an aversion to administering punishments. Notably, participants who typically avoided observing unfair treatment were inclined to punish when forced to observe it. Furthermore, when given the opportunity to punish indirectly, participants were less likely to avoid observing unfair distributions. These results suggest that the elevated instances of direct punishment noted in the traditional third-party punishment game might be reflective of the game's structure, which constrains participants' ability to avoid witnessing unfair distributions.

Methods of Assessing Intercultural Competence for International Assignments: A Systematic Review of Reviews

Despite the high cost and high frequency of failure in expatriate assignments, the potential value and opportunity gained by sending employees overseas is driving the number of business expatriates skyward. One way organizations can significantly mitigate risk is by assessing and selecting candidates for intercultural competence. Intercultural competence has affective, cognitive, and conative aspects. It can be measured via inventory or survey instruments, works of creative self-expression, dialogue, case study or critical incident analysis, and performance in real or contrived situations, but each approach has strengths and weaknesses. Experts recommend multiple assessments via mixed methods. Survey instruments have become prevalent in business because they are simple, quick, inexpensive, and yield easily comparable results. The author of this article conducts a review of reviews, or meta-review, of available survey instruments. Out of several dozen surveys, five met the criteria for review in this article, and three proved more valid and reliable than their peers. The author closes by discussing the services of global mobility consultants with proprietary assessment and training methods, then making recommendations for candidate selection processes based on risk tolerance, resources available, and the magnitude of the requirement.

Novel engineering: integrating literacy and engineering design in a fifth grade classroom

This article describes a new and unique context for integrating STEM and literacy instruction—Novel Engineering. Oftentimes, STEM design challenges are focused on developing solutions to the big problems that humans face such as cleaning up oil spills or contrived situations in which children are tasked with building solutions to hypothetical problems such as creating bridges or towers for the purpose of the challenge only. Though these types of learning experiences have merit and benefit students by developing problem-solving skills and bringing awareness to global issues, they are sometimes disconnected from the world outside the classroom. This article focuses instead on using conflicts within the storyline of children’s books as the problem-solving context and has benefits for children in both language arts and STEM learning. We offer suggestions that classroom teachers across the K-6 spectrum could use to implement Novel Engineering in their own classrooms.

A Clinic-Based Assessment for Evaluating Job-Related Social Skills in Adolescents and Adults with Autism.

Many individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties obtaining and maintaining employment, yet little research has evaluated methods for assessing and improving critical vocational skills. In this study, we evaluated an assessment of job-related social skills for individuals with ASD by arranging conditions that simulated on-the-job experiences in a clinic setting. The experimenter contrived situations to assess a variety of social skills, including asking for help, asking for more materials, and responding to corrective feedback. A total of eight individuals, aged 16 to 32years, participated. Results suggested that the assessment was useful for identifying specific social skills that could be targeted for intervention to increase success in the work environment. These findings add to the current literature by demonstrating an objective method for assessing a variety of job-related social skills under controlled, naturalistic conditions.

Did the Solar system form in a sequential triggered star formation event?

The presence and abundance of the short-lived radioisotopes (SLRs) $^{26}$Al and $^{60}$Fe during the formation of the Solar System is difficult to explain unless the Sun formed in the vicinity of one or more massive star(s) that exploded as supernovae. Two different scenarios have been proposed to explain the delivery of SLRs to the protosolar nebula: (i) direct pollution of the protosolar disc by supernova ejecta and (ii) the formation of the Sun in a sequential star formation event in which supernovae shockwaves trigger further star formation which is enriched in SLRs. The sequentially triggered model has been suggested as being more astrophysically likely than the direct pollution scenario. In this paper we investigate this claim by analysing a combination of $N$-body and SPH simulations of star formation. We find that sequential star formation would result in large age spreads (or even bi-modal age distributions for spatially coincident events) due to the dynamical relaxation of the first star-formation event(s). Secondly, we discuss the probability of triggering spatially and temporally discrete populations of stars and find this to be only possible in very contrived situations. Taken together, these results suggest that the formation of the Solar System in a triggered star formation event is as improbable, if not more so, than the direct pollution of the protosolar disc by a supernova.

Teaching Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder to Mand “Where?”

A modified multiple-baseline design across participants was used to evaluate a procedure for teaching the mand “Where?” to 3 children with autism. The participants were 3 and 5 years old and were participating in an intensive applied behavior analysis program. The participants were able to mand for items they wanted when the items were not in sight but were unable to ask where an item was located. The procedure consisted of a preference assessment for play activities, contrived conditioned motivating operations (CMO’s), prompting the children to mand “Where,” and consequences for correct and incorrect responding. Each contrived CMO consisted of an opportunity for the child to mand “Where” while playing with a selected activity, prompting the child to mand, and reinforcing a correct response by answering the question “Where.” Two of the participants learned to mand “Where” after training with 1 CMO and the mand generalized to novel contrived situations, activities, and the natural environment and was maintained over time (up to 4-weeks), whereas one participant required training with a second CMO before generalization occurred.

Teachers’ professional knowledge construction in Assessment for Learning

This article attempts to unpack the complexity of teachers’ professional knowledge construction in Assessment for Learning (hereafter, AfL). It presents a qualitative study of a school‐based AfL Project which took place in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Thirty lessons video‐recorded in the AfL Project and nine teacher interviews conducted after the Project were analyzed. The findings enrich our understanding of professional knowledge construction in four aspects: (1) personal nature of teachers’ practical knowledge construction in contrived situations; (2) confined integration of AfL into pedagogical content knowledge in terms of ‘skill progression that accompanies experience’; (3) more sophisticated integration of AfL into pedagogical content knowledge as ‘practicalizing theoretical knowledge’; and (4) reflection, conscious deliberation, and ‘theorizing practical knowledge’ associated with more sophisticated professional knowledge integration. Implications for enhancing teachers’ professional learning are discussed.

Bayesian optimal use of visual feature cues in visual attention

Event Abstract Back to Event Bayesian optimal use of visual feature cues in visual attention Benjamin Vincent1* 1 University of Dundee , United Kingdom How do we utilise visual cues in order to guide attention? While popular accounts (feature integration theory, guided search, and low-level salience) vary in a number of ways, they all assume a max-of-sensory-outputs selection mechanism. Such a max-observer can be expected to be optimal in contrived situations where targets and distracters have equal variability along some sensory dimension such as luminance, contrast or orientation. However it may be overoptimistic to assume that this equal variability is always the case in natural visual environments. So the question arises, is the attention system suboptimal by making the assumption of equal variance about target and distracter features? If so, then current popular models are adequate and notions of optimality in attentional phenomena would be in doubt. If not, and human performance is close to Bayesian optimal, then existing models would be challenged. To test this, a simple psychophysical present/absent detection task was used, with Gabor target and distracter stimuli. By adding additional orientation uncertainty to distracters, the equal variance assumption is violated. Will subjects perform optimally and exceed the performance of a max-observer? Experiments resulted in receiver-operating-characteristic (ROC) curves for individuals and were compared to predictions of the max-observer and a Bayesian optimal observer. Predictions were obtained through Monte Carlo simulations. A side-by-side comparison of models is fair, as both have a single parameter (which is estimated from the data) corresponding to degree of internal orientation uncertainty. The max-observer has a decision criteria based upon a sensory dimension, while the Bayesian optimal observer has a decision criteria based on the posterior probability of target presence. Under conditions which violate the strict equal variance assumptions, it was found that human performance was not in fact suboptimal. Performance at the task greatly exceeded the highest possible performance obtainable by the max-observer, providing strong evidence against the use of a max-of-sensory-outputs selection mechanism. The fact that the decision criteria is based upon a sensory dimension greatly limits the possible performance of a max-observer. In contrast, the Bayesian optimal observer provided very good fits to human performance (and ROC curve) data. Human performance at this task is not explicable by a max-of-sensory-outputs selection mechanism, which is problematic for feature integration theory, guided search, and low-level salience. These results provide a strong proof-of-concept, in a controlled psychophysical setting, that visual features are evaluated for the posterior probability of target presence. Thus this work adds to the small but growing research that suggests attentional phenomena are by-products of near optimal inference processes. Conference: Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010, Salt Lake City, UT, United States, 25 Feb - 2 Mar, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster session I Citation: Vincent B (2010). Bayesian optimal use of visual feature cues in visual attention. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.03.00018 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 17 Feb 2010; Published Online: 17 Feb 2010. * Correspondence: Benjamin Vincent, University of Dundee, Dundee, United Kingdom, b.t.vincent@dundee.ac.uk Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Benjamin Vincent Google Benjamin Vincent Google Scholar Benjamin Vincent PubMed Benjamin Vincent Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Vision: Attending the Invisible

In everyday vision, attention and awareness are hand in glove and almost impossible to tell apart. Recent work has exploited more contrived situations that allow these psychologically defined processes to be dissociated, providing insights into their respective neurophysiological correlates.

An Analysis of Children's Strategies for Reading Mathematics

Students “doing” mathematics ultimately results in students reading mathematics. This reading of mathematics is manifested in students reading words, symbols (including numerals), and visuals such as diagrams and graphs. Furthermore, students' successful response to word problems engages them in reading mathematics in the context of real − life or contrived situations presented in text. There are a variety of skills that students might use to read mathematics in these various arenas, and in most cases, multiple skills are utilized. This article presents the cases of two fourth grade students engaged in reading a children's trade book with embedded mathematics and in reading from their mathematics textbook. The authors found that the students utilized the knowledge from their daily lived experiences (from direct and indirect engagements) to assist them with the mathematics in the trade book and used conceptual understanding rather than formal procedures in response to the text of the mathematics textbook.

Observing TCP dynamics in real networks

The behavior of the TCP protocol in simple situations is well-understood, but when multiple connections share a set of network resources the protocol can exhibit surprising phenomena. Earlier studies have identified several such phenomena, and have analyzed them using simulation or observation of contrived situations. This paper shows how, by analyzing traces of a busy segment of the Internet, it is possible to observe these pheonomena in “real life” and measure both their frequency and their effects on performance. A TCP implementation might use similar techniques to support rate-based congestion control.

The molecular biology of disease resistance.

Plants have evolved with pathogens and insect pests for millions of years. It is therefore not surprising that a particular plant is resistant to most of them. When certain environmental conditions exist, however, virulent pathogens can cause damage to plant tissues both in the field and in storage. Indeed, modern intensive agriculture has often exacerbated the occurrence of disease outbreaks by presenting the pest with an intense monoculture of genetically identical plants grown in close proximity under high water and fertilizer regimes. Plant pathologists and entomologists are faced with the job of preventing economic losses in these contrived situations. Historically, the most desirable and effective strategy has been the incorporation of disease resistance genes into commercially acceptable cultivars. In the past ten years, the tools of molecular biology have been applied to the study of the mechanisms accounting for disease resistance.

Maternal behaviour in Border Leicester, Glen Vale (Border Leicester derived) and Merino sheep

Ewe and lamb behaviour in traditional Border Leicesters, Glen Vale Border Leicesters of the NSW Agriculture and Fisheries, Glen Vale x Border Leicester crosses and medium-fine-wool Merinos, all running in paddocks of 3-4.5 ha, were compared in spring 1983 at Glen Innes, N.S.W. Twenty-eight aspects of behaviour with a known or reputed influence on lamb survival, especially of multiples, were examined in undisturbed and contrived situations. The Glen Vales and their crosses were superior to the Border Leicesters and Merinos in behaviour and lamb survival, particularly behaviour concerned with the ability of ewes to keep their lambs together. The study indicates that contrived twin-care tests could form the basis of a selection program to improve maternal care and survival of multiples.

The overconfidence effect in social prediction.

In five studies with overlapping designs and intents, subjects predicted a specific peer's responses to a variety of stimulus situations, each of which offered a pair of mutually exclusive and exhaustive response alternatives. Each prediction was accompanied by a subjective probability estimate reflecting the subjects' confidence in its accuracy--a measure validated in Study 5 by having subjects choose whether to "gamble" on the accuracy of their prediction or on the outcome of a simple aleatory event. Our primary finding was that in social prediction, as in other judgmental domains, subjects consistently proved to be highly overconfident. That is, regardless of the type of prediction item (e.g., responses to hypothetical dilemmas, responses to contrived laboratory situations, or self-reports of everyday behaviors) and regardless of the type of information available about the person whose responses they were predicting (e.g., predictions about roommates or predictions based on prior interviews), the levels of accuracy subjects achieved fell considerably below the levels required to justify their confidence levels. Further analysis revealed two specific sources of overconfidence. First, subjects generally were overconfident to the extent they were highly confident. Second, subjects were most likely to be overconfident when they knowingly or unknowingly made predictions that ran counter to the relevant response base rates and, as a consequence, achieved low accuracy rates that their confidence estimates failed to anticipate. Theoretical and normative implications are discussed and proposals for subsequent research offered.

Public Executives: Imperium, Sacerdotium, Collegium? Bicentennial Leadership Challenges

Challenges surrounding public executive leadership as America enters the third century of the Constitution are examined here. The focus is chiefly the presidency but with some comparisons and contrasts with professional local government managers. Since the beginnings of formal study of public administration, these two quite different executive levels have been principal concerns. Space limits prevent dealing with other executives here, and these two levels best highlight bicentennial era developments. Three crucial dimensions of the present environment of presidential and other public executive performance are discussed initially. First, big national expenditures fund many public activities which are performed by private interests and state and local governments; except for such direct entitlements as Social Security, relatively less is spent on functions performed directly by the national government. Second, American political parties-never disciplined in an European parliamentary sense-declined for nearly three decades before the 1980s as vehicles of sustained, national coalition building; special interest groups and political action committees have grown enormously in numbers, expenditures, and influence. Third, mass media largely dominate communication of political and governmental affairs; political image makers encourage a media focus on personality and contrived situations more than on substantive achievement. Factors two and three combine to produce a common result: BIG money is required to finance today's politics. That has major consequences for public administration. Big money in politics is significantly related to the first of two functions of chief executives which are discussed in part two of this assessment: executive staffing and increased reliance by presidents and other partisanly elected chief executives on transient political appointees for positions formerly filled by long-term professional experts. Besides executive staffing, a cluster of substantive functions of the chief executive is discussed in part two: policy leadership, implementation, and institutional/organizational maintenance and development. One thesis here is that achievement by the president and other elected political executives in these substantive responsibilities has been substantially diminished by a combination of high-level spoils and imperial/sacerdotal imagery.

Social correlates of drinking in contrived situations.

This chapter reviews the literature on experimentally created drinking situations with humans. In these experiments, social factors have been alternatively investigated as the dependent and independent variables. The findings of several studies assessing the impact of elements in the drinking environment are summarized. The effects of solitary drinking vs. group drinking have been covered and illustrate the quantitative and qualitative responses elicited. An aspect of this review examines studies that attribute behaviorally integrating effects to alcohol when the beverage is incorporated into certain therapeutic settings. Also illustrated are studies that have attempted to influence drinking behavior in alcoholics by using social contingencies.

Nonreactive measures in psychotherapy outcome research

Attempts to assess outcomes of psychotherapy have relied too heavily on measures likely to be highly reactive, by which is meant that the processes of measurement affect what is being measured. Commonly employed measures of outcome such as therapist ratings or self-report are especially susceptible to effects attributable to knowledge of what is being measured. There are advantages in developing and using measures that, even though imperfect in other ways, are minimally reactive. Nonreactive measures should be considered as supplementary and not as substitutes for other measures. Problems with nonreactive measures involving ethics, validity and other psychometric limitations are troublesome but not insurmountable. Promising categoires of nonreactive measures include physical traces of past behaviors, archival records, nonverbal behaviors and observations carried out in contrived situations. Measures with dependably low levels of reactivity, including physiological measures, should also be considered for use.

Social Skills Training of LD Adolescents: A Generalization Study

The purpose of this study was to determine the reliability of role playing as a device for assessing generalization of social skills training and to determine the extent to which LD adolescents generalize specific social skills to the natural setting following training. LD high-school students' social skills were observed in two types of situations before and after training: (a) contrived (but unobtrusive) situations in the subjects' natural environment, and (b) novel role-playing situations. Results suggested that LD adolescents do not automatically generalize recently learned social skills to novel role-playing situations and the natural environment. Also, high performance in a novel role-playing situation does not necessarily mean that a student will show a correspondingly high performance in the natural environment. Consequently, it appears that learning disabled adolescents must be trained to generalize newly learned social skills, and that generalization of newly learned social skills should be measured in the learner's natural environment.

Come and go reconsidered: Children's use of deictic verbs in contrived situations

A production-based method of investigating children's understanding of deictic verbs is described. Use of come/go and bring/take by 4- to 7-year-olds in experimentally controlled deictic situations is compared with the results of Clark and Garnica's (1974) comprehension method with the same verbs. The production data indicate that (1) age of acquisition of these verbs is considerably younger than previously reported, (2) bring and take are acquired later than the come/go pair, and (3) acquisition of these verbs involves mapping the appropriate words onto preconceived features of situations, rather than the abstraction of the semantic features underlying each verb.

A comparison of judgmental policy equations obtained from human judges under natural and contrived conditions

During the last decade, numerous investigators have constructed mathematical models of experts' judgmental processes. However, investigators have not collected data from judges as they normally or naturally make their decisions. Instead, they have used artificial situations which contrived the judgment so that it differed in many ways from the natural judgmental conditions. Nonetheless, investigators have assumed that the models determined from contrived judgments were similar to models which would have been found if the natural judgment had been used. However, this assumption has not heretofore been investigated. Sufficient data have been collected concerning the ratings of acute suicide lethality made by telephone workers at the Suicide Prevention Center of Los Angeles to permit the construction of models of these workers' natural judgmental processes. The clinical records of two telephone workers were obtained, and regression models were constructed of their natural judgmental processes. These two workers, and two others, then made suicide lethality ratings in several contrived judgmental situations. The contrived situations differed as to the type of cue used, the methods by which the cue values were obtained, the number of ratings made, and the nature of the persons rated; consequently, some situations were more like the natural conditions than others. Multiple regression analyses were applied to the data, and policy equations were constructed for each worker for each type of contrived judgment. All of these judgmental models were compared, using an index which measured the agreement between the judges' policy equations. Great similarity was found among all the policy equations, both among those of the natural and contrived situations and among those of different workers. Even those models obtained from the most contrived judgmental situations were found to be highly similar to the natural policy equations. Thus, support was found for the assumption made by previous investigators that the models obtained under contrived and natural judgmental conditions are highly similar.