3,615 research outputs found

    In the name of status:Adolescent harmful social behavior as strategic self-regulation

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    Adolescent harmful social behavior is behavior that benefits the person that exhibits it but could harm (the interest of) another. The traditional perspective on adolescent harmful social behavior is that it is what happens when something goes wrong in the developmental process, classifying such behaviors as a self-regulation failure. Yet, theories drawing from evolution theory underscore the adaptiveness of harmful social behavior and argue that such behavior is enacted as a means to gain important resources for survival and reproduction; gaining a position of power This dissertation aims to examine whether adolescent harmful social behavior can indeed be strategic self-regulation, and formulated two questions: Can adolescent harmful social behavior be seen as strategic attempts to obtain social status? And how can we incorporate this status-pursuit perspective more into current interventions that aim to reduce harmful social behavior? To answer these questions, I conducted a meta-review, a meta-analysis, two experimental studies, and an individual participant data meta-analysis (IPDMA). Meta-review findings of this dissertation underscore that when engaging in particular behavior leads to the acquisition of important peer-status-related goals, harmful social behavior may also develop from adequate self-regulation. Empirical findings indicate that the prospect of status affordances can motivate adolescents to engage in harmful social behavior and that descriptive and injunctive peer norms can convey such status prospects effectively. IPDMA findings illustrate that we can reach more adolescent cooperation and collectivism than we are currently promoting via interventions. In this dissertation, I argue we can do this in two ways. One, teach adolescents how they can achieve status by behaving prosocially. And two, change peer norms that reward harmful social behavior with popularity

    Breaking Virtual Barriers : Investigating Virtual Reality for Enhanced Educational Engagement

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    Virtual reality (VR) is an innovative technology that has regained popularity in recent years. In the field of education, VR has been introduced as a tool to enhance learning experiences. This thesis presents an exploration of how VR is used from the context of educators and learners. The research employed a mixed-methods approach, including surveying and interviewing educators, and conducting empirical studies to examine engagement, usability, and user behaviour within VR. The results revealed educators are interested in using VR for a wide range of scenarios, including thought exercises, virtual field trips, and simulations. However, they face several barriers to incorporating VR into their practice, such as cost, lack of training, and technical challenges. A subsequent study found that virtual reality can no longer be assumed to be more engaging than desktop equivalents. This empirical study showed that engagement levels were similar in both VR and non-VR environments, suggesting that the novelty effect of VR may be less pronounced than previously assumed. A study against a VR mind mapping artifact, VERITAS, demonstrated that complex interactions are possible on low-cost VR devices, making VR accessible to educators and students. The analysis of user behaviour within this VR artifact showed that quantifiable strategies emerge, contributing to the understanding of how to design for collaborative VR experiences. This thesis provides insights into how the end-users in the education space perceive and use VR. The findings suggest that while educators are interested in using VR, they face barriers to adoption. The research highlights the need to design VR experiences, with understanding of existing pedagogy, that are engaging with careful thought applied to complex interactions, particularly for collaborative experiences. This research contributes to the understanding of the potential of VR in education and provides recommendations for educators and designers to enhance learning experiences using VR

    Cognitive Inhibition as a Core Component of Executive Functions:Exploring Intra- and Interindividual Differences

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    Cognitive inhibition is an essential executive function that we use in our everyday lives. Numerous factors have been claimed to influence this construct including video gaming, exercise and expertise in musical instruments. However, in this thesis, I focus on an understudied factor, the alignment of chronotype and testing time, and a heavily studied yet controversial factor, bilingualism. Throughout this thesis, with one exception, I present a series of experiments which have been conducted online. In the first empirical chapter, I examined a relatively novel Faces task which the authors have claimed to measure three cognitive processes, including two different forms of inhibition and task switching (Chapter 2). Based on this chapter's findings, I decided to use the Faces task in Chapters 3, 4 and 6. The next two chapters determined whether the alignment of time of testing and chronotype influences inhibition and task switching among the young adult (Chapter 3) and older adult (Chapter 4) population. Afterwards, I explored how conflict is resolved through a mouse tracking paradigm and by extension, whether this paradigm can be used for a variety of inhibition tasks (Chapter 5). For the final empirical chapter, I identified whether training inhibition in a verbal domain impacts inhibition in a non-verbal domain (i.e., far transfer effects). To achieve this, I investigated whether bilingualism, which can be seen as a form of cognitive training within the verbal domain, influences performance in non-verbal tasks which index inhibition (Chapter 6). The main findings of this thesis suggest that cognitive inhibition is not substantially impacted by synchrony effects nor by bilingualism. Furthermore, the findings imply that mouse tracking could be a promising tool to use to examine cognitive inhibition

    Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on a Legal Concept

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    In the early twenty-first century, the concept of citizenship is more contested than ever. As refugees set out to cross the Mediterranean, European nation-states refer to "cultural integrity" and "immigrant inassimilability," revealing citizenship to be much more than a legal concept. The contributors to this volume take an interdisciplinary approach to considering how cultures of citizenship are being envisioned and interrogated in literary and cultural (con)texts. Through this framework, they attend to the tension between the citizen and its spectral others - a tension determined by how a country defines difference at a given moment

    Introduction to Psychology

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    Introduction to Psychology is a modified version of Psychology 2e - OpenStax

    Effectiveness of Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacons (RRFBs) in Small and Rural Communities

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    Ensuring the safety of pedestrians and cyclists in rural and small communities is becoming increasingly important as planners seek to encourage active travel and eliminate traffic-related injuries and fatalities, consistent with Vision Zero. One area of focus is the protection of vulnerable road users such as pedestrians, who face a significant risk of injury or death in a traffic collision. The risks to pedestrians are particularly high when crossing roadways in high-risk areas such as high-speed and low pedestrian-volume rural roads and between intersections where drivers may not expect them. One concern in rural communities is that pedestrians may face a heightened risk in rural transition zones as they approach the boundary of a city, town, or village from a higher-speed rural highway. In these settings drivers’ perceptions may lag behind their changing surroundings, and their awareness of reduced speed limits and the presence of pedestrians may be diminished. This report addresses the need to evaluate the effectiveness of RRFBs in rural and small communities. We first review prior literature on RRFB effectiveness to synthesize research insights that provide contextspecific guidance for their use as well as gaps in this literature. To supplement this body of research, we use a rigorous observational research design to evaluate the effectiveness of RRFBs within the unique context of small and rural communities in Vermont. Our results are used to provide recommendations for updating Vermont\u27s RRFB guidelines

    Cerebral Metamorphopsia: Perceived spatial distortion from lesions of the adult human central visual pathway

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    Metamorphopsia is the perceived visual illusion of spatial distortion. Cerebral causes of metamorphopsia are much less common than retinal or ocular causes. Cerebral metamorphopsia can be caused by lesions along the central visual pathway or as a manifestation of epileptogenic discharges. Geometric visual distortions may result from structural lesions of the central visual pathway after reorganisation of the retinotopic representation in the cortex. Very few experimental investigations have been performed regarding cerebral metamorphopsia as it is often viewed as a clinical curiousity and analysis of the perceived distortion is difficult due to its subjective nature. Investigations have been undertaken to understand cortical plasticity as an explanation for visual filling-in. There has been much interest in cortical reorganisation after injuries to the peripheral and central visual pathway. Behavioural experiments aimed at quantifying the possible visual spatial distortion surrounding homonymous paracentral scotomas may be able to demonstrate cortical reorganisation after brain-damage and provide clues regarding the neural processes of visual perception. The aims of the thesis are: 1. To identify which cases of metamorphopsia, both published and unpublished, might be a consequence of cortical spatial reorganisation of retinotopic projections. 2. To investigate perceptual spatial distortion surrounding homonymous paracentral scotomas in adults with isolated unilateral injuries of the striate cortex. A review of the literature describing cases of cerebral metamorphopsia was performed. Metamorphopsia caused by retinal or ocular pathology, psychiatric conditions, drugs or medications were excluded. A retrospective case series of eight patients with metamorphopsia from a cerebral cause was performed in two clinical neurology practices specialising in vision disorders. Two cases who suffered from paracentral homonymous scotomas due to isolated unilateral primary visual cortex (V1) lesions were identified from a Neuro-ophthalmology practice. Neuropsychophysical experiments to investigate visual spatial perception surrounding their scotomas were developed and tested using MATLAB and Psychtoolbox. The use of the term 'metamorphopsia' was only in reference to cases in which contours or lines were experienced as distorted. In the published literature, few cases of cerebral metamorphopsia have been identified as being potentially due to cortical reorganisation. The main result is a statistically significant visual spatial distortion in the visual field surrounding a paracentral homonymous scotoma when compared to a normal control. There is also significant distortion of perception in the subjects' "unaffected" visual hemifield. After lesions of V1, visual perceptual spatial distortions may occur in the visual field surrounding homonymous paracentral scotomas. The spatial distortion may also occur in the normal hemifield possibly due to long-range cortical connections crossing to the other hemisphere through the corpus callosum. A collaborative approach across disciplines within vision science is required to further investigate the mechanisms responsible for perceptual visual illusions. Behavioural testing in brain-damaged cases remains important in developing theories of normal visual processing. New neuroimaging and neuroscience techniques could then test these theories, furthering our understanding of visual perception. An understanding of normal visual perception could allow future modification of neuronal processes to harness cortical reorganisation and potentially restore functional vision in humans with lesions of the central visual pathway

    Applying machine learning: a multi-role perspective

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    Machine (and deep) learning technologies are more and more present in several fields. It is undeniable that many aspects of our society are empowered by such technologies: web searches, content filtering on social networks, recommendations on e-commerce websites, mobile applications, etc., in addition to academic research. Moreover, mobile devices and internet sites, e.g., social networks, support the collection and sharing of information in real time. The pervasive deployment of the aforementioned technological instruments, both hardware and software, has led to the production of huge amounts of data. Such data has become more and more unmanageable, posing challenges to conventional computing platforms, and paving the way to the development and widespread use of the machine and deep learning. Nevertheless, machine learning is not only a technology. Given a task, machine learning is a way of proceeding (a way of thinking), and as such can be approached from different perspectives (points of view). This, in particular, will be the focus of this research. The entire work concentrates on machine learning, starting from different sources of data, e.g., signals and images, applied to different domains, e.g., Sport Science and Social History, and analyzed from different perspectives: from a non-data scientist point of view through tools and platforms; setting a problem stage from scratch; implementing an effective application for classification tasks; improving user interface experience through Data Visualization and eXtended Reality. In essence, not only in a quantitative task, not only in a scientific environment, and not only from a data-scientist perspective, machine (and deep) learning can do the difference

    Keep Your Eyes above the Ball: Investigation of Virtual Reality (VR) Assistive Gaming for Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) Visual Training

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    Humans are beyond all visual beings since most of the outside information is gathered through the visual system. When the aging process starts, visual functional damages become more and more common and the risk of developing visual impairment is higher. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is one of the main afflictions that leads to severe damage to the optical system due to the aging process. The ones affected lose the ability to use the central part of vision, essential for accurate visual information processing. Even if less accurate, peripheral vision remains unaffected, hence medical experts have developed training procedures to train patients to use peripheral vision instead to navigate their environment and continue their daily lives. This type of training is called eccentric viewing. However, there are several shortcomings in current approaches, such as not being engaging or individualizable enough nor cost and time-effective. The main scope of this dissertation was to find out if more engaging and individualizable methods can be used for peripheral training of AMD patients. The current work used virtual reality (VR) gaming to deliver AMD training; the first time such an approach was used for eccentric viewing training. In combination with eye-tracking, real-time individualized assistance was also achieved. Thanks to an integrated eye-tracker in the headset, concentric gaze-contingent stimuli were used to redirect the eyes toward an eccentric location. The concentric feature allowed participants to choose freely and individually their peripheral focus point. One study investigated the feasibility a VR system for individualized visual training of ophthalmic patients, two studies investigated two types of peripheral stimuli (three spatial cues and two optical distortions) and the last study was a case study looking into the feasibility of such an approach for a patient with late AMD. Changes in gaze directionality were observed in all the last three studies for one specific spatial cue, a concentric ring. In accordance with the literature, the gaze was directed spontaneously toward the most effective peripheral position. The last study additionally proved gaming feasible for future testing of the elderly AMD population. The current work opened the road to more individualized and engaging interventions for eccentric viewing training for late AMD
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