Social Learning Processes in Swiss Soil Protection? The 'From Farmer - To Farmer' Project

Social learning approaches have become a prominent focus in studies related to sustainable agriculture. In order to better understand the potential of social learning for more sustainable development, the present study assessed the processes, effects and facilitating elements of interaction related to social learning in the context of Swiss soil protection and the innovative ‘From Farmer - To Farmer’ project. The study reveals that social learning contributes to fundamental transformations of patterns of interactions. However, the study also demonstrates that a learning-oriented understanding of sustainable development implies including analysis of the institutional environments in which the organizations of the individual representatives of face-to-face-based social learning processes are operating. This has shown to be a decisive element when face-to-face-based learning processes of the organisations’ representatives are translated into organisational learning. Moreover, the study revealed that this was achieved not directly through formalisation of new lines of institutionalised cooperation but by establishing links in a ‘boundary space’ trying out new forms of collaboration, aiming at social learning and co-production of knowledge. It is argued that further research on social learning processes should give greater emphasis to this intermediary level of ‘boundary spaces’.

Traumatization and chronic pain: a further model of interaction.

Up to 80% of patients with severe posttraumatic stress disorder are suffering from "unexplained" chronic pain. Theories about the links between traumatization and chronic pain have become the subject of increased interest over the last several years. We will give a short summary about the existing interaction models that emphasize particularly psychological and behavioral aspects of this interaction. After a synopsis of the most important psychoneurobiological mechanisms of pain in the context of traumatization, we introduce the hypermnesia-hyperarousal model, which focuses on two psychoneurobiological aspects of the physiology of learning. This hypothesis provides an answer to the hitherto open question about the origin of pain persistence and pain sensitization following a traumatic event and also provides a straightforward explanatory model for educational purposes.

Envisioning sustainable water futures in a transdisciplinary learning process: combining normative, explorative, and participatory scenario approaches

Competing water demands for household consumption as well as the production of food, energy, and other uses pose challenges for water supply and sustainable development in many parts of the world. Designing creative strategies and learning processes for sustainable water governance is thus of prime importance. While this need is uncontested, suitable approaches still have to be found. In this article we present and evaluate a conceptual approach to scenario building aimed at transdisciplinary learning for sustainable water governance. The approach combines normative, explorative, and participatory scenario elements. This combination allows for adequate consideration of stakeholders’ and scientists’ systems, target, and transformation knowledge. Application of the approach in the MontanAqua project in the Swiss Alps confirmed its high potential for co-producing new knowledge and establishing a meaningful and deliberative dialogue between all actors involved. The iterative and combined approach ensured that stakeholders’ knowledge was adequately captured, fed into scientific analysis, and brought back to stakeholders in several cycles, thereby facilitating learning and co-production of new knowledge relevant for both stakeholders and scientists. However, the approach also revealed a number of constraints, including the enormous flexibility required of stakeholders and scientists in order for them to truly engage in the co-production of new knowledge. Overall, the study showed that shifts from strategic to communicative action are possible in an environment of mutual trust. This ultimately depends on creating conditions of interaction that place scientists’ and stakeholders’ knowledge on an equal footing.

On the interaction of attentional focus and gaze: The quiet eye inhibits focus-related performance decrements

To date, despite a large body of evidence in favor of the advantage of an effect-related focus of attention compared with a movement-related focus of attention in motor control and learning, the role of vision in this context remains unclear. Therefore, in a golf-putting study, the relation between attentional focus and gaze behavior (in particular, quiet eye, or QE) was investigated. First, the advantage of an effect-related focus, as well as of a long QE duration, could be replicated. Furthermore, in the online-demanding task of golf putting, high performance was associated with later QE offsets. Most decisively, an interaction between attentional focus and gaze behavior was revealed in such a way that the efficiency of the QE selectively manifested under movement-related focus instructions. As these findings suggest neither additive effects nor a causal chain, an alternative hypothesis is introduced explaining positive QE effects by the inhibition of not-to-be parameterized movement variants.

Rethinking science for sustainable development: Reflexive interaction for a paradigm transformation

If we postulate a need for the transformation of society towards sustainable development, we also need to transform science and overcome the fact/value split that makes it impossible for science to be accountable to society. The orientation of this paradigm transformation in science has been under debate for four decades, generating important theoretical concepts, but they have had limited impact until now. This is due to a contradictory normative science policy framing that science has difficulties dealing with, not least of all because the dominant framing creates a lock-in. We postulate that in addition to introducing transdisciplinarity, science needs to strive for integration of the normative aspect of sustainable development at the meta-level. This requires a strategically managed niche within which scholars and practitioners from many different disciplines can engage in a long-term common learning process, in order to become a “thought collective” (Fleck) capable of initiating the paradigm transformation. Arguing with Piaget that “decentration” is essential to achieve normative orientation and coherence in a learning collective, we introduce a learning approach—Cohn's “Theme-Centred Interaction”—which provides a methodology for explicitly working with the objectivity and subjectivity of statements and positions in a “real-world” context, and for consciously integrating concerns of individuals in their interdependence with the world. This should enable a thought collective to address the epistemological and ethical barriers to science for sustainable development.

DAT1 polymorphism determines L-DOPA effects on learning about others' prosociality.

Despite that a wealth of evidence links striatal dopamine to individualś reward learning performance in non-social environments, the neurochemical underpinnings of such learning during social interaction are unknown. Here, we show that the administration of 300 mg of the dopamine precursor L-DOPA to 200 healthy male subjects influences learning about a partners' prosocial preferences in a novel social interaction task, which is akin to a repeated trust game. We found learning to be modulated by a well-established genetic marker of striatal dopamine levels, the 40-bp variable number tandem repeats polymorphism of the dopamine transporter (DAT1 polymorphism). In particular, we found that L-DOPA improves learning in 10/10R genoype subjects, who are assumed to have lower endogenous striatal dopamine levels and impairs learning in 9/10R genotype subjects, who are assumed to have higher endogenous dopamine levels. These findings provide first evidence for a critical role of dopamine in learning whether an interaction partner has a prosocial or a selfish personality. The applied pharmacogenetic approach may open doors to new ways of studying psychiatric disorders such as psychosis, which is characterized by distorted perceptions of others' prosocial attitudes.

Testing the 'Learning for Sustainabiliy' Approach in a Training for Trainers: Contribution to new learning theory and approaches

Mainstreaming the LforS approach is a challenge due to dive rging institutional priorities, customs, and expectations of classically traine d staff. A workshop to test LforS theory and practice, and explore how to mainstream it, took place in a concrete context in a rural district of Mozambique, focusing on agricultural, forest and water resources. The evaluation showed that the principles of interaction applied pe rmitted to link rational know ledge with practical experience through mutual learning and iterative self-reflection. The combination of learning techniques was considered usef ul; participants called for further opportunities to apply the LforS methodology, proposing next steps.

Shallow Dialogue Processing Using Machine Learning Algorithms (or not)

This paper presents a shallow dialogue analysis model, aimed at human-human dialogues in the context of staff or business meetings. Four components of the model are defined, and several machine learning techniques are used to extract features from dialogue transcripts: maximum entropy classifiers for dialogue acts, latent semantic analysis for topic segmentation, or decision tree classifiers for discourse markers. A rule-based approach is proposed for solving cross-modal references to meeting documents. The methods are trained and evaluated thanks to a common data set and annotation format. The integration of the components into an automated shallow dialogue parser opens the way to multimodal meeting processing and retrieval applications.