Student perceptions of barriers to networking with employers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the usefulness of the concept of the ‘implied graduate’ to explain the difficulties, which students report when engaging with local employers. Design/methodology/approach - The ‘implied graduate’ is an analytical concept that aims to bring together assumptions about what a graduate should be like. In this paper the concept has been used to analyse interview data collected from students after they took part in an employability project at a small Higher Education (HE) campus in a Further Education (FE) college. Findings - The students in this study reported significant issues with continuing to engage and maintain contact with the employers they met during the project. For many, this was the first time they had met graduate level employers and so felt inexperienced in how to approach networking with them. It seems that some of the offers for future contact made by the employers were aimed at an ‘implied graduate’ and, as such, the students struggled to fulfil those expectations. Originality/value - This paper sheds light on the difficulties that HE in FE students face in engaging with graduate employers. These issues are likely to contribute to the well-established, but unexplained, differences in employment outcomes for students from diverse backgrounds. Keywords: Non-traditional Students, Employability, Graduates, Networking, HE in FE, Article Classification: Research pape

Mindfulness & Bodyfulness: A New Paradigm

The word mindfulness, though it has been used for centuries, may be both poorly defined and poorly used. Though the word connotes mental processes, the construct often includes embodiment practices such as yoga, sensory tracking, conscious breathing, tai chi, and qi gong. This can generate confusion, conflation, muddled research, and an anti-somatic bias. The author proposes the invention of a new term, bodyfulness, in order to centralize the often marginalized voice of the body in therapeutic, empirical, sociocultural, and contemplative practices

Experimental approaches to the study of culture in primates

First paragraph: The topic of culture in nonhumans has received a lot of attention in recent years, and perhaps this is not surprising. The idea that other animals - apes, monkeys, and maybe even rats and fish - may show a semblance of a trait that we consider to be so fundamentally human, is both exciting and controversial. Dialogue between enthusiastic advocates of animal culture on the one hand, and wary sceptics on the other, has therefore generated a fruitful intellectual atmosphere, and spawned a broad, rich, scientific literature on the topic

Inking in a Blue-Ringed Octopus, Hapalochlaena lunulata, with a Vestigial Ink Sac

Here we report for the first time that adult Hapalochlaena lunulata (Quoy & Gairnard, 1832), which has a vestigial ink sac, is capable of inking. Ink was released under three different agonistic conditions: female-female aggression, rejection of mating attempt, and when attacked by a predator. We observed no apparent reaction to the ink by the other animals involved in these interactions

Cultural Evolution and Perpetuation of Arbitrary Communicative Conventions in Experimental Microsocieties

Previous studies have shown that iconic graphical signs can evolve into symbols through repeated usage within dyads and interacting communities. Here we investigate the evolution of graphical signs over chains of participants. In these chains (or "replacement microsocieties"), membership of an interacting group changed repeatedly such that the most experienced members were continually replaced by naive participants. Signs rapidly became symbolic, such that they were mutually incomprehensible across experienced members of different chains, and new entrants needed to learn conventionalised meanings. An objective measure of graphical complexity (perimetric complexity) showed that the signs used within the microsocieties were becoming progressively simplified over successive usage. This is the first study to show that the signs that evolve in graphical communication experiments can be transmitted to, and spontaneously adopted by, naive participants. This provides critical support for the view that human communicative symbols could have evolved culturally from iconic representations

Cumulative culture and explicit metacognition: a review of theories, evidence and key predictions

A variety of different proposals have attempted to explain the apparent uniqueness of human cumulative culture as a consequence of underlying mechanisms that are also assumed to be uniquely well-developed in humans. Recently, Heyes and colleagues have proposed explicit (or Type 2) metacognition as a key feature of human cognition that might enable cumulative culture. In the current review we examine these arguments, and consider their plausibility. Firstly we consider whether distinctions between cognitive processes described as explicit/implicit, and Type 1/2 (or Systems 1/2), do indeed capture features that distinguish processes specific to human cognition, versus those that are shared with other species. In particular we consider whether this applies to distinctions relating to metacognitive processes. We also consider the ways in which explicit metacognitive processing might plausibly facilitate cumulative culture. We categorise the potential benefits as either optimising receiver behaviour, or optimising sender behaviour. Within both of these categories benefits could arise as a consequence of more effective representation of either one’s own knowledge state, or that of others. We evaluate the current state of evidence supporting each of these potential benefits. We conclude by proposing methodological approaches that could be used to directly test the theory, and also identify which (if any) of the possible causal mechanisms may be implicated

Human Cumulative Culture in the Laboratory: Effects of (Micro) Population Size

Traditionally, experiments on social learning (both in humans and nonhumans) involve dyads, with an experimenter or experimenter-trained conspecific serving as the demonstrator and the participant as the observer. But social learning in nature often involves multiple potential models, and the models themselves were once learners. We discuss our studies of social learning in adult humans in interactive group settings in the absence of formal demonstrations by experimenters, which track transmission over multiple learner generations. In these experiments we find evidence for cumulative learning over generations. This has allowed us to manipulate learning conditions in order to test hypotheses regarding the necessary conditions for cumulative culture. We also report results from a further experiment using similar methods, which compares conditions of varying cohort size. Participants were given the task to build a paper airplane to fly as far as possible. Contrary to expectations, there was no advantage for larger cohort sizes, in terms of the cumulative effects observed

Artificially generated cultural variation between two groups of captive colobus monkeys, Colobus guereza kikuyuensis

The majority of studies of social learning in primates have tested subjects in isolation and investigated the effects of learning over very short periods of time. We aimed to test for social learning in two social groups of colobus monkeys, Colobus guereza kikuyuensis. Subjects were shown video footage of familiar monkeys either pushing or pulling a plastic flap to obtain a food reward, while they were given simultaneous access to the same apparatus. Action frequencies showed a significant difference between the two groups, with the pull group performing a higher proportion of pulls to pushes, compared with the push group. Copying persisted even in later sessions during which the demonstration footage was not being shown. We conclude that we successfully generated two contrasting behavioural traditions in these groups of monkeys. We do not know how long this contrast in behaviour would have persisted had we been able to continue testing for an even longer period of time, but further studies using similar designs and even longer test periods would have the power to confirm whether stable behavioural variation can be sustained between groups of monkeys, supported by social transmission

Human teaching and cumulative cultural evolution

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 648841 RATCHETCOG ERC-2014-CoG.Although evidence of teaching behaviour has been identified in some nonhuman species, human teaching appears to be unique in terms of both the breadth of contexts within which it is observed, and in its responsiveness to needs of the learner. Similarly, cultural evolution is observable in other species, but human cultural evolution appears strikingly distinct. This has led to speculation that the evolutionary origins of these capacities may be causally linked. Here we provide an overview of contrasting perspectives on the relationship between teaching and cultural evolution in humans, and briefly review previous research which suggests that cumulative culture (here meaning cultural evolution featuring a trend towards improving functionality) can occur without teaching. We then report the results of a novel experimental study in which we investigated how the benefits of teaching may depend on the complexity of the skill to be acquired. Participants were asked to tie knots of varying complexity. In our Teaching condition, opportunities to interact with an experienced partner aided transmission of the most complex knots, but not simpler equivalents, relative to exposure to completed products alone (End State Only condition), and also relative to information about the process of completion (Intermediate States condition). We conclude by considering the plausibility of various accounts of the evolutionary relationship between teaching and cultural evolution in humans.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Human teaching and cumulative cultural evolution

Although evidence of teaching behaviour has been identified in some nonhuman species, human teaching appears to be unique in terms of both the breadth of contexts within which it is observed, and in its responsiveness to needs of the learner. Similarly, cultural evolution is observable in other species, but human cultural evolution appears strikingly distinct. This has led to speculation that the evolutionary origins of these capacities may be causally linked. Here we provide an overview of contrasting perspectives on the relationship between teaching and cultural evolution in humans, and briefly review previous research which suggests that cumulative culture (here meaning cultural evolution featuring a trend towards improving functionality) can occur without teaching. We then report the results of a novel experimental study in which we investigated how the benefits of teaching may depend on the complexity of the skill to be acquired. Participants were asked to tie knots of varying complexity. In our Teaching condition, opportunities to interact with an experienced partner aided transmission of the most complex knots, but not simpler equivalents, relative to exposure to completed products alone (End State Only condition), and also relative to information about the process of completion (Intermediate States condition). We conclude by considering the plausibility of various accounts of the evolutionary relationship between teaching and cultural evolution in humans