Metacognition and mindreading in young children: a cross-cultural study

Prior studies document cross cultural variation in the developmental onset of mindreading. In particular, Japanese children are reported to pass a standard false belief task later than children from Western countries. By contrast, we know little about cross-cultural variation in young children’s metacognitive abilities. Moreover, one prominent theoretical discussion in developmental psychology focuses on the relation between metacognition and mindreading. Here we investigated the relation between mindreading and metacognition (both implicit and explicit) by testing 4-year-old Japanese and German children. We found no difference in metacognition between the two cultural groups. By contrast, Japanese children showed lower performance than German children replicating cultural differences in mindreading. Finally, metacognition and mindreading were not related in either group. We discuss the findings in light of the existing theoretical accounts of the relation between metacognition and mindreading

PENYELIDIKAN REFLEKTIF: MENGAPA LUAS DAERAH TIDAK PERNAH NEGATIF?

“Mengapa luas daerah tidak pernah negatif?” Pertanyaan tersebut memotivasi penulis untuk melakukan penelitian dan pencarian terhadap bukti-bukti yang dapat menjelaskan bagaimana luas tidak pernah bernilai negatif. Penelitian tidak selalu diawali dengan mencari pada sumber tertulis, tapi dapat diawali dengan melakukan pencarian terhadap pengalaman pada diri sendiri yang merupakan tahap pertama dari reflective inquiry. Sehingga metode penelitian yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah penyelidikan reflektif yang merupakan bagian dari reflective inquiry. Secara harfiah reflektif merupakan proses bercermin pada pengetahuan dan pegalaman dalam diri sendiri, pengetahuan eksplisit, serta bertujuan membangun ulang sistem keyakinan dalam diri seseorang mengenai suatu hal. Penyelidikan reflektif yang digunakan berdasarakan pada tiga level berpikir reflektif oleh Suryadi, pertama dimulai dari pengalaman dan pengetahuan sendiri (implicit), kemudian mencoba mencari ilmu dan pengetahuan keluar dari diri sendiri (explicit), dan jika setelah tahap implicit dan explicit penulis belum menyakini solusi yang didapat benar-benar dapat menjadi jawaban dari permasalahan yang dihadapi, akan muncul tahap ketiga critical yang memiliki dua kemungkinan hasil yaitu ditemukannya solusi atau ditemukannya petunjuk untuk solusi lain. Selama melakukan penelitian pada tahap implicit penulis menemukan hubungan antara dimensi dengan luas, yang membuka kemungkinan bahwa terdapat dimensi negatif dan mungkin dapat menampung luas dengan skala negatif sehingga terdapat luas yang bernilai negatif. Tapi penelitian tidak berhenti sampai disitu, pada tahap selanjutnya yaitu explicit penulis menemukan hubungan antara pengukur(measure), dimensi, dan luas yang mengarahkan pada pembuktian terhadap jawaban dari mengapa luas daerah tidak pernah bernilai negatif. Proses pemaknaan selama penelitian membuka pikiran penulis mengenai keberadaan dimensi negatif yang dituangkan pada tahap critical.;-- Why area is never negative? This question motivate researcher to conduct inquiry and search evidence that can explain how area is never negative. An inquiry is not always start form doing research to explicit sources, but it can start the research from our own knowledge and experience first. The research that start from our own knowledge and experience lead to inquiry that called as Reflective Inquiry. Reflective can define as process that happen when we reflect on our own knowledge and experience, on explicit knowledge, and purpose to reconstruct the belief system in our self about anything. Reflective inquiry that used in this research based on three level of reflective thinking by Suryadi. First, reflect on our own knowledge and experience (implicit), then try to enrich the result with combine it to explicit knowledge (explicit), if the result from implicit and explicit is not the solution, then we take the next step, called critical. Critical have two possible result, first, the result become the solution itself or the result just become hint that lead to the right solution. Result that come from implicit process is researcher found relation between area and dimension, and disclose possible idea, that there is negative dimension that can accommodate area with negative scale and make negative area possibly occur. When combine that relation with explicit source, researcher found new relation. Relation between measure, dimension, and area that lead to solution of why area is never negative. Meaning process during research give inspiration to researcher about the existence of negative dimension which written on critical step

Optimal Incentive Contracts in the Presence of Career Concerns: Theory and Evidence

This paper studies career concerns -- concerns about the effects of current performance on future compensation -- and describes how optimal incentive contracts are affected when career concerns are taken into account. Career concerns arise frequently: they occur whenever the market uses a worker's current output to update its belief about the worker's ability and competition then forces future wages (or wage contracts) to reflect these updated beliefs. Career concerns are stronger when a worker is further from retirement, because a longer prospective career increases the return to changing the market's belief. In the presence of career concerns, the optimal compensation contract optimizes total incentives -- the combination of the implicit incentives from career concerns and the explicit incentives from the compensation contract. Thus, the explicit incentives from the optimal compensation contract should be strongest when a worker is close to retirement. We find empirical support for this prediction in the relation between chief-executive compensation and stock-market performance.

Implicit religion, explicit religion and purpose in life : an empirical enquiry among 13- to 15-year-old adolescents

In his analysis of the construct "implicit religion" Edward Bailey speaks of those individuals "who believe in Christianity" but who do not display the behaviours of explicit religion, like church attendance. A recent research tradition has tried to operationalise this understanding of implicit religion by studying those who believe that they can be a Christian without going to church. A longer established research tradition has demonstrated the association between explicit religiosity and an enhanced sense of purpose in life. The aim of the present study is to test the hypothesis that implicit religiosity (in the sense of believing that you can be a Christian without going to church) is also associated with an enhanced sense of purpose in life. Data provided by a sample of 25,825 13- to 15-year-old adolescents support this hypothesis. In turn these findings support the notion that implicit religion (in the sense operationalised by this study) fulfils some functions similar to those fulfilled by explicit religion

Believe It or Not: Adding Belief Annotations to Databases

We propose a database model that allows users to annotate data with belief statements. Our motivation comes from scientific database applications where a community of users is working together to assemble, revise, and curate a shared data repository. As the community accumulates knowledge and the database content evolves over time, it may contain conflicting information and members can disagree on the information it should store. For example, Alice may believe that a tuple should be in the database, whereas Bob disagrees. He may also insert the reason why he thinks Alice believes the tuple should be in the database, and explain what he thinks the correct tuple should be instead. We propose a formal model for Belief Databases that interprets users' annotations as belief statements. These annotations can refer both to the base data and to other annotations. We give a formal semantics based on a fragment of multi-agent epistemic logic and define a query language over belief databases. We then prove a key technical result, stating that every belief database can be encoded as a canonical Kripke structure. We use this structure to describe a relational representation of belief databases, and give an algorithm for translating queries over the belief database into standard relational queries. Finally, we report early experimental results with our prototype implementation on synthetic data.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figure

Body dissatisfaction revisited : on the importance of implicit beliefs about actual and ideal body image

Body dissatisfaction (i.e., a negative attitude towards one’s own physical appearance) is assumed to originate from a perceived discrepancy between the actual physical appearance (i.e., actual body image) and the desired ideal state of the body (i.e., ideal body image). We assessed implicit beliefs about these two aspects of the body image independently using two Relational Responding Tasks (RRT) in a sample of participants who were either low or high in explicitly reported body dissatisfaction. As hypothesized, differences in body dissatisfaction exerted a differential influence on the two RRT scores. The implicit belief that one is thin was less pronounced in participants who were strongly dissatisfied with their body relative to participants who were more satisfied with their body. The implicit desire to be thin (i.e., thin ideal body image), in contrast, tended to be more pronounced in participants who exhibited a high degree of body dissatisfaction as compared to participants who exhibited a low degree of body dissatisfaction. Hierarchical regression analyses also revealed that the RRT scores were predictive of self-reported body dissatisfaction, even over and above the predictive validity of some (but not all) explicit predictors of body dissatisfaction that were included in the present study. More generally, these findings contribute to the empirical validation of the RRT as a measure of implicit beliefs in the context of body dissatisfaction

Children's suggestibility in relation to their understanding about sources of knowledge

In the experiments reported here, children chose either to maintain their initial belief about an object's identity or to accept the experimenter's contradicting suggestion. Both 3– to 4–year–olds and 4– to 5–year–olds were good at accepting the suggestion only when the experimenter was better informed than they were (implicit source monitoring). They were less accurate at recalling both their own and the experimenter's information access (explicit recall of experience), though they performed well above chance. Children were least accurate at reporting whether their final belief was based on what they were told or on what they experienced directly (explicit source monitoring). Contrasting results emerged when children decided between contradictory suggestions from two differentially informed adults: Three– to 4–year–olds were more accurate at reporting the knowledge source of the adult they believed than at deciding which suggestion was reliable. Decision making in this observation task may require reflective understanding akin to that required for explicit source judgments when the child participates in the task