学习不良儿童的元认知偏差及矫正

Metacognitive illusions or metacognitive bias is a concept that is a homologous with metacognitve monitor accuracy. In the dissertation, metacognitive illusions mainly refers to the absolute differences between judgment of learning (JOL) and recall because individuals are misguided by some invalid cues or information. JOL is one kind of metacognitive judgments, which is the prediction about the future performance of learned materials. Its mechanism and accuracy are the key issues in the study of JOL. Cue-utilization framework proposed by Koriat (1997) summarized the previous findings and provided a significant advance in understanding how people make JOL. However, the model is not able to explain individual differences in the accuracy of JOL. From the perspective of people’s cognitive bound, our study use posterior associative word pairs easy to produce metacognitive bias to explore the deeper psychological mechanism of metacontive bias. Moreover, we plan to investigate the cause to result in higher metacognitive illusions of children with LD. Based on these, the study tries to look for the method of mending metacognitive illusions. At the same time, we will summarize the findings of this study and previous literatures, and propose a revesied theory for explaining children’s with LD cue selection and utilization according to Koriat’s cue-utilization model. The results of the present study indicated that: (1) Children showed stable metacognitive illusions for the weak associative and posterior associative word pairs, it was not true for strong associative word pairs. It was higher metacognitive illusions for children with LD than normal children. And it was significant grade differences for metacognitive illusions. A priori associative strength exerted a weaker effect on JOL than it did on recall. (2) Children with LD mainly utilized retrieval fluency to make JOL across immediate and delay conditions. However, for normal children, it showed some distinction between encoding fluency and retrieval fluency as potential cues for JOL across immediate and delay conditions. Obviously, children with LD lacked certain flexibility for cue selection and utilization. (3)When word pairs were new list, it showed higher metacognitve transfer effects for analytic inferential group than heuristic inferential group for normal children in the second block. And metacognitive relative accuracy got increased for both children with and without LD across the experimental conditions. However, it was significantly improved only for normal children in analytic inferential group.

5-13岁儿童对惯性运动的认知发展

Research on naïve physics investigates children’s intuitive understanding of physical objects, phenomena and processes. Children, and also many adults, were found to have a misconception of inertia, called impetus theory. In order to investigate the development of this naïve concept and the mechanism underlying it, four age groups (5-year-olds, 2nd graders, 5th graders, and 8th graders) were included in this research. Modified experimental tasks were used to explore the effects of daily experience, perceptual cues and general information-processing ability on children’s understanding of inertia. The results of this research are: 1) Five- to thirteen-year-olds’ understanding of inertia problems which were constituted by two ogjects moving at the same spped undergoes an L-shaped developmental trend; Children’s performance became worse as they got older, and their performance in the experiment did not necessarily ascend with the improvement of their cognitive abilities. 2) The L-shaped developmental curve suggests that children in different ages used different strategies to solve inertia problems: Five- to eight-year-olds only used heuristic strategy, while eleven- to thirteen-year-olds solved problems by analyzing the details of inertia motion. 3) The different performance between familiar and unfamiliar problems showed that older children were not able to spontaneously transfer their knowledge and experience from daily action and observation of inertia to unfamiliar, abstract inertia problems. 4) Five- to eight-year-olds showed straight and fragmented pattern, while more eleven- to thirteen-year-olds showed standard impetus theory and revised impetus theory pattern, which showed that younger children were influenced by perceptual cues and their understanding of inertia was fragmented, while older children had coherent impetus theory. 5) When the perceptual cues were controlled, even 40 percent 5 years olds showed the information-processing ability to analyze the distance, speed and time of two objects traveling in two different directions at the same time, demonstrating that they have achieved a necessary level to theorize their naïve concept of inertia.

吗啡相关情境线索的形成及效应表达的神经基础——海马与基底外侧杏仁核在其中的作用

Drug-associated cue-induced relapse to drug seeking causes most difficulties of therapy for drug addiction. Addicts are exposed to two forms of environmental stimuli during drug-taking: contextual stimuli (e.g. a house in which the drug is consumed) and discrete stimuli (DS, e.g. a crack pipe or a syringe for drug). These stimuli become contextual cues and discrete cues, respectively. The incentive value of contextual cues plays a great role in opiates relapse. Compared with drug self-administration model, conditioned place preference (CPP) reflects the approach behavior for drug cues, not concerned with acquisition of operant behaviors. The present study aimed to investigate the role of basolateral amygdala (BLA) and hippocampus in the effect of opiates-related contextual cues using CPP model. Establishing DS-dependent or contextual cues-dependent CPP, the effect of BLA or hippocampus inactivation prior to training phase on acquisition of contextual cues-opiates association was evaluated. Inactivation prior to test phase was used to evaluate roles of BLA and hippocampus in expression of contextual cues-dependent morphine CPP. The main results were as follows: Inactivation of BLA or dorsal hippocampus selectively impaired acquisition of contextual cue-dependent CPP, but inactivation of ventral hippocampus had no impact on acquisition of either DS-dependent or contextual cue-dependent morphine CPP. Inactivation of BLA selectively inhibited expression of contextual cue-depended CPP. Inactivation of ventral hippocampus inhibited expression of both DS-dependent and contextual cue-dependent morphine CPP. These results suggest that BLA and dorsal hippocampus contribute to contextual cue association with opiates but not DS-opiates association. BLA and ventral hippocampus play important roles in incentive value of contextual cues. The present study provides more information for the neurological substrates underlying contextual cues associated with opiates.

5-9岁儿童对常见食物及其功能的认知发展

Research on naïve biology investigates children spontaneous understanding of biology objects, phenomena and function. Previous researches focus mostly on biology phenomena. Little has done on organism’s function, such as eating food. Many research in this field found that children were unable to categorize food by nutrition criterion, but rely on physical cues. In order to investigate the development of children’s naïve understanding of food and to find if they can classify food by nutrition criterion, three age groups (5-year-olds, 7-year-olds, and 9-year-olds) were included in this study. Varies experimental tasks were also used to explore the children’s understanding of food and its function. The results showed as the followings: 1) A few 5-year- old children can classify food by nutrition criterion when they take the spontaneous classification task. However, more and more children can realize what make a kind of food different from another can be the nutrition it contains. 2) Kindergarteners can find the relation between food and its output. When they become older, more and more children can explain the relation by consistent theory. It can be said that 9-year-old children have already have a profound understanding of nutrition. They gradually developed naive theory of biology on nutrition level. 3) Even kindergarteners can understand the concept of “food balance”. However, with development there was a significant age increase in food balance choice. 4) Children’s knowledge of food balance grows with age, but urban and rural educational background influence cognitive performance.

知觉负荷与线索通道特征对注意捕获的影响

A dual task paradigm which consisted of RSVP task and orthogonal spatial cuing task was adopted to study the effects of perceptual load and cue modality on attention capture. This dual task paradigm was modified from Santangelo’s tasks in which only the high load condition used the dual task. Experiment 1 found that in the low perceptual load condition, the visual cues showed advantage in capturing attention compared with the audiovisual ones. While in the high perceptual load condition, the audiovisual cues were better to capture attention. SOA was introduced into Experiment 2, 3 and 4 in order to help clarify the relationship among perceptual load, cuing modality and attention capture. The low load visual cuing task testified the period time course characteristics in attention capture which was found by Liang et.al. Differing from Liang’s conclusion that attention capture occurred at 333ms, attention capture occurred at 50ms here which might be caused by the different paradigms used. Moreover, the similar period time course was found in high load audiovisual cuing task when SOA equaled 50ms. And no such period time course characteristics were found neither in the high load visual cuing task nor the low load audiovisual cuing task. These results found the period time course characteristics in attention capture. And it was suggested that these characteristics were influenced by perceptual load and cuing modality.

海洛因成瘾者决策障碍及其行为机制的研究----短视行为及冲动、强迫和药物在决策中的作用

Addiction can be investigated from the perspective of decision making. Addicts usually make incorrect decisions when facing drug-related cues or they are driven to drugs, resulting in repeated drug seeking and taking. The present study adopted temporal discounting as behavioral task and on the basis of the fact that heroin addicts discounted more steeply than health participants (addicts preferred to choose immediate but smaller reward, regarded as myopia) which was consistent with previous research, three questions was raised and being concentrated on in this study. The first question was whether the character of myopia would be revealed in a somewhat complicated task? We designed a card game in which the participants were tested whether they would play the trump card in order to win a trick but not the whole game. Addicts played the trump card significantly earlier than controls did, indicating they focused on immediate single trick but not the game. Moreover, the performance in the card game and temporal discounting correlated significantly, suggesting addicts would display myopic decision not only in simply task like temporal discounting but also in task more complicated and similar to daily-life decision. Secondly, the present study adopted various kinds of temporal discounting tasks. In previous research, temporal discounting gain task was usually adopted. In the present study, we also adopted temporal discounting loss task. In either gain or loss task, there are two delayed amounts. Results showed in each decision condition addicts made poorer performance compared with control but in larger amount condition, addicts actually improved their decision performance. Meanwhile, addicts did not show loss aversion due to their close discount rates in gain and loss task while for controls, the discount rates were much lower in loss task than those in gain task. Thus we demonstrated that addicts were insensitive to negative outcomes by the method of temporal discounting. Finally, we investigated three mechanisms which exerted impacts on decision making. We adopted Go/NoGo task to test impulsivity and found addicts commits more errors (higher impulsivity) than controls did. We also designed a behavioral task which could be used to test drug-related compulsive behavior on human participants. Results showed addicts produced stereotyped key-pressing behavior when presented with drug-related cues. Furthermore, it was found participants with higher impulsivity displayed poorer performance in decision making but addicts with higher compulsivity only made poorer performance in smaller amount decision and the correlation between compulsivity and decision making was relative weak. In order to investigate the role of susceptibility and effect of drugs, we adopted years of abusing heroin as the indictor and discovered addicts with longer history of heroin abusing made poorer performance in smaller amount condition than addicts with shorter history. Also, the earlier the addicts began to use drug, the worse they would do in the smaller amount decision. The results here indicated drug itself could exert impact on decision making in certain condition. The present study revealed three characters of heroin addicts from the aspect of decision making: (1) focusing upon current benefit due to they preferred to choose immediate gain and delayed loss; (2) showed no loss aversion compared with healthy participants (3) inability to inhibit inappropriate response particularly when facing drug-related cue. These characters contribute to the facts that addicts seek and take drugs repeatedly while ignoring the negative consequences caused by abusing drugs.

顿悟中的蔡格尼克效应：左右脑在解题失败与提示信息加工时的活动差异

Zeigarnik effect refers to the enhanced memory performance for unfinished tasks and studies on insight using hemi-visual field presentation technology also find that after failing to solve an problem, hints to the problem are more effective received and lead to insight experience when presented to the left-visual field (Right hemisphere) than presented to the right-visual field, especial when the hints appeared with a delay. Thus, it seems that right hemisphere may play an important role in preserving information of unsolved problems and processing related cues. To further examine the finding above, we introduce an Chinese character chunking task to investigate the brain activities during the stage of failure to resolve problems and of hint presentation using Event-Related Potentials (ERP) and functional MRI technology. Our FMRI results found that bilateral BA10 showed more activation when seeing hints for unsolved problems and we proposed that it may reflect the processes of information to failure problems, howerver, there was no hemispheric difference. The ERP results after the effort to the problems showed that unsolved problems elicited a more positive P150 over the right frontal cortex while solved problems demonstrated a left hemispheric advantage of P150. When hints present, P2 amplitudes of hints were modulated by the status of problem only in the right hemisphere but not in the left hemisphere. Our results confirmed the hypothesis that failure to solve problems would trigger the perseverance processes in right hemisphere, which would make right hemisphere more sensitive to related information of failure problems.

线索语义相容性的研究

With the studies of the Stimulus-Response Compatibility (SRC), more and more psychologists consider that the compatibility isn't only exist between stimulus and stimulus, response and response, but also any two sets in the information processing, it means that the compatibility is the basic feature of the human information processing. Research on the compatibility of the precue is a powerful evidence to support the issue. Dimension Overlap Model (Kornblum, 1990) is one of the most popular models to explain the mechanism of the SRC which focus on the dimension overlapping between the stimulus and response will activate the compatible response automatically, the compatibility effects origin from whether the compatible response prove or interference the response, the so the time course between the automatic activation and the task processing cause the dynamical time feature of the SRC (Kornblum, 1997). Yet the DO model has gotten many supports, it hasn't been tested in the paradigm of the precue task. At the same time, company with the development of the Environment Psychology, the effect of the ex-information in the environment on the inside information processing has drown much attention, does the validity probability of the cue have any influence on the cue compatibility? How about the relationship of the cue compatibility and the SRC? Research on the questions will reveal the characteristics of the human information processing, enhance the knowledge of the compatibility phenomena and resource, enlarge the field of SRC and produce more practice usage on the design of human-machine system. The mechanism and influence factors of symbolic compatibility between cue and stimulus were investigated within a precueing paradigm. The influence of the dimension overlapping relation between the cue and the stimulus, cue and the response on the reaction time were studied under the different kinds of SRC, to test whether or not it confirms the dimension overlap hypothesis, to test is there any effect of SOA and validity probability of cues on the cue compatibility. The results showed that the cue compatibility exists and owns such features: 1, It confirms the dimension overlap model that the cue which dimension overlapped with the stimulus or the response will influence the efficiency of the processing, the reaction time is shorter when the cue is congruent with the stimulus or the response that that of the incongruent cue; 2, Consistent to the automatic activation hypothesis, the time course is the important characteristic of the cue compatibility. The largest compatibility effect can be gotten from the middle duration of SOA. 3, The validity probability of cues influence the cue compatibility significantly, the strength of the cue compatibility effect grows stronger with the higher validity probability of cues. 4, The cue compatibility affect the effect of SRC, especially when the cue is compatible with the stimulus; 5, The cue compatibility has two-fold meaning, the cue-stimulus compatibility and the cue-response compatibility, the former is stronger than the later when they compete each other. In summary, the compatibility, the basic feature of human information processing, is proved by the research, and the dimension overlap model and automatic activation hypothesis is tested by the studying on the cue compatibility.

小学儿童空间物体位置编码的实验研究

As a key issue in spatial cognitive developmental research, the coding of object location plays an important role in children's cognitive development. The development of location coding is a precondition for children's adaptation to their environments, and the development of corresponding ability could enhance children's adaptation ability and improve their synthetic diathesis. In this paper, under the improved paradigm of object searching, 7-, 9- and 11-year-olds of urban primary school students were involved in two studies including the total of four experiments. The children were examined upon the ability to encode target location in terms of the distance between two landmarks, three points on a line, the intersection of two lines, or the corresponding points on two parallel lines. The experiments were designed to explore the primary school children's cognitive developmental process upon spatial object location and the correlative restricting factors. From the studies, the following conclusions were drawn: 1)The ability of 7-year-olds to represent target location in terms of the relationships of points and lines is in the inceptive stage and appears unstable. Meanwhile, the same ability of 9-year-olds is in a state of fast developing. The 9-year-olds' performance depends on how difficult the task is. It is stable when task is easy while unstable when task becomes difficult. The ability of 11-year-olds reaches much-developed state and the group's performance is independent of the difficulty of tasks. 2) The correlate coefficient is significant between Raven Standard Inference ability levels and the performance of representing target location in terms of the relationships of points. Those children with good performance in Raven Standard Inference Test have good performance in target location coding. The case is true for all different age groups. As of the task in terms of the relationships of lines, the correlate coefficient between Raven Standard Inference ability levels and children's performance of representing target location is found significant only for the 7-year-olds' group. The case is not true for the groups of 9- and 11-year-olds. It is also found that the correlate coefficient is significant between the sum of performance and Raven Standard Inference ability levels, and that is true for all age groups. 3) Effects from task variable exist upon children's above-mentioned cognitive performance. The effects are different according to different difficulty levels of tasks. Also, they are different according to the different ages. 4) The subjects who failed in the 'no cues for encoding given' situation were able to improve their performances when the cues of encoding were given. Therefore it is possible to improve the primary school children's corresponding cognitive performance by providing the cues of encoding. 5) Two kinds of efficient strategies were used to solve the problem. They are trial-comparison strategy and anticipation-directed strategy.

普通话重音的知觉及其声学表现

This research, mainly by using perceptual experiment and relating its results to the acoustic correlates, investigated the acoustic correlates of mandarin prominences of prosodic word、prosodic phrase、sentence and their mutual influences. The results are as follow: (1) for the prominence of prosodic word, according the order of the extents to which these acoustic correlates contribute to the perception of the prominence, its acoustic correlates are duration、pitch、spectral tilt、energy and pitch-change, the results also have showed that the perception of the prominence is influenced by some non-acoustic factors; (2) for the prominence of prosodic phrase, baseing on the experimental results, the existing of prosodic phrase prominence in mandarian has been proposed, and the experiments proved that the prosodic phrase prominence fall on the semantic focus of the phrase typically; (3) for the prominence of sentence, the experimental results show that, the lengthening of duration, similar with the pitch-change, mainly localised on the prosodic head of the domain on which the sentence prominence emphisize, and this lengthening would, in different levels, spread on other syllables in the phonetic constituents which contain the prosodic head, and this pattern of lengthening of duration does not vary with changing of domain of sentence prominence, that means, in mandarin sentence, there is generally no acoustic cues which can been used in the perception of the domain of sentnece prominence; (4) for the acoustic cues of mutual influences of the prominences of different levels, the experiment have proved that, not only the pitch-change but also the lengthening of duration are subjective to melodic grid law. In the last part of the dissertation, I have tried to given an explantion about the above experimental results from psylogical view point.

大脑序列记忆信息的提取

The purpose of this study was to examine the cognitive and neural mechanism underlying the serial position effects using cognitive experiments and ERPs(the event related potentials), for 11 item lists in very short-term and the continuous-distractor paradigm with Chinese character. The results demonstrated that when the length of list was 11 Chinese character, and the presentation time, the item interval and the retention interval was 400ms, the primacy effect and recency effect belong to the associative memory and absolute memory respectively. The retrieval of the item at the primacy part depended mainly on the context cues, but the retrieval of the item at the recency part depended mainly on the memory trace. The same results was concluded in the continuous-distractor paradigm (the presentation time was 1sec, the item interval is 12sec, and the retention interval was 30sec). Cognitive results revealed the robust serial position effects in the continuous-distractor paradigm. The different retrieval process between items at the primacy part and items at the recency part of the serial position curve was found. The behavioral responses data of ERP illustrated that the responses for the prime and recent items differed neither in accuracy nor reaction time, the retrieval time for the items at the primacy part was longer than that for the items at the recency part. And the accuracy of retrieval for the primacy part item was lower than that for the recency part items. That meant the retrieval of primacy part items needed more cognitive processes. The recent items, compared with the prime items, evoked ERPs that were more positive, this enhanced positivity occurred in a positive component peaking around 360ms. And for the same retrieval direction (forward or backward), the significant positive component difference between the retrieval for prime items and the retrieval for recent items was found. But there was no significant difference between the forward and backward retrieval at both the primacy and recency part of the serial position curve. These revealed the two kind of retrieval (forward and backward) at the same part of the serial position curve belonged to the same property. These findings fit more closely with the notion of the distinct between the associative memory and the absolute memory.

Recovering Intrinsic Images from a Single Image

We present an algorithm that uses multiple cues to recover shading and reflectance intrinsic images from a single image. Using both color information and a classifier trained to recognize gray-scale patterns, each image derivative is classified as being caused by shading or a change in the surface's reflectance. Generalized Belief Propagation is then used to propagate information from areas where the correct classification is clear to areas where it is ambiguous. We also show results on real images.

Learning object segmentation from video data

This memo describes the initial results of a project to create a self-supervised algorithm for learning object segmentation from video data. Developmental psychology and computational experience have demonstrated that the motion segmentation of objects is a simpler, more primitive process than the detection of object boundaries by static image cues. Therefore, motion information provides a plausible supervision signal for learning the static boundary detection task and for evaluating performance on a test set. A video camera and previously developed background subtraction algorithms can automatically produce a large database of motion-segmented images for minimal cost. The purpose of this work is to use the information in such a database to learn how to detect the object boundaries in novel images using static information, such as color, texture, and shape. This work was funded in part by the Office of Naval Research contract #N00014-00-1-0298, in part by the Singapore-MIT Alliance agreement of 11/6/98, and in part by a National Science Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship.

The Role of Fixation and Visual Attention in Object Recognition

This research project is a study of the role of fixation and visual attention in object recognition. In this project, we build an active vision system which can recognize a target object in a cluttered scene efficiently and reliably. Our system integrates visual cues like color and stereo to perform figure/ground separation, yielding candidate regions on which to focus attention. Within each image region, we use stereo to extract features that lie within a narrow disparity range about the fixation position. These selected features are then used as input to an alignment-style recognition system. We show that visual attention and fixation significantly reduce the complexity and the false identifications in model-based recognition using Alignment methods. We also demonstrate that stereo can be used effectively as a figure/ground separator without the need for accurate camera calibration.

Understanding nurses’ decision-making when managing weaning from mechanical ventilation: a study of novice and experienced critical care nurses in Scotland and Greece.

Aim and objectives To examine how nurses collect and use cues from respiratory assessment to inform their decisions as they wean patients from ventilatory support. Background Prompt and accurate identification of the patient's ability to sustain reduction of ventilatory support has the potential to increase the likelihood of successful weaning. Nurses' information processing during the weaning from mechanical ventilation has not been well-described. Design A descriptive ethnographic study exploring critical care nurses' decision-making processes when weaning mechanically ventilated patients from ventilatory support in the real setting. Methods Novice and expert Scottish and Greek nurses from two tertiary intensive care units were observed in real practice of weaning mechanical ventilation and were invited to participate in reflective interviews near the end of their shift. Data were analysed thematically using concept maps based on information processing theory. Ethics approval and informed consent were obtained. Results Scottish and Greek critical care nurses acquired patient-centred objective physiological and subjective information from respiratory assessment and previous knowledge of the patient, which they clustered around seven concepts descriptive of the patient's ability to wean. Less experienced nurses required more encounters of cues to attain the concepts with certainty. Subjective criteria were intuitively derived from previous knowledge of patients' responses to changes of ventilatory support. All nurses used focusing decision-making strategies to select and group cues in order to categorise information with certainty and reduce the mental strain of the decision task. Conclusions Nurses used patient-centred information to make a judgment about the patients' ability to wean. Decision-making strategies that involve categorisation of patient-centred information can be taught in bespoke educational programmes for mechanical ventilation and weaning. Relevance to clinical practice Advanced clinical reasoning skills and accurate detection of cues in respiratory assessment by critical care nurses will ensure optimum patient management in weaning mechanical ventilation