Fostering oral presentation competence through a virtual reality-based task for delivering feedback

While previous studies have stressed the importance of feedback delivered by experts, it is unclear whether students’ oral presentation competence can be fostered through innovative technology for delivering feedback. This experimental study examined the effectiveness of a virtual reality-based task, in which first-year undergraduate students practiced their presentation in a virtual environment and received feedback produced by the system, on their presentation competence components (i.e. cognition, behaviour and attitudes towards presenting). The effects were compared with a control condition, which was a face-to-face presentation task with expert feedback. The students’ performance was measured using pre- and post-test multiple-choice tests, validated rubrics, and self-evaluation instruments. Results revealed significant improvements from pre-test to post-test in all three presentation competence components, without a difference between the conditions. Furthermore, the self-evaluation tests showed that students who presented in virtual reality were appreciative of the detailed and analytical feedback they received. Because of sample size limitations, the effects found could not be generalised. Therefore, future research on a larger sample is needed to examine population effects. Follow-up studies should focus on the extent to which virtual reality-based tasks can encourage self-regulation skills for the effective and efficient integration of these tasks in presentation courses.</p

Digital phenotyping and the COVID-19 pandemic:Capturing behavioral change in patients with psychiatric disorders

Contains fulltext : 227418.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)The COVID-19 pandemic has led to unprecedented societal changes limiting us in our mobility and our ability to connect with others in person. These unusual but widespread changes provide a unique opportunity for studies using digital phenotyping tools. Digital phenotyping tools, such as mobile passive monitoring platforms (MPM), provide a new perspective on human behavior and hold promise to improve human behavioral research. However, there is currently little evidence that these tools can reliably detect changes in behavior. Considering the Considering the COVID-19 pandemic as a high impact common environmental factor we studied potential impact on behavior of participants using our mobile passive monitoring platform BEHAPP that was ambulatory tracking them during the COVID-19 pandemic. We pooled data from three MPM studies involving Schizophrenia (SZ), Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Bipolar Disorder (BD) patients (N = 12). We compared the data collected on weekdays during three weeks prior and three weeks subsequent to the start of the quarantine. We hypothesized an increase in communication and a decrease in mobility. We observed a significant increase in the total time spent on communication applications (median 179 and 243 min per week respectively, p = 0.005), and a significant decrease in the number of unique places visited (median 6 and 3 visits per week respectively, p = 0.007), while the total time spent at home did not change significantly (median 64 and 77 h per week, respectively, p = 0.594). The data provides a proof of principle that digital phenotyping tools can identify changes in human behavior incited by a common external environmental factor.6 p

Human social complexity:Evolutionary and methodological considerations

The ability to cognitively manage complex social environments, also termed social complexity, has been hypothesized to be an important factor in the evolution of the human brain, especially the neocortex. This is known as the social brain hypothesis. Traditional methods of studying evolutionary processes have resulted in inconsistent evidence regarding the validity of the social brain hypothesis. Recent technological and methodological advances have led to novel methods to examine both ancient and recent evolution using genetic information. The aim of this thesis is to provide a basis for future studies using genetic data to examine the evolution of human social complexity. We highlight the relevance of methodological decisions, such as the operationalization of social complexity. An example of a method studying evolution using genetic data was carried out for sociability, demonstrating how inconsistent results can follow from methodological decisions, while providing an indication that sociability genes are not more likely than average to be conserved across speciation. We examined how social complexity is associated with cognition and brain size in modern humans. We found that while operational definitions matter, social complexity measures are associated with various cognitive skills. Unexpectedly, associations between brain size and social complexity were mainly found for regions in the cerebellum instead of the neocortex. Because self-report and proxy-report of social behavior is prone to bias, passive digital technologies are proposed for the measurement of social complexity and we demonstrate how data quality and quantity affect the measurement of various behaviors using such technologies

The social brain hypothesis and social dysfunction: A Darwinian paradox

The social brain hypothesis (SBH) states that the evolution of the primate neocortex to levels beyond what is expected based on total brain size is the result of selection pressure for high levels of social complexity. In situations of selection pressure such as the one suggested by the SBH, genetic variants related to the phenotype in question are assumed to eventually either become lost or reach fixation in the population, reducing the genetic variation related to the phenotype. However, variation in social functioning has been found to be related to genetic variation (Bralten et al., 2021) and reduced social functioning is connected to a wide variety of psychiatric disorders (Porcelli et al., 2019) which are assumed to result in reduced reproductive fitness. Although this genetic variation may appear to be an argument against the SBH, this paradox is a commonly known paradox in evolutionary psychiatry, where genetic variation related to severe psychiatric disorders maintained despite the apparent evolutionary disadvantage. Hypotheses attempting to explain this paradox include ancestral neutrality, balancing selection and mutation-selection balance, which are compatible with the SBH to variable extents. Recent methodological advances have also created many opportunities to use genetic data to examine evolutionary markers (Song et al., 2021). Using methodologies such as selection pressure timelines and cross-species conservation of genetic variants, researchers can now examine the evolutionary processes involved in the continued existence of genetic variation in social functioning. Findings from such analyses may contribute to our understanding of the evolution of the brain and to our understanding of social dysfunction such as that observed in psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorde

The social brain hypothesis and social dysfunction:A Darwinian paradox

The social brain hypothesis (SBH) states that the evolution of the primate neocortex to levels beyond what is expected based on total brain size is the result of selection pressure for high levels of social complexity. In situations of selection pressure such as the one suggested by the SBH, genetic variants related to the phenotype in question are assumed to eventually either become lost or reach fixation in the population, reducing the genetic variation related to the phenotype. However, variation in social functioning has been found to be related to genetic variation (Bralten et al., 2021) and reduced social functioning is connected to a wide variety of psychiatric disorders (Porcelli et al., 2019) which are assumed to result in reduced reproductive fitness. Although this genetic variation may appear to be an argument against the SBH, this paradox is a commonly known paradox in evolutionary psychiatry, where genetic variation related to severe psychiatric disorders maintained despite the apparent evolutionary disadvantage. Hypotheses attempting to explain this paradox include ancestral neutrality, balancing selection and mutation-selection balance, which are compatible with the SBH to variable extents. Recent methodological advances have also created many opportunities to use genetic data to examine evolutionary markers (Song et al., 2021). Using methodologies such as selection pressure timelines and cross-species conservation of genetic variants, researchers can now examine the evolutionary processes involved in the continued existence of genetic variation in social functioning. Findings from such analyses may contribute to our understanding of the evolution of the brain and to our understanding of social dysfunction such as that observed in psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorde

Behapp:Digital phenotyping platform &amp; app (iOS, Android)

Behapp is a research instrument for use in (medical) scientific research contexts. Behapp facilitates the collection of personal smartphone-based data that is descriptive of a person's social behavior in terms of mobility and communication