Differences in the weighting and choice of evidence for plausible versus implausible causes.

Individuals have difficulty changing their causal beliefs in light of contradictory evidence. We hypothesized that this difficulty arises because people facing implausible causes give greater consideration to causal alternatives, which, because of their use of a positive test strategy, leads to differential weighting of contingency evidence. Across 4 experiments, participants learned about plausible or implausible causes of outcomes. Additionally, we assessed the effects of participants' ability to think of alternative causes of the outcomes. Participants either saw complete frequency information (Experiments 1 and 2) or chose what information to see (Experiments 3 and 4). Consistent with the positive test account, participants given implausible causes were more likely to inquire about the occurrence of the outcome in the absence of the cause (Experiments 3 and 4) than those given plausible causes. Furthermore, they gave less weight to Cells A and B in a 2 × 2 contingency table and gave either equal or less weight to Cells C and D (Experiments 1 and 2). These effects were inconsistently modified by participants' ability to consider alternative causes of the outcome. The total of the observed effects are not predicted by either dominant models of normative causal inference or by the particular positive test account proposed here, but they may be commensurate with a more broadly construed positive test account.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Psychological Association via http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a003554

Efficiency of Executive Function: A Two-Generation Cross-Cultural Comparison of Samples From Hong Kong and the United Kingdom.

Although Asian preschoolers acquire executive functions (EFs) earlier than their Western counterparts, little is known about whether this advantage persists into later childhood and adulthood. To address this gap, in the current study we gave four computerized EF tasks (providing measures of inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and planning) to a large sample ( n = 1,427) of 9- to 16-year-olds and their parents. All participants lived in either the United Kingdom or Hong Kong. Our findings highlight the importance of combining developmental and cultural perspectives and show both similarities and contrasts across sites. Specifically, adults' EF performance did not differ between the two sites; age-related changes in executive function for both the children and the parents appeared to be culturally invariant, as did a modest intergenerational correlation. In contrast, school-age children and young adolescents in Hong Kong outperformed their United Kingdom counterparts on all four EF tasks, a difference consistent with previous findings from preschool children.A joint-council award to the authors funded this research (ES/K010225/1:Economic and Social Research Council, Research Grants Council of Hong Kong). Thinking Games website development supported by the Institute of Educational Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305A110932 to the University of Cambridge. Electronic access to dataset: http://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/851984/

Under What Conditions Can Recursion Be Learned? Effects of Starting Small in Artificial Grammar Learning of Center-Embedded Structure

It has been suggested that external and/or internal limitations paradoxically may lead to superior learning, that is, the concepts of starting small and less is more (Elman,; Newport,). In this paper, we explore the type of incremental ordering during training that might help learning, and what mechanism explains this facilitation. We report four artificial grammar learning experiments with human participants. In Experiments 1a and 1b we found a beneficial effect of starting small using two types of simple recursive grammars: right-branching and center-embedding, with recursive embedded clauses in fixed positions and fixed length. This effect was replicated in Experiment 2 (N = 100). In Experiment 3 and 4, we used a more complex center-embedded grammar with recursive loops in variable positions, producing strings of variable length. When participants were presented an incremental ordering of training stimuli, as in natural language, they were better able to generalize their knowledge of simple units to more complex units when the training input “grew” according to structural complexity, compared to when it “grew” according to string length. Overall, the results suggest that starting small confers an advantage for learning complex center-embedded structures when the input is organized according to structural complexity

INSTRUCT Lab

INSTRUCT lab open acces

Invited talks and lectures

A collection of invited talks and lectures by Prof Michelle Ellefso

Replication needs fidelity

R scripts and data for 'Is Replication Possible without Fidelity?' manuscrip

EARLI2018 SIG22 poster - Constructivist against explicit instruction approaches to teaching

A long standing debate in educational and psychological research is the effectiveness of constructivist teaching methods over direct instruction. One of the main arguments against constructivist teaching techniques is based on the upgrade of our knowledge on information-processing system – human cognitive architecture. Current findings about human cognitive architecture provide evidence that direct instruction is significantly more efficient than discovery learning ('minimal guidance during instruction') in teaching scientific concepts and processes. However, some of the critiques on direct instruction advocates concern important aspects of schooling that have been left out from their approach such as how to motivate students, how to attend to the social contexts of the instruction and how to support the development of more broad schooling purposed such as produce scientifically informed citizens. The focus of the present study is to explore different ways of training late primary school children to make informed decisions on socio-scientific issues that involve scientific knowledge and affect their local community and the society in general. The main research aim is to identify which learning environment is superior and establish some of the factors that predict the efficacy of one type of instruction over the others (e.g. previous content knowledge on the subject matter, previous decision-making skills, academic achievement, gender). An experimental pre-test post-test design with three learning conditions (explicit instruction, guided discovery and unguided discovery) and whole-class interventions was adopted. The sample consisted of 180 11-year-old students from four primary schools in central Greece. Preliminary findings will be presented

Investigation of the associations between physical activity, self-regulation and educational outcomes in childhood.

It is common knowledge that physical activity leads to physiological and psychological benefits. The current study explored the association between physical activity and self-regulation longitudinally and the indirect relationship this may have on academic achievement, using secondary data on primary and secondary school children from the Millennium Cohort Study, a cohort of infants born in 2000-2001 in the United Kingdom. There are two main findings. First, there is a positive link between physical activity and emotional (not behavioural) regulation both concurrently and longitudinally across all three time points, 7-years-old, 11-years-old and 14-years-old. The relationship was negative for emotional regulation and negligible for behavioural regulation when controlling for socioeconomic status. Second, across two time points (due to data availability), physical activity positively predicted academic achievement through emotional regulation for 7-year-olds and behavioural regulation in 11-year-olds. The impact of this relationship was more pronounced when controlling for socioeconomic status. Together these findings indicate that emotional regulation is linked to physical activity in early childhood. Subsequently, emotion regulation predicts academic attainment, suggesting that early interventions might focus on attention rather than behaviour

IGWANA2022 poster - The contribution of cognitive flexibility to arithmetic skills in Chinese children

Poster Presentatio