Cultural variation in cognitive flexibility reveals diversity in the development of executive functions

Cognitive flexibility, the adaptation of representations and responses to new task demands, improves dramatically in early childhood. It is unclear, however, whether flexibility is a coherent, unitary cognitive trait, or is an emergent dimension of task-specific performance that varies across populations with divergent experiences. Three-to 5-year-old English-speaking U.S. children and Tswana-speaking South African children completed two distinct language-processing cognitive flexibility tests: the FIM-Animates, a word-learning test, and the 3DCCS, a rule-switching test. U.S. and South African children did not differ in word-learning flexibility but showed similar age-related increases. In contrast, U.S. preschoolers showed an age-related increase in rule-switching flexibility but South African children did not. Verbal recall explained additional variance in both tests but did not modulate the interaction between population sample (i.e., country) and task. We hypothesize that rule-switching flexibility might be more dependent upon particular kinds of cultural experiences, whereas word-learning flexibility is less cross-culturally variable

Sustainable plant protection for increased food security in a changing climate

The global climate is changing. Rising temperatures in temperate regions are making headlines, but there are a host of changes that may have even greater impact on a global scale, particularly in regions where food security is already delicately balanced. Rising sea levels, changing patterns of rainfall, availability of water and increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are all likely to affect the biotic environment upon which we depend

Hybridization in parasites: consequences for adaptive evolution, pathogenesis and public health in a changing world

[No abstract available

Water for small-scale biogas digesters in sub-Saharan Africa

Acknowledgements This work was part-funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council funded ESPA project, NE/K010441/1 ‘ALTER – Alternative Carbon Investments in Ecosystems for Poverty Alleviation’. We are also grateful to the AUC for funding part of this work under the Afri-Flame project on ‘Adapta- tion of small-scale biogas digesters for use in rural households in sub-Saharan AfricaPeer reviewedPublisher PD

Do bold shakeups of the learning-teaching agreement work? A commognitive perspective on a LUMOS low lecture innovation

Mathematics undergraduates, and their lecturers, often describe the transition into university mathematics as a process of enculturation into new mathematical practices and new ways of constructing and conveying mathematical meaning (Nardi, 1996). Whatcharacterises the breadth and intensity of this enculturation varies according to factors such as (Artigue, Kent & Batanero, 2007): student background and preparedness for university level studies of mathematics; the aims and scope of each of the courses that thestudents take in the early days of their arrival at university; how distant the pedagogical approaches taken in these courses are from those taken in the secondary schools that the students come from; the students’ affective dispositions towards the subject and their expectations for what role mathematics is expected to play in their professional life. On their part, lecturers’ views on their pedagogical role may also vary according to factors such as (Nardi, 2008): length of teaching experience; type of courses (pure, applied, optional, compulsory etc.) they teach; perceptions of the goals of university mathematics teaching (such as to facilitate access to the widest possible population of participants in mathematics or select those likely to push the frontiers of the discipline); and, crucially, institutional access to innovative practices, e.g. through funded, encouraged and acknowledged research into such practices.In this paper I draw on my experiences as a member of the International Advisory Board of the LUMOS project (Barton & Paterson, 2013) to comment on aspects of aforementioned student enculturation. Here I see this enculturation as the adaptation of different ways to act and communicate mathematically. I take a perspective on these ways to act and communicate as discourses and I treat the changes to the mathematical and pedagogical perspectives of those who act as discursive shifts. To this purpose, I deploythe approach introduced by Anna Sfard (2008) and known as the commognitive approach

Reconstructing Colonization Dynamics of the Human Parasite Schistosoma mansoni following Anthropogenic Environmental Changes in Northwest Senegal

© 2015 Van den Broeck et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The attached file is the published version of the article