Effects of identical context on visual pattern recognition by pigeons

The effects of identical context on pattern recognition by pigeons for outline drawings of faces were investigated by training pigeons to identify (Experiment 1) and categorize (Experiment 2) these stimuli according to the orientation of the mouth—an upright U shape representing a smiling mouth or an inverted U shape representing a sad mouth. These target stimuli were presented alone (Pair 1), with three dots in a triangular orientation to represent a nose and eyes (Pair 2), and with the face pattern surrounded by an oval (Pair 3). In Experiment 1, the pigeons trained with Pair 1 were most accurate, those trained with Pair 2 were less so, and those trained with Pair 3 failed to acquire the discrimination within eighty 100-trial sessions. The same ordering was found in Experiment 2 for pigeons trained on the three pairs simultaneously. The authors suggest that a contrasting finding in humans, the face superiority effect, might be due to a gain in discriminability resulting from recognition of the pattern as a face. An exemplar model of information processing that excludes linguistic coding accounts for the present results.     

Blurring the color line: The desegregation of the Baltimore city public schools, 1954–1994

Perched on the Mason-Dixon line, Baltimore ignored calls for resistance from its southern neighbors by becoming one of the first cities in the country to comply withBrown. By the beginning of the 1955 school year, leaders had implemented a desegregation plan, and Baltimore was being applauded for the early and peaceful integration of its public schools. Within a few years, however, the praise faded as it became clear that Baltimore still suffered from de facto segregation. Faced with this reality, the school board refused to take the steps necessary to remedy the problem, instead shifting the blame to society at large. This failure by the board started a pattern of abandonment by school leadership that culminated in 1991 with the privatization of several of Baltimore's public schools. The result of this abandonment is a crippled school system that still has not dealt with issues of race and equality.     

Context-sensitive regularities in English vowel spelling

The predictive value of rime spellings in English was compared directly to other types of regularities beyond the level of the single letter. A computer-assisted analysis of a list of twenty-four thousand written words, each paired with its corresponding pronunciation, reveals that only a small number of rime spellings are highly regular in their pronunciations. The conventional division of vowel letter pronunciations into short and long in closed and open written syllables is the most reliable key to English pronunciation. Our findings support the notion that English spelling is based at least in part on syllable structure. In addition, prefixes and suffixes provide very reliable clues to pronunciation, which suggests that their regularity should be exploited in the teaching of reading.     

Appropriability of innovation benefit as a predictor of the source of innovation

It has been empirically observed that, in some industries product users are the most frequent sources of product innovations while, in other industries, product manufacturers are. I hypothesize that such differences are caused by differences in the ability of these two “functional” categories of innovators to appropriate innovation benefit. I explore this hypothesis by examining the real-world effectiveness of mechanisms (such as patents and lead time) used for the appropriation of innovation benefit and the dependence of this effectiveness on the functional relationship between innovator and innovation.     

Relative efficiency of R&D activities: A cross-country study accounting for environmental factors in the DEA approach

This paper applies the production framework associated with the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to evaluate the relative efficiency of R&D activities across countries. R&D capital stocks and manpower are treated as inputs while patents and academic publications are considered as outputs. A three-stage approach, which involves using DEA for evaluating efficiency and using Tobit regressions for controlling the external environment, is applied to 30 countries in recent years. The results show that less than one-half of the countries are fully efficient in R&D activities and that more than two-thirds are at the stage of increasing returns to scale. Most countries have a more significant advantage in producing SCI cum EI publications than in generating patents.     

Marital conflict and conduct problems in Children of Twins

The Children-of-Twins design was used to test whether associations between marital conflict frequency and conduct problems can be replicated within the children of discordant twin pairs. A sample of 2,051 children (age 14-39 years) of 1,045 twins was used to estimate the genetic and environmental influences on marital conflict and determine whether genetic or environmental selection processes underlie the observed association between marital conflict and conduct problems. Results indicate that genetic and nonshared environmental factors influence the risk of marital conflict. Furthermore, genetic influences mediated the association between marital conflict frequency and conduct problems. These results highlight the need for quasiexperimental designs in investigations of intergenerational associations.     

The role of social-academic goals in Chinese students’ self-regulated learning

European Journal of Psychology of Education - The role of mastery and performance goals in self-regulated learning (SRL) has received much attention. However, in collectivist and Confucian-heritage...