We demonstrate “economies of experience” in eye-movement patterns—that is, optimization of eye-movement patterns aimed at more efficient and less costly visual processing, similar to the priming-induced formation of sparser cortical representations or reduced reaction times. Participants looked at Mooney-type, degraded stimuli that were difficult to recognize without prior experience, but easily recognizable after exposure to their undegraded versions. As predicted, eye-movement dispersion, velocity, and the number of fixations decreased with each stimulus presentation. Further analyses showed that this effect was contingent (...) on recognition, and the selection of information from the stimulus could be informed by the identity of the presented object. Finally, our study demonstrates that after exposure to the undegraded version of the stimulus, eye-movement patterns associated with its degraded and undegraded versions become more similar. This suggests that eye-movement patterns can evolve to facilitate the optimal processing of a given stimulus via experience-driven perceptual learning. (shrink)

The beauty contest game is widely used to study the determinants of strategic thinking. Here, we examine the role of theory of mind in strategic reasoning by comparing both performance and the reas...

Maintenance of proper health and prevention of diseases of civilization are now significant public health problems. Nutrition is an important factor in the development of youth, as well as the current and future state of health. The aim of the study was to show the benefits of the application of cluster analysis to assess the dietary habits of high school students. The survey was carried out on 1,631 eighteen-year-old students in seven randomly selected secondary schools in Bialystok using a self-prepared (...) anonymous questionnaire. An evaluation of the time of day meals were eaten and the number of meals consumed was made for the surveyed students. The cluster analysis allowed distinguishing characteristic structures of dietary habits in the observed population. Four clusters were identified, which were characterized by relative internal homogeneity and substantial variation in terms of the number of meals during the day and the time of their consumption. The most important characteristics of cluster 1 were cumulated food ration in 2 or 3 meals and long intervals between meals. Cluster 2 was characterized by eating the recommended number of 4 or 5 meals a day. In the 3rd cluster, students ate 3 meals a day with large intervals between them, and in the 4th they had four meals a day while maintaining proper intervals between them. In all clusters dietary mistakes occurred, but most of them were related to clusters 1 and 3. Cluster analysis allowed for the identification of major flaws in nutrition, which may include irregular eating and skipping meals, and indicated possible connections between eating patterns and disturbances of body weight in the examined population. (shrink)

Existing research shows that people can improve their decision skills by learning what experts paid attention to when faced with the same problem. However, in domains like financial education, effective instruction requires frequent, personalized feedback given at the point of decision, which makes it time‐consuming for experts to provide and thus, prohibitively costly. We address this by demonstrating an automated feedback mechanism that allows amateur decision‐makers to learn what information to attend to from one another, rather than from an expert. (...) In the first experiment, eye movements of N = 100 subjects were recorded while they repeatedly performed a standard behavioral finance investment task. Consistent with previous studies, we found that a significant proportion of subjects were affected by decision bias. In the second experiment, a different group of N = 100 subjects faced the same task but, after each choice, they received individual, machine learning‐generated feedback on whether their pre‐decision eye movements resembled those made by Experiment 1 subjects prior to good decisions. As a result, Experiment 2 subjects learned to analyze information similarly to their successful peers, which in turn reduced their decision bias. Furthermore, subjects with low Cognitive Reflection Test scores gained more from the proposed form of process feedback than from standard behavioral feedback based on decision outcomes. (shrink)

Most studies on bilingual language development focus on children’s second language (L2). Here, we investigated first language (L1) development of Polish-English early migrant bilinguals in four domains: vocabulary, grammar, phonological processing and discourse. We first compared Polish language skills between bilinguals and their Polish non-migrant monolingual peers, and then investigated the influence of the cumulative exposure to L1 and L2 on bilinguals’ performance. We then examined whether high exposure to L1 could possibly minimize the gap between monolinguals and bilinguals. We (...) analyzed data from 233 typically developing children (88 bilingual, 145 monolingual) aged 4;0 to 7;5 (years; months) on six language measures in Polish: receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary, receptive grammar, productive grammar (sentence repetition), phonological processing (non-word repetition) and discourse abilities (narration). Information about language exposure was obtained via parental questionnaires. For each language task, we analyzed the data from the subsample of bilinguals who had completed all the tasks in question and from monolinguals matched one-on-one to the bilingual group on age, SES (measured by years of mother’s education), gender, non-verbal IQ and short term memory. The bilingual children scored lower than monolinguals in all language domains, except discourse. The group differences were more pronounced on the productive tasks (vocabulary, grammar, phonological processing) and moderate on the receptive tasks (vocabulary and grammar). L1 exposure correlated positively with the vocabulary size and phonological processing. Grammar scores were not related to the levels of L1 exposure, but were predicted by general cognitive abilities. L2 exposure negatively influenced productive grammar in L1, suggesting possible L2 transfer effects on L1 grammatical performance. Children’s narrative skills benefitted from exposure to two languages: both L1 and L2 exposure influenced story structure scores in L1. Importantly, we did not find any evidence (in any of the tasks in which the gap was present) that the performance gap between monolinguals and bilinguals could be fully closed with high amounts of L1 input. (shrink)

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on the global economy, including the provision of health services, with medical facilities and patients cancelling or postponing medical appointments. An alternative to in-person appointments was through the available forms of telemedicine. Scientific reports around the world have suggested that the accessibility and quality of health services declined. The aim of this study was to investigate the accessibility and quality of health services in Poland and to verify whether there were differences (...) between men and women in this respect. The study was based on the authors’ own survey questionnaire filled in by 265 respondents, including 181 women, 82 men, and 2 persons without a defined gender. The study revealed that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the accessibility and quality of health services declined. Additionally, women were more likely to use general and specialist health services than men, but a comparison of changes in the assessment of accessibility and quality of services by gender revealed no differences in the assessment of accessibility and quality. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 4, April 2022.

Popyt na zawody i kompetencje na podlaskim rynku pracy a potrzeby pracodawców w zakresie kształcenia ustawicznego pracowników w wieku 45 lat i więcej Katarzyna Baczyńska-Koc, Magdalena Borys, Andrzej Klimczuk, Iwona Pietrzak, Bogusław Plawgo, Katarzyna Radziewicz, Ewa Rollnik-Sadowska, Cecylia Sadowska-Snarska & Justyna Żynel-Etel .

Current theories propose that our sense of curiosity is determined by the learning progress or information gain that our cognitive system expects to make. However, few studies have explicitly tried to quantify subjective information gain and link it to measures of curiosity. Here, we asked people to report their curiosity about the intrinsically engaging perceptual ‘puzzles’ known as Mooney images, and to report on the strength of their aha experience upon revealing the solution image (curiosity relief). We also asked our (...) participants (279) to make a guess concerning the solution of the image, and used the distribution of these guesses to compute the crowdsourced semantic entropy (or ambiguity) of the images, as a measure of the potential for information gain. Our results confirm that curiosity and, even more so, aha experience is substantially associated with this semantic information gain measure. These findings support the expected information gain theory of curiosity and suggest that the aha experience or intrinsic reward is driven by the actual information gain. In an unannounced memory part, we also established that the often reported influence of curiosity on memory is fully mediated by the aha experience or curiosity relief. We discuss the implications of our results for the burgeoning fields of curiosity and psychoaesthetics. (shrink)

Building on our diverse research traditions in the study of reasoning, language and communication, the Polish School of Argumentation integrates various disciplines and institutions across Poland in which scholars are dedicated to understanding the phenomenon of the force of argument. Our primary goal is to craft a methodological programme and establish organisational infrastructure: this is the first key step in facilitating and fostering our research movement, which joins people with a common research focus, complementary skills and an enthusiasm to work (...) together. This statement—the Manifesto—lays the foundations for the research programme of the Polish School of Argumentation. (shrink)

The youngest population in society is recognized as that at the healthiest stage of life but is burdened by the occurrence of premature death that should be avoidable. There is a need to use adequate statistical methods in assessing the health status of the population of developmental age. The aim of the study was to analyze trends of mortality in children and adolescents by age and gender in the Podlaskie Voivodeship in the years 2003-2012 by joinpoint regression and to identify (...) the causes of mortality. The mortality rate was analysed according to gender and the age groups: 0, 1-4, 5-9, 10-14 and 15-19 years in the Podlaskie Voivodeship. The data were obtained from the Central Statistical Office for the period 2003-2012. Differences in mortality levels between age and gender subgroups were obtained by the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Join- point regression was used to analyze the trends in mortality. The nomenclature of ICD-10 was used to assess the causes of mortality of children and adolescents. In the Podlaskie Voivodeship in the years 2003-2012 in the 0-19-year-old age group, the highest proportion of deaths (42.4%) occurred during the first year of life. There were differences in mortality rates between boys (8.0/104) and girls (3.1/104) in the 15-19-year-old age group (p < 0.01), and also between the 1-14-year-old and 15-19-year-old age groups (p < 0.01), both among boys (2.1/104 vs. 8.0/104) and girls (1.5/104 vs. 3.1/104). Monotonous trends were shown regarding total mortality rates in infants. There was a drop in the mortality rate of infant girls (AAPC = 5.3%, p < 0.05) and boys (AAPC = 4.7%, p < 0.05). Changes in the direction of the total mortality rate trend were visible in the population of boys aged 1-14 years, in which, between 2003 and 2010, a significant reduction in mortality (AAPC = 9.5%) was observed, while in the years 2010-2012 the trend was not significant. No statistical evidence was found that mortality changed among girls in the 1-14-year-old and 15-19-year-old age groups. Deaths in infancy were due to perinatal conditions and congenital mal- formations. The main causes of mortality in the 1-19-year-old age group were external causes, mainly traffic accidents and intentional self-harm. Joinpoint regression indicated a uniform decrease of mortality in the years 2003-2012 except for boys from 1-14 years old, for whom the decreasing trend was for the years 2003-2010 with subsequent stabilization. The main problems are still infant deaths due to perinatal conditions, traffic accidents and intentional self-harm in boys in the 15-19-year-old age group. (shrink)

Even though female food acquisition is an area of considerable interest in hunter-gatherer research, the ecological determinants of women’s economic decisions in these populations are still poorly understood. The literature on female foraging behavior indicates that there is considerable variation within and across foraging societies in the amount of time that women spend foraging and in the amount and types of food that they acquire. It is possible that this heterogeneity reflects variation in the trade-offs between time spent in food (...) acquisition and child care activities that women face in different groups of hunter-gatherers. In this paper we discuss the fitness trade-offs between food acquisition and child care that Hiwi and Ache women foragers might face. Multiple regression analyses show that in both populations the daily food acquisition of a woman’s spouse is negatively related to female foraging effort. In addition, nursing mothers spend less time foraging and acquire less food than do nonnursing women. As the number of dependents that a woman has increases, however, women also increase foraging time and the amount of food they acquire. Some interesting exceptions to these general trends are as follows: (a) differences in foraging effort between nursing and nonnursing women are less pronounced when fruits and roots are in season than in other seasons of the year; (b) foraging return rates decrease for Ache women as their numbers of dependents increase; and (c) among Ache women, the positive effect of number of dependents on foraging behavior is less pronounced when fruits are in season than at other times of the year. Lastly, in the Hiwi sample we found that postreproductive women work considerably harder than women of reproductive age in the root season but not in other seasons of the year. We discuss how ecological variation in constraints, the number of health insults to children that Hiwi and Ache mothers can avoid, and the fitness benefits they can gain from spending time in food acquisition and child care might account for differences and similarities in the foraging behaviors of subgroups of Hiwi and Ache mothers across different seasons of the year. Valid tests of the explanations we propose will require considerable effort to measure the relationship between maternal food acquisition, child care, and adverse health outcomes in offspring. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

When people are performing a task, it is hard to know whether they are about to make a mistake. Klaproth, Halbrügge, Krol, Vernaleken, Zander, and Russwinkel address this by recording EEG signals while people are performing a flight control task, and show that by examining the EEG signal they can determine when people failed to notice particular stimuli, which could lead to better assistive tools.

Selective reproductive technologies, such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, enable enhanced clinical success rates, create reproductive choices, and produce new commercial opportunities. Drawing upon empirical material acquired during a ten-month period in 2016, this study uses a total of twenty-two in-depth interviews with doctors, CEOs, clinical directors, marketing directors, patient counselors, and embryologists to discuss how traveling for the SRT of gender selection for nonmedical reasons is mediated by fertility clinics and clinicians in Dubai. Multimodal analysis was used to analyze the (...) clinical websites’ key rhetorical and visual features. Meanwhile, interviews and observational studies highlighted the context within which gender selection takes place. Findings revealed that gender selection is promoted as a form of “enhancement” and “family balance,” which, when combined with the ways that Dubai is assembled as a sensory tourist destination, routinize SRTs and lead to an understanding of gender selection as not merely an individualized reproductive journey but an optimization of the family unit. (shrink)

In this work, no denying the role, or even more so, the value of rational thinking, it is assumed that it is not the only effective tool for man to achieve his valuable goals. It is conjectured here that sometimes irrational thinking is an equally good (and sometimes even better than rational thinking) means of achieving them. In the light of these assumptions, the goal of my work is to indicate the benefits that may be the result of irrational thinking (...) in the colloquial (i.e. unscientific) domain of everyday human practice. The given examples of irrational thinking come from research in the field of cognitive and social psychology and behavioural economics. Their results prove that irrational behaviours (including thinking) are neither accidental nor senseless, and on the contrary systematic and easy to predict, they constitute important arguments for considering the phenomenon of irrational thinking. I also discuss this issue although only to a limited extent. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to represent Zygmunt Bauman's formulation of personal identity and to present its cultural weight today. Bauman defines a post-modern personal identity as opposed to the modern personal identity. These conceptions of identity express views of man and the world held in two different periods—modernity and postmodernity. In modernity man is perceived as a being who in accordance with his "volitions" and "ideas" creates (and controls) the world and himself. In post-modernity man is seen as (...) a being who in the face of the defeat of the modern project refuses to create himself, in other words refuses to create his personal identity. This paper presents the poor structural integration of personal identity in the context of its creation. The author of this paper perceives philosophical considerations relating to personal identity as parallel to philosophical investigations relating to the nature of truth. (shrink)

A report on the conference “Ecosemiotic Paradigm for Nature and Culture”.

The article investigates the problem of Kant's proposal for a final global legal order. Kant expressed his stance very vaguely in the consecutively published texts On the Common Saying, Toward Perpetual Peace and The Metaphysics of Morals, which enabled numerous, often contradictory interpretations. The aim of the paper is to propose an alternative method of analysis of Kant's texts, which on one side reconciles textual discrepancies in his writings and on the other throws new light on many of the previous (...) interpretations. In order to accomplish this goal, I draw distinctions between four perspectives, from which the philosopher considers this issue in his writings. This allows me to give the final form of Kant's world peace, explain the character of the international state of nature vs the original one, and understand the role of the principles of politics and the status of Kant's teleological understanding of history. (shrink)

This article presents an overview of generally available applications for creating multimedia and interactive educational materials, such as presentations, instructional videos, self-tests and interactive repetitions. With the use of the presented tools, pilot materials were developed to support the teaching of biostatistics at a medical university. The authors conducted surveys among students of faculties of medicine in order to evaluate the materials used in terms of quality and usefulness. The article presents the analysis of the results obtained.

This article aims to discuss conceptual levels of narrative representations of utterances based on reported speech frames employed in presidential speeches. It adopts some assumptions from Chilton’s Deictic Space Theory and Cap’s Proximisation Theory, both primarily used to indicate exclusive reference, a clash of interests and threat-oriented conceptualisation of events. This article, however, extends their scope to include strategies for inclusion and positive image construction and makes a distinction between primary, secondary and tertiary embedding as discursive means that contribute to (...) presentation of self and legitimisation. Data for this research comprise a corpus of 125 presidential speeches divided into three subcorpora: JKC – John Kennedy Corpus, BCC – Bill Clinton Corpus, and BOC – Barrack Obama Corpus. A total of 1251 instances of narrative reports have been analysed to investigate primary and multilevel embedding, which constitute the basis for this study. (shrink)

Water does rather than is. It wets, humidifies, evaporates, crystallizes, permeates, fills, leaks, drips, trickles, softens, hardens, congeals, dilutes, shapes, drills, erodes, corrodes, bonds, dis...

Die Frage »Was machst du?« hat einen festen Platz in unserem Alltag. Wonach erkundigt sich jemand, der wissen will, was sein Gegenüber tut? An einer gewöhnlichen Antwort - etwa: »Ich schreibe eine Geburtstagskarte.« - wird unmittelbar deutlich, was die Schreibende augenblicklich macht. Erstaunlicherweise sagt sie nicht, woran wir ihr Schreiben erkennen. Anna Magdalena Schaupp zeigt, warum wir dennoch wissen, was die Person tut, indem sie das Handeln von seinem Vollzug her aufgreift und versucht, Handlungen weder von ihren Zielen noch (...) von ihren Ursachen oder Gründen - sondern vom Handeln - her zu denken. (shrink)

There are not enough mouths to utterAll your fleeting names, O water.– Wisława Szymborska, “Water”Wisława Szymborska’s poetic take on water is driven by a paradox. On the one hand, the poem speaks...

This paper addresses the issue of the stability of lists of genes identified as differentially expressed in microarray experiments. The similarities be- tween gene rankings yielded by various gene selection methods performed with resampled datasets were assessed. The mean percentage of overlapping genes for two rankings varied from 10 to 90% depending on the applied gene selection method and the size of the list. The assessment of the stability of obtained gene rankings seems to be relevant in the analysis of (...) microarray data. (shrink)

Cooperation between doctors of various specialties and other medical specialists is the standard of care in the treatment of patients. Due to the variety of diseases and the dynamic development of medicine in general, it is difficult to be an expert in every field and know all the recommended treatments. An example of such cooperation is the joint treatment of patients with the problem of ingrown toenails. The article contains an analysis of patients who received treatment in a doctor’s office (...) in cooperation with podiatrists. A conservative approach towards the treatment of this condition sees the patient being initially diagnosed and treated by a podiatrist and then later, if necessary, being referred to a doctor for surgical treatment. The exchange of experiences and information on patients treated by interdisciplinary teams allows doctors and podiatrists to find the best possible treatment and improve the quality of life of patients. The follow-up of patients after surgery can be performed later in podiatry offices. Owing to modern electronic communication, it is possible for a doctor to constantly monitor the patient’s condition without the need for direct visits to the doctor’s office. (shrink)

Coping after myocardial infarction. The mediational effects of positive and negative emotions The aim of the study was to examine mediational effects of positive and negative emotions on the relationship between cognitive appraisal and coping after myocardial infarction. Subjects were 163 patients assessed a few days after their first MI episode for cognitive appraisal using the Situation Appraisal Questionnaire developed by Wrześniewski and based on the Lazarus theory. The participants' current emotional state and coping strategies were evaluated with Polish versions (...) of the PANAS and CISS-S, respectively. The data were analyzed using the boostrapping procedure. Resultant models turned out to be similar for threat and loss appraisal, where PEs mediated task-oriented coping, while NEs were found to mediate emotion-oriented coping. A different relationship was found for challenge. Due to a significant intercorrelation among appraisals, mediational models for threat and loss were re-analyzed when controlling for challenge. Nevertheless, even if a situation is perceived as highly stressful, both positive and negative emotions can emerge, resulting in strategies that serve different functions to meet external and internal demands. (shrink)

This paper presents several applications of the dimensional analysis method to problems investigated in medical sciences. The method is used to analyze various complex processes without using formal laws governing the same. It is particularly suitable for a general analysis of fluid transfer in the human body. This paper mainly serves as an overview of selected applications, mostly those emerging in the recent years, and includes a discussion of the mathematical fundamentals of dimensional analysis together followed by its critical analysis. (...) Containing detailed calculations of two examples, the paper also serves as training material in the area of the computational method of the dimensional analysis algorithm. (shrink)

The 14th Conference of the International Network for Economic Method was held in Finland at the University of Helsinki, from 18th to 21st of August 2019. It was the second time the biannual...