The Effect of Register, Direction, and Magnitude on Musicians’ Evaluations of Chamber Ensemble Intonation: A Within-Study Comparison for Analysis of Repeated Measures

This study had two primary purposes: (1) to investigate the effect of register, direction, and magnitude on musicians’ evaluation of chamber ensemble intonation, and (2) determine whether a novel nonparametric technique, ordinal pattern analysis (OPA), was a viable alternative to repeated-measures analysis of variance (rANOVA). I digitally mastered a recording of a string quartet performing a phrase from Capriol Suite by altering the intonation of the violin or cello voice ±20 and 30 cents sharp and flat. Participants ( N = 72) completed a discrimination task and an evaluation task with the recordings, with task order, and within-task item order presented in a random order. Analysis using rANOVA revealed significant differences due to register, direction, and magnitude: Excerpts with cello errors were rated as more in tune than excerpts with violin errors; excerpts with flat errors were rated as more in tune than excerpts with sharp errors, and excerpts with 20-cent magnitude errors were rated as more in tune than excerpts with 30-cent magnitude errors. OPA results were consistent with rANOVA results. Substantive implications for music teaching and learning are discussed alongside methodological considerations and implications for music education research using repeated-measures designs.

Visual exploration in adults: Habituation, mere exposure, or optimal level of arousal?

Exploration is one of the most powerful behaviours that drive learning from infancy to adulthood. The aim of the current study was to examine the role of novelty and subjective preference in visual exploration. To do this, we combined a visual exploration task with a subjective evaluation task, presenting novel and familiar pictures. The first goal was to ascertain whether, as demonstrated in babies, short habituation favors visual exploration of familiarity, whereas longer habituation leads to an exploration of novelty. The second goal was to evaluate the influence of familiarization on participants’ subjective evaluation of the stimuli. When presented with novel and very familiar stimuli, participants explored the novel stimuli more. In line with the optimal-level of arousal model, participants showed more positive evaluations of the semi-familiar stimuli compared with very familiar or very novel ones.

Automatic evaluation of complex alignments: An instance-based approach

Ontology matching is the task of generating a set of correspondences (i.e., an alignment) between the entities of different ontologies. While most efforts on alignment evaluation have been dedicated to the evaluation of simple alignments (i.e., those linking one single entity of a source ontology to one single entity of a target ontology), the emergence of matchers providing complex alignments (i.e., those composed of correspondences involving logical constructors or transformation functions) requires new strategies for addressing the problem of automatically evaluating complex alignments. This paper proposes (i) a benchmark for complex alignment evaluation composed of an automatic evaluation system that relies on queries and instances, and (ii) a dataset about conference organisation. This dataset is composed of populated ontologies and a set of competency questions for alignment as SPARQL queries. State-of-the-art alignments are evaluated and a discussion on the difficulties of the evaluation task is provided.

Deep Learning-Based Image Automatic Assessment and Nursing of Upper Limb Motor Function in Stroke Patients

This paper mainly introduces the relevant contents of automatic assessment of upper limb mobility after stroke, including the relevant knowledge of clinical assessment of upper limb mobility, Kinect sensor to realize spatial location tracking of upper limb bone points, and GCRNN model construction process. Through the detailed analysis of all FMA evaluation items, a unique experimental data acquisition environment and evaluation tasks were set up, and the results of FMA prediction using bone point data of each evaluation task were obtained. Through different number and combination of tasks, the best coefficient of determination was achieved when task 1, task 2, and task 5 were simultaneously used as input for FMA prediction. At the same time, in order to verify the superior performance of the proposed method, a comparative experiment was set with LSTM, CNN, and other deep learning algorithms widely used. Conclusion. GCRNN was able to extract the motion features of the upper limb during the process of movement from the two dimensions of space and time and finally reached the best prediction performance with a coefficient of determination of 0.89.

A Fresh Look at the Unconscious Thought Effect: Using Mind-Wandering Measures to Investigate Thought Processes in Decision Problems With High Information Load

Unconscious Thought Theory (Dijksterhuis, 2004) states that thinking about a complex problem unconsciously can result in better solutions than conscious deliberation. We take a fresh look at the cognitive processes underlying “unconscious” thought by analyzing data of 822 participants who worked on a complex apartment-evaluation task in three experiments. This task’s information-presentation and evaluation parts were separated by different kinds of filler-interval activities, which corresponded to standard conscious-thought and unconscious-thought manipulations. Employing experience-sampling methods, we obtained thought reports during and after filler-interval engagement. Evidence concerning the existence of the Unconscious Thought Effect was mixed, with such an effect being present in the first two experiments only. In these experiments, we further found less problem deliberation to be associated with better performance on the apartment task. Interestingly, this benefit disappeared when we probed participants’ thoughts during the filler interval. We suggested that explicit thought awareness diminishes the Unconscious Thought Effect.

Testing the adolescent social reorientation model using hierarchical growth curve modeling with parcellated fMRI data

Adolescence is characterized as a period when social relationships and experiences shift toward peers. The social reorientation model of adolescence posits this shift is driven by neurobiological changes that increase the salience of status-related social information. We focused on two phenomena that are highly salient and dynamic during adolescence—social status and self-perception—and tested this hypothesis by examining longitudinal changes in neural responses during a self/other evaluation task. Using hierarchical growth curve modeling with parcellated whole-brain data, we found weak evidence for this hypothesis. Social brain regions showed increased responsivity across adolescence, but this trajectory wasn’t unique to status-related social information. Brain regions associated with self-focused cognition showed heightened responses during self-evaluation in the transition to mid-adolescence, especially for status-related social information. Together, these results qualify existing models of adolescent social reorientation and highlight the multifaceted changes in self and social development during adolescence.

Anxiety- and Depression-Related Individual Differences in Affective and Cognitive Judgments of Self-Referential Praise and Criticism

Introduction: While praise is generally pleasant and criticism unpleasant, individual differences in response to social evaluations arise from distinct personal traits and states. Here, we investigate how processing of self-referential praise and criticism varies with personal attributes related to anxiety and depression, two highly prevalent and often chronic affective conditions. Methods: Ninety-three healthy participants first completed questionnaires for anxiety- and depression-related traits and states, and then they were scheduled to perform an evaluation task to rate praise and criticism for pleasantness and truthfulness. Results: Fear of negative evaluation positively correlated with unpleasantness of criticism. Trait- and state-anxiety and depression were positively associated with the truthfulness of criticism but negatively associated with that of praise. We further divided participants into high- and low-scoring groups based on the medians of their scores of each scale that displayed significant correlations with comment ratings and found group differences in their responses to praise and criticism. Discussion: The findings suggest that more highly anxious and depressed individuals may be subject to negatively-distorted self-representations in response to self-referential evaluations, thus exhibiting attenuated rejection for criticism or reduced acceptance for praise, which may have important implications not only for facilitating daily social interactions but also for subclinical and clinical diagnosis and treatment given that affective and cognitive processing of self-referential evaluations serves as a critical process exhibiting the sense of the self.

Self-evaluation Interventions

Research has repeatedly shown self-efficacy to be associated with course outcomes in CS and across other fields. CS education research has documented this and has developed CS-specific self-efficacy measurement instruments, but to date there have been only a few studies examining interventions intended to improve students’ self-efficacy in CS, and several types of self-efficacy interventions suggested by previous research remain to be tested in CS. This study attempts to address this lack of research by reporting on the results of a trial intervention intended to improve students’ self-efficacy in an introductory programming course. Students were recruited to complete a self-evaluation task, which previous research has suggested could have a beneficial impact on self-efficacy, which should in turn have a beneficial impact on course performance. Participating students’ course outcomes and self-efficacy were compared with those of the students who did not complete the self-evaluation task, using propensity score weighting adjustments to control for differences between the groups on entering characteristics and prior values of self-efficacy and course outcomes. We found that, whereas there was only marginal evidence for the self-evaluation intervention having a direct effect on self-efficacy, students who completed the self-evaluation task had significantly higher project scores during the weeks they were asked to complete it, compared to the students who did not participate. These findings suggest that there are potential benefits to incorporating self-evaluation tasks into introductory CS courses, although perhaps not by virtue of directly influencing self-efficacy.

A Preliminary Comparison of In-Person and Telepractice Evaluations of Stuttering

Purpose The purpose of this study was to compare in-person and telepractice evaluations of stuttering with adult participants. The research questions were as follows: Is an evaluation for stuttering via telepractice equivalent to an in-person evaluation in terms of (a) duration of individual evaluation tasks and overall length of the evaluation, (b) clinical outcomes across evaluating clinicians, and (c) participant experience? Method Participants were 14 adults who stutter (males = 11; age range: 20–68) who were simultaneously assessed via telepractice and in-person. Comprehensive evaluations included analysis of the speaker's stuttering, evaluation of the speaker's perceptions and attitudes about stuttering, and language testing. Evaluations were administered by either an in-person clinician or a telepractice clinician but were simultaneously scored by both clinicians. Participants were randomly assigned to the in-person-led assessment condition or the telepractice-led assessment condition. Results No statistically significant differences were found between the in-person and telepractice-led evaluations in terms of overall evaluation task duration, evaluation clinical outcomes, or participants' reported experiences. That is, telepractice evaluations for stuttering in adults may be an equivalent option to in-person evaluations. Conclusions Results of this preliminary study indicate that telepractice evaluations of stuttering may be comparable to in-person evaluations in terms of duration, clinical outcomes, and participant experiences. The current study supports the notion that telepractice evaluations may be a viable option for adult clients who stutter. Clinical considerations and future directions for research are discussed.