STUDENTS’ CONCEPT ORGANISATION REGARDING CHEMICAL EQUILIBRIUM IN UPPER-SECONDARY EDUCATION: BASED ON REACTION TIME TECHNIQUE

Chemical equilibrium is so important domain knowledge in chemistry that the corresponding organisation of concepts in students has been an interesting but unsolved issue. A deeper understanding of how students organise the relevant concepts in long-term memory is beneficial to develop more targeted teaching practices. This research utilized the reaction time technique as a new approach to exploring upper-secondary school students’ organisation of concepts regarding chemical equilibrium. A category judgment task involving 247 Chinese twelfth-grade students from two upper-secondary schools was conducted. The results showed that a significant difference was between the reaction time of concept dimensions. The mean reaction time of the dimension ‘reversible reaction’ was the shortest, but the dimension ‘representation of state’ had the longest mean reaction time. Next, there was no significant difference in the organisation of concepts between students studying chemistry at different levels of academic achievement. These findings provide a new and essential picture to deeply understand the organisation of concepts regarding chemical equilibrium and help focus on the relations between some relevant concepts. This research represents that the reaction time technique can be utilized in the research on organisation of science concepts. Keywords: category judgment task, chemical equilibrium, organisation of concepts, reaction time

Research on the Quantitative Evaluation of Judicial Justice in Environmental Infringement Cases

<p align="justify">The environmental protection is a significant issue that the current government departments attach great importance, and the environmental justice is the legal means to protect the environment, which is also a very important part of the judicial reform. How to realize judicial fairness in related environmental cases is the focus of public opinion and the difficulty of judicial research. At present, the practice of rule in law evaluation has been able to evaluate the judicial impartiality objectively and quantitatively from the macro perspective, but the specific facts of relevant cases cannot be accurately analyzed from the micro perspective. The discussion of environmental cases in this paper has positive referenced significance for other cases of rights and interests’ infringement and has important value for promoting the realization of judicial category judgment and accurate analysis of specific fields under the condition of modern information, and also provides beneficial help for judicial evaluation.</p>

Language boosting by transcranial stimulation in progressive supranuclear palsy

ObjectiveTo explore whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) can improve language capacities in patients with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP).MethodsWe used a sham-controlled double-blind crossover design to assess the efficiency of tDCS over the DLPFC in a cohort of 12 patients with PSP. In 3 separate sessions, we evaluated the ability to boost the left DLPFC via left-anodal (excitatory) and right-cathodal (inhibitory) tDCS, while comparing them to sham tDCS. Tasks assessing lexical access (letter fluency task) and semantic access (category judgment task) were applied immediately before and after the tDCS sessions to provide a marker of potential language modulation.ResultsThe comparison with healthy controls showed that patients with PSP were impaired on both tasks at baseline. Contrasting poststimulation vs prestimulation performance across tDCS conditions revealed language improvement in the category judgment task following right-cathodal tDCS, and in the letter fluency task following left-anodal tDCS. A computational finite element model of current distribution corroborated the intended effect of left-anodal and right-cathodal tDCS on the targeted DLPFC.ConclusionsOur results demonstrate tDCS-driven language improvement in PSP. They provide proof-of-concept for the use of tDCS in PSP and set the stage for future multiday stimulation regimens, which might lead to longer-lasting therapeutic effects promoted by neuroplasticity.Classification of evidenceThis study provides Class III evidence that for patients with PSP, tDCS over the DLPFC improves performance in some language tasks.

Encoding Tasks Dissociate the Effects of Divided Attention on Category-Cued Recall and Category-Exemplar Generation

The combined effects of encoding tasks and divided attention upon category-exemplar generation and category-cued recall were examined. Participants were presented with pairs of words each comprising a category name and potential example of that category. They were then asked to indicate either (i) their liking for both of the words or (ii) if the exemplar was a member of the category. It was found that divided attention reduced performance on the category-cued recall task under both encoding conditions. However, performance on the category-exemplar generation task remained invariant across the attention manipulation following the category judgment task. This provides further evidence that the processes underlying performance on conceptual explicit and implicit memory tasks can be dissociated, and that the intentional formation of category-exemplar associations attenuates the effects of divided attention on category-exemplar generation.

When a Thought Equals a Look: Refreshing Enhances Perceptual Memory

Cognition constantly involves retrieving and maintaining information that is not perceptually available in the current environment. Studies on visual imagery and working memory suggest that such high-level cognition might, in part, be mediated by the revival of perceptual representations in the inferior temporal cortex. Here, we provide new support for this hypothesis, showing that reflectively accessed information can have similar consequences for subsequent perception as actual perceptual input. Participants were presented with pairs of frames in which a scene could appear, and were required to make a category judgment on the second frame. In the critical condition, a scene was presented in the first frame, but the second frame was blank. Thus, it was necessary to refresh the scene from the first frame in order to make the category judgment. Scenes were then repeated in subsequent trials to measure the effect of refreshing on functional magnetic resonance imaging repetition attenuation—a neural index of memory—in a scene-selective region of the visual cortex. Surprisingly, the refreshed scenes produced equal attenuation as scenes that had been presented twice during encoding, and more attenuation than scenes that had been presented once during encoding, but that were not refreshed. Thus, the top-down revival of a percept had a similar effect on memory as actually seeing the stimulus again. These findings indicate that high-level cognition can activate stimulus-specific representations in the ventral visual cortex, and that such top-down activation, like that from sensory stimulation, produces memorial changes that affect perceptual processing during a later encounter with the stimulus.