Applying self-processing biases in education:improving learning through ownership

Accepting ownership of an item is an effective way of associating it with self, evoking self-processing biases that enhance memory. This memory advantage occurs even in ownership games, where items are arbitrarily divided between participants to temporarily ‘own’. The current study tested the educational applications of ownership games across two experiments. In Experiment 1, 7 to 9-year-old children were asked to choose three novel, labelled shapes from an array of nine. The experimenter chose three shapes and three remained ‘un-owned’. A subsequent free-recall test showed that children reliably learned more self-owned than other-owned or un-owned shapes. Experiment 2 replicated this finding for shapes that were assigned to owners rather than chosen, and showed that ownership enhanced memory more effectively than a control game with no ownership manipulation. Together, these experiments show that ownership games can evoke self-processing biases in children’s memory, enhancing learning. Implications for education strategies are discussed

The spontaneous formation of stereotypes via cumulative cultural evolution

All people share knowledge of cultural stereotypes of social groups—but what are the origins of these stereotypes? We examined whether stereotypes form spontaneously as information is repeatedly passed from person to person. As information about novel social targets was passed down a chain of individuals, what initially began as a set of random associations evolved into a system that was simplified and categorically structured. Over time, novel stereotypes emerged that not only were increasingly learnable but also allowed generalizations to be made about previously unseen social targets. By illuminating how cognitive and social factors influence how stereotypes form and change, these findings show how stereotypes might naturally evolve or be manipulated

The simultaneous extraction of multiple social categories from unfamiliar faces

The research was supported by an award from the Experimental Psychology Society's Small Grant scheme.Peer reviewedPostprin

Nanoparticle-coated microcrystals

Coprecipitation provides a rapid high-yield method for self-assembly of nanoparticles on the surface of flat water-soluble crystalline surfaces and a simple immobilisation technique prior to storage or thermal and chemical modification

Me first? Positioning self in the attentional hierarchy

The attention system that allocates resources across competing aspects of the environment is influenced by biases toward particular types of stimuli, such as cues of threat (e.g., angry-face image), self-reference (e.g., own-face image) and current goals (e.g., food image when hungry). Here, we used dot probe tasks to investigate which of these stimulus types are prioritized in the attentional hierarchy, measuring response latency to dot probes presented in the same location as different face types. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 42) were presented with self, angry and neutral face images in the dot probe task, which revealed a clear attentional bias for self-images over both angry and neutral images. In Experiment 2, each participant (N = 69) was assigned a self, angry or neutral goal image for a secondary monitoring task designed to induce a temporary goal, and this image was included in the stimuli presented in the dot probe task. Again, self-cues were found to produce a strong attentional bias, but images associated with temporary goals were found to be the most effective source of attentional bias. Results are discussed in relation to the relative importance of self, threat and temporary goal cues in the attentional hierarchy

Clinical software development for the Web: lessons learned from the BOADICEA project.

BACKGROUND: In the past 20 years, society has witnessed the following landmark scientific advances: (i) the sequencing of the human genome, (ii) the distribution of software by the open source movement, and (iii) the invention of the World Wide Web. Together, these advances have provided a new impetus for clinical software development: developers now translate the products of human genomic research into clinical software tools; they use open-source programs to build them; and they use the Web to deliver them. Whilst this open-source component-based approach has undoubtedly made clinical software development easier, clinical software projects are still hampered by problems that traditionally accompany the software process. This study describes the development of the BOADICEA Web Application, a computer program used by clinical geneticists to assess risks to patients with a family history of breast and ovarian cancer. The key challenge of the BOADICEA Web Application project was to deliver a program that was safe, secure and easy for healthcare professionals to use. We focus on the software process, problems faced, and lessons learned. Our key objectives are: (i) to highlight key clinical software development issues; (ii) to demonstrate how software engineering tools and techniques can facilitate clinical software development for the benefit of individuals who lack software engineering expertise; and (iii) to provide a clinical software development case report that can be used as a basis for discussion at the start of future projects. RESULTS: We developed the BOADICEA Web Application using an evolutionary software process. Our approach to Web implementation was conservative and we used conventional software engineering tools and techniques. The principal software development activities were: requirements, design, implementation, testing, documentation and maintenance. The BOADICEA Web Application has now been widely adopted by clinical geneticists and researchers. BOADICEA Web Application version 1 was released for general use in November 2007. By May 2010, we had > 1200 registered users based in the UK, USA, Canada, South America, Europe, Africa, Middle East, SE Asia, Australia and New Zealand. CONCLUSIONS: We found that an evolutionary software process was effective when we developed the BOADICEA Web Application. The key clinical software development issues identified during the BOADICEA Web Application project were: software reliability, Web security, clinical data protection and user feedback.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Preparent Training: An Examination of Programmed Text Instruction in Social Learning Theory and Parenting Applications

Psycholog

Perceptually Uniform Construction of Illustrative Textures

Illustrative textures, such as stippling or hatching, were predominantly used as an alternative to conventional Phong rendering. Recently, the potential of encoding information on surfaces or maps using different densities has also been recognized. This has the significant advantage that additional color can be used as another visual channel and the illustrative textures can then be overlaid. Effectively, it is thus possible to display multiple information, such as two different scalar fields on surfaces simultaneously. In previous work, these textures were manually generated and the choice of density was unempirically determined. Here, we first want to determine and understand the perceptual space of illustrative textures. We chose a succession of simplices with increasing dimensions as primitives for our textures: Dots, lines, and triangles. Thus, we explore the texture types of stippling, hatching, and triangles. We create a range of textures by sampling the density space uniformly. Then, we conduct three perceptual studies in which the participants performed pairwise comparisons for each texture type. We use multidimensional scaling (MDS) to analyze the perceptual spaces per category. The perception of stippling and triangles seems relatively similar. Both are adequately described by a 1D manifold in 2D space. The perceptual space of hatching consists of two main clusters: Crosshatched textures, and textures with only one hatching direction. However, the perception of hatching textures with only one hatching direction is similar to the perception of stippling and triangles. Based on our findings, we construct perceptually uniform illustrative textures. Afterwards, we provide concrete application examples for the constructed textures.Comment: 11 pages, 15 figures, to be published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphic