Task-specific Variables Research Articles

The Relationship between Metacognitive Ability and Metacognitive Accuracy

Judgments of learning (JOLs), as one type of metacognitive judgments, are assessments that people make about how well they have learned material. The effective use of JOLs depends on various factors, including task-specific variables and the learner’s own metacognitive resources. Little has been known about the relationship between JOL accuracy for memory predictions and metacognitive ability, which is an emerging theory-practice gap in the field of metacognition. The present study investigated the relationship between the absolute accuracy of JOLs and the metacognitive awareness inventory (MAI), using concrete and abstract word pairs through three study-test cycles. We found that participants who scored high on the MAI, also produced a high level of absolute accuracy on each study-test cycle. The results from mediation analyses yielded that the impact of the MAI on absolute accuracy on cycle 3 was completely mediated by absolute accuracy on the first two cycles for both concrete and abstract word pairs. In addition, the same pattern of results was obtained even when a subset of the MAI (either knowledge or regulation of cognition) was used. These indicate that trait-based metacognitive abilities can well explain the correspondence between JOLs and recall performance on the first test. However, their impact is reduced after study-test practice, suggesting that experience-based factors become critical to improving metacognitive accuracy.

Task-specific variables influence preschool children's faithful versus selective imitation

We investigated whether task-specific variables modulate children's imitation to be selective or faithful. An adult performed four actions to retrieve a toy from a house in two contexts, after which children were given the opportunity to copy the adult's actions. In the window and door context, the children could only retrieve the toy at the end. In the two doors context, the children were given the opportunity to retrieve the toy midway through the task or continue and retrieve it at the end. The results indicated that not only were the children more likely to reproduce the modeled actions in the window and door context than in the two doors context, but they were also more likely to reproduce the sequence of the actions. Our research adds to a growing body of literature indicating that children's imitation is guided by a rational evaluation of task-specific variables and confirming that imitation is a source of learning, but it is not fixed, automatic, and stereotyped.

The Influence of Self-Efficacy Beliefs in the Academic Performance of Latina/o Students in the United States: A Systematic Literature Review

This review had three aims: (a) examine the relationship between self-efficacy (SE) and academic performance (AP) in Latina/o students, (b) identify the types of measures of SE and AP that have been used, and (c) identify the differences between global and specific measures of SE in predicting academic performance in Latina/o students. Twenty-seven articles were included in the analysis. Major findings included the following: (a) significant and positive relationship between self-efficacy and academic performance in Latina/o students, at all educational levels, and through different types of measurements of self-efficacy and academic performance; (b) particular performance domains or content, or task-specific variables, were more favorable in the examination of the relationship between self-efficacy and academic performance than global domains; (c) Latina/o is not a homogeneous group; therefore, acculturation process, immigration status, family’ experience on higher education, affective variables, and parents’ and teachers’ support were also factors that significantly correlated with Latina/os’ academic achievement.

Six In Vivo Assessments of Compulsive Behavior: A Validation Study Using the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory-Revised.

Due to the complex and heterogeneous nature of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), movement toward multimodal assessment has become necessary to more precisely understand the nature of the disorder and interrelations between symptom clusters. Thus, the present study utilized large undergraduate samples (total N = 800) to test the validity of six in vivo assessments of OC symptoms (i.e., one ordering/arranging task, two contamination fear/washing tasks, and three checking tasks). Associations between task-specific variables and self-reported symptom scores (as measured by the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory-Revised [OCI-R]) were examined. The majority of the in vivo task variables (those presented in Studies 1-4) exhibited significant relationships with the corresponding OCI-R symptom subscale (i.e., ordering, washing, checking). However, many of the task variables demonstrated relationships with other OCI-R symptom subscales, as well. Some evidence for discriminant validity was found, as task variables were generally unrelated to past-week symptoms of depression or anxiety. While continued research is necessary to further establish the validity and utility of the tasks discussed in the current article, findings have implications for improving future empirical examination of OC symptoms.

Fifty Years of Physics of Living Systems.

The equilibrium-point hypothesis and its more recent version, the referent configuration hypothesis, represent the physical approach to the neural control of action. This hypothesis can be naturally combined with the idea of hierarchical control of movements and of synergic organization of the abundant systems involved in all actions. Any action starts with defining trajectories of a few referent coordinates for a handful of salient task-specific variables. Further, referent coordinates at hierarchically lower levels emerge down to thresholds of the tonic stretch reflex for the participating muscles. Stability of performance with respect to salient variables is reflected in the structure of inter-trial variance and phenomena of motor equivalence. Three lines of recent research within this framework are reviewed. First, synergic adjustments of the referent coordinate and apparent stiffness have been demonstrated during finger force production supporting the main idea of control with referent coordinates. Second, the notion of unintentional voluntary movements has been introduced reflecting unintentional drifts in referent coordinates. Two types of unintentional movements have been observed with different characteristic times. Third, this framework has been applied to studies of impaired movements in neurological patients. Overall, the physical approach searching for laws of nature underlying biological movement has been highly stimulating and productive.

Distance and Interference in the Reference Management of African American Adults

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of distance and interference on the adequacy of reference management in 2 contrasting narrative conditions among age-defined groups of healthy African American adults. Twenty middle-aged (M = 51 years) and 20 older (M = 72 years) women produced a complex story retelling and a personal narrative of a childhood experience. All narratives were transcribed orthographically, parsed into terminal units (T-units), and analyzed for surface structure markings of referents. Results varied on the basis of task complexity and specific dependent variables. Older adults produced shorter T-unit distances between nouns and pronouns in story retelling compared with middle-aged adults. Middle-aged adults, but not older adults, exhibited longer T-unit distances between referents on story retelling than on personal narratives. Both groups performed similarly in the management of intervening information between referents. The presence of African American English features was related to interference but not to referential distance. Older adults demonstrated an effective age-related strategy for simplifying complex story retelling by producing shorter T-unit distances and, thus, less intervening information between referents. These findings suggest that referential distance may be a more important factor in mediating story recall. (For a summary and guidelines for therapy, see Bunce, 1991.).

Motor control: on the way to physics of living systems.

AbstractWe accept two axioms: (1) the central nervous system is a physical/physiological object, not a computational one, and (2) the neural control of natural voluntary movements is organized in a hierarchical way. At the top level of the hierarchy, referent values for a few salient, task-specific variables are reflected in a set of neural signals (possibly, subthreshold depolarization levels of neuronal pools). Further, as a result of a sequence of few-to-many mappings, these signals result in sets of activation thresholds of the alpha-motoneuronal pools for the many muscles involved in the planned movement. This scheme naturally results in synergies stabilizing the values (time profiles) of task-specific, salient variables. In this context, “synergies” are defined as covaried across repetitive trials adjustments within a redundant set of elemental variables that ensure stability of a performance variable to which they all contribute. Several consequences of this scheme have received experimental support in recent studies. In particular, a novel phenomenon of feed-forward motor control, anticipatory synergy adjustments, has been discovered. Another nontrivial prediction of this scheme is that transient perturbations are expected to lead to equifinality at the level of task–relevant variables, but not necessarily at the level of elemental variables. Results of two recent experiments have confirmed this prediction for multi-joint positional tasks and multi-digit force production tasks. These results provide direct support for the ideas of control with referent configurations organized into a hierarchical system.KeywordsPhysicsRedundancyAbundanceEquilibrium-point hypothesisReferent configurationSynergyUncontrolled manifold hypothesisEquifinalityAnticipatory synergy adjustments

Task specific computations in attentional maps

The lateral intraparietal area (LIP), a portion of monkey posterior parietal cortex, has been implicated in spatial attention. We review recent evidence from our laboratory showing that LIP encodes a priority map of the external environment that specifies the momentary locus of attention and is activated in a variety of behavioral tasks. The priority map in LIP is shaped by task-specific variables. We suggest that the multifaceted responses in LIP represent mechanisms for allocating attention, and that the attentional system may flexibly configure itself to meet the cognitive, motor and motivational demands of individual tasks.

Goal orientation, perceived task outcome and task demands in mathematics tasks: effects on students' attitude in actual task settings.

In earlier studies, it has been found that students' domain-specific cognitions and personal learning goals (goal orientation) influence task-specific appraisals of actual learning tasks. The relations between domain-specific and task-specific variables have been specified in the model of adaptive learning. In this study, additional influences, i.e., perceived task outcome on a former occasion and variations in task demands, were investigated. The purpose of this study was to identify personality and situational variables that mediate students' attitude when confronted with a mathematics task. Students worked on a mathematics task in two subsequent sessions. Effects of perceived task outcome at the first session on students' attitude at the second session were investigated. In addition, we investigated how differences in task demands influenced students' attitude. Variations in task demands were provoked by different conditions in task-instruction. In one condition, students were told that the result on the test would add to their mark on mathematics. This outcome orienting condition was contrasted with a task-orienting condition where students were told that the results on the test would not be used to give individual grades. Participants were sixth grade students (N = 345; aged 11-12 years) from 14 primary schools. Multivariate and univariate analyses of (co)variance were applied to the data. Independent variables were goal orientation, task demands, and perceived task outcome, with task-specific variables (estimated competence for the task, task attraction, task relevance, and willingness to invest effort) as the dependent variables. The results showed that previous perceived task outcome had a substantial impact on students' attitude. Additional but smaller effects were found for variation in task demands. Furthermore, effects of previous perceived task outcome and task demands were related to goal orientation. The resulting pattern confirmed that, in general, performance-oriented learning goals emphasised the negative impact of failure experiences, whereas task-oriented learning goals had a strengthening effect on how success experiences influenced students' attitude.

Sensory input directs spatial and temporal plasticity in primary auditory cortex.

The cortical representation of the sensory environment is continuously modified by experience. Changes in spatial (receptive field) and temporal response properties of cortical neurons underlie many forms of natural learning. The scale and direction of these changes appear to be determined by specific features of the behavioral tasks that evoke cortical plasticity. The neural mechanisms responsible for this differential plasticity remain unclear partly because important sensory and cognitive parameters differ among these tasks. In this report, we demonstrate that differential sensory experience directs differential plasticity using a single paradigm that eliminates the task-specific variables that have confounded direct comparison of previous studies. Electrical activation of the basal forebrain (BF) was used to gate cortical plasticity mechanisms. The auditory stimulus paired with BF stimulation was systematically varied to determine how several basic features of the sensory input direct plasticity in primary auditory cortex (A1) of adult rats. The distributed cortical response was reconstructed from a dense sampling of A1 neurons after 4 wk of BF-sound pairing. We have previously used this method to show that when a tone is paired with BF activation, the region of the cortical map responding to that tone frequency is specifically expanded. In this report, we demonstrate that receptive-field size is determined by features of the stimulus paired with BF activation. Specifically, receptive fields were narrowed or broadened as a systematic function of both carrier-frequency variability and the temporal modulation rate of paired acoustic stimuli. For example, the mean bandwidth of A1 neurons was increased (+60%) after pairing BF stimulation with a rapid train of tones and decreased (-25%) after pairing unmodulated tones of different frequencies. These effects are consistent with previous reports of receptive-field plasticity evoked by natural learning. The maximum cortical following rate and minimum response latency were also modified as a function of stimulus modulation rate and carrier-frequency variability. The cortical response to a rapid train of tones was nearly doubled if BF stimulation was paired with rapid trains of random carrier frequency, while no following rate plasticity was observed if a single carrier frequency was used. Finally, we observed significant increases in response strength and total area of functionally defined A1 following BF activation paired with certain classes of stimuli and not others. These results indicate that the degree and direction of cortical plasticity of temporal and receptive-field selectivity are specified by the structure and schedule of inputs that co-occur with basal forebrain activation and suggest that the rules of cortical plasticity do not operate on each elemental stimulus feature independently of others.

Speech versus keying in command and control applications

Experimental comparisons of speech and competitor input media such as keying have, taken overall, produced equivocal results: this has usually been attributed to "task-specific variables". Thus, it seems that there are some good, and some less good, situations for utilization of speech input. One application generally thought to be a success is small-vocabulary, isolated-word recognition for command and control. In a simulated command and control task, Poock purportedly showed a very significant superiority of speech over keying in terms of higher input speeds and lower error rates. This paper argues that the apparent superiority observed results from a methodological error—specifically that the verbose commands chosen suit the requirements of speech input but make little or no concession to the requirements of keying. We describe experiments modelled on those of Poock, but designed to overcome this putative flaw and to effect a fair comparison of the input media by using terse, abbreviated commands for the keying condition at least. Results of these new experiments reveal that speech input is 10.6% slower (although this difference is not statistically significant) and 360.4% more error-prone than keying, supporting our hypothesis that the methodology of the earlier work was flawed. However, simple extrapolation of our data for terse commands to the situation where keyed commands are entered in full suggests that other differences between our work and Poock's could play a part. Overall, we conclude that a fair comparison of input media requires an experimental design that explicitly attempts to minimize the so-called transaction cycle—the number of user actions necessary to elicit a system response—for each medium.

Task motivation and mathematics achievement in actual task situations

This article presents the findings of a study designed to investigate how specific cognitions and feelings, measured in the actual learning situation, influence learning intention and achievement in mathematics. A number of motivational and affective variables measured at the trait level (viz. goal-orientation, attributional style, and self-efficacy) were included in the study. The model of adaptable learning as developed by Boekaerts was used to measure task-specific motivation. In this model phenomena at a task-specific level are assumed to mediate the influence of trait characteristics. The matrix of covariances among the trait and task-specific variables was used as input for a path analysis. The data largely confirmed the assumptions of the model of adaptable learning. In a group of 8th graders (aged 11–12), the model was found to be effective in explaining the students' experimental state and learning intention when confronted with a complex math task.

Spatial comprehension and comparison processes in verification tasks

Two experiments use the sentence-picture verification paradigm to study encoding and comparison processes with spatial information. Subjects decided whether a spatial description of a figure or a geometric figure matched a second figure. Three critical results (the effects of display complexity, the effects of lexical markedness, and the relative speeds of “same” and “different” responses) covaried across four experimental conditions. These results demonstrate that task-specific variables can be the primary determinants of how subjects verify sentences. When the two displays were presented successively and subjects took as much time as they needed to prepare for the test figure, verification time was not affected by the pictorial complexity of the test figure or by the markedness of the relational terms used in the descriptions, and “same” responses were faster than “different” responses. When subjects had less time to study the spatial description before the test picture appeared, the effects of complexity and lexical markedness on verification time increased and were largest when the two displays appeared simultaneously; concurrently, “differents” became faster than “sames.” This pattern of results is not easily handled by current models for sentence-picture verification.