Students’ Perceptions on the Use of English as Medium of Instruction (EMI) at The International Class of The Economic Development Study Program of The Faculty of Economic & Business of University of Bengkulu

The objective of this research is to investigate the students’ perceptions on the use of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) at the International Class of Economic Development Study Program Faculty of Economics and Business of University of Bengkulu. This research used descriptive quantitative survey design. Questionnaire and interview were the instrument of the research. The questionnaire was distributed to all population of this research, which was 19 students. The sample of the interview was 5 students. The result of this research showed that most of the respondents were positive with the statements given. In perceiver dimension, positive responses were the highest consisting of 37.9% of students agreed and 26.3% of students strongly agreed. In target dimension, positive responses were the highest consisting of 48.1% of students agreed and 32.3% of students strongly agreed. Meanwhile, in situation dimension positive responses were also the highest percentage consisting of 44.7% of students agreed and 9.2% of students strongly agreed. In conclusion, the majority of the students are positive with the EMI program in their class either in terms of perceiver, target, and situation. However, more than half of the students were not confident in terms of communicating with English in learning process. Besides, the implementation was still partial in most courses.

Comparisons Inform Me Who I Am: A General Comparative-Processing Model of Self-Perception

People’s self-concept contributes to their sense of identity over time. Yet self-perception is motivated and serves survival and thus does not reflect stable inner states or accurate biographical accounts. Research indicates that different types of comparison standards act as reference frames in evaluating attributes that constitute the self. However, the role of comparisons in self-perception has been underestimated, arguably because of lack of a guiding framework that takes into account relevant aspects of comparison processes and their interdependence. I propose a general comparative model of self-perception that consists of a basic comparison process involving the individual’s prior mental representation of the target dimension, the construal of the comparison standard, and the comparison outcome representing the posterior representation of the target dimension. The generated dimensional construal is then appraised with respect to one’s motives and controllability and goes on to shape emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses. Contextual and personal factors influence the comparison process. This model may be informative in better understanding comparison processes in people’s everyday lives and their role in shaping self-perception and in designing interventions to assist people overcome undesirable consequences of comparative behavior.

Comparisons inform me who I am: A general comparative processing model of self-perception

Our self-concept contributes to our sense of identity over time. Yet, self-perception is motivated and serves survival and thus does not reflect stable inner states or accurate biographical accounts. Literature indicates that different types of comparison standards act as reference frames in evaluating attributes that constitute the self. However, the role of comparisons in self-perception has been underestimated, arguably due to lack of a guiding framework that takes into account relevant aspects of comparison processes and their interdependence. I propose a general comparative model of self-perception that consists of a basic comparison process involving the individual’s prior mental representation of the target dimension, the construal of the comparison standard, and the comparison outcome representing the posterior representation of the target dimension. The generated dimensional construal is then appraised with respect to one’s motives and controllability and goes on to shape emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses. Contextual and personal factors influence the comparison process. This model may be informative in better understanding comparison processes in our everyday life, their role in shaping self-perception, as well as in designing interventions to assist people overcome undesirable consequences of comparative behavior.

Event-based encoding of biological motion and location in visual working memory

We make use of discrete yet meaningful events to orient ourselves to the dynamic environment. Among these events, biological motion, referring to the movements of animate entities, is one of the most biologically salient. We usually encounter biological motions of multiple human beings taking place simultaneously at distinct locations. How we encode biological motions into visual working memory (VWM) to form a coherent experience of the external world and guide our social behaviour remains unclear. This study for the first time addressed the VWM encoding mechanism of biological motions and their corresponding locations. We tested an event-based encoding hypothesis for biological motion and location: When one element of an event is required to be memorised, the irrelevant element of an event will also be extracted into VWM. We presented participants with three biological motions at different locations and required them to memorise only the biological motions or their locations while ignoring the other dimension. We examined the event-based encoding by probing a distracting effect: If the event-based encoding took place, the change of irrelevant dimension in the probe would lead to a significant distraction and impair the performance of detecting target dimension. We found significant distracting effects, which lasted for 3 s but vanished at 6 s, regardless of the target dimension (biological motions vs. locations, Experiment 1) and the exposure time of memory array (1 s vs. 3 s, Experiment 2). These results together support an event-based encoding mechanism during VWM encoding of biological motions and their corresponding locations.

Cross-dimensional magnitude interaction is modulated by representational noise: Evidence from space-time interaction

Magnitudes along different dimensions (e.g., space and time) tend to interact with each other in perception, with some magnitude dimensions more susceptible to cross-dimensional interference than others. What causes such asymmetries in cross-dimensional magnitude interaction is being debated. The current study investigated whether the representational noise of magnitudes modulates the (a)symmetry in space-time interaction. In three experiments using different formats of length, we showed that dynamic unfilled lengths result in a higher representational noise than either static unfilled length or static filled length. Correspondingly, we observed that the time-on-space effect was larger for dynamic unfilled lengths than for static unfilled length or static filled length (and it did not differ between the latter two). Further correlational analyses showed that the susceptibility of a target dimension to the influence of a concurrent dimension increased as a function of participants’ representational noise in the target dimension (e.g., noisier length representations, a larger effect of stimulus duration on length reproduction). In all, our study showed that the representational noise of space and time modulate the way the two dimensions interact. These findings suggest that cross-dimensional magnitude interactions arise as a result of memory interference, with noisier magnitudes being more prone to being nudged by concurrent magnitudes in other dimensions. Such memory interference can be seen as a result of Bayesian inference with correlated priors between magnitude dimensions.

Effects of target attributes on children's patterns of referential under- and over-specification

ABSTRACTWe examined the effects of object attributes on children's descriptive patterns in a referential communication task. Thirty preschoolers described object pairs that were selected by the experimenter. The targets were defined by shared size or colour, and differed on the non-target dimension in half of the trials. The children also completed a non-verbal reasoning task with analogous stimuli. They selected objects after observing the experimenter make a choice and inferring the basis for selection. In the communication task, the children produced fewer size than colour descriptions, particularly when the size targets differed in colour. They also over-specified colour features more often than size. They did not show a similar challenge identifying size relationships in the non-verbal task. The results support the conclusion that target attributes have a systematic influence on children's referential performance. Potential mechanisms for these effects, and directions for future research are discussed.