Using Insights from Cognitive Neuroscience to Investigate the Effects of Event-Driven Process Chains on Process Model Comprehension

Business process models have been adopted by enterprises for more than a decade. Especially for domain experts, the comprehension of process models constitutes a challenging task that needs to be mastered when creating or reading these models. This paper presents the results we obtained from an eye tracking experiment on process model comprehension. In detail, individuals with either no or advanced expertise in process modeling were confronted with models expressed in terms of Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs), reflecting different levels of difficulty. The first results of this experiment confirm recent findings from one of our previous experiments on the reading and comprehension of process models. On one hand, independent from their level of exper-tise, all individuals face similar patterns, when being confronted with process models exceeding a certain level of difficulty. On the other, it appears that process models expressed in terms of EPCs are perceived differently compared to process models specified in the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). In the end, their generalization needs to be confirmed by additional empirical experiments. The presented expe-riment continues a series of experiments that aim to unravel the factors fostering the comprehension of business process models by using methods and theories stemming from the field of cognitive neuroscience and psychology

Referential precedents in spoken language comprehension: a review and meta-analysis

Listeners’ interpretations of referring expressions are influenced by referential precedents—temporary conventions established in a discourse that associate linguistic expressions with referents. A number of psycholinguistic studies have investigated how much precedent effects depend on beliefs about the speaker’s perspective versus more egocentric, domain-general processes. We review and provide a meta-analysis of visual-world eyetracking studies of precedent use, focusing on three principal effects: (1) a same speaker advantage for maintained precedents; (2) a different speaker advantage for broken precedents; and (3) an overall main effect of precedents. Despite inconsistent claims in the literature, our combined analysis reveals surprisingly consistent evidence supporting the existence of all three effects, but with different temporal profiles. These findings carry important implications for existing theoretical explanations of precedent use, and challenge explanations based solely on the use of information about speakers’ perspectives

An environment for studying the impact of spatialising sonified graphs on data comprehension

We describe AudioCave, an environment for exploring the impact of spatialising sonified graphs on a set of numerical data comprehension tasks. Its design builds on findings regarding the effectiveness of sonified graphs for numerical data overview and discovery by visually impaired and blind students. We demonstrate its use as a test bed for comparing the approach of accessing a single sonified numerical datum at a time to one where multiple sonified numerical data can be accessed concurrently. Results from this experiment show that concurrent access facilitates the tackling of our set multivariate data comprehension tasks. AudioCave also demonstrates how the spatialisation of the sonified graphs provides opportunities for sharing the representation. We present two experiments investigating users solving set data comprehension tasks collaboratively by sharing the data representation

The processing of ambiguous sentences by first and second language learners of English

This study compares the way English-speaking children and adult second language learners of English resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences such as The dean liked the secretary of the professor who was reading a letter. Two groups of advanced L2 learners of English with Greek or German as their L1 participated in a set of off-line and on-line tasks. While the participants ' disambiguation preferences were influenced by lexical-semantic properties of the preposition linking the two potential antecedent NPs (of vs. with), there was no evidence that they were applying any structure-based ambiguity resolution strategies of the type that have been claimed to influence sentence processing in monolingual adults. These findings differ markedly from those obtained from 6 to 7 yearold monolingual English children in a parallel auditory study (Felser, Marinis, & Clahsen, submitted) in that the children's attachment preferences were not affected by the type of preposition at all. We argue that whereas children primarily rely on structure-based parsing principles during processing, adult L2 learners are guided mainly by non-structural informatio

Applying science of learning in education: Infusing psychological science into the curriculum

The field of specialization known as the science of learning is not, in fact, one field. Science of learning is a term that serves as an umbrella for many lines of research, theory, and application. A term with an even wider reach is Learning Sciences (Sawyer, 2006). The present book represents a sliver, albeit a substantial one, of the scholarship on the science of learning and its application in educational settings (Science of Instruction, Mayer 2011). Although much, but not all, of what is presented in this book is focused on learning in college and university settings, teachers of all academic levels may find the recommendations made by chapter authors of service. The overarching theme of this book is on the interplay between the science of learning, the science of instruction, and the science of assessment (Mayer, 2011). The science of learning is a systematic and empirical approach to understanding how people learn. More formally, Mayer (2011) defined the science of learning as the “scientific study of how people learn” (p. 3). The science of instruction (Mayer 2011), informed in part by the science of learning, is also on display throughout the book. Mayer defined the science of instruction as the “scientific study of how to help people learn” (p. 3). Finally, the assessment of student learning (e.g., learning, remembering, transferring knowledge) during and after instruction helps us determine the effectiveness of our instructional methods. Mayer defined the science of assessment as the “scientific study of how to determine what people know” (p.3). Most of the research and applications presented in this book are completed within a science of learning framework. Researchers first conducted research to understand how people learn in certain controlled contexts (i.e., in the laboratory) and then they, or others, began to consider how these understandings could be applied in educational settings. Work on the cognitive load theory of learning, which is discussed in depth in several chapters of this book (e.g., Chew; Lee and Kalyuga; Mayer; Renkl), provides an excellent example that documents how science of learning has led to valuable work on the science of instruction. Most of the work described in this book is based on theory and research in cognitive psychology. We might have selected other topics (and, thus, other authors) that have their research base in behavior analysis, computational modeling and computer science, neuroscience, etc. We made the selections we did because the work of our authors ties together nicely and seemed to us to have direct applicability in academic settings

The comprehension revolution : a twenty-year history of process and practice related to reading comprehension

Includes bibliographie

Is this a question? Not for long. The statement bias.

Four experiments demonstrate a 'statement bias': questions are more often misremembered as statements than vice versa. Experiment 1 suggests that the bias increases with increasing item comprehensibility. This finding rules out that the statement bias is only due to the belief that statements are more prevalent in communication than questions are. Experiment 2 demonstrates that the statement bias is related to depth of processing at encoding. Experiment 3 shows that the bias occurs irrespective of the truth of the statement underlying the sentence. Experiment 4 shows that the statement bias is also obtained for sentences pertaining to products and services.Internet; Yield; Market; Market research; Research; Communication;

Understanding analogical reasoning : viewpoints from psychology and related disciplines

Analogy and metaphor have a long history of study in linguistics, education, philosophy and psychology. Consensus over what analogy is or how analogy functions in language and thought, however, has been elusive. This paper, the first in a two part series, examines these various research traditions, attempting to bring out major lines of agreement over the role of analogy in individual human experience. As well as being a general literature review which may be helpful for newcomers to the study of analogy, this paper attempts to extract from these literatures existing theories, models and concepts which may be interesting or useful for computational studies of analogical reasoning