A Child-Driven Metadata Schema: A Holistic Analysis of Children\u27s Cognitive Processes During Book Selection

The purpose of this study was to construct a child-driven metadata schema by understanding children\u27s cognitive processes and behaviors during book selection. Existing knowledge organization systems including metadata schemas and previous literature in the metadata domain have shown that there is a no specialized metadata schema that describes children\u27s resources that also is developed by children. It is clear that children require a new or alternative child-driven metadata schema. Child-driven metadata elements reflected the children\u27s cognitive perceptions that could allow children to intuitively and easily find books in an online cataloging system. The literature of development of literacy skills claims that the positive experiences of selecting books empower children\u27s motivation for developing literacy skills. Therefore, creating a child-driven metadata schema not only contributes to the improvement of knowledge organization systems reflecting children\u27s information behavior and cognitive process, but also improves children\u27s literacy and reading skills. Broader research questions included what metadata elements do children like to use? What elements should a child-driven metadata schema include? In order to answer these research questions, a triangulated qualitative research design consisting of questionnaires, paired think-aloud, interview, and diaries were used with 22 child participants between the ages of 6 and 9. A holistic understanding of the children\u27s cognitive processes during book selection as a foundation of a child-driven metadata schema displays an early stage of an ontological contour for a children\u27s knowledge organization system. A child-driven metadata schema constructed in this study is apt to include different metadata elements from those metadata elements existing in current cataloging standards. A child-driven metadata schema includes five classes such as story/subject, character, illustration, physical characteristics, and understandability, and thirty three metadata elements such as character\u27s names and images, book cover\u27s color, shape, textured materials, engagement element, and tone. In addition, the analysis of the relationship between emergent emotional vocabularies and cognitive factors and facets illustrated the important role of emotion and attention in children\u27s information processing and seeking behaviors

The institutional context of rationality

In the last three decades, mainstream economics has been influenced by authors associated with new institutional economics and new behavioral economics. The dispute over rationality as an assumption of economic theories is becoming particularly evident and is taking new forms. The aim of this article is to examine the connections between the institutional and behavioral approaches as well as between researchers’ ideas as to what rationality is and their beliefs regarding an optimal economic system. It will demonstrate that so-called behavioral and institutional economists have more in common than not. Institutions play a key role in the arguments of behavioural economists, whereas the argument of institutional economists is almost always based on the issue of human cognitive abilities and emotions. What directly links the two trends is the attention given to the rationality of actions that an individual takes as a premise of economic choices and as an assumption of economic theories. Differences in views relate to the understanding of rationality and exist within the framework of behavioral economics itself. At the core of the dispute is the distinction between two concepts of rationality: constructivist and ecological. This distinction serves as a starting point for the second matter discussed in the article. The author argues that the concept of constructivist rationality is related to the vision of the top-down creation of social order, while the proponents of the ecological approach to rationality stress the importance of market institutions. Interestingly, from the perspective of cognitive psychology and the heuristics of Daniel Kahneman, it can be presumed that the convictions of a scholar about the “ideal system” can influence his or her arguments on the essence of human rationality.Publication of English-language versions of the volumes of the “Annales. Ethics in Economic Life” financed through contract no. 501/1/P-DUN/2017 from the funds of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education devoted to the promotion of scholarship

What do faculties specializing in brain and neural sciences think about, and how do they approach, brain-friendly teaching-learning in Iran?

Objective: to investigate the perspectives and experiences of the faculties specializing in brain and neural sciences regarding brain-friendly teaching-learning in Iran. Methods: 17 faculties from 5 universities were selected by purposive sampling (2018). In-depth semi-structured interviews with directed content analysis were used. Results: 31 sub-subcategories, 10 subcategories, and 4 categories were formed according to the “General teaching model”. “Mentorship” was a newly added category. Conclusions: A neuro-educational approach that consider the roles of the learner’s brain uniqueness, executive function facilitation, and the valence system are important to learning. Such learning can be facilitated through cognitive load considerations, repetition, deep questioning, visualization, feedback, and reflection. The contextualized, problem-oriented, social, multi-sensory, experiential, spaced learning, and brain-friendly evaluation must be considered. Mentorship is important for coaching and emotional facilitation

The value of theoretical multiplicity for steering transitions towards sustainability

Transition management, as a theory of directing structural societal changes towards sustainable system innovations, has become a major topic in scientific research over the last years. In this paper we focus on the question how transitions towards sustainability can be steered, governed or managed, in particular by governmental actors. We suggest an approach of theoretical multiplicity, arguing that multiple theories will be needed simultaneously for dealing with the complex societal sustainability issues. Therefore, we address the steering question by theoretically comparing transition management theory to a number of related theories on societal change and intervention, such as multi-actor collaboration, network governance, configuration management, policy agenda setting, and adaptive management. We conclude that these related theories put the managerial assumptions of transition management into perspective, by adding other steering roles and leadership mechanisms to the picture. Finally we argue that new modes of steering inevitable have consequences for the actual governance institutions. New ways of governing change ask for change within governance systems itself and vice versa. Our argument for theoretical multiplicity implicates the development of multiple, potentially conflicting, governance capacitie

Abstraction as a basis for the computational interpretation of creative cross-modal metaphor

Various approaches to computational metaphor interpretation are based on pre-existing similarities between source and target domains and/or are based on metaphors already observed to be prevalent in the language. This paper addresses similarity-creating cross-modal metaphoric expressions. It is shown how the “abstract concept as object” (or reification) metaphor plays a central role in a large class of metaphoric extensions. The described approach depends on the imposition of abstract ontological components, which represent source concepts, onto target concepts. The challenge of such a system is to represent both denotative and connotative components which are extensible, together with a framework of general domains between which such extensions can conceivably occur. An existing ontology of this kind, consistent with some mathematic concepts and widely held linguistic notions, is outlined. It is suggested that the use of such an abstract representation system is well adapted to the interpretation of both conventional and unconventional metaphor that is similarity-creating

The CHREST architecture of cognition : the role of perception in general intelligence

Original paper can be found at: http://www.atlantis-press.com/publications/aisr/AGI-10/ Copyright Atlantis Press. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This paper argues that the CHREST architecture of cognition can shed important light on developing artificial general intelligence. The key theme is that "cognition is perception." The description of the main components and mechanisms of the architecture is followed by a discussion of several domains where CHREST has already been successfully applied, such as the psychology of expert behaviour, the acquisition of language by children, and the learning of multiple representations in physics. The characteristics of CHREST that enable it to account for empirical data include: self-organisation, an emphasis on cognitive limitations, the presence of a perception-learning cycle, and the use of naturalistic data as input for learning. We argue that some of these characteristics can help shed light on the hard questions facing theorists developing artificial general intelligence, such as intuition, the acquisition and use of concepts and the role of embodiment

The Problem of Mental Action

In mental action there is no motor output to be controlled and no sensory input vector that could be manipulated by bodily movement. It is therefore unclear whether this specific target phenomenon can be accommodated under the predictive processing framework at all, or if the concept of “active inference” can be adapted to this highly relevant explanatory domain. This contribution puts the phenomenon of mental action into explicit focus by introducing a set of novel conceptual instruments and developing a first positive model, concentrating on epistemic mental actions and epistemic self-control. Action initiation is a functionally adequate form of self-deception; mental actions are a specific form of predictive control of effective connectivity, accompanied and possibly even functionally mediated by a conscious “epistemic agent model”. The overall process is aimed at increasing the epistemic value of pre-existing states in the conscious self-model, without causally looping through sensory sheets or using the non-neural body as an instrument for active inference

Distributed Learning System Design: A New Approach and an Agenda for Future Research

This article presents a theoretical framework designed to guide distributed learning design, with the goal of enhancing the effectiveness of distributed learning systems. The authors begin with a review of the extant research on distributed learning design, and themes embedded in this literature are extracted and discussed to identify critical gaps that should be addressed by future work in this area. A conceptual framework that integrates instructional objectives, targeted competencies, instructional design considerations, and technological features is then developed to address the most pressing gaps in current research and practice. The rationale and logic underlying this framework is explicated. The framework is designed to help guide trainers and instructional designers through critical stages of the distributed learning system design process. In addition, it is intended to help researchers identify critical issues that should serve as the focus of future research efforts. Recommendations and future research directions are presented and discussed