Why Do Children Who Solve False Belief Tasks Begin to Find True Belief Control Tasks Difficult? A Test of Pragmatic Performance Factors in Theory of Mind Tasks

The litmus test for the development of a metarepresentational Theory of Mind is the false belief (FB) task in which children have to represent how another agent misrepresents the world. Children typically start mastering this task around age four. Recently, however, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. Pragmatic accounts assume that the TB task is pragmatically confusing because it poses a trivial academic test question about a rational agent’s perspective; and we do not normally engage in such discourse about subjective mental perspectives unless there is at least the possibility of error or deviance. The lack of such an obvious possibility in the TB task implicates that there might be some hidden perspective difference and thus makes the task confusing. In the present study, we test the pragmatic account by administering to 3- to 6-year-olds (N = 88) TB and FB tasks and structurally analogous true and false sign (TS/FS) tasks. The belief and sign tasks are matched in terms of representational and metarepresentational complexity; the crucial difference is that TS tasks do not implicate an alternative non-mental perspective and should thus be less pragmatically confusing than TB tasks. The results show parallel and correlated development in FB and FS tasks, replicate the puzzling performance pattern in TB tasks, but show no trace of this in TS tasks. Taken together, these results speak in favor of the pragmatic performance account.

Benford’s model as a Tool for analysing students performance pattern and anomaly

Studies on existing methods of analyses are still insufficient due to the lack of investigation of students’ performance pattern. Prior studies found that there is a limit in the existing systems that can be used to make a comparative analysis and monitoring of the student academic performance. To look into this problem, this study explores the possibility of analysing students’ performance pattern in higher institutions. A system based on Benford’s law was designed to analyse students’ performance pattern and the system was tested with students Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA). Python programming language, Malplot library, wxpython graphical user interface and Atom text and source code editor were used for developing and testing the application. After a couple of error debugging and fixes, a well-functioning application that met the requirements of the system was achieved. This study also features a spiral model which was adopted as the methodological approach in the development of the Benford’s Analysis system. The interaction between users and the Benford’s Analysis system was described. Furthermore, a brief description of Benford’s law, pattern recognition, students’ performance and stochastic modeling was given.

Analysis and Design of an Efficient and Novel MIMO Antenna for 5G Smart Phones Using FDTD and FEM

A novel and compact antenna element is analyzed and designed to achieve an efficient 4x4 MIMO antenna for a mobile phone at 3.5 GHz band for 5G communication. FTDT and FEM techniques are used to analyze and compare modeling accuracy of the proposed MIMO antenna. It has achieved a minimum isolation of 19.7dB between two antennas with radiation efficiency of 86%. The improved isolation and efficiency for the proposed MIMO antenna has been achieved without any decoupling structure between antennas, instead larger separation between elements due to compact size of the proposed element facilitated to achieve good performance. Pattern diversity is also achieved by arranging adjacent asymmetric antennas in reverse direction with each other. The envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) is less than 0.002 and Channel Capacity loss (CCL) is also less than 0.4 bps/Hz in the whole frequency band (3.36-3.66 GHz), which is suitable for 5G MIMO systems.

Do infants have abstract grammatical knowledge of word order at 17 months? Evidence from Mandarin Chinese.

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months) participated and the same experiment was conducted with eighteen adults. The results show that hearing well-formed NP-V-NP sentences triggered infants to fixate more on a transitive scene than on a reflexive scene. In contrast, when they heard deviant NP-NP-V sequences, no such preference pattern was found, a performance pattern that is adult-like. This is at variance with some of the results from Candan et al. (2012), who only found evidence for canonical word order comprehension at almost age 3 when considering fixation time. Furthermore, within the age range tested, performance showed no effect of age or vocabulary size.

The effect of instruction on motor skill learning

Instructions often break down motor sequences into smaller parts, such that they can be more easily remembered. Here, we show that different ways of breaking down a finger sequence can subsequently lead to better or worse performance. The initial instruction still influenced the temporal performance pattern after 10 days of practice. The results demonstrate that the initial cognitive representation of a motor skill strongly influences how a skill is learned and performed.

Clitic-Doubled Left Dislocation in Heritage Spanish: Judgment versus Production Data

This project examines whether heritage speakers of Spanish distinguish when Spanish clitic-doubled left dislocation (CLLD) is discursively appropriate via an acceptability judgment task (AJT) and a speeded production task (SPT). This two-task experimental design is intended to determine whether heritage speakers diverge from an L1 Spanish/L2 English baseline and, if so, whether such divergence is due to their grammatical knowledge, processing constraints, or other task effects. The baseline group accepted and produced CLLD significantly more than other constructions in anaphoric contexts, with the opposite pattern in non-anaphoric contexts, as expected for Spanish. The heritage speakers showed the same significant differences in production in both conditions and in the AJT’s anaphoric condition; in the non-anaphoric condition, however, they did not show any differences between CLLD and the other relevant constructions. We argue that this group of heritage speakers knows the discursive distribution of CLLD just as the baseline speakers do, as attested by the similar performance pattern in production. Furthermore, we posit that their AJT performance, which shows evidence of overextension of CLLD beyond its anaphoric context and into non-anaphoric contexts, may be due to the metalinguistic nature of AJTs.

Grade 9 learners’ algebra performance: Comparisons across quintiles, insights from errors and curriculum implications

It is well known that learners’ performance in mathematics in under-resourced secondary schools in South Africa is poor. However, little is known about the performance of learners in top-performing well-resourced secondary schools apart from their good results in Grade 12. In this study, the performance of Grade 9 learners in top-performing quintile 5 (i.e. well-resourced) schools was compared with that of learners in quintile 1–3 (i.e. poorly resourced) schools using a 45-item test. While the quintile 5 learners obtained higher test scores, the performance pattern across the test items was very similar for both quintile groupings. A detailed error analysis of 89 quintile 5 learners’ responses to equation items revealed difficulties in applying the standard equation-solving procedure, and in operating with negatives and subtraction, particularly on like terms. These problems may be related to a poorly conceived curriculum in the areas of integers and equations. It is recommended that Grade 8 and 9 teachers pay regular attention to all four arithmetic operations on integers. Furthermore, the teaching of equations should give greater attention to the cognitive shifts required in solving equations with letters on both sides of the equal sign.

Music ergogenic effect on strength performance: randomized clinical test

Background: Using preferred music during the exercise series was a differentiated way to increase muscle performance and fatigue slowdown, increasing the number of repetitions in these exercises. Despite of some studies present the effects of music, there is still a little music influence in strength training. Objectives: Verify the music effect on the strength performance in young adults, and the relation with the preferences of muscular grouping according to gender. Methods: a cross-sectional, controlled and crossover study was carried out with 20 physically active young adult participants (10 men). After previous laboratory evaluations, they underwent two exercise sessions, one experimental, where the participant performed 3 maximum series of exercises Barbell Curl and Leg Extensor seat listening to songs of their own choosing and another control session without music, adopting the series with greater repetition in each exercise for analysis. A minimum interval of 48 hours was adopted between each session. The protocol order (i.e. with music or without music) was made by the raffle. In the sessions, participants were asked to perform the maximum number of repetitions at 80% of the load determined in the laboratory. Results: The use of their preferred music significantly increased the number of repetitions in the two exercises, however, the preferences for muscular clusters characterized by the genders proved to be a determining variable. Conclusion: With the increasing of repetitions it was possible to observe an ergogenic resource to increase the performance in strength training, thus, a differentiated performance pattern was found between men and women in arm exercises when they use music.