Social Transmission Of Knowledge Research Articles

Evaluation of long-term welfare initiatives on working equid welfare and social transmission of knowledge in Mexico.

Working equids play an essential role in supporting livelihoods, providing resilience and income security to people around the world, yet their welfare is often poor. Consequently, animal welfare focussed NGOs employ a range of initiatives aimed at improving standards of working equid welfare. However, there is debate surrounding the efficacy of welfare initiatives utilised and long term monitoring and evaluation of initiatives is rarely undertaken. This study compares equid welfare and the social transmission of welfare information across Mexican communities that had previously received differing intervention histories (veterinary treatment plus educational initiatives, veterinary treatment only and control communities) in order to assess their efficacy. Indicators of equid welfare were assessed using the Equid Assessment Research and Scoping tool and included body condition score, skin alterations, lameness, general health status and reaction to observer approach. Owners were interviewed about their involvement in previous welfare initiatives, beliefs regarding equid emotions and pain, and the social transmission of welfare knowledge, including whether they ask advice about their equid or discuss its health with others and whether there is a specific individual that they consider to be ‘good with equids’ in their community. In total 266 owners were interviewed from 25 communities across three states. Better welfare (specifically body condition and skin alteration scores) was seen in communities where a history of combined free veterinary treatment and educational initiatives had taken place compared to those that had only received veterinary treatment or control communities. The social transfer of welfare knowledge was also higher in these communities, suggesting that the discussion and transfer of equid welfare advice within communities can act as a mechanism to disseminate good welfare practices more widely. Our results suggest that using a combined approach may enhance the success of welfare initiatives, a finding that may impact future NGO programming.

»Wer hat das gesagt?«

AbstractPrevious discussions of the author have almost fully disregarded the fact that language, and, consequently, the role of »sender«, and thus also the narrator of a literary work, are anchored in the functional contexts of evolution. The sender is not only a byproduct of language, but an essential part of information. In the first part of the article, four innate tools are examined which can count as prerequisites of existing narrative works: a sender detector, which prompts us to look out for the sender of all kinds of verbal or otherwise speech-like communication; the ability to provide linguistic information with meta-level source-tag indicating scope and reliability; the capability of relating others’ action to their mental states (»theory of mind«); and the transmission of social knowledge (»gossip «). The last two paragraphs describe the role these dispositions play in the game of literature. The study is located in the overlapping area of biopoetics, pragma-linguistics, and cognitive poetics.

Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying social learning in infancy: infants' neural processing of the effects of others' actions.

Social transmission of knowledge is one of the reasons for human evolutionary success, and it has been suggested that already human infants possess eminent social learning abilities. However, nothing is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms that subserve infants' acquisition of novel action knowledge through the observation of other people's actions and their consequences in the physical world. In an electroencephalogram study on social learning in infancy, we demonstrate that 9-month-old infants represent the environmental effects of others' actions in their own motor system, although they never achieved these effects themselves before. The results provide first insights into the neurocognitive basis of human infants' unique ability for social learning of novel action knowledge.

Clio Unbound: Theories of Law between Discourse and Tradition

This paper argues against two extreme attitudes to the history of a discipline: on the one hand, ignorance and dismissiveness; and on the other hand, canonisation. The ever-present challenge is to find a balance between these two extremes. The paper attempts to walk the middle way by offering an alternative history of theories of law. It does so by revealing the basic characteristics of theories of law that tend towards either the explanatory paradigm of discourse or of tradition. Discourse-oriented theories tend to give explanatory priority to autonomous systems or orders of already articulated rules or norms. They also tend to conceptualise behaviour from the first person ex ante perspective, and tend to require explicit deliberation, even at the level of social conventions. The political value behind these theories tends to be the imposition of social order from above and the constraint of the power of officials by the rule of law. Tradition-oriented theories tend to give explanatory priority to the long-term activities of persons interacting in certain distinct contexts (such as various kinds of communities and institutions). They tend to conceptualise behaviour as consisting of embodied, though not completely unreflective, learning, resulting in the formation of certain skills and propensities. They also tend to focus on the transmission of social knowledge via the involvement of persons in certain contexts of interaction. The political value behind these theories is that of responsiveness and attention to the needs of the disadvantaged. The paper does not set out to evaluate the strengths or weaknesses of either explanatory paradigm. Rather, the aim is to offer an alternative history of the discipline of jurisprudence, with the hope that it encourages the construction of other such histories, thereby opening up possibilities for finding new insights in the works of the past. If, as it is argued, the formation of a jurisprudential orientation is at least partly dependent on how a legal theorist understands the history of jurisprudence, then offering alternative ways of seeing that history also carries with it the potential for renewing the discipline.

The social transmission of knowledge at the University: Teaching style and epistemic dependence

It is argued that an epistemic authority would induce greater influence in transmitting knowledge to students when there is a correspondence between the (authoritarian vs. democratic) style of the authority and students’ perceptions of their relation to the authority (high vs. low epistemic dependence). In two studies it was predicted, and found, that students who perceived themselves in a state of low epistemic dependence towards their teachers were more influenced by a democratic than by an authoritarian teaching style. This difference in appropriation was not found for students who perceived themselves in a state of epistemic dependence towards the epistemic authority.

Narrative and social tacit knowledge

This paper discusses the role of narrative in the expression and transmission of social knowledge as a specific type of tacit knowledge. Narrative is a central mechanism by which social knowledge is conveyed. Narrative provides a bridge between the tacit and the explicit, allowing tacit social knowledge to be demonstrated and learned, without the need to propositionalize it. Institutions can best maintain their stock of stories by providing occasions on which they can be told. Archival systems such as databases, lessons learned systems, and video records are less effective, particularly when they attempt to store records or transcripts of oral stories. However, they can be improved by attention to key design dimensions, including appropriate allocation of the effort required from system administrators and users, and attention to translation between genres.

Hypothesis testing in students: Sequences, stages, and instructional strategies

AbstractSix sequences in the development of hypothesis‐testing conceptions are proposed, involving (a) interpretation of the hypothesis; (b) the distinction between using theories and testing theories; (c) the consideration of multiple possibilities; (d) the relation of theory and data; (e) the nature of verification and falsification; and (f) the relation of truth and falsity. An alternative account is then provided involving three global stages: concrete operations, formal operations, and a postformal “metaconstructive”stage. Relative advantages and difficulties of the stage and sequence conceptualizations are discussed. Finally, three families of teaching strategy are distinguished, which emphasize, respectively: (a) social transmission of knowledge; (b) carefully sequenced empirical experience by the student; and (c) self‐regulated cognitive activity of the student. It is argued on the basis of Piaget's theory that the last of these plays a crucial role in the construction of such logical reasoning strategies as those involved in testing hypotheses.