Explicit Reasoning Research Articles

Conversational agents for academically productive talk: a comparison of directed and undirected agent interventions

Conversational agents that draw on the framework of academically productive talk (APT) have been lately shown to be effective in helping learners sustain productive forms of peer dialogue in diverse learning settings. Yet, literature suggests that more research is required on how learners respond to and benefit from such flexible agents in order to fine-tune the design of automated APT intervention modes and, thus, enhance agent pedagogical efficacy. Building on this line of research, this work explores the impact of a configurable APT agent that prompts peers to build on prior knowledge and logically connect their contributions to important domain concepts discussed in class. A total of 96 computer science students engaged in a dialogue-based activity in the context of a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) university course. During the activity, students worked online in dyads to accomplish a learning task. The study compares three conditions: students who collaborated without any agent interference (control), students who received undirected agent interventions that addressed both peers in the dyad (U treatment), and students who received directed agent interventions addressing a particular learner instead of the dyad (D treatment). The results suggest that although both agent intervention methods can improve students’ learning outcomes and dyad in-task performance, the directed one is more effective than the undirected one in enhancing individual domain knowledge acquisition and explicit reasoning. Furthermore, findings show that the positive effect of the agent on dyad performance is mediated by the frequency of students’ contributions displaying explicit reasoning, while most students perceive agent involvement favorably.

A functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation of theory of mind impairments in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy

Although patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) are known to have theory of mind (ToM) impairments, the latter's neural functional bases have yet to be explored. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to gain insights into the neural dysfunction associated with ToM impairments in patients with mTLE.Twenty-five patients (12 and 13 with right and left mTLE, respectively) and 25 healthy controls performed the "animated shapes" task during fMRI. This complex ToM task requires both explicit reasoning about mental states and implicit processing of information on biological motion and action. The animated shapes evoke both ToM and non-ToM interaction perception, and the corresponding neural activation patterns were compared. Behavioral performance (i.e. categorization of the interactions) was also recorded.Relative to healthy controls, both patients with right and left mTLE were impaired in categorizing ToM interactions. The fMRI results showed that both patients with right and left mTLE had less intense neural activation (relative to controls) in regions involved in the implicit component of ToM processes (i.e. the fusiform gyrus in patients with right mTLE and the supplementary motor area in patients with left mTLE). In patients with right mTLE, we also observed more intense activation (relative to controls) in regions involved in the explicit component of ToM processes (i.e. the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex); age at onset of epilepsy also mediated activation in regions involved in the explicit component (i.e. the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction). Patients with left mTLE displayed greater activation of the contralateral mesial regions (relative to controls); we speculate that this may correspond to the deployment of a compensatory mechanism.This study provides insights into the disturbances of the implicit/explicit ToM neural network in patients with mTLE. These impairments in the ToM neural network depend on clinical characteristics, such as the laterality (right or left mTLE) and the age at onset of epilepsy.

Beyond Affective Influences on Deontological Moral Judgment: The Role of Motivations for Prevention in the Moral Condemnation of Harm.

Past research suggests that deontological judgments, which condemn deliberate harm no matter what the beneficial consequences, typically arise from emotional and intuitive reactions to the harm, whereas utilitarian judgments, which acknowledge the potential benefits of deliberate harm, typically arise from rational deliberation about whether these benefits outweigh the costs. The present research explores whether specific motivational orientations might, at times, increase the likelihood of deontological judgments without increasing emotional reactions. A meta-analysis of 10 newly conducted studies indicated that, compared with when focused on advancement ( promotion), when people were focused on security ( prevention) they made stronger deontological judgments in hypothetical moral dilemmas. Moreover, this effect could not be explained by participants' differing emotional reactions to the dilemmas when prevention-focused, but instead mirrored reports of their explicit reasoning. Implications for expanding current models of deontological and utilitarian moral judgment are discussed.

Rationalizing our Way into Moral Progress

Research suggests that the explicit reasoning we offer to ourselves and to others is often rationalization, that we act instead on instincts, inclinations, stereotypes, emotions, neurobiology, habits, reactions, evolutionary pressures, unexamined principles, or justifications other than the ones we think we’re acting on, then we tell a post hoc story to justify our actions. This is troubling for views of moral progress according to which moral progress proceeds from our engagement with our own and others’ reasons. I consider an account of rationalization, based on Robert Audi’s, to make clear that rationalization, unlike simple lying, can be sincere. Because it can be sincere, and because we also have a desire to be consistent with ourselves, I argue that rationalization sets us up for becoming better people over time, and that a similar case can be made to explain how moral progress among groups of people can proceed via rationalization.

Stochastic Solution on Convergence Property of Quadratic Functions

Constraints satisfaction problems (CSPs) aim at solution via algorithms that search a domain space for goal states. The solution of which must satisfy all constraints and guarantees explicit reasoning structure that conveys data about the problem to the algorithm. Thus, it assigns to an output, a set of variables that satisfies a set of constraints in its bid to prune off huge portion of the search space. This study presents solutions to quadratic functions via David Fletcher Powell method and stochastic method of optimization. To aim this purpose, hybrid neural networks are trained using DFP as a pre-processor to yield approximate solutions to the quadratic function. A trial solution of the quadratic equation is written as sum of two parts: (a) first part satisfies the initial condition for unconstrained optimization using DFP and hybrids as separate methods to solve a quadratic function; while (b) second part uses DFP as a pre-processor with adjustable parameters of for the ANN-TLRN hybrid. Results show that presented method introduces a closer form to the analytic solution. These present method is easily extended to solve a wide range of problems.

Using Economic Methods Evaluatively

As evaluators, we are often asked to determine whether policies and programs provide value for the resources invested. Addressing that question can be a quandary, and, in some cases, evaluators question whether cost–benefit analysis is fit for this purpose. With increased interest globally in social enterprise, impact investing, and social impact bonds, the search is on to find valid, credible, useful ways to determine the impact and value of social investments. This article argues that when addressing an evaluative question about an economic problem (the merit, worth, or significance of resource use), economic analysis can enhance evaluation but is usually insufficient to fully answer the evaluative question and that a stronger approach would involve explicit evaluative reasoning, supported by judicious use of economic and other methods. An overarching theoretical framework is proposed, and implications for evaluation practice are discussed.

Uncertain Causation, Regulation, and the Courts

Law-and-economics suggests principles for deciding how best to allocate rights, duties, and legal liability for actions that cause harm or that fail to prevent it. The same principles can be applied to suggest how to coordinate the overlapping activities of regulators and the courts in constraining and penalizing individual behaviors and business activities in an effort to increase net social benefits. This paper reviews law-and-economics principles useful for benefit-cost analysis (BCA) and judicial review of regulations and public policies; highlights the crucial roles of causation and uncertainty in applying these principles to choose among competing alternatives; and discusses how net social benefits can be increased by applying these same principles to judicial review of regulations that are based on uncertain assumptions about causation of harm. Real-world examples of air pollution regulation and food safety regulation illustrate that deference by the courts (including administrative law judges) to regulators is not likely to serve the public interest when harmful effects caused by regulated activities are highly uncertain and are assessed primarily by regulatory agencies. In principle, responsibility for increasing net social benefits by insisting on rigorous analysis of causality and remaining uncertainties by both plaintiffs and defendants should rest with the courts. In practice, failure of the courts to shoulder this burden encourages excessive regulation that suppresses socially beneficial economic activities without preventing the harms or producing the benefits that regulators and activists project in advocating for regulation. Stronger judicial review of regulations by courts that require sound and explicit reasoning about causality from litigants is needed to reduce arbitrary and capricious regulations, meaning those in which there is no rational connection between the facts found and the choice made, and to promote the public interest by increasing the netbenefits from regulated activities.

The nature of instructional effects in color constancy.

The instructions subjects receive can have a large effect on experimentally measured color constancy, but the nature of these effects and how their existence should inform our understanding of color perception remains unclear. We used a factorial design to measure how instructional effects on constancy vary with experimental task and stimulus set. In each of 2 experiments, we employed both a classic adjustment-based asymmetric matching task and a novel color selection task. Four groups of naive subjects were instructed to make adjustments/selections based on (a) color (neutral instructions); (b) the light reaching the eye (physical spectrum instructions); (c) the actual surface reflectance of an object (objective reflectance instructions); or (d) the apparent surface reflectance of an object (apparent reflectance instructions). Across the 2 experiments we varied the naturalness of the stimuli. We find clear interactions between instructions, task, and stimuli. With simplified stimuli (Experiment 1), instructional effects were large and the data revealed 2 instruction-dependent patterns. In 1 (neutral and physical spectrum instructions) constancy was low, intersubject variability was also low, and adjustment-based and selection-based constancy were in agreement. In the other (reflectance instructions) constancy was high, intersubject variability was large, adjustment-based constancy deviated from selection-based constancy and for some subjects selection-based constancy increased across sessions. Similar patterns held for naturalistic stimuli (Experiment 2), although instructional effects were smaller. We interpret these 2 patterns as signatures of distinct task strategies-1 is perceptual, with judgments based primarily on the perceptual representation of color; the other involves explicit instruction-driven reasoning. (PsycINFO Database Record

Algebraic Thinking through Koch Snowflake Constructions

By engaging in recursive and explicit reasoning, students gain insight into the nature of fractal constructions.

Why do clinicians choose the therapies and techniques they do? Exploring clinical decision-making via treatment selections in dysphagia practice

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are assumed to use evidence-based practice to inform treatment decisions. However, the reasoning underpinning treatment selections is not well known. Understanding why SLPs choose the treatments they do may be clarified by exploring the reasoning tied to specific treatments such as dysphagia interventions.Method: An electronic survey methodology was utilised. Participants were accessed via the gatekeepers of two national dysphagia special interest groups representing adult and paediatric populations. Information was elicited on the dysphagia therapies and techniques used and on the reasoning for using/not using therapies. Data was analysed using descriptive and non-parametric statistics.Result: The survey had a 74.8% response rate (n = 116). Consensus in both treatment selections and reasoning supporting treatment decisions was evident. Three favoured interventions (texture modification, thickening liquids, positioning changes) were identified. The reasoning supporting treatment choices centred primarily on client suitability and clinician knowledge. Knowledge reflected both absent knowledge (e.g. training) and accumulated knowledge (clinical experience).Conclusion: Dysphagia practice appears highly-defined, being characterised by group consensus regarding both preferred treatments and the reasoning underpinning treatment selections. Treatment selections are based on two core criteria: client suitability and the SLPs experience/knowledge. Explicit scientific reasoning is less influential than practice-centric influences.

Evidence for Intuitive Morality: Preverbal Infants Make Sociomoral Evaluations

AbstractTraditional views of morality and moral development rooted in rationality and demonstrations of explicit reasoning suggest that moral evaluations emerge in childhood. In contrast, definitions of morality rooted in intuition allow scholars to examine the emergence of moral evaluations among those who cannot reason this way, such as human infants. Consistent with an intuition‐based view of morality, infants evaluate prosocial individuals positively and evaluate antisocial individuals negatively. These evaluations are sensitive to the intent and epistemic states of the person who is helping or hindering, and to the previous behavior of the person who is being helped or hindered. Early‐emerging intuitions regarding others' morally relevant behaviors may have evolved to support wide‐scale cooperation in human societies.

Assessing theory of mind in schizophrenia during a collaborative game

Introduction While Theory of mind (ToM) impairments have been well established in schizophrenia (SZ), very few studies have investigated these impairments during social interactions. However, in daily life the attribution of mental states to others (ToM) is most often implicit and spontaneous whereas classical ToM tasks rely on explicit, deliberate and cognitively-demanding reasoning. Objective The aim of the present study was to fully characterize ToM ability in schizophrenia by investigating this ability during a collaborative game. Methods Ten individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) and ten healthy control (HC) participants were recruited. Patients' severity of symptoms was measured using the PANSS. All participants were asked to play a collaborative game with an experimenter. During this game, the aim of the participant was to transfer a given route from his/her map to his/her interlocutor. The prosodic focus marking was used as a linguistic marker of ToM. Participants were also submitted to a classical ToM task requiring explicit attribution of mental states and to a neuropsychological evaluation. Results The results showed that, by contrast to HC participants, SZ patients did not produce prosodic focus marking revealing difficulties to attribute knowledge to their interlocutor during the collaborative game. SZ patients were impaired on both explicit and implicit ToM assessment. No correlation was found between the ToM abilities and the symptoms or the neuropsychological evaluation. Conclusions Thus, the interactive task we used appears to be an original option for studying ToM ability in schizophrenia since it is close to what happens in real-life interactions.

Justifications for coercive care in child and adolescent psychiatry, a content analysis of medical documentation in Sweden.

BackgroundThere has been considerable interest in normative ethics regarding how and when coercive care can be justified. However, only a few empirical studies consider how professionals reason about ethical aspects when assessing the need for coercive care for adults, and even less concerning children and adolescents. The aim of this study was to examine and describe how professionals document their value arguments when considering the need for coercive psychiatric care of young people.MethodsAll 16 clinics that admitted children or adolescents to coercive care during one year in Sweden were included in the study. These clinics had a total of 155 admissions of 142 patients over one year. Qualitative content analysis with a deductive approach was used to find different forms of justification for coercive care that was documented in the medical records, including Care Certificates.ResultsThe analysis of medical records revealed two main arguments used to justify coercive care in child and adolescent psychiatry: 1) the protection argument - the patients needed protection, mainly from themselves, and 2) the treatment requirement argument - coercive care was a necessary measure for administering treatment to the patient. Other arguments, namely the caregiver support argument, the clarification argument and the solidarity argument, were used primarily to support the two main arguments. These supportive arguments were mostly used when describing the current situation, not in the explicit argumentation for coercive care. The need for treatment was often only implicitly clarified and the type of care the patient needed was not specified. Few value arguments were used in the decision for coercive care; instead physicians often used their authority to convince others that treatment was necessary.ConclusionsOne clinical implication of the study is that decisions about the use of coercive care should have a much stronger emphasis on ethical aspects. There is a need for an ethical legitimacy founded upon explicit ethical reasoning and after communication with the patient and family, which should be documented together with the decision to use coercive care.

When and where to transfer for Bayesian network parameter learning

Learning Bayesian networks from scarce data is a major challenge in real-world applications where data are hard to acquire. Transfer learning techniques attempt to address this by leveraging data from different but related problems. For example, it may be possible to exploit medical diagnosis data from a different country. A challenge with this approach is heterogeneous relatedness to the target, both within and across source networks. In this paper we introduce the Bayesian network parameter transfer learning (BNPTL) algorithm to reason about both network and fragment (sub-graph) relatedness. BNPTL addresses (i) how to find the most relevant source network and network fragments to transfer, and (ii) how to fuse source and target parameters in a robust way. In addition to improving target task performance, explicit reasoning allows us to diagnose network and fragment relatedness across Bayesian networks, even if latent variables are present, or if their state space is heterogeneous. This is important in some applications where relatedness itself is an output of interest. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of BNPTL at various scarcities and source relevance levels compared to single task learning and other state-of-the-art parameter transfer methods. Moreover, we demonstrate successful application to real-world medical case studies.

Behavioral measures of implicit theory of mind in adults with high functioning autism

Theory of mind (ToM) research has shown that adults with high functioning autism (HFA) demonstrate typical performance on tasks that require explicit belief reasoning, despite clear social difficulties in everyday life situations. In the current study, we used implicit belief manipulations that are task-irrelevant and therefore less susceptible to strategies. In a ball-detection task, it was shown that neurotypical individuals detect a ball faster if an agent believed the ball was present. We predicted that adults with high functioning autism (HFA) would not show this effect. While we found a numerical difference in the hypothesized direction, we did not find a reliable group effect. Interestingly, the implicit ToM-index showed a strong negative correlation with both self-reported and observational measures of social difficulties in the HFA group. This suggests that the relationship between implicit ToM reasoning and the symptomatology of HFA might be subtler than assumed.

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy.

Adults routinely make sense of others' actions by inferring the mental states that underlie these actions. Over the past two decades, developmental researchers have made significant advances in understanding the origins of this ability in infancy. This evidence indicates that when infants observe an agent act in a simple scene, they infer the agent's mental states and then use these mental states, together with a principle of rationality (and its corollaries of efficiency and consistency), to predict and interpret the agent's subsequent actions and to guide their own actions toward the agent. In this review, we first describe the initial demonstrations of infants' sensitivity to the efficiency and consistency principles. We then examine how infants identify novel entities as agents. Next, we summarize what is known about infants' ability to reason about agents' motivational, epistemic, and counterfactual states. Finally, we consider alternative interpretations of these findings and discuss the current controversy about the relation between implicit and explicit psychological reasoning.

Promoting academically productive talk with conversational agent interventions in collaborative learning settings

Research on computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) and conversational pedagogical agents has strongly emphasized the value of providing dynamic dialogue support for learners working together to accomplish a certain task. Recently, on the basis of the classroom discourse framework of Academically Productive Talk (APT), a flexible form of conversational agent support has emerged employing APT-based intervention methods so as to stimulate pedagogically beneficial conversational interactions among learning partners. This paper investigates the impact of an APT-based Linking Contributions (LC) intervention mode implemented by a conversational agent in the context of a collaborative activity in higher education. This type of agent interventions encourages students to explicitly externalize their reasoning on important domain concepts building upon the contributions of their partners. Forty-three (43) students collaborated in small groups using a prototype CSCL system to accomplish three different tasks in the domain of Multimedia Learning. Groups were randomly assigned to the treatment or the control condition. In the treatment condition, a conversational agent participated in students' dialogues making LC mode interventions. In the control condition, students discussed without the agent intervening. The results of the study illustrated that the students in the treatment condition engaged in a more productive dialogue demonstrating increased explicit reasoning throughout the collaborative activity. Furthermore, it was shown that the students in the treatment condition outperformed the control students in various measures on knowledge acquisition. Evidence also suggests that students' enhanced learning performance was mediated by the positive effect of the agent intervention mode on students' argumentation. Overall, this study provides insights into how the use of a configurable conversational agent displaying unsolicited LC interventions during students' discourse can be beneficial to collaborative learning.

Algebraic Generalization Strategies Used by Kuwaiti Pre-service Teachers

This study reports on the algebraic generalization strategies used by elementary and middle/high school pre-service mathematics teachers in Kuwait. They were presented with 9 tasks that involved linear, exponential, and quadratic situations. The results showed that these pre-service teachers had difficulty in generalizing algebraic rules in all 3 types of tasks. The most difficult problems were those involving exponents; they seemed to confuse exponential growth with the multiplication of n. Although they used several strategies such as explicit, recursive, and chunking, they tended to rely on explicit reasoning. They saw the explicit rule as a quick and easy rule to be used. In order to improve students’ understanding of algebraic reasoning, we must improve the understating of generalization. Teachers’ programs should put more emphasis on the type of content that teachers need to learn rather than on how much mathematics credits teachers need.

Online Multi-Target Tracking With Unified Handling of Complex Scenarios.

Complex scenarios, including miss detections, occlusions, false detections, and trajectory terminations, make the data association challenging. In this paper, we propose an online tracking-by-detection method to track multiple targets with unified handling of aforementioned complex scenarios, where current detection responses are linked to the previous trajectories. We introduce a dummy node to each trajectory to allow it to temporally disappear. If a trajectory fails to find its matching detection, it will be linked to its corresponding dummy node until the emergence of its matching detection. Source nodes are also incorporated to account for the entrance of new targets. The standard Hungarian algorithm, extended by the dummy nodes, can be exploited to solve the online data association implicitly in a global manner, although it is formulated between two consecutive frames. Moreover, as dummy nodes tend to accumulate in a fake or disappeared trajectory while they only occasionally appear in a real trajectory, we can deal with false detections and trajectory terminations by simply checking the number of consecutive dummy nodes. Our approach works on a single, uncalibrated camera, and requires neither scene prior knowledge nor explicit occlusion reasoning, running at 132 frames/s on the PETS09-S2L1 benchmark sequence. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the dummy nodes in complex scenarios and show that our proposed approach is robust against false detections and miss detections. Quantitative comparisons with other methods on five benchmark sequences demonstrate that we can achieve comparable results with the most existing offline methods and better results than other online algorithms.

THE SOCIAL VALUE OF REASONING IN EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION

Social epistemology has to be admired for its courage in tackling those areas of human judgment that seem most epistemically problematic. When and how are we justified in accepting the testimony of a stranger? That looks like a hard question. Social epistemology has less obvious application to what might be considered the easy cases of epistemic justification: for example, the justification of judgments founded on explicit reasoning (‘there is no largest prime number’), or inner sense (‘I am presently feeling cold and a bit nervous’). My aim in what follows is to explore the social dimension of these ‘easy’ cases, and in fact also to discuss some hidden reasons why the epistemic justification of these judgments seems less problematic than the justification of judgments based on, for example, testimony and perception.