1,721,239 research outputs found
Acquiring a theory of biology: Knowledge about inheritance in children with lower intelligence
No full textResearch on conceptual development in the domain of biology shows that young children with normal development are familiar with basic concepts but not yet with causal biological processes. Do children with lower IQ acquire the same knowledge at the same time? Two aspects of biological inheritance were examined: the distinction between inherited and acquired properties, and the relevant mechanism for inheritance. Twenty children at borderline of mental retardation (mean age: 10;3 years) participated in the study, and two groups of children with normal IQ served as controls, one matched for chronological and one for mental age. Results revealed an overall developmental lag for the children with lower intelligence. These children preferred an intentional mechanism as a causal explanation for inheritance, which rarely occurred in the control groups. This result could reflect a conceptual deficit and an immature theory of biology in children with lower IQ
Automatic activation of subvocal rehearsal in phonological working memory in children and adults with learning disabilities
No full textRecently, Hasselhorn and Mahler (2002) demonstrated that children with learning disabilities in contrast to younger and normal children at the same level of mental age do not show a word length effect on memory span. Within the working memory framework provided by Baddeley the absence of the word length effect might be interpreted as evidence for a deficit in automatic activation of subvocal rehearsal. In the present study adult subjects with learning disabilities were tested in addition to children. Results revealed that these subjects do produce the word length effect, but perform badly in a test of the phonological store component of working memory (nonword repetition). The results are discussed with regard to the role of phonological working memory in learning disabilities and their developmental changes
Special issues on 'working memory and executive functioning in individuals with intellectual disabilities'.
No full textIn recent years, evidence has mounted to show that the study of working memory and executive functions is crucial for understanding the cognitive profile of individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID), and for implementing appropriate interven- tion programmes. The two constructs of working memory and
executive functions have been differently conceptulised and studied. However, there is a substantial agreement that working memory refers to the temporary maintenance of information in memory and to its eventual elaboration in order to meet specific cognitive requests (e.g. Baddeley 1986). Under somewhat more debate is the definition of ‘executive functions’ and the possibility that they concern a large variety of cognitive processes, working memory included. However, according to Meltzer (2007, pages 1–2) ‘there is general agreement... that executive function is an umbrella term for the complex cognitive processes that serve ongoing, goal-directed behaviour. In this regard, most of the definitions of executive function include many, but not all, of the following elements: goal setting and planning; organization of behaviour over time; flexibility; attention and memory systems that guide processe
Naive Biologie im kindlichen Denken:
No full textThe development of domain-specific knowledge within foundational theories, i.e., intuitive physics, biology, or psychology, has already been examined in cognitive developmental psychology for several years. It is of major importance in this research to find out if children can distinguish between the causal mechanisms appropriate to the different domains (e.g., intentional vs. mechanical causation). The present work focused on the distinction between naive biology and sociology. Distinguishing between these domains children should be aware of the differences between biological relationships (relatives), And purely social relationships (friends). In two studies, 2,5 four-year-old and 25 six-year-old preschoolers worked on little tasks in which they had to distinguish between people in their everyday life (parents, siblings, grandparents, friends, nursery school teachers, doctors) concerning the type of relationship. Do preschoolers know that relatives can only be shared with a defined group of people, but friends can not (study 1)? Do they know that sibling relationships begin and end in a different way compared to friendships (study 2)? The data in these studies reveal a significant developmental progress during the preschool years. While the younger children could not yet distinguish between relatives and friends the older six year olds proved to be sensitive for the special features of family-relationships. The results suggest that only at the end of the preschool years domain-specific biological causality is established in children's thinking
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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