Group-level Patterns Research Articles

On the relationship between complexity of primary occupation and L2 varietal behavior in adult migrants in Austria

Abstract This article explores for the first time the relationship between occupational complexity (operationalized using the complexity measures indicated in the Dictionary of occupational titles) and adult migrants’ second language (L2) sociolinguistic repertoires in the Austro-Bavarian naturalistic context. We analyze the data of 36 adult migrant L2 German speakers who participated in a virtual reality experiment involving interactions with a dialect-speaking and standard German-speaking interlocutor, the goal being to capture participants’ interpersonal varietal behavior, that is, their addressee-relational, differential use of standard German, Austro-Bavarian dialect, and mixture varieties. Bayesian multinomial mixed-effects models reveal that participants with occupations requiring more handling and physical precision work are predicted to employ dialect varieties more often, but exclusively in interaction with the standard German-speaking interlocutor. A person-centered visual-quantitative analysis additionally facilitates insights concerning which migrants deviate most notably from group-level patterns, and how these deviations may relate to the complexity of their primary occupation. More generally, this study paves new ground with respect to how we can operationally define and capture the complexity of occupational status, and moreover sets out a new direction for research questions investigating how career-related differences impact on (L2) language variation and use.

The direction of effects between parenting and adolescent affective well-being in everyday life is family specific

Numerous theories and empirical studies have suggested that parents and their adolescent children reciprocally influence each other. As most studies have focused on group-level patterns, however, it remained unclear whether this was true for every family. To investigate potential heterogeneity in directionality, we applied a novel idiographic approach to examine the effects between parenting and adolescent well-being in each family separately. For 100 days, 159 Dutch adolescents (Mage = 13.31, 62% female) reported on affective well-being and four parenting dimensions. The family-specific effects of pre-registered (https://osf.io/7n2jx/) dynamic structural equation models indeed revealed that a reciprocal day-to-day association between parenting and adolescent affective well-being was present only in some families, with the proportion of families displaying a reciprocal association varying across the four parenting dimensions (11–55%). In other families, either parenting predicted the adolescent’s affective well-being (8–43%) or vice versa (10–27%), or no day-to-day associations were found (16–60%). Adolescents with higher trait levels of environmental sensitivity and neuroticism were more strongly affected by parenting. Thus, findings suggest that the ways in which parents and adolescents influence each other in everyday life are unique, stressing the need to move towards an idiographic parenting science.

An examination of force maps targeted at orientation interactions in moving groups.

Force mapping is an established method for inferring the underlying interaction rules thought to govern collective motion from trajectory data. Here we examine the ability of force maps to reconstruct interactions that govern individual's tendency to orient, or align, their heading within a moving group, one of the primary factors thought to drive collective motion, using data from three established general collective motion models. Specifically, our force maps extract how individuals adjust their direction of motion on average as a function of the distance to neighbours and relative alignment in heading with these neighbours, or in more detail as a function of the relative coordinates and relative headings of neighbours. We also examine the association between plots of local alignment and underlying alignment rules. We find that the simpler force maps that examined changes in heading as a function of neighbour distances and differences in heading can qualitatively reconstruct the form of orientation interactions, but also overestimate the spatial range over which these interactions apply. More complex force maps that examine heading changes as a function of the relative coordinates of neighbours (in two spatial dimensions), can also reveal underlying orientation interactions in some cases, but are relatively harder to interpret. Responses to neighbours in both the simpler and more complex force maps are affected by group-level patterns of motion. We also find a correlation between the sizes of regions of high alignment in local alignment plots and the size of the region over which alignment rules apply when only an alignment interaction rule is in action. However, when data derived from more complex models is analysed, the shapes of regions of high alignment are clearly influenced by emergent patterns of motion, and these regions of high alignment can appear even when there is no explicit direct mechanism that governs alignment.

Contextualising the temporal dimension in multilingual identity construction: A longitudinal Q methodological study with Chinese LOTE-learning public high school students

Multilingual identity construction is a diachronic, non-linear and constantly evolving process which is influenced by a complex range of contextual and temporal factors. Yet the temporal dimension seldom receives explicit empirical attention and remains under-theorised. Meanwhile, the dynamics of multilingual identity development are rarely explored at the cohort (i.e., whole-class) level. Underpinned by complex dynamic systems theory, this study tracks the evolution of multilingual identity positions in a class of Japanese-learning public high school students in China using longitudinal Q methodology. Three rounds of Q sorting and Q-based interviews were administered over the course of one academic year. The findings testified the enrichment and concretisation of students' multilingual identity with the accumulation of their Japanese learning experience. A range of sociocultural factors with changing saliencies impacted the students’ identity development, giving rise to group-level patterns of convergences and divergences at different timepoints. We argue that the temporal axis should be explicitly conceptualised in multilingual identity research. A temporal model of multilingual identity development is proposed to better contextualise and construe the continuity and shifts of multilingual identity at both individual and group levels.

Identifying Listeners Whose Speech Intelligibility Depends on a Quiet Extra Moment After a Sentence.

An extra moment after a sentence is spoken may be important for listeners with hearing loss to mentally repair misperceptions during listening. The current audiologic test battery cannot distinguish between a listener who repaired a misperception versus a listener who heard the speech accurately with no need for repair. This study aims to develop a behavioral method to identify individuals who are at risk for relying on a quiet moment after a sentence. Forty-three individuals with hearing loss (32 cochlear implant users, 11 hearing aid users) heard sentences that were followed by either 2 s of silence or 2 s of babble noise. Both high- and low-context sentences were used in the task. Some individuals showed notable benefit in accuracy scores (particularly for high-context sentences) when given an extra moment of silent time following the sentence. This benefit was highly variable across individuals and sometimes absent altogether. However, the group-level patterns of results were mainly explained by the use of context and successful perception of the words preceding sentence-final words. These results suggest that some but not all individuals improve their speech recognition score by relying on a quiet moment after a sentence, and that this fragility of speech recognition cannot be assessed using one isolated utterance at a time. Reliance on a quiet moment to repair perceptions would potentially impede the perception of an upcoming utterance, making continuous communication in real-world scenarios difficult especially for individuals with hearing loss. The methods used in this study-along with some simple modifications if necessary-could potentially identify patients with hearing loss who retroactively repair mistakes by using clinically feasible methods that can ultimately lead to better patient-centered hearing health care. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21644801.

Identifying and predicting posttraumatic stress symptom states in adults with posttraumatic stress disorder.

Between-person heterogeneity of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is well established. Within-person analyses and the DSM-5 suggest that heterogeneity may also be evident within individuals across time as they move through social contexts and biological cycles. Modeling within-person symptom-level fluctuations may confirm such heterogeneity, elucidate mechanisms of disorder maintenance, and inform time- and person-specific interventions. The present study aimed to identify and predict discrete within-person disorder presentations, or symptom states, and explore group-level patterns of these states. Adults (N = 20, 60.0% male, M age = 38.25 years) with PTSD responded to symptom surveys four times per day for 30 days. We subjected each individual's dataset to Gaussian finite mixture modeling (GFMM) to uncover latent, within-person classes of symptom levels (i.e., states) and predicted those states with idiographic elastic net regularized regression using a set of time-based and behavioral predictors. Next, we conducted a GFMM of the within-person GFMM outputs and tested idiographic prediction models of these states. Multiple within-person states were revealed for 19 of 20 participants (Mdn = 4; 66 for the full sample). Prediction models were moderately successful, M AUC = .66 (d = 0.58), range: .50-1.00. The GFMM of the within-person model outputs revealed two states: one with above-average and one with below-average symptom levels. Prediction models were, again, moderately successful, M AUC = .66; range: .50-.89. The findings provide evidence for within-person heterogeneity of PTSD as well as between-person similarities and suggest that future work should incorporate additional contextual variables as symptom state predictors.

What do correct answers reveal? The interpersonal and mathematical aspects of students’ interactions during groupwork in seventh grade mathematics

ABSTRACT Background Groupwork is a desirable activity in mathematics classrooms for the opportunity it creates for collaborative reasoning and interdependence. Correlations between group-level processes and outcomes have helped characterize the features of more successful groups, but group-level constructs can obscure how students negotiate ideas. This study investigated how students’ interactions, and the written work they produced, reflected their negotiations of authority and mathematics content during groupwork. Methods I used techniques from systemic functional linguistics to analyze transcripts from groups of 7th-grade students during work on an open-ended mathematics task, to document connections between groups’ interpersonal processes and their mathematical products. Findings Two groups who produced similar products did so through different processes. In one group students’ written work reflected consensus, evidenced by students’ verbal contributions. In the other group, the written product reflected two distinct lines of reasoning that were both verbalized but never integrated in conversation. Contribution While previous studies have documented differences in interactional patterns between more and, respectively, less successful groups, this study extends that line of research by describing differences between similarly successful groups. The use of SFL helps explain the path from group-level patterns and group outputs through individual students’ participation.

Age-Specific Activation Patterns and Inter-Subject Similarity During Verbal Working Memory Maintenance and Cognitive Reserve.

Cognitive Reserve (CR), according to a recent consensus definition of the NIH-funded Reserve and Resilience collaboratory,1 is constituted by any mechanism contributing to cognitive performance beyond, or interacting with, brain structure in the widest sense. To identity multivariate activation patterns fulfilling this postulate, we investigated a verbal Sternberg fMRI task and imaged 181 people with age coverage in the ranges 20–30 (44 participants) and 55–70 (137 participants). Beyond task performance, participants were characterized in terms of demographics, and neuropsychological assessments of vocabulary, episodic memory, perceptual speed, and abstract fluid reasoning. Participants studied an array of either one, three, or six upper-case letters for 3 s (=encoding phase), then a blank fixation screen was presented for 7 s (=maintenance phase), to be probed with a lower-case letter to which they responded with a differential button press whether the letter was part of the studied array or not (=retrieval phase). We focused on identifying maintenance-related activation patterns showing memory load increases in pattern score on an individual participant level for both age groups. We found such a pattern that increased with memory load for all but one person in the young participants (p < 0.001), and such a pattern for all participants in the older group (p < 0.001). Both patterns showed broad topographic similarities; however, relationships to task performance and neuropsychological characteristics were markedly different and point to individual differences in Cognitive Reserve. Beyond the derivation of group-level activation patterns, we also investigated the inter-subject spatial similarity of individual working memory rehearsal patterns in the older participants’ group as a function of neuropsychological and task performance, education, and mean cortical thickness. Higher task accuracy and neuropsychological function was reliably associated with higher inter-subject similarity of individual-level activation patterns in older participants.

Randomness in the choice of neighbours promotes cohesion in mobile animal groups.

Classic computational models of collective motion suggest that simple local averaging rules can promote many observed group-level patterns. Recent studies, however, suggest that rules simpler than local averaging may be at play in real organisms; for example, fish stochastically align towards only one randomly chosen neighbour and yet the schools are highly polarized. Here, we ask—how do organisms maintain group cohesion? Using a spatially explicit model, inspired from empirical investigations, we show that group cohesion can be achieved in finite groups even when organisms randomly choose only one neighbour to interact with. Cohesion is maintained even in the absence of local averaging that requires interactions with many neighbours. Furthermore, we show that choosing a neighbour randomly is a better way to achieve cohesion than interacting with just its closest neighbour. To understand how cohesion emerges from these random pairwise interactions, we turn to a graph-theoretic analysis of the underlying dynamic interaction networks. We find that randomness in choosing a neighbour gives rise to well-connected networks that essentially cause the groups to stay cohesive. We compare our findings with the canonical averaging models (analogous to the Vicsek model). In summary, we argue that randomness in the choice of interacting neighbours plays a crucial role in achieving cohesion.

Collective Rhythm as an Emergent Property During Human Social Coordination.

The literature on social interactions has shown that participants coordinate not only at the behavioral but also at the physiological and neural levels, and that this coordination gives a temporal structure to the individual and social dynamics. However, it has not been fully explored whether such temporal patterns emerge during interpersonal coordination beyond dyads, whether this phenomenon arises from complex cognitive mechanisms or from relatively simple rules of behavior, or which are the sociocultural processes that underlie this phenomenon. We review the evidence for the existence of group-level rhythmic patterns that result from social interactions and argue that the complexity of group dynamics can lead to temporal regularities that cannot be predicted from the individual periodicities: an emergent collective rhythm. Moreover, we use this interpretation of the literature to discuss how taking into account the sociocultural niche in which individuals develop can help explain the seemingly divergent results that have been reported on the social influences and consequences of interpersonal coordination. We make recommendations on further research to test these arguments and their relationship to the feeling of belonging and assimilation experienced during group dynamics.

Coordination dynamics of multi-agent interaction in a musical ensemble

Humans interact with other humans at a variety of timescales and in a variety of social contexts. We exhibit patterns of coordination that may differ depending on whether we are genuinely interacting as part of a coordinated group of individuals vs merely co-existing within the same physical space. Moreover, the local coordination dynamics of an interacting pair of individuals in an otherwise non-interacting group may spread, propagating change in the global coordination dynamics and interaction of an entire crowd. Dynamical systems analyses, such as Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA), can shed light on some of the underlying coordination dynamics of multi-agent human interaction. We used RQA to examine the coordination dynamics of a performance of “Welcome to the Imagination World”, composed for wind orchestra. This performance enacts a real-life simulation of the transition from uncoordinated, non-interacting individuals to a coordinated, interacting multi-agent group. Unlike previous studies of social interaction in musical performance which rely on different aspects of video and/or acoustic data recorded from each individual, this project analyzes group-level coordination patterns solely from the group-level acoustic data of an audio recording of the performance. Recurrence and stability measures extracted from the audio recording increased when musicians coordinated as an interacting group. Variability in these measures also increased, indicating that the interacting ensemble of musicians were able to explore a greater variety of behavior than when they performed as non-interacting individuals. As an orchestrated (non-emergent) example of coordination, we believe these analyses provide an indication of approximate expected distributions for recurrence patterns that may be measurable before and after truly emergent coordination.

Whole-brain morphological alterations associated with trigeminal neuralgia

BackgroundNovel neuroimaging strategies have the potential to offer new insights into the mechanistic basis for trigeminal neuralgia (TN). The present study aims to conduct whole-brain morphometry analyses of TN patients and to assess the value of group-level neocortical and subcortical structural patterns as tools for diagnostic biomarker exploration.MethodsCortical thickness, surface area, and myelin levels in the neocortex were measured via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The radial distance and the Jacobian determinant of the subcortex in 43 TN patients and 43 matched controls were compared. Pattern learning algorithms were employed to establish the utility of group-level MRI findings as tools for predicting TN. An additional 40 control patients with hemifacial spasms were then evaluated to assess algorithm sensitivity and specificity.ResultsTN patients exhibited reductions in cortical indices in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the midcingulate cortex (MCC), and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) relative to controls. They further presented with widespread subcortical volume reduction that was most evident in the putamen, the thalamus, the accumbens, the pallidum, and the hippocampus. Whole brain-level morphological alterations successfully enable automated TN diagnosis with high specificity (TN: 95.35 %; disease controls: 46.51 %).ConclusionsTN is associated with a distinctive whole-brain structural neuroimaging pattern, underscoring the value of machine learning as an approach to differentiating between morphological phenotypes, ultimately revealing the full spectrum of this disease and highlighting relevant diagnostic biomarkers.

The effects of puberty and its hormones on subcortical brain development

Puberty triggers a period of structural “re-organization” in the brain, when rising hormone levels act via receptors to influence morphology. However, our understanding of these neuroendocrine processes in humans remains poor. As such, the current longitudinal study characterized development of the human subcortex during puberty, including changes in relation to pubertal (Tanner) stage and hormone (testosterone, dehydroepiandrosterone [DHEA]) levels. Beyond normative group-level patterns of development, we also examined whether individual differences in the rate of pubertal maturation (i.e., “pubertal/hormonal tempo”) were associated with variations in subcortical trajectories. Participants (N = 192; scans = 366) completed up to three waves of MRI assessments between 8.5 and 14.5 years of age. Parents completed questionnaire assessments of pubertal stage at each wave, and adolescents provided hormone samples on a subset of waves. Generalized additive mixture models were used to characterize trajectories of subcortical development. Results showed that development of most subcortical structures was related to pubertal stage, although findings were mostly non-significant when controlling for age. Testosterone and DHEA levels were related to development of the amygdala, hippocampus and pallidum in both sexes, and findings in the amygdala remained significant when controlling for age. Additionally, we found that variability in hormonal (specifically testosterone) tempo was related to right hippocampal development in males, with an accelerated pattern of hippocampal development in those with greater increases in testosterone levels. Overall, our findings suggest prominent hormonal influences on the amygdala and hippocampus, consistent with the prevalence of androgen and estrogen receptors in these regions. We speculate that these findings are most likely reflective of the important role of adrenarcheal processes on adolescent brain development.

Examining Individual Differences in Language Learning: A Neurocognitive Model of Language Aptitude.

A common practice in the cognitive neurosciences is to investigate population-typical phenomena, treating individuals as equal except for a few outliers that are usually discarded from analyses or that disappear on group-level patterns. Only a few studies to date have captured the heterogeneity of language processing across individuals as so-called "individual differences"; fewer have explicitly researched language aptitude, which designates an individual's ability for acquiring foreign languages. Existing studies show that, relative to average learners, very gifted language learners display different task-related patterns of functional activation and connectivity during linguistic tasks, and structural differences in white and grey matter morphology, and in white matter connectivity. Despite growing interest in language aptitude, there is no recent comprehensive review, nor a theoretical model to date that includes the neural level. To fill this gap, we review neuroscientific research on individual differences in language learning and language aptitude and present a first, preliminary neurocognitive model of language aptitude. We suggest that language aptitude could arise from an advantageous neurocognitive profile, which leads to high intrinsic motivation and proactive engagement in language learning activities. On the neural level, interindividual differences in the morphology of the bilateral auditory cortex constrain individual neural plasticity, as is evident in the speed and efficiency of language learning. We suggest that language learning success is further dependent upon highly efficient auditory-motor connections (speech-motor networks) and the structural characteristics of dorsal and ventral fibre tracts during language learning.

Examination of an averaging method for estimating repulsion and attraction interactions in moving groups.

Groups of animals coordinate remarkable, coherent, movement patterns during periods of collective motion. Such movement patterns include the toroidal mills seen in fish shoals, highly aligned parallel motion like that of flocks of migrating birds, and the swarming of insects. Since the 1970's a wide range of collective motion models have been studied that prescribe rules of interaction between individuals, and that are capable of generating emergent patterns that are visually similar to those seen in real animal group. This does not necessarily mean that real animals apply exactly the same interactions as those prescribed in models. In more recent work, researchers have sought to infer the rules of interaction of real animals directly from tracking data, by using a number of techniques, including averaging methods. In one of the simplest formulations, the averaging methods determine the mean changes in the components of the velocity of an individual over time as a function of the relative coordinates of group mates. The averaging methods can also be used to estimate other closely related quantities including the mean relative direction of motion of group mates as a function of their relative coordinates. Since these methods for extracting interaction rules and related quantities from trajectory data are relatively new, the accuracy of these methods has had limited inspection. In this paper, we examine the ability of an averaging method to reveal prescribed rules of interaction from data generated by two individual based models for collective motion. Our work suggests that an averaging method can capture the qualitative features of underlying interactions from trajectory data alone, including repulsion and attraction effects evident in changes in speed and direction of motion, and the presence of a blind zone. However, our work also illustrates that the output from a simple averaging method can be affected by emergent group level patterns of movement, and the sizes of the regions over which repulsion and attraction effects are apparent can be distorted depending on how individuals combine interactions with multiple group mates.

Prosody and ideologies of embodiment: Variation in the use of pitch and articulation rate among fitness instructors

AbstractThis article discusses semiotic connections among linguistic prosody, the body, and forms of physical activity. A quantitative study of the instructional styles of bodybuilding and yoga instructors on YouTube shows that bodybuilding instructors employ faster articulation rates and higher pitch (F0) than yoga instructors. We argue that articulation rate and pitch become semiotically linked to notions of energy, and the differences in the instructors’ styles are rooted in differences in levels of embodied energy that bodybuilding and yoga are assumed to require. Instructors employ linguistic features that reflect these ideologies of their activities, and in doing so, present themselves as embodied instantiations of their respective practices. This study shows that ideologies of the body as a physically active doer of things provide an important source for the generation of iconic, energy-related meanings. Crucially, we show that ideological notions of energy and embodied iconicity can drive group-level patterns of linguistic variation. (Prosody, iconicity, style, embodiment, social meaning, ideology)*

Group-level patterns emerge from individual speed as revealed by an extremely social robotic fish.

Understanding the emergence of collective behaviour has long been a key research focus in the natural sciences. Besides the fundamental role of social interaction rules, a combination of theoretical and empirical work indicates individual speed may be a key process that drives the collective behaviour of animal groups. Socially induced changes in speed by interacting animals make it difficult to isolate the effects of individual speed on group-level behaviours. Here, we tackled this issue by pairing guppies with a biomimetic robot. We used a closed-loop tracking and feedback system to let a robotic fish naturally interact with a live partner in real time, and programmed it to strongly copy and follow its partner's movements while lacking any preferred movement speed or directionality of its own. We show that individual differences in guppies' movement speed were highly repeatable and in turn shaped key collective patterns: a higher individual speed resulted in stronger leadership, lower cohesion, higher alignment and better temporal coordination of the pairs. By combining the strengths of individual-based models and observational work with state-of-the-art robotics, we provide novel evidence that individual speed is a key, fundamental process in the emergence of collective behaviour.

Environmental context elicits behavioural modification of collective state in schooling fish

Pattern formation and collective behaviour in animal aggregations is highly complex and occurs across many scales, over a wide range of environmental conditions. The patterns found in collective behaviour may be modulated by the environmental habitat in which a group is located. Here, we consider whether habitat context influences the collective behaviour of fish schools under threat of predation in a dynamic salt marsh system. By comparing collective responses of wild forage fish prior to and during predator attack across three environmental contexts, we examine whether schooling state is influenced by the habitat that fish schools reside in. Our results indicate that habitat context had a much stronger effect on collective state relative to predation. The habitats studied (both a marsh edge habitat and a higher complexity habitat) induced changes in the behavioural state of fish schools compared to a free-field context, which demonstrates an alteration of the collective behaviours performed by the school. This suggests that other ecological factors, such as the local environment, plays a larger role than predation risk in structuring the spatial and temporal group level patterns found in collective behaviour.

Pooling Regularized Graph Neural Network for fMRI Biomarker Analysis.

Understanding how certain brain regions relate to a specific neurological disorder has been an important area of neuroimaging research. A promising approach to identify the salient regions is using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which can be used to analyze graph structured data, e.g. brain networks constructed by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We propose an interpretable GNN framework with a novel salient region selection mechanism to determine neurological brain biomarkers associated with disorders. Specifically, we design novel regularized pooling layers that highlight salient regions of interests (ROIs) so that we can infer which ROIs are important to identify a certain disease based on the node pooling scores calculated by the pooling layers. Our proposed framework, Pooling Regularized-GNN (PR-GNN), encourages reasonable ROI-selection and provides flexibility to preserve either individual- or group-level patterns. We apply the PR-GNN framework on a Biopoint Autism Spectral Disorder (ASD) fMRI dataset. We investigate different choices of the hyperparameters and show that PR-GNN outperforms baseline methods in terms of classification accuracy. The salient ROI detection results show high correspondence with the previous neuroimaging-derived biomarkers for ASD.

Simultaneous underweighting and overestimation of rare events: Unpacking a paradox.

We investigated previous findings suggesting a paradoxical inconsistency of people's beliefs and choices: When making decisions under uncertainty, people seem to both overestimate the probability of rare events in their judgments and underweight the probability of the same rare events in their choices. In our reexamination, we found that people's beliefs are consistent with their decisions, but they do not necessarily correspond with the environment. Both overestimation and underweighting of the rare event seemed to result from (most, but not all) participants' mistaken belief that they can infer and exploit sequential patterns in a static environment. In addition, we found that such inaccurate representations can be improved through incentives. Finally, detailed analysis suggested a mixture of individual-level response patterns, which can give rise to an erroneous interpretation of group-level patterns. Our results offer an explanation for why beliefs and decisions can appear contradictory and present challenges to some current models of decisions under uncertainty. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).