348,964 research outputs found
Reexamining the Role of Cognitive Conflict in Science Concept Learning
Abstract In this study, we defined and quantified the degree of cognitive conflict induced by a discrepant event from a cognitive perspective. Based on the scheme developed, we investigated the relationship between cognitive conflict and conceptual change, and the influences of students’ cognitive characteristics on conflict in learning the concept of density. Subjects were 171 seventh-grade girls from two city middle schools in Korea. Tests regarding logical thinking ability, field dependence/independence, and meaningful learning approach were administered. A preconception test and a test of responses to a discrepant event were also administered. Computer-assisted instruction was then provided to students as a conceptual change intervention. A conception test was administered as a posttest. In analyzing students’ responses to the discrepant event, seven types of responses were identified: Rejection, reinterpretation, exclusion, uncertainty, peripheral belief change, belief decrease, and belief change. These types were then ordered into four levels. The results indicated that there existed a significant correlation between cognitive conflict and conceptual change. t -test results revealed that there were statistically significant differences in the degree of cognitive conflict by the levels of students’ logical thinking ability and field dependence/independence. Meaningful learning approach, however, was found to have no statistically significant effect on cognitive conflict. Educational implications are discussed
An Ordinal View of Independence with Application to Plausible Reasoning
An ordinal view of independence is studied in the framework of possibility
theory. We investigate three possible definitions of dependence, of increasing
strength. One of them is the counterpart to the multiplication law in
probability theory, and the two others are based on the notion of conditional
possibility. These two have enough expressive power to support the whole
possibility theory, and a complete axiomatization is provided for the strongest
one. Moreover we show that weak independence is well-suited to the problems of
belief change and plausible reasoning, especially to address the problem of
blocking of property inheritance in exception-tolerant taxonomic reasoning.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Uncertainty in
Artificial Intelligence (UAI1994
How Beliefs about HIV Status Affect Risky Behaviors: Evidence from Malawi, Second Version
This paper examines whether and to what extent changes in beliefs about own HIV status induce changes in risky sexual behavior using data from married males living in three regions of Malawi. Risky behavior is measured as the propensity to engage in extramarital affairs. The empirical analysis is based on panel surveys for years 2006 and 2008 from the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP), which contain detailed information on beliefs about HIV status and on sexual behaviors. Many individuals change their beliefs over time, because of opportunities to get tested for HIV and informational campaigns. We estimate the effect of belief revisions on the propensity to engage in extra-marital affairs using a panel data estimator developed by Arellano and Carrasco (2003), which accommodates unobserved heterogeneity as well as belief endogeneity arising from the dependence of current beliefs on lagged behaviors. We find that downward revisions in the belief of being HIV positive lead to an increased propensity to engage in extra-marital affairs and upward revisions to a decreased propensity. The estimates are shown to be robust to underreporting of affairs. Using our estimates and a standard epidemeological model of disease transmission, we find that increasing the responsiveness of beliefs to test results would reduce the HIV transmission rate as infected individuals reduce sexual behavior and decrease the likelihood that uninfected persons have contact with an HIV-positive person.AIDS, Malawi, Beliefs
How Beliefs about HIV Status Affect Risky Behaviors: Evidence from Malawi, Fifth Version
This paper examines how beliefs about own HIV status affect decisions to engage in risky sexual behavior using data on married males living in Malawi. Risky behavior is measured as the propensity to engage in extramarital affairs. The empirical analysis is based on panel surveys for years 2006 and 2008 from the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP). Beliefs vary significantly over time in the data, in part because of HIV testing and informational campaigns. We estimate the effect of beliefs about own HIV status on risky behavior using a panel data estimator developed by Arellano and Carrasco (2003), which accommodates unobserved heterogeneity as well as belief endogeneity arising from the dependence of current beliefs on lagged behaviors. We find that beliefs are an important determinant of risky behavior, with downward revisions in the belief of being HIV positive increasing risky behavior and upward revisions decreasing it. We modify Arellano and Carrasco’s (2003) estimator to allow for underreporting of affairs and find the estimates to be relatively robust to underreporting. Using our estimates and a prototypical epidemiological model of disease transmission, we show that making individuals better informed about their HIV status, either by increasing the credibility of test results and/or increasing access to testing, would on net reduce the HIV transmission rate.Beliefs, Malawi, HIV
A diachronic study of historiography
The humanities are often characterized by sociologists as having a low mutual
dependence among scholars and high task uncertainty. According to Fuchs' theory
of scientific change, this leads over time to intellectual and social
fragmentation, as new scholarship accumulates in the absence of shared unifying
theories. We consider here a set of specialisms in the discipline of history
and measure the connectivity properties of their bibliographic coupling
networks over time, in order to assess whether fragmentation is indeed
occurring. We construct networks using both reference overlap and textual
similarity. It is shown that the connectivity of reference overlap networks is
gradually and steadily declining over time, whilst that of textual similarity
networks is stable. Author bibliographic coupling networks also show signs of a
decline in connectivity, in the absence of an increasing propensity for
collaborations. We speculate that, despite the gradual weakening of ties among
historians as mapped by references, new scholarship might be continually
integrated through shared vocabularies and narratives. This would support our
belief that citations are but one kind of bibliometric data to consider ---
perhaps even of secondary importance --- when studying the humanities, while
text should play a more prominent role
A taxonomy of surprise definitions
Surprising events trigger measurable brain activity and influence human
behavior by affecting learning, memory, and decision-making. Currently there
is, however, no consensus on the definition of surprise. Here we identify 18
mathematical definitions of surprise in a unifying framework. We first propose
a technical classification of these definitions into three groups based on
their dependence on an agent's belief, show how they relate to each other, and
prove under what conditions they are indistinguishable. Going beyond this
technical analysis, we propose a taxonomy of surprise definitions and classify
them into four conceptual categories based on the quantity they measure: (i)
'prediction surprise' measures a mismatch between a prediction and an
observation; (ii) 'change-point detection surprise' measures the probability of
a change in the environment; (iii) 'confidence-corrected surprise' explicitly
accounts for the effect of confidence; and (iv) 'information gain surprise'
measures the belief-update upon a new observation. The taxonomy poses the
foundation for principled studies of the functional roles and physiological
signatures of surprise in the brain.Comment: To appear in the Journal of Mathematical Psycholog
HOW BELIEFS ABOUT HIV STATUS AFFECT RISKY BEHAVIORS: EVIDENCE FROM MALAWI
This paper examines how beliefs about own HIV status affect decisions to engage in risky sexual behavior, as measured by having extramarital sex and/or multiple sex partners. The empirical analysis is based on a panel survey of males from the 2006 and 2008 rounds of the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP). The paper develops a behavioral model of the belief-risky behavior relationship and estimates the causal effect of beliefs on risky behavior using the Arellano and Carrasco (2003) semiparametric panel data estimator, which accommodates both unobserved heterogeneity and belief endogeneity arising from a possible dependence of current beliefs on past risky behavior. Results show that downward revisions in the belief assigned to being HIV positive increase risky behavior and upward revisions decrease it. For example, based on a linear specification, a decrease in the perceived probability of being HIV positive from 10 to 0 percentage points increases the probability of engaging in risky behavior (extramarital affairs) from 8.3 to 14.1 percentage points. We also develop and implement a modified version of the Arellano and Carrasco (2003) estimator to allow for misreporting of risky behavior and find estimates to be robust to a range of plausible misreporting levels. © 2013 The Authors. Journal of Applied Econometrics published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Does perception of automation undermine pro-environmental behaviour? Findings from three everyday settings
The global deployment of technology to aid mitigation of climate change has great potential but the realisation of much of this potential depends on behavioural response. A culturally pervasive reliance on and belief in technology raises the risk that dependence on technology will hamper human actions of mitigation. Theory suggests that ‘green’ behaviour may be undermined by automated technology but empirical investigation has been lacking. We examined the effect of the prospect of automation on three everyday behaviours with environmental impact. Based on evidence from observational and experimental studies, we demonstrated that the prospect of automation can undermine even simple actions for sustainability. Further, we examined the process by which automated technology influences behaviour and suggest that automation may impair personal responsibility for action
Dependence in Propositional Logic: Formula-Formula Dependence and Formula Forgetting -- Application to Belief Update and Conservative Extension
Dependence is an important concept for many tasks in artificial intelligence.
A task can be executed more efficiently by discarding something independent
from the task. In this paper, we propose two novel notions of dependence in
propositional logic: formula-formula dependence and formula forgetting. The
first is a relation between formulas capturing whether a formula depends on
another one, while the second is an operation that returns the strongest
consequence independent of a formula. We also apply these two notions in two
well-known issues: belief update and conservative extension. Firstly, we define
a new update operator based on formula-formula dependence. Furthermore, we
reduce conservative extension to formula forgetting.Comment: We find a mistake in this version and we need a period of time to fix
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