Domain-specific Processes Research Articles

Gifted education: changing conceptions, emphases and practice

Gifted education is leading an interdisciplinary paradigm shift moving education out of its historic role of entrenching systemic inequities. It is a crucible for pioneering investigations of optimal human development and provides a vehicle for increasing social equity. We review changing conceptions of intelligence, motivation and creativity, and consider current findings on processes that affect the development of high ability. We discuss the role of context and neuroscience as they apply to understanding the development of giftedness. We describe changing emphases in gifted education, focusing on the shift from categorical homogeneity to developmental diversity, concluding that giftedness and talent are best understood as dynamic, fluid, domain-specific and context-sensitive processes. Finally, we consider implications for educational practice: How do these changes impact definition, prediction, identification, programming, psychosocial practices and teacher development, opening up opportunities for optimal learning, development and fulfillment across the population, and across the life span?

Structural and Functional Organizing Principles of Language: Evolving Theories

The overall goal of this paper is to evaluate theories that attempt to address the organizing principles of language and review the development of these theories toward the integration of language within an interactive network of higher-level cognitive functions. Commencing with an overview of traditional concepts of language as modular, distinct, and innate, we focus firstly on areas that highlight the foundation of modularity theory including various module definitions and criteria, and applications of modularity in information processing and biological systems. We also discuss challenges to the overall applicability of a modular system and limitations of modular models in dealing with adaptation, novelty, innate versus learned, domain-general and domain-specific features, and developmental and age-related changes of cognitive organization. Prompted by the rapidly increasing amount of empirical data on the functional elements of the human brain, we then evaluate several major theories of cognition, including views that oppose modular organization and those that integrate modular and semi-modular views with topological modularity in simpler, and dynamic integration in higher-level cognitive functions.Within this framework, modular and non-modular components of linguistic knowledge, organizing principles of language viewed either as specific or derived from other systems, and concepts of language as one of the cognitive functions or the outcome of unique interactions among cognitive components are discussed. Emerging theories that integrate interactive network models support a cognitive architecture as a mosaic of domain-specific and domain-general processes involving both functional segregation and integration within a global neuronal workspace. Within this anatomically distributed workspace, the language function represents unique interactions among cognitive components consistent with an organization that is task-dependent with a continuum between degrees of modular and shared processing. As a higher-level, learning-based, and effortful cognitive process language transiently enlists a less modular organization for an efficient network configuration in interaction with several cognitive systems and the domain-general cognitive control/multiple-demand network.

Distinct iEEG activity patterns in temporal-limbic and prefrontal sites induced by emotional intentionality

Our emotions tend to be directed towards someone or something. Such emotional intentionality calls for the integration between two streams of information; abstract hedonic value and its associated concrete content. In a previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study we found that the combination of these two streams, as modeled by short emotional music excerpts and neutral film clips, was associated with synergistic activation in both temporal-limbic (TL) and ventral-lateral PFC (vLPFC) regions. This additive effect implies the integration of domain-specific 'affective' and 'cognitive' processes. Yet, the low temporal resolution of the fMRI limits the characterization of such cross-domain integration. To this end, we complemented the fMRI data with intracranial electroencephalogram (iEEG) recordings from twelve patients with intractable epilepsy. As expected, the additive fMRI activation in the amygdala and vLPFC was associated with distinct spatio-temporal iEEG patterns among electrodes situated within the vicinity of the fMRI activation foci. On the one hand, TL channels exhibited a transient (0–500 msec) increase in gamma power (61–69 Hz), possibly reflecting initial relevance detection or hedonic value tagging. On the other hand, vLPFC channels showed sustained (1–12 sec) suppression of low frequency power (2.3–24 Hz), possibly mediating changes in gating, enabling an on-going readiness for content-based processing of emotionally tagged signals. Moreover, an additive effect in delta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) was found among the TL channels, possibly reflecting the integration between distinct domain specific processes. Together, this study provides a multi-faceted neurophysiological signature for computations that possibly underlie emotional intentionality in humans.

Context-dependent social evaluation in 4.5-month-old human infants: the role of domain-general versus domain-specific processes in the development of social evaluation.

The ability to distinguish friends from foes allows humans to engage in mutually beneficial cooperative acts while avoiding the costs associated with cooperating with the wrong individuals. One way to do so effectively is to observe how unknown individuals behave toward third parties, and to selectively cooperate with those who help others while avoiding those who harm others. Recent research suggests that a preference for prosocial over antisocial individuals emerges by the time that infants are 3 months of age, and by 8 months, but not before, infants evaluate others’ actions in context: they prefer those who harm, rather than help, individuals who have previously harmed others. Currently there are at least two reasons for younger infants’ failure to show context-dependent social evaluations. First, this failure may reflect fundamental change in infants’ social evaluation system over the first year of life, in which infants first prefer helpers in any situation and only later evaluate prosocial and antisocial actors in context. On the other hand, it is possible that this developmental change actually reflects domain-general limitations of younger infants, such as limited memory and processing capacities. To distinguish between these possibilities, 4.5-month-olds in the current studies were habituated, rather than familiarized as in previous work, to one individual helping and another harming a third party, greatly increasing infants’ exposure to the characters’ actions. Following habituation, 4.5-month-olds displayed context-dependent social preferences, selectively reaching for helpers of prosocial and hinderers of antisocial others. Such results suggest that younger infants’ failure to display global social evaluation in previous work reflected domain-general rather than domain-specific limitations.

The Functional Topography and Temporal Dynamics of Overlapping and Distinct Brain Activations for Adaptive Task Control and Stable Task-set Maintenance during Performance of an fMRI-adapted Clinical Continuous Performance Test

Previous studies have demonstrated that stable and adaptive attention processes are mediated by partly overlapping, but distinct, brain areas. Dorsal medial PFC and anterior insula may form a "core network" for attention control, which is believed to operate on both temporal scales. However, both the existence of such a network as well as the unique functional topography for adaptive and stable attention processes is still highly debated. In this study, 87 healthy participants performed a clinical not-X continuous performance test optimized for use in a mixed block and event-related fMRI design. We observed overlapping activations related to stable and adaptive attention processes in dorsal medial PFC and anterior insula/adjacent cortex as well as in the right inferior parietal lobe and middle temporal gyrus. We also identified areas of activations uniquely related to stable and adaptive attention processes in widespread cortical, cerebellar, and subcortical areas. Interestingly, the functional topography within the PFC indicated a rostro-caudal distribution of adaptive, relative to stable, attention processes. There was also evidence for a time-on-task effect for activations related to stable, but not adaptive, attention processes. Our results provide further evidence for a "core network" for attention control that is accompanied by unique areas of activation involved in domain-specific processes operating on different temporal scales. In addition, our results give new insights into the functional topography of stable and adaptive attention processes and their temporal dynamics in the context of an extensively used clinical attention test.

Theta brain rhythms index perceptual narrowing in infant speech perception.

The development of speech perception shows a dramatic transition between infancy and adulthood. Between 6 and 12 months, infants' initial ability to discriminate all phonetic units across the world's languages narrows—native discrimination increases while non-native discrimination shows a steep decline. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine whether brain oscillations in the theta band (4–8 Hz), reflecting increases in attention and cognitive effort, would provide a neural measure of the perceptual narrowing phenomenon in speech. Using an oddball paradigm, we varied speech stimuli in two dimensions, stimulus frequency (frequent vs. infrequent) and language (native vs. non-native speech syllables) and tested 6-month-old infants, 12-month-old infants, and adults. We hypothesized that 6-month-old infants would show increased relative theta power (RTP) for frequent syllables, regardless of their status as native or non-native syllables, reflecting young infants' attention and cognitive effort in response to highly frequent stimuli (“statistical learning”). In adults, we hypothesized increased RTP for non-native stimuli, regardless of their presentation frequency, reflecting increased cognitive effort for non-native phonetic categories. The 12-month-old infants were expected to show a pattern in transition, but one more similar to adults than to 6-month-old infants. The MEG brain rhythm results supported these hypotheses. We suggest that perceptual narrowing in speech perception is governed by an implicit learning process. This learning process involves an implicit shift in attention from frequent events (infants) to learned categories (adults). Theta brain oscillatory activity may provide an index of perceptual narrowing beyond speech, and would offer a test of whether the early speech learning process is governed by domain-general or domain-specific processes.

Analyzing stereotypes of creating graphical user interfaces

Abstract A graphical user interface (GUI, UI) is an important part of an application, with which users interact directly. It should be implemented in the best way with respect to understandability. If a user does not understand the terms in the UI, he or she cannot work with it; then the whole system is worthless. In order to serve well the UI should contain domain-specific terms and describe domain-specific processes. It is the primary source for domain analysis right after domain users and experts. Our general goal is to propose a method for an automatic domain analysis of user interfaces. First, however, the basic principles and stereotypes must be defined that are used when creating user interfaces and rules must be derived for creating an information extracting algorithm. In this paper these stereotypes are listed and analyzed and a set of rules for extracting domain information is created. A taxonomy of UIs and a taxonomy of components based on their domain-specific information is also proposed. Our DEAL method for extracting this information is outlined and a prototype of DEAL is presented. Also our goals for the future are listed: expanding the prototype for different components and different types of UIs.

Differential school contextual effects for math and English: Integrating the big-fish-little-pond effect and the internal/external frame of reference

The internal/external frame of reference and the big-fish-little-pond effect are two major models of academic self-concept formation which have considerable theoretical and empirical support. Integrating the domain specific and compensatory processes of the internal/external frame of reference model with the big-fish-little-pond effect suggests a potential unified model and the presence of a positive compensatory school context effect. This effect, in contrast to the big-fish-little-pond effect, indicates that school-average ability in one academic domain has a positive effect on self-concept in another domain. To date, little empirical support has been observed for this underlying theoretical assumption. The unified model and implied positive compensatory school context effect were tested in both traditional and themed (magnet) university track schools in Germany. In a large multilevel study (5016 students from 157 schools), we found support for the unified model in both school types but for the positive compensatory effect in themed schools only. The substantive and applied implications of these findings are discussed, as well as their theoretical importance for self-concept research.

The Multiple Subfunctions of Attention: Differential Developmental Gateways to Literacy and Numeracy

Attention is construed as multicomponential, but the roles of its distinct subfunctions in shaping the broader developing cognitive landscape are poorly understood. The current study assessed 3- to 6-year-olds (N=83) to: (a) trace developmental trajectories of attentional processes and their structure in early childhood and (b) measure the impact of distinct attention subfunctions on concurrent and longitudinal abilities related to literacy and numeracy. Distinct trajectories across attention measures revealed the emergence of 2 attentional factors, encompassing "executive" and "sustained-selective" processes. Executive attention predicted concurrent abilities across domains at Time 1, whereas sustained-selective attention predicted basic numeracy 1 year later. These concurrent and longitudinal constraints cast a broader light on the unfolding relations between domain-general and domain-specific processes over early childhood.

Self-Perceptions, Self-Worth and Sport Participation in Adolescents

The purpose of this study was to study the associations between specific self-perceptions and global self-worth with different frequency levels of sport participation among Spanish boys and girls adolescents. Students (457 boys and 460 girls) completed the Self Perception Profile for Children (Harter, 1985) and items assessing sport engagement from The Health Behavior in School Children Questionnaire (Wold, 1995). Results showed that some specific dimensions of self-perception were related to different frequency of sport participation whereas overall judgments of self-worth did not. Specifically, for boys and girls, higher levels of sport participation were positively associated to Athletic Competence, and for boys were also associated with Physical Appearance and Social Acceptance. The potential implications of domain specific socialisation processes on the configuration of self-perceptions are highlighted.

A comparison between element salience versus context as item difficulty factors in Raven's Matrices

The nature of contextual facilitation effects for items derived from Raven's Progressive Matrices was investigated in two experiments. For these, the original matrices were modified, creating either abstract versions with high element salience, or versions which comprised realistic entities set in familiar contexts. In order to replicate and extend previous research, two versions of the contextual matrices were created, either comprising black and white or colored elements. The best performance was for colored contextual items, then equal performance for black and white contextual and colored abstract versions. By-item and by-participant correlations were invariably positive and significant, showing that irrespective of appearance and content, the best performers at one set of items were the best at another, and that the hardest items for one set were the hardest for another. Overall, these findings suggest that contextual facilitation effects are unlikely to be due to the recruitment of special domain-specific cognitive processes, and that differences in difficulty between versions can be fully accounted for by element salience, verbal tagging, and item engagement.

Unpacking Intuition: A Process and Outcome Framework

In recent years, the topic of intuition has become an important focus of attention in psychology. It is often assumed to be a unitary construct; however, recent research suggests that intuition is multifaceted. This article disaggregates intuition by discriminating between domain-general mechanisms and domain-specific processes of intuiting and primary types of intuition and secondary types of intuition. The theoretical relationships between and within processes and types are examined and analyzed at behavioral and information processing levels, noting the importance in advances in social cognition research. As a result of this analysis, we provide a conceptual framework that connects intuitive processes and outcomes. The article concludes by outlining some of the implications of the framework and in particular highlights future methodological challenges faced by intuition researchers in laboratory and organizational field settings.

Neural differences in the processing of semantic relationships across cultures

The current study employed functional MRI to investigate the contribution of domain-general (e.g. executive functions) and domain-specific (e.g. semantic knowledge) processes to differences in semantic judgments across cultures. Previous behavioral experiments have identified cross-cultural differences in categorization, with East Asians preferring strategies involving thematic or functional relationships (e.g. cow-grass) and Americans preferring categorical relationships (e.g. cow-chicken). East Asians and American participants underwent functional imaging while alternating between categorical or thematic strategies to sort triads of words, as well as matching words on control trials. Many similarities were observed. However, across both category and relationship trials compared to match (control) trials, East Asians activated a frontal-parietal network implicated in controlled executive processes, whereas Americans engaged regions of the temporal lobes and the cingulate, possibly in response to conflict in the semantic content of information. The results suggest that cultures differ in the strategies employed to resolve conflict between competing semantic judgments.

Writing a structured abstract for the thesis

BackgroundStudies investigating recognition memory (RM) in schizophrenia report a selective deficit in autonoetic awareness and intact levels of noetic awareness for visual stimuli. It has been suggested that abnormalities in autonoetic awareness result from a breakdown in frontal strategic memory processes involved in encoding and retrieval and executive functions linked to reality monitoring and decision making.AimsThe aims of this thesis were to investigate four predictions arising from these proposals: (1) If decrements in autonoetic awareness arise from a ‘central’ impairment, then these abnormalities should not be domain-specific; (2) if autonoetic awareness abnormalities arise from a breakdown in executive processes, then these abnormalities should correlate with executive dysfunction; (3) because autonoetic awareness is a necessary correlate of episodic memory, then patients with schizophrenia should also be impaired in contextual memory; and (4) autonoetic awareness abnormalities are likely to be more severe in schizophrenia, a condition associated with marked executive dysfunction relative to major depressive disorder, in which executive dysfunction is less marked.MethodThe remember/know paradigm was used to investigate RM across four modalities (verbal, visual, auditory and olfactory) in three groups: patients with schizophrenia (N=19), patients with major depressive disorder (N=21), and normal controls (N=24). A subgroup of the same schizophrenia patients (N=14) were also tested for temporalorder memory for words, line drawings and abstract drawings. Autobiographical memory was assessed in patients using the Autobiographical Memory Interview. Executive function and working memory were assessed using the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and the Letter-Number Sequencing Test, respectively.ResultsAutonoetic awareness abnormalities were evident in patients with schizophrenia for voices (p<0.05) and smells (p<0.05). These deficits were restricted to schizophrenia, with patients with major depressive disorder performing intermediate to both schizophrenia patients and normal controls. A subgroup of the same schizophrenia patients also exhibited impaired temporal-order memory (p<0.05), but this impairment was restricted to words and also evident in patients with major depressive disorder (p<0.05). Executive dysfunction and reduced working memory was restricted to patients with schizophrenia, but none of these measures correlated with decrements in autonoetic awareness or temporal-order memory. Autobiographical memory for both patient groups was within the normal range.Conclusions: Impaired autonoetic awareness for voices and smells in the same cohort of schizophrenia patients provide some support for proposals that abnormalities in autonoetic awareness stem from a breakdown in ‘central’ rather than domain-specific processes. Furthermore, these patients were also impaired for temporal-order memory, which suggests that strategic memory processes were also implicated in these schizophrenia patients.

The Pervasiveness of 1/f Scaling in Speech Reflects the Metastable Basis of Cognition

Human neural and behavioral activities have been reported to exhibit fractal dynamics known as 1/f noise, which is more aptly named 1/f scaling. Some argue that 1/f scaling is a general and pervasive property of the dynamical substrate from which cognitive functions are formed. Others argue that it is an idiosyncratic property of domain-specific processes. An experiment was conducted to investigate whether 1/f scaling pervades the intrinsic fluctuations of a spoken word. Ten participants each repeated the word bucket over 1,000 times, and fluctuations in acoustic measurements across repetitions generally followed the 1/f scaling relation, including numerous parallel yet distinct series of 1/f fluctuations. On the basis of work showing that 1/f scaling is a universal earmark of metastability, it is proposed that the observed pervasiveness of 1/f fluctuations in speech reflects the fact that cognitive functions are formed as metastable patterns of activity in brain, body, and environment.

Emotion and working memory: Evidence for domain-specific processes for affective maintenance.

Working memory is comprised of separable subsystems for visual and verbal information, but what if the information is affective? Does the maintenance of affective information rely on the same processes that maintain nonaffective information? The authors address this question using a novel delayed-response task developed to investigate the short-term maintenance of affective memoranda. Using selective interference methods the authors find that a secondary emotion-regulation task impaired affect intensity maintenance, whereas secondary cognitive tasks disrupted brightness intensity maintenance, but facilitated affect maintenance. Additionally, performance on the affect maintenance task depends on the valence of the maintained feeling, further supporting the domain-specific nature of the task. The importance of affect maintenance per se is further supported by demonstrating that the observed valence effects depend on a memory delay and are not evident with simultaneous presentation of stimuli. These findings suggest that the working memory system may include domain-specific components that are specialized for the maintenance of affective memoranda.

Attention, intention and domain-specific processing

Many researchers use subliminal priming to investigate domain-specific processing mechanisms, which have classically been defined in terms of their autonomy from other cognitive systems. Surprisingly, recent research has demonstrated that nonconsciously elicited cognitive processes are not independent of attention. By extension, these findings have been used to call into question the autonomy of domain-specific processing mechanisms. By contrast, we argue that the demonstrated modulation of nonconscious cognitive processes by attention occurs at a predomain-specific stage of processing. Thus, although we agree that attention might be a prerequisite of nonconscious processes, we suggest that there is no reason to think that higher-level cognitive systems directly modulate domain-specific processes.

Unconscious Word Processing Engages a Distributed Network of Brain Regions

A briefly exposed visual stimulus may not be consciously perceived if it is preceded and followed by a dissimilar visual pattern or mask. Despite the subject's lack of awareness, prior behavioral studies have shown that such masked stimuli, nevertheless, engage domain-specific processes [Dehaene, S., Naccache, L., Cohen, L., Le Bihan, D., Mangin, J.-F., Poline, J.-B., et al. Cerebral mechanisms of word masking and unconscious repetition priming. Nature Neuroscience, 4, 752-758, 2001; Bar, M., & Biederman, I. Subliminal visual priming. Psychological Science, 9, 464-469, 1998; Dehaene, S., Naccache, L., Le Clec'H, G., Koechlin, E., Mueller, M., Dehaene-Lambertz, G., et al. Imaging unconscious semantic priming. Nature, 395, 597-600, 1998; Whalen, P. J., Rauch, S. L., Etcoff, N. L., McInerney, S. C., Lee, M. B., & Jenike, M. A. Masked presentations of emotional facial expressions modulate amygdala activity without explicit knowledge. Journal of Neuroscience, 18, 411-418, 1998; Marcel, A. J. Conscious and unconscious perception: Experiments on visual masking and word recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 15, 197-237, 1983]. Masking thus provides a method for identifying language processes that are preattentive and automatic. Functional magnetic resonance imaging used in concert with masking may identify brain regions engaged by these unconscious language processes. In an adaptation design, subjects viewed a continuous stream of masked words and masked nonwords while performing an unrelated detection task, in which they were asked to make a response to a visible colored nonword stimulus (i.e., ampersands in red or blue font). Most trials were masked nonwords and masked words were presented once every 12-15 sec. The task ensured participant engagement, while the masked nonword baseline controlled for perceptual and orthographic processing. Participants were naïve to the purpose of the experiment and testing indicated that they did not consciously perceive either the words or nonwords. Masked words, but not masked nonwords, strongly activated left hemisphere language regions, including Broca's area, the angular gyrus, and the lateral temporal lobe. Differential activation of the posterior corpus callosum was also observed.

MONITORING EVENT FLOWS AND MODELLING SCENARIOS FOR CRISIS PREDICTION: APPLICATION TO ETHNIC CONFLICTS FORECASTING

We have developed an early warning prototype, based on a knowledge management approach, so as to carry out the online detection of crises. Experts, with the help of automatic tools, design an ontology describing domain-specific crisis eruption processes. Then a recognition engine performs model-based inference, in order to identify among the events feeding the system, typical sequences that might trigger a crisis. Crises are described in the ontology through the template technique which provides also mechanisms to assess the similarity between stored scenarios and event flows related to the monitored process. This technique takes into account imperfect knowledge and uncertainties: for instance, imprecise temporal constraints between events are represented by fuzzy sets.

Product data modeling using GTPPM — A case study

The Georgia Tech Process to Product Modeling (GTPPM) is a formal process-centric product modeling method. It enables capture of domain-specific information and work processes through process modeling. The method was initially developed in response to the need to integrate multiple use-cases with differing data definitions from different companies. It automates and applies formal methods to aspects of process and product modeling that have traditionally been negotiated by committees. It has been deployed in several research projects, in addition, as an information flow analysis method rather than as a product modeling method. This paper reports a case of deploying GTPPM as a product modeling method, using a purpose-built software tool for its implementation. The case study in the domain of precast concrete construction demonstrates that it is possible to semi-automatically derive a product data model from the collected information through normalization, information integration, and conflict resolution processes.