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Be unique, be open, be art
(2010)
This article serves as an introduction to the FQS special issue 'Participatory Qualitative Research'. In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in participatory research strategies. The articles in this special issue come from different disciplines. Against the background of concrete empirical research projects, they address numerous conceptual considerations and methodological approaches. After reading the contributions, and engaging with the authors' arguments, the authors were prompted to focus in particular on those areas in which further work needs to be done. They include, on the one hand, fundamental principles of participatory research, such as democratic-theory considerations, the concept of 'safe space', participation issues, and ethical questions. And, on the other hand, the authors focus an practical research considerations regarding the rote and tasks of the various participants; specific methodological approaches; and quality criteria - understood here in the sense of arguments justifying a participatory approach. The authors' aim is to stimulate a broad discussion that does not focus only on participatory research in the narrower sense. Because participatory methodology poses certain knowledge- and research-related questions in a radical way, it has the potential to draw attention to hitherto neglected areas in qualitative methodology and to stimulate their further development.
The essay describes a primal scene, imagining how it might have been in the very beginning. Undoubtedly, it was a “homo ludens” who started the project of becoming human by using hand, eye, and the ability to imagine. Technical, phonetic, and figurative gestures gave way to the so-called second nature – cultural expressions that lead to technology, supported understanding, created pictures, music, theatre, or artistic legacies like the labyrinth that serves as a format for this essay. The “line of thoughts” (somewhere between fiction and reality) performs its own truth while one walks through: The text is constructed along the path of a labyrinth, the production of speech interrupted by its seven turns – allowing the experience of linear and cyclical time and creating rhythm and a motion of progression. It was written to be performed – not only to be read, but also to be seen and heard. Readers may imagine it as speech whose sound, rhythm and gestural elements inscribe themselves on the body.
This paper describes a novel emotionally intelligent cognitive assistant to engage and help older adults with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) to complete activities of daily living (ADL) more independently. Our new system combines two research streams. First, the development of cognitive assistants with artificially intelligent controllers using partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Second, a model of the dynamics of emotion and identity called Affect Control Theory that arises from the sociological literature on culturally shared sentiments. We present background material on both of these research streams, and then demonstrate a prototype assistive technology that combines the two. We discuss the affective reasoning, the probabilistic and decision-theoretic reasoning, the computer-vision based activity monitoring, the embodied prompting, and we show results in proof-of-concept tests.
This paper presents an exploratory study conducted to understand how audio-visual prompts are understood by people on an emotional level as a first step towards the more challenging task of designing emotionally aligned prompts for persons with cognitive disabilities such as Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD). Persons with ADRD often need assistance from a caregiver to complete daily living activities such as washing hands, making food, or getting dressed. Artificially intelligent systems have been developed that can assist in such situations. This paper presents a set of prompt videos of a virtual human ‘Rachel’, wherein she expressively communicates prompts at each step of a simple hand washing task, with various human-like emotions and behaviors. A user study was conducted for 30 such videos with respect to three basic and important dimensions of emotional experience: evaluation, potency, and activity. The results show that, while people generally agree on the evaluation (valence: good/bad) of a prompt, consensus about power and activity is not as socially homogeneous. Our long term aim is to enhance such systems by delivering automated prompts that are emotionally aligned with individuals in order to help with prompt adherence and with long-term adoption.
Angststörungen, insbesondere Panikstörungen und Agoraphobie, sind weitverbreitete psychische Störungen, die eine hohe Komorbidität mit Persönlichkeitsstörungen aufweisen. Randomisierte kontrollierte Studien, die sich mit dieser sehr relevanten Gruppe von Patienten befassen, fehlen bisher. Die multizentrisch durchgeführte Studie zu Angst- und Persönlichkeitsstörungen (APS) untersucht 200 Patienten mit Panikstörung und/oder Agoraphobie mit komorbiden Persönlichkeitsstörungen in einer randomisierten, kontrollierten Vergleichsstudie zwischen Analytischer Psychotherapie (psychoanalytic therapy, PT) und Kognitiver Verhaltenstherapie (cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT), wobei jede Gruppe 100 Patienten enthält. Jeder Patient wird über einen Zeitraum von sechs Jahren untersucht, unabhängig von der Dauer der individuellen Behandlung. Die wesentlichen Fragestellungen dieser Studie beziehen sich auf den Vergleich der Effektivität von PT und CBT in dieser speziellen Patientenpopulation, auf den Vergleich der Nachhaltigkeit der Effekte von PT und CBT, den Vergleich der langfristigen Kosten-Nutzen-Relation von PT und CBT, sowie die Untersuchung von prädiktiven Patientenmerkmalen für individuelle Therapieempfehlungen (Differenzielle Indikationsstellung). Die APS-Studie vergleicht Effektivität, Nachhaltigkeit und Kosten-Nutzen-Relation von PT und CBT für Angst- plus Persönlichkeitsstörungen in einem randomisierten, kontrollierten Design. Das Studiendesign erfüllt damit die Anforderungen an eine Effektivitätsstudie für PT, die unlängst definiert wurden.
Unpacking the Habitus
(2016)
The concept of habitus refers to socially stratified patterns of perception, classification, and thinking that are supposed to bring about specific lifestyles. Until now, research on the links between stratification and lifestyles has accounted for the habitus mainly in conceptual and theoretical terms, and studies directly measuring habitus and its association with stratification and lifestyles are rare. The present study conceptualizes the habitus as an individual-level pattern of meaning making and suggests an operationalization that is commonly used in identity research. Using survey data of 3,438 respondents, the study investigates associations between different lifestyles and patterns of meaning making. Results show, first, that self-related meanings vary systematically across lifestyle categories and mirror respondents' stratification position. Second, the meanings of various social concepts also vary significantly across lifestyle categories and partly reflect descriptive lifestyle characteristics. In sum, the study presents a plausible operationalization of (parts of) the habitus and advances our understanding of its mediating position between stratification and lifestyles.
Previous studies showed that the movements of another person's eyes and head guides infants' attention and promotes social learning by leading to enhanced encoding of cued objects. However, it is an open question whether social features like eyes are required or if the lateral movement of any arbitrary stimulus can elicit similar effects. The current experiments investigate the effects of the movement of a nonsocial cue and a perceptually similar social cue on object processing in 4-month-olds using event-related potentials (ERPs). Infants were presented with one of two central cues, either a box with a checkerboard pattern or a box with eye-like features on the front, which turned to one side. The cue thereby either turned toward a novel object or turned away from it. Afterwards, the object was presented again and ERPs in response to these previously cued or uncued objects were compared. When the nonsocial box served as the cue, no difference in neural processing of previously cued and uncued objects was found. In contrast, when the box with eyes served as the cue, we found an enhanced positive slow wave (PSW) for uncued as compared to cued objects. While the turning of the box with eyes promoted the encoding of cued objects, uncued objects needed enhanced activity for processing when presented for a second time. Results suggest that not every dynamic cue can influence infants’ object processing but that the presence of a basic social characteristic like isolated schematic eyes is sufficient to enhance social learning processes in early infancy. This hints on a specific sensitivity of the infant brain to social information which helps infants to focus on relevant information in the environment during social learning.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence and computer science can be used by social scientists in their study of groups and teams. Here, we explain how developments in machine learning and simulations with artificially intelligent agents can help group and team scholars to overcome two major problems they face when studying group dynamics. First, because empirical research on groups relies on manual coding, it is hard to study groups in large numbers (the scaling problem). Second, conventional statistical methods in behavioral science often fail to capture the nonlinear interaction dynamics occurring in small groups (the dynamics problem). Machine learning helps to address the scaling problem, as massive computing power can be harnessed to multiply manual codings of group interactions. Computer simulations with artificially intelligent agents help to address the dynamics problem by implementing social psychological theory in data-generating algorithms that allow for sophisticated statements and tests of theory. We describe an ongoing research project aimed at computational analysis of virtual software development teams.
This article critically examines the governing of ‘sustainable urban development’ through self-build cohousing groups in Gothenburg and Hamburg. The two case cities have been selected because both are currently involved in major urban restructuring, and have launched programmes to support self-build groups and cohousing as part of their emphasis on promoting urban sustainable development through this process. Departing from a theoretical discussion on advanced liberal urban governance, focusing in particular on the contemporary discourse on sustainable urban development, we examine the interaction between political institutions, civil society and private actors in the construction of cohousing as a perceived novel and alternative form of housing that may contribute to fulfilling certain sustainability goals. Questions centre on the socio-political contextualization of cohousing; concepts of sustainability; strategies of, and relations between, different actors in promoting cohousing; gentrification and segregation; and inclusion and exclusion. In conclusion we argue that, while self-build groups can provide pockets of cohousing as an alternative to dominant forms of housing, the economic and political logics of advanced liberal urban development make even such a modest target difficult, particularly when it comes to making such housing affordable.
In the current study, 24- to 27-month-old children (N = 37) used pointing gestures in a cooperative object choice task with either peer or adult partners. When indicating the location of a hidden toy, children pointed equally accurately for adult and peer partners but more often for adult partners. When choosing from one of three hiding places, children used adults’ pointing to find a hidden toy significantly more often than they used peers’. In interaction with peers, children's choice behavior was at chance level. These results suggest that toddlers ascribe informative value to adults’ but not peers’ pointing gestures, and highlight the role of children's social expectations in their communicative development.
This paper is the first to examine the motivational disposition of Nepalese learners of L2 English. Based on an adapted version of the questionnaire in (Kormos, Judit & Kata Csizér. 2008. Age-related differences in motivation of learning English as a foreign language: Attitudes, selves, and motivated behavior. Language Learning 58. 327–355. Doi:10.1111/j.1467-9922.2008.00443.x.), we test the robustness and culture-specific applicability of well-known motivational antecedents to this learner population, and we investigate how the effects of these antecedents are mediated by the learners’ gender, age and regional aspects of the educational setting. In doing so, we offer novel ways of analyzing the data: Firstly, we employ random forests and conditional inference trees for assessing the relative importance of motivational antecedents. Secondly, we complement the traditional ‘scale-based approach’, which focuses on holistic constructs like the ‘Ideal L2 Self’, with an ‘item-based approach’ that highlights more specific components of such scales. The results are interpreted with reference to the L2 Motivational Self System (Dörnyei, Zoltán. 2005. The psychology of the language learner: Individual differences in second language acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) and to previous studies on other Asian populations of L2 learners.
The origin of pointing
(2019)
Pointing gestures play a foundational role in human language, but up to now, we have not known where these gestures come from. Here, we investigated the hypothesis that pointing originates in touch. We found, first, that when pointing at a target, children and adults oriented their fingers not as though trying to create an “arrow” that picks out the target but instead as though they were aiming to touch it; second, that when pointing at a target at an angle, participants rotated their wrists to match that angle as they would if they were trying to touch the target; and last, that young children interpret pointing gestures as if they were attempts to touch things, not as arrows. These results provide the first substantial evidence that pointing originates in touch.
Research-led teaching is designed to give students the opportunity to engage with their learning process and develop the skills needed to build their professional identity through active participation in the scientific cognitive process. Here in particular, social workers need research-oriented behavior, hermeneutic competencies and reflexivity in order to master the imminent requirements of case comprehension and case processing in a professional way.
This chapter looks at children ‘out of place’ as a category, focusing on the example of the sexually abused and thus sexually exposed child as experiencing an ‘out of place’ childhood. It focuses on the child who has been sexually abused and exploited, in contexts involving no compensation – monetary or otherwise. A code for childhood sexuality also developed in the West, with the focus on the innocence and malleability of young people. The projection onto children by adults, in terms of what they should be, can thus eventually be damaging. Children are presented as incapable of being responsible subjects with their own agency in the context of sexuality. Children’s agency in the context of their sexuality is highly restricted through laws dictating minimum ages of sexual activity and consent, as well as social expectations of a child as a non-sexual and innocent being.
Emotion theory needs to explain the relationship of language and emotions, and the embodiment of emotions, by specifying the computational mechanisms underlying emotion generation in the brain. We used Chris Eliasmith’s Semantic Pointer Architecture to develop POEM, a computational model that explains numerous important phenomena concerning emotions, including how some stimuli generate immediate emotional reactions, how some emotional reactions depend on cognitive evaluations, how bodily states influence the generation of emotions, how some emotions depend on interactions between physiological inputs and cognitive appraisals, and how some emotional reactions concern syntactically complex representations. We contrast our theory with current alternatives, and discuss some possible applications to individual and social emotions.
Changing people’s travel behaviours and mode choices is an important mitigation option to reduce greenhouse gas emission in transport. Previous studies have shown that symbolic meanings associated with new low-emission vehicles and travel services influence people’s willingness to adopt these innovations. However, little is known about the symbolic meanings of many upcoming transport innovations, which often influence habitual decision-making and their stratification within the population. This study thus examines cultural affective meanings of a broad range of conventional and novel transport mode options in a nationally representative German sample. Cluster analysis of affective meanings of travel modes identified six unique traveller segments. These consumer groups differ significantly in their intention to adopt low-emission travel modes and are characterized by specific psychographic, socio-demographic and behavioural profiles. The results demonstrate that affective meanings of choice options are predictive regarding the attitudes and (intended) behaviour of traveller segments. Moreover, the invariant positive meanings of conventional cars across segments indicate the strong cultural embeddedness of this mode in society. We discuss the implications of our approach for the development of government strategies for sustainable transport.
In empirically informed research on action explanation, philosophers and developmental psychologists have recently proposed a teleological account of the way in which we make sense of people’s intentional behavior. It holds that we typically don’t explain an agent’s action by appealing to her mental states but by referring to the objective, publically accessible facts of the world that count in favor of performing the action so as to achieve a certain goal. Advocates of the teleological account claim that this strategy is our main way of understanding people’s actions. I argue that common motivations mentioned to support the teleological account are insufficient to sustain its generalization from children to adults. Moreover, social psychological studies, combined with theoretical considerations, suggest that we do not explain actions mainly by invoking publically accessible, reason-giving facts alone but by ascribing mental states to the agent.
We compared event-related potentials during sentence reading, using impression formation equations of a model of affective coherence, to investigate the role of affective content processing during meaning making. The model of Affect Control Theory (ACT; Heise, 1979, 2007) predicts and quantifies the degree to which social interactions deflect from prevailing social norms and values - based on the affective meanings of involved concepts. We tested whether this model can predict the amplitude of brain waves traditionally associated with semantic processing. To this end, we visually presented sentences describing basic subject-verb-object social interactions and measured event-related potentials for final words of sentences from three different conditions of affective deflection (low, medium, high) as computed by a variant of the ACT model (Schröder, 2011). Sentence stimuli were closely controlled across conditions for alternate semantic dimensions such as contextual constraints, cloze probabilities, co-occurrences of subject-object and verb-object relations. Personality characteristics (schizotypy, Big Five) were assessed to account for individual differences, assumed to influence emotion-language interactions in information processing. Affective deflection provoked increased negativity of ERP waves during the P2/N2 and N400 components. Our data suggest that affective incoherence is perceived as conflicting information interfering with early semantic processing and that increased respective processing demands – in particular in the case of medium violations of social norms - linger on until the N400 time window classically associated with the integration of concepts into embedding context. We conclude from these results that affective meanings influence basic stages of meaning making.
Any-Cubes
(2019)
Here we present Any-Cubes, a prototype toy with which children can intuitively and playfully explore and understand machine learning as well as Internet of Things technology. Our prototype is a combination of deep learning-based image classification [12] and machine-to-machine (m2m) communication via MQTT. The system consists of two physical and tangible wooden cubes. Cube 1 ("sensor cube") is inspired by Google's teachable machine [14,15]. The sensor cube can be trained on any object or scenery. The machine learning functionality is directly implemented on the microcontroller (Raspberry Pi) by a Google Edge TPU Stick. Via MQTT protocol, the microcontroller sends its current status to Cube 2, the actuator cube. The actuator cube provides three switches (relays controlled by an Arduino board) to which peripheral devices can be connected. This allows simple if-then functions to be executed in real time, regardless of location. We envision our system as an intuitive didactic tool for schools and maker spaces.
Creative coding is a form of postdigital art that uses programming to solve esthetical problems, subordinating functionality to expression. It often comes with rather uncommon usage patterns of coding, going beyond technologies' affordances and finding ways of appropriating them in an individual way and in exchange with others. The learning ecologies GitHub, Stack Overflow, and Pouët present digital infrastructures that curate and support such appropriation-related activities. The paper presents a qualitative analysis of the structure of these spaces, and the appropriation-related communication taking place. It shows how crucial the varying designs of the learning ecologies and the implemented interaction possibilities are for the appropriation activities taking place and draws a line to the desire for stronger participation in postdigital curation.
I argue that uniquely human forms of ‘Theory of Mind’ (or ‘ToM’) are a product of cultural evolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental states—and so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that uniquely human forms of ToM are not required for language development, such that an account of the cultural origins of ToM does not jeopardise the explanation of language development. Finally, I sketch a historical model of the cultural evolution of mental state talk.
We describe how we use social simulation as a core method in a new master’s program designed to teach future leaders of urban change to deal with the complexity inherent in current societal transformations. We start by depicting the challenges with regard to cross-disciplinary knowledge integration and overcoming value-based, rigid thinking styles that inevitably arise in the process of solving ecological, technological, or social problems in cities new and old. Next, we describe a course based on urban modeling and participatory approaches, designed to meet those challenges. We reflect on our first experience with this approach and discuss future developments and research needs.
A topology of groups
(2020)
In this work, we study the collaboration patterns of open source software projects on GitHub by analyzing the pull request submissions and acceptances of repositories. We develop a group typology based on the structural properties of the corresponding directed graphs, and analyze how the topology is connected to the repositorys collective identity, hierarchy, productivity, popularity, resilience and stability. These analyses indicate significant differences between group types and thereby provide valuable insights on how to effectively organize collaborative software development. Identifying the mechanisms that underlie self-organized collaboration on digital platforms is important not just to better understand open source software development but also all other decentralized and digital work environments, a setting widely regarded as a key feature of the future work place.
The idea that a simple execution of an innovation invented by actors other than those who are expected to apply it is not likely to take place is a truism. We assume, however, in this paper the idea of a discursive production of knowledge on the application of an innovation across different levels of the education system. We aim to shed light on an innovation’s ‘journey’ from educational policy over training providers to teams of professionals in early childhood education and care (ECEC). By investigating knowledge and emotions associated with the introduction of an intended innovation using the example of “stimulation interactions” in day care-centers, the paper contributes to research on the transfer of innovations in education. To better understand challenges occurring during the transfer of innovations, we triangulate methods from discourse theory (coding techniques based on GTM) and cognitive science, namely cognitive-affective mapping (according to the scholarly conventions). The data corpus includes educational plans (N = 2), in-service training programs (N = 123) and group discussions of pedagogical teams (N = 6) who participated in an in-service training on the subject, stimulating interaction. Findings underline that similar messages from the inventors on the educational policy level are received and processed heterogeneously by the teams of pedagogues as a result of their preexisting views, routine practices and experiences with intended innovations through in-service trainings. Besides, a diffuse mixture of competing and contradictory information is communicated to the professionals and, hence, collides with the in-service training providers’ and educational policy actors’ expectations on the processing of the intended innovation. Specific knowledge elements and their valences are diametrically opposed to each other. Dissonances like these are considered as obstacles to social innovation. The obstacles are caused by the lack of a ‘common language’ beyond all levels. Hence, policy-makers and in-service-training providers should anticipate the supportive as well as competing knowledge-emotional complexes of professionals and take these into account when communicating an intended innovation.
Human thought can be characterised as being situated in the ‘space of reasons’. That is to say that human thought is guided by the norms of theoretical and practical rationality which, in turn, enable autonomous thinking. But how do children learn to navigate the space of reasons? Building on the work of Tugendhat and Bakhurst, among others, we argue, first, that this process involves the acquisition of propositional thought and that it is an essentially social one in which both children and adults take an active role. Second, and more specifically, by drawing on Brandom's theory of meaning, we provide a philosophical analysis of empirical findings with respect to the efficacy of ‘Sustained Shared Thinking’ (SST) in early educational settings. We argue that the efficacy of SST is based on its emphasising, modelling and practising those elements of communication that are essential for gaining proficiency in ‘playing the game of giving and asking for reasons’, namely drawing inferences between propositions and concepts and providing justifications for one's assertions. This is achieved by making explicit the inferential relationships between concepts and propositions and by the use of modal and doxastic markers that function as an invitation to a joint search for reasons.
This research investigated how German-speaking children learn color words, both in terms of centroid mappings and boundary delineation, and how they construct the color lexicon as a connected system. The results were compared to those of Japanese children to draw insights on general mechanisms that underlie the acquisition of words in the color lexicon. For both languages, input frequency and category size contributed to the ease of learning. In contrast, in both language groups, naming (in)consistency in adults predicted the adult-like boundary delineation.
It counts as empirically proven that infants can individuate objects. Object individuation is assumed to be fundamental in the development of infants’ ontology within the object-first account. It crucially relies on an object-file (OF) system, representing both spatiotemporal (“where”) and categorical (“what”) information about objects as solid, cohesive bodies moving continuously in space and time. However, infants’ performance in tasks requiring them to use featural information to detect individuation violations appears to be at odds with the object-first account. In such cases, infants do not appear to be able to develop correct expectations about the numerosity of objects. Recently, proponents of the object-first account proposed that these individuation failures result from integration errors between the OF system and an additional physical reasoning system. We are going to argue that the predictions of a feature-based physical-reasoning (PR) system are sufficient for explaining infants’ behavior. The striking predictive power of the PR system calls into question the relevance of the OF system and, thereby, challenges the assumption that infants can individuate objects early on.
Positive associations between children’s general language skills and emotion understanding are well documented. Concurrently, research from other domains highlights the importance of domain-specific language skills for conceptual development. The current study examined the relative contributions of emotion-specific and general vocabulary to individual differences in multiple early-acquired components of emotion understanding (e.g., facial emotion recognition) and later-acquired components (e.g., knowledge of emotion regulation strategies) in 4- to 9-year-old children (N = 86). Emotion-specific vocabulary was measured by size (i.e., number of emotion words children use) and depth (i.e., adult-like use of emotion words). Findings emphasize the role of children’s emotion-specific vocabulary rather than general vocabulary for early-acquired and later-acquired components of emotion understanding, especially when measured by expressive tasks. At preschool age, the size of emotion-specific vocabulary explains children’s knowledge of emotion regulation strategies. In primary school, however, the depth of emotion-specific vocabulary becomes relevant for individual differences in emotion understanding.
While research on object individuation assumes that even very young children are able to perceive objects as particulars, we argue that the results of relevant studies can be explained in terms of feature discrimination. We propose that children start out navigating the world with a feature‐based ontology and only later become able to individuate objects spatiotemporally. Furthermore, object individuation is a cognitively demanding achievement resting on a uniquely human form of enculturation, namely the acquisition of deictic demonstratives. We conclude by outlining empirical expectations for operationalizations of our proposal.
Curatorial activities provide (infra)structure and meaning to artworks through the selection and combination of different pieces and their public display. Therefore the way context is added shapes people’s perspective towards art. (Post-)digital art and online exhibitions come with specific constraints concerning curation and have a potential to overcome the hierarchies between curators, artists and visitors. In discussing selected digital exhibition formats from the 1990s until today, the article illustrates how the genre has evolved in response to technological changes and concepts of democratization as well as user involvement. Looking at the online exhibition “UN/NATURAL SURROGATES” (2019) the article opens up a perspective towards meta-curating that allows to conceive (online) exhibitions as a means of reflecting on curatorial processes in the postdigital era.
Infants show impressive speech decoding abilities and detect acoustic regularities that highlight the syntactic relations of a language, often coded via non-adjacent dependencies (NADs, e.g., is singing). It has been claimed that infants learn NADs implicitly and associatively through passive listening and that there is a shift from effortless associative learning to a more controlled learning of NADs after the age of 2 years, potentially driven by the maturation of the prefrontal cortex. To investigate if older children are able to learn NADs, Lammertink et al. (2019) recently developed a word-monitoring serial reaction time (SRT) task and could show that 6–11-year-old children learned the NADs, as their reaction times (RTs) increased then they were presented with violated NADs. In the current study we adapted their experimental paradigm and tested NAD learning in a younger group of 52 children between the age of 4–8 years in a remote, web-based, game-like setting (whack-a-mole). Children were exposed to Italian phrases containing NADs and had to monitor the occurrence of a target syllable, which was the second element of the NAD. After exposure, children did a “Stem Completion” task in which they were presented with the first element of the NAD and had to choose the second element of the NAD to complete the stimuli. Our findings show that, despite large variability in the data, children aged 4–8 years are sensitive to NADs; they show the expected differences in r RTs in the SRT task and could transfer the NAD-rule in the Stem Completion task. We discuss these results with respect to the development of NAD dependency learning in childhood and the practical impact and limitations of collecting these data in a web-based setting.
The Covid-19 pandemic and resulting damage is often portrayed in staggering numbers and statistics. This article offers, by contrast, a personal and qualitative account of employees, volunteers, and young residents at a refugee home in Berlin, Germany. Through the story of a boy who has spent the past 4 years in several of Berlin’s 84 remaining refugee accommodations, we examine the inequalities that already existed in Germany and how the pandemic has exacerbated them. To provide ample context, we critically assess the so-called Welcome Classes that children and teens have been attending since their arrival to the country in or around 2015 and argue that the segregation experienced at school mirrors the isolation from the host society that refugees and people seeking asylum are subjected to residentially. We then present an emergency response to school closures: A digital homework mentorship program designed to mitigate the heightened barriers to social interaction and access to education brought about by the pandemic. We explore the sociocultural theory underpinning the program, describe its methods, and offer a qualitative evaluation of the results. Finally, we discuss how the informal education intervention helps fill gaps in the system, offering an approach that can be used going forward to promote learning, social-emotional development, and inclusion of young people with migration and refugee backgrounds.
This paper addresses the emerging methodological debate about citizen social science from the perspective of participatory research methods. The paper introduces the research forum as a horizontal and safe communicative space moderated by academic researchers that enables co-researcher participation across all phases of co-creational research projects. It is argued that in co-creational citizen social science, such a communicative space requires conceptualisation in order for it to foster citizens’ engagement in the knowledge production that deals with their specific social lifeworlds. In the research forum, the potential that the social sciences bring to citizen science—methodological reflection and the theoretical interpretation and contextualisation of data—can flourish in a collaborative process. Based on the expertise in co-created research in multigenerational co-housing projects, the paper reflects on practical experiences with the research forum in terms of four central dimensions: (1) opening up spaces for social encounters; (2) establishing communicative practice; (3) initiating a process of social self-understanding; (4) engaging in (counter-)public discourses. Finally, the paper closes with a summary of potential and challenges that the research forum provides as a methodological foundation for co-creation in citizen social science projects.
We present an agent-based model for studying the societal implications of attitude change theories. Various psychological theories of persuasive communication at the individual level are implemented as simulation experiments. The model allows us to investigate the effects of contagion and assimilation, motivated cognition, polarity, source credibility, and idiosyncratic attitude formation. Simulations show that different theories produce different characteristic macrolevel patterns. Contagion and assimilation are central mechanisms for generating consensus, however, contagion generates a radicalized consensus. Motivated cognition causes societal polarization or the fragmentation of attitudes. Polarity and source credibility have comparatively little effect on the societal distribution of attitudes. We discuss how the simulations provide a bridge between microlevel psychological theories and the aggregated macrolevel studied by sociology. This approach enables new types of evidence for evaluating psychological theory to complement experimental approaches, thus answering calls to enhance the role of coherent and formalized theory in psychological science.
We review Affect Control Theory (ACT) as a promising basis for equipping computational agents in social simulations with a sense of sociality. ACT is a computational theory that integrates sociological insights about the symbolic construction of the social order with psychological knowledge about cognitive-affective mechanisms. After explaining the theoretical foundations of ACT and applications of the theory at the dyadic and group level, we describe a case study applying the theory from an ongoing research project examining self-organized online collaboration in software development.
Post-digital fairy tales
(2021)
How can Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) be employed to reflect on and understand post-digital society and its challenges? To discuss such a complex matter, object of our investigation through the years, we rely on the results of an experimentation that used fairy tales as a starting point for opening up imagination and increasing the distance to everyday life and typical media usage behavior. The activity “Postdigital Fairy Tales” was conducted at Politecnico di Milano, bringing together 45 students in Communication Design for five full days of intensive experimentation. We explored the practice of crafting and developing interactive narratives that analyze societal twists and shifts due to digitalization by remixing traditional fairy tale narratives with aspects of our post-digital era. For this reason we chose to focus on Instagram and to exploit its affordances. The results show how IDNs can be used to question digital media usage with regard to patterns of aesthetics and interaction modes, and to analyse the wicked problems associated with digitalization.
un/natural surrogates
(2021)
The visual essay is an extension of the 2019 online exhibition un/natural surrogates which was created as part of the research project "Postdigital Art Practices in Cultural Education". The essay contrasts thirteen artworks from that show with thirteen newly selected artworks from the last seventy years, based on aesthetic similarities, parallels in the subject matter, and other related characteristics of the works. In doing so, an ahistorical story without -isms is offered.
Economic and Labour Rights
(2021)
This author discusses the question whether children have economic and labour rights, and if so, what that means in practice. With regard to international law, he clarifies the relationship between different areas of law and the relationship between various legal concepts that are relevant to the protection of children’s economic and labour rights. More specifically, he explores the relationship between human rights in general and children’s rights in particular, as well as the relationship between economic and social rights, human and labour rights, and legal and moral rights. Next, he focuses on working children and their associations and which economic and labour rights they consider necessary. Furthermore, he discusses how these rights are, or should be, reflected in international law and in national legislation. Finally, the key obstacles in protecting children’s economic and labour rights in international law are discussed, i.e. what practical difficulties are to be overcome on the ground in order to realise and bring to life the economic and labour rights of children.
The interplay between intuitive and deliberative processing is known to be important for human decision making. As independent modes, intuitive processes can take on many forms from associative to constructive, while deliberative processes often rely on some notion of decision theoretic rationality or pattern matching. Dual process models attempt to unify these two modes based on parallel constraint networks or on socially or emotionally oriented adjustments to utility functions. This paper presents a new kind of dual process model that unifies decision theoretic deliberative reasoning with intuitive reasoning based on shared cultural affective meanings in a single Bayesian sequential model. Agents constructed according to this unified model are motivated by a combination of affective alignment (intuitive) and decision theoretic reasoning (deliberative), trading the two off as a function of the uncertainty or unpredictability of the situation. The model also provides a theoretical bridge between decision-making research and sociological symbolic interactionism. Starting with a high-level view of existing models, we advance Bayesian Affect Control Theory (BayesACT) as a promising new type of dual process model that explicitly and optimally (in the Bayesian sense) trades off motivation, action, beliefs and utility. We demonstrate a key component of the model as being sufficient to account for some aspects of classic cognitive biases about fairness and dissonance, and outline how this new theory relates to parallel constraint satisfaction models.
Theoretical and Empirical Modeling of Identity and Sentiments in Collaborative Groups (THEMIS.COG) was an interdisciplinary research collaboration of computer scientists and social scientists from the University of Waterloo (Canada), Potsdam University of Applied Sciences (Germany), and Dartmouth College (USA). This white paper summarizes the results of our research at the end of the grant term. Funded by the Trans-Atlantic Platform’s Digging Into Data initiative, the project aimed at theoretical and empirical modeling of identity and sentiments in collaborative groups. Understanding the social forces behind self-organized collaboration is important because technological and social innovations are increasingly generated through informal, distributed processes of collaboration, rather than in formal organizational hierarchies or through market forces. Our work used a data-driven approach to explore the social psychological mechanisms that motivate such collaborations and determine their success or failure. We focused on the example of GitHub, the world’s current largest digital platform for open, collaborative software development. In contrast to most, purely inductive contemporary approaches leveraging computational techniques for social science, THEMIS.COG followed a deductive, theory-driven approach. We capitalized on affect control theory, a mathematically formalized theory of symbolic interaction originated by sociologist David R. Heise and further advanced in previous work by some of the THEMIS.COG collaborators, among others. Affect control theory states that people control their social behaviours by intuitively attempting to verify culturally shared feelings about identities, social roles, and behaviour settings. From this principle, implemented in computational simulation models, precise predictions about group dynamics can be derived. It was the goal of THEMIS.COG to adapt and apply this approach to study the GitHub collaboration ecosystem through a symbolic interactionist lens. The project contributed substantially to the novel endeavor of theory development in social science based on large amounts of naturally occurring digital data.
Let’s Talk About Emotions
(2021)
Learning to use language in an adult-like way is a long-lasting process. This may particularly apply to complex conceptual domains such as emotions. The present study examined children’s and adults’ patterns of emotion word usage regarding their convergence and underlying semantic dimensions, and the factors influencing the ease of emotion word learning. We assessed the production of emotion words by 4- to 11-year-old children (N = 123) and 27 adults (M = 37 years) using a vignette test. We found that the older the children, the more emotion words they produced. Moreover, with increasing age, children’s pattern of emotion word usage converged with adult usage. The analysis for semantic dimensions revealed one clear criterion—the differentiation of positive versus negative emotions—for all children and adults. We further found that broad covering emotion words are produced earlier and in a more adult-like way.
Perner and Roessler (in: Aguilar J, Buckareff A (eds) Causing human action: new perspectives on the causal theory of action, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 199–228, 2010) hold that children who do not yet have an understanding of subjective perspectives, i.e., mental states, explain actions by appealing to objective facts. In this paper, we criticize this view. We argue that in order to understand objective facts, subjects need to understand perspectives. By analysing basic fact-expressing assertions, we show that subjects cannot refer to facts if they do not understand two types of perspectivity, namely, spatial and doxastic perspectivity. To avoid conceptual confusion regarding different ways of referring to facts, we distinguish between reference to facts de re and de dicto.
Simulation tools aimed at enhancing cross-sectoral cooperation can support the transition from a traditional transport planning approach based on predictions towards more integrated and participatory urban mobility planning. This shift entails a broader appraisal of urban dynamics and transformations in the policy framework, capitalizing on new developments in urban modelling. In this paper, we argue that participatory social simulation can be used to solve these emerging challenges in mobility planning. We identify the functionalities that such a tool should have when supporting integrated mobility planning. Drawing on a transdisciplinary case study situated in Potsdam, Germany, we address through interviews and workshops stakeholders’ needs and expectations and present the requirements of an actionable tool for practitioners. As a result, we present three main challenges for participatory, simulation-based transport planning, including: (1) enhancement of the visioning process by testing stakeholders’ ideas under different scenarios and conditions to visualise complex urban relationships; (2) promotion of collective exchange as means to support stakeholder communication; and (3) credibility increase by early stakeholder engagement with model development. We discuss how our participatory modelling approach helps us to better understand the gaps in the knowledge of the planning process and present the coming steps of the project.
Among the philosophical accounts of reference, Quine’s (1974) The Roots of Reference stands out in offering an integrated account of the acquisition of linguistic reference and object individuation. Based on a non-referential ability to distinguish bodies, the acquisition of sortals and quantification are crucial steps in learning to refer to objects. In this article, we critically re-assess Quine’s account of reference. Our critique will proceed in three steps with the aim of showing that Quine effectively presupposes what he sets out to explain, namely, reference to objects. We are going to argue (i) that sortals do not individuate, (ii) that bodies are already objects, and (iii) that the acquisition of variables presupposes a notion of identity. The result is diagnostic of a central desideratum for any theory of reference: an explanation of spatiotemporal object individuation.