Andrew J. B. Fugard

How People Interpret Conditionals: Shifts toward the Conditional Event.

We investigated how people interpret conditionals and how stable their interpretation is over a long series of trials. Participants were shown the colored patterns on each side of a 6-sided die and were asked how sure they were that a conditional holds of the side landing upward when the die is randomly thrown. Participants were presented with 71 trials consisting of all combinations of binary dimensions of shape (e.g., circles and squares) and color (e.g., blue and red) painted onto the sides of each die. In 2 experiments (N₁ = 66, N₂ = 65), the conditional event was the dominant interpretation, followed by conjunction, and material conditional responses were negligible. In both experiments, the percentage of participants giving a conditional event response increased from around 40% at the beginning of the task to nearly 80% at the end, with most participants shifting from a conjunction interpretation. The shift was moderated by the order of shape and color in each conditionals antecedent and consequent: Participants were more likely to shift if the antecedent referred to a color. In Experiment 2 we collected response times: Conditional event interpretations took longer to process than conjunction interpretations (mean difference = 500 ms). We discuss implications of our results for mental models theory and probabilistic theories of reasoning.

Supporting thinking on sample sizes for thematic analyses: a quantitative tool

Thematic analysis is frequently used to analyse qualitative data in psychology, healthcare, social research and beyond. An important stage in planning a study is determining how large a sample size may be required, however current guidelines for thematic analysis are varied, ranging from around 2 to over 400 and it is unclear how to choose a value from the space in between. Some guidance can also not be applied prospectively. This paper introduces a tool to help users think about what would be a useful sample size for their particular context when investigating patterns across participants. The calculation depends on (a) the expected population theme prevalence of the least prevalent theme, derived either from prior knowledge or based on the prevalence of the rarest themes considered worth uncovering, e.g. 1 in 10, 1 in 100; (b) the number of desired instances of the theme; and (c) the power of the study. An adequately powered study will have a high likelihood of finding sufficient themes of the desired prevalence. This calculation can then be used alongside other considerations. We illustrate how to use the method to calculate sample size before starting a study and achieved power given a sample size, providing tables of answers and code for use in the free software, R. Sample sizes are comparable to those found in the literature, for example to have 80% power to detect two instances of a theme with 10% prevalence, 29 participants are required. Increasing power, increasing the number of instances or decreasing prevalence increases the sample size needed. We do not propose this as a ritualistic requirement for study design, but rather as a pragmatic supporting tool to help plan studies using thematic analysis.

Scan patterns during the processing of facial expression versus identity: an exploration of task-driven and stimulus-driven effects.

Perceptual studies suggest that processing facial identity emphasizes upper-face information, whereas processing expressions of anger or happiness emphasizes the lower-face. The two goals of the present study were to determine (a) if the distributions of eye fixations reflect these upper/lower-face biases, and (b) whether this bias is task- or stimulus-driven. We presented a target face followed by a probe pair of morphed faces, neither of which was identical to the target. Subjects judged which of the pair was more similar to the target face while eye movements were recorded. In Experiment 1 the probe pair always differed from each other in both identity and expression on each trial. In one block subjects judged which probe face was more similar to the target face in identity, and in a second block subjects judged which probe face was more similar to the target face in expression. In Experiment 2 the two probe faces differed in either expression or identity, but not both. Subjects were not informed which dimension differed, but simply asked to judge which probe face was more similar to the target face. We found that subjects scanned the upper-face more than the lower-face during the identity task but the lower-face more than the upper-face during the expression task in Experiment 1 (task-driven effects), with significantly less variation in bias in Experiment 2 (stimulus-driven effects). We conclude that fixations correlate with regional variations of diagnostic information in different processing tasks, but that these reflect top-down task-driven guidance of information acquisition more than stimulus-driven effects.

Visual/verbal-analytic reasoning bias as a function of self-reported autistic-like traits: A study of typically developing individuals solving Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices

People with autism spectrum condition (ASC) perform well on Raven’s matrices, a test which loads highly on the general factor in intelligence. However, the mechanisms supporting enhanced performance on the test are poorly understood. Evidence is accumulating that milder variants of the ASC phenotype are present in typically developing individuals, and that those who are further along the autistic-like trait spectrum show similar patterns of abilities and impairments as people with clinically diagnosed ASC. We investigated whether self-reported autistic-like traits in a university student sample, assessed using the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ; Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Skinner, et al., 2001), predict performance on Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices. We found that reporting poorer social skills but better attention switching predicted a higher Advanced matrices score overall. DeShon, Chan, and Weissbein (1995) classified Advanced matrices items as requiring a visuospatial, or a verbal-analytic strategy. We hypothesised that higher AQ scores would predict better performance on visuospatial items than on verbal-analytic items. This prediction was confirmed. These results are consistent with the continuum view and can be explained by the enhanced perceptual functioning theory of performance peaks in ASC. The results also confirm a new prediction about Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices performance in people with ASC.

An Evaluation of the Implementation and Impact of England's Mandated School-Based Mental Health Initiative in Elementary Schools

Abstract. We report on a randomized controlled trial of Targeted Mental Health in Schools (TaMHS), which is a nationally mandated school-based mental health program in England. TaMHS aimed to improve mental health for students with, or at risk of, behavioral and emotional difficulties by providing evidence-informed interventions relating to closer working relationships between health and education services. Our study involved 8,480 children (aged 8–9 years) from 266 elementary schools. Students in intervention schools with, or at risk of, behavioral difficulties reported significant reductions in behavioral difficulties compared with control school students, but no such difference was found for students with, or at risk of, emotional difficulties. Implementation of TaMHS was associated with increased school provision of a range of interventions and enhanced collaboration between schools and local specialist mental health providers. The implications of these findings are discussed, in addition to the strengths and limitations of the study.

Syntactic predictions and asyntactic comprehension in aphasia: Evidence from scope relations

People with aphasia (PWA) often fail to understand syntactically complex sentences. This phenomenon has been described as asyntactic comprehension and has been explored in various studies cross-linguistically in the past decades. However, until now there has been no consensus among researchers as to the nature of sentence comprehension failures in aphasia. Impaired representations accounts ascribe comprehension deficits to loss of syntactic knowledge, whereas processing/resource reduction accounts assume that PWA are unable to use syntactic knowledge in comprehension due to resource limitation resulting from the brain damage. The aim of this paper is to use independently motivated psycholinguistic models of sentence processing to test a variant of the processing/resource reduction accounts that we dub the Complexity Threshold Hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, PWA are capable of building well-formed syntactic representations, but, because their resources for language processing are limited, their syntactic parser fails when processing complexity exceeds a certain threshold. The source of complexity investigated in the experiments reported in this paper is syntactic prediction. We conducted two experiments involving comprehension of sentences with different types of syntactic dependencies, namely dependencies that do not require syntactic prediction (i.e. unpredictable dependencies in sentences that require Quantifier Raising) and dependencies whose resolution requires syntactic predictions at an early stage of processing based on syntactic cues (i.e. predictable dependencies in movement-derived sentences). In line with the predictions of the Complexity Threshold Hypothesis, the results show that the agrammatic patients that participated in this study had no difficulties comprehending sentences with the former type of dependencies, whereas their comprehension of sentences with the latter type of dependencies was impaired.

How Will Software Engineers of the Internet of Things Reason about Trust

The Internet of Things (IoT) will consist of everyday physical objects communicating with each other via massively distributed service-oriented architectures (SOAs). One neglected area of research is how engineers developing software underlying the IoT will decide whether the services they use and compose are trustworthy. We sketch how a formal socio-cognitive theory of trust can guide empirical research on the topic, and report preliminary results from 25 engineers who were asked how they currently reason about software component trustworthiness.

A process model of the understanding of uncertain conditionals

ABSTRACT To build a process model of the understanding of conditionals we extract a common core of three semantics of if-then sentences: (a) the conditional event interpretation in the coherencebased probability logic, (b) the discourse processingtheory of Hans Kamp, and (c) the game-theoretical approach of Jaakko Hintikka. The empirical part reports three experiments in which each participant assessed the probability of 52 if-then sentencesin a truth table task. Each experiment included a second task: An n-back task relating the interpretation of conditionals to working memory, a Bayesian bookbag and poker chip task relating the interpretation of conditionals to probability updating, and a probabilistic modus ponens task relating the interpretation of conditionals to a classical inference task. Data analysis shows that the way in which the conditionals are interpreted correlates with each of the supplementary tasks. The results are discussed within the process model proposed in the introduction.

'Shine bright like a diamond'? A reply to Braun and Clarke

We thank the authors for their commentary and humbly accept their chiding about our language on the ontological nature of themes. While noting that many qualitative researchers are content with tal...

Estimating effectiveness of school-based counselling: using data from controlled trials to predict improvement over non-intervention change

Background: There is a growing body of data to show that participation in school-based counselling is associated with significant reductions in psychological distress. However, this cannot be taken as evidence that school-based counselling is effective, as improvements may have happened without the intervention. Aims: The purpose of this study was to develop a method of estimating the amount of ‘natural’ change that might be expected in young people who would attend school-based counselling, such that the effects of the intervention over and above this amount could be identified. Method: Young Persons CORE (YP-CORE) scores from 74 participants allocated to waiting list control conditions in four pilot trials of school-based counselling in the UK were re-analysed using regression models, and a formula was found for estimating the outcomes for young people were they not to receive counselling. This was termed their Estimated Non-intervention Outcome (ENO), and could then be compared against the young persons Actual Outcome (AO), to give an estimated intervention effect (EIE). Results: The formula for the ENO was 4.17 + 0.64 × baseline score. Using this, we calculated a mean EIE for 256 young people in a cohort evaluation study of school-based counselling, which showed that the counselling was associated with large and significantly greater change than would be expected without the intervention (Cohens d = 0.91). Discussion: The method presented in this paper is a simple means for improving the accuracy of estimations of treatment effectiveness, helping to adjust for changes due to spontaneous recovery and other non-treatment effects.