Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Representational development'

Karmiloff-Smith (e.g. 1986, 1992) has suggested that 'cognitive flexibility' is the result of a series of three representational redescriptions. These redescriptions are carried out by endogenous metaprocesses operating directly on the representations. Representational redescription accounts only for development beyond 'behavioural success', the stimulus to the redescription being stability at a previous level. Many features of the Representational Redescription theory are criticised, but the underlying idea that cognitive flexibility is associated with representational level is maintained. This point is supported by a review and study of planning development arguing that representational development, rather than process development explains increasing flexibility. Data from children's drawings and block balancing, along with a theoretical analysis of the model indicate that the details of the Representational Redescription theory are not consistent or plausible. In particular the concepts of initial procedural representation, endogenous metaprocesses, behavioural success, stability as the spur to development, and implicit information within representations, are rejected. Removing the constraints of behavioural success suggests a new recursive model, which is proposed as a general developmental mechanism. 'Recursive Re-Representation' views representational redescription as a creative process, and builds on Boden's (1992) computational approach to creativity. Cognitive flexibility is determined by a limited cognitive capacity, the level of 'chunking' in a domain and the possession of an overview of the relevant conceptual space. Chunking is achieved through a re-representation of behaviour and the environment, rather than a direct operation on representations. The BAIRN system (Wallace, Klahr & Bluff, 1987) is suggested as providing the basis for an implementation of Recursive ReRepresentation. It is argued that the Recursive Re-Representation account which views Representational Redecription as a recursive, creative process provides a more parsimonious approach to representational change throughout development.

It is argued in Chapters 1 to 4 that in cognitive psychology in general, and in the disciplines of language acquisition and cognitive development in particular, there is substantial benefit to be derived from distinguishing between two representational systems, one system being deployed in long-established or highly-practiced functions, and the second deployed in novel tasks, or where difficulties interrupt the first system. It is also argued that the proper subject of cognitive development is the second of these systems. Chapters 5 and 6 are concerned in different ways with the origins of language in the individual, in particular with the question of what innate knowledge of language might be justified. It is concluded that many questions regarding innate knowledge remain open, and that a source in human evolution for knowledge of language is no more likely than sources in individual or social development. In Chapter 7 it is argued that representational drawing emerges late in the 4th year of life, and some new techniques are described for studying early representational drawing. Following these treatments of external systems of representation, Chapter 8 offers a general developmental theory of forms of representation, extending Piaget's insight that mental representation is co-extensive with thought, and that the main axis of cognitive development is the content of thought and representation. Chapters 9 to 12 apply this theory to the representation of belief and desire, and of extrinsic and intrinsic qualities of objects, by 11/2 to 4 year-old children. Chapter 13 introduces a new method for analyzing the free classification task, a task sometimes used to assess children's ability to think about intrinsic qualities, and applies this method to various data sets. Chapter 14 applies these insights and results to the problem of characterizing concepts and concept development and favourably discusses the idea that more precise knowledge of this aspect of development may help to explain certain features of early language acquisition.

This study is based on the integration of the communicative approach to attachment (Bretherton, 1995), the intersubjective perspective of Infant Research (Sander, 1977) and mentalization theories (Fonagy et al., 1996; Meins, 2001). These frameworks hypothesize that children’s relational and representational competences develop in a complex matrix of communication. The aim was to investigate aspects of complex communicative processes (Brown et al. 1997). The study focused on the relationship between the following maternal characteristics: prosody, verbal communication (Carli & Nasuelli, 2003), mentalization as well as on the children’s attachment patterns and their levels of symbolic play, as precursors of mentalization. Method Participants: 96 non-clinical Italian mother-infant dyads, when children were 6, 12 and 18 months of age. Instruments: -the Tas-20 (Bagby et al., 1994) for the evaluation of alexithymia, -a system to code characteristics of maternal verbal communication (Carli & Nasuelli, 2001); -the PRAAT program (Boersma & Weenink, 2005) to investigate characteristics of maternal prosody ); -the Parent Development Interview (Slade et al., 2002), to analyze maternal reflective functioning; -videotaped free play sessions to analyze Mind-mindedness and to evaluate symbolic play development); -the Strange Situation (Ainsworth & Wittig, 1969): to evaluate children's attachment to mothers. Results and discussion As expected, Mother’s reflective functioning, as well as their prosody and verbal communication during the Strange Situation differed according to children’s security of attachment. No relations were found with symbolic play. Furthermore, mentalization measures were not related, prompting further studies on the concept itself and its operationalization

A series of studies were conducted with the aim of showing that the Representational Redescription (RR) model (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992) can be used a general model of cognitive development. In this thesis, 3 aspects of the RR model were explored. The first set of experiments involved analysing the generalisability of RR levels across tasks in a domain. In an initial study, the levels of the RR model were successfully applied to a balance scale task. Then, in a subsequent study, children’s RR levels on the balance scale task were compared with their RR levels on a balance beam task (see Pine et al, 1999). Children were seen to access the same level of verbal knowledge across both tasks. This suggests that it is verbal knowledge which provides the basis for generalisation of knowledge. The second set of experiments involved a consideration of the RR model in relation to the domain of numeracy. The levels of the RR model were applied to children’s developing representations for the one-to-one and cardinality principles. The RR levels were shown to have utility in predicting children’s openness to different types of “procedurally based” and “conceptually based” teaching interventions, with pre-implicit children benefiting from procedural interventions, and children who have implicit and more advanced representational levels benefiting from conceptual interventions. The final study involved a microgenetic analysis of children’s representational levels on the balance beam task. The findings from this study indicated the importance of a period of stability prior to a cognitive advance, and demonstrated that cognitive advances can be driven by changes in the verbal explanations that are offered, rather than changes in successful performance. This provides support for the mechanism of change proposed by Karmiloff-Smith, 1992. Together, the findings indicate that the RR model provides a useful perspective about the cognitive development of children. In particular, the thesis highlights when children can use the same representations for different tasks in a domain and suggests the mechanism that brings about representational change.

This study investigated the development of children's understanding of representational change when presented with natural kind and human artifact stimuli. Fifteen three-year-old, 21 four-year-old and 19 five-year-old children were shown four natural kind and four human artifact picture pairs. The initial drawing of each was constructed to suggest the object of interest. Following a story, each child was then shown the second drawing, which showed the true nature of the object. The picture pairs were then put away and the child asked what she had thought the first picture of the pair to be. Following the collection of the representational change data, children were interviewed to gather data on whether or not they distinguished between two domains: natural kinds and human artifacts. Analysis of the representational change data revealed a significant main effect for age. Post-hoc analysis pointed to a significant difference between the ages of three and four, three and five, but not four and five. No other results were significant. On the domain question significant effects were noted for domain and for age. Post-hoc analysis for domain revealed that children answered the domain question correctly more often for natural kinds than for human artifacts. The post-hoc analysis for age showed significant differences between three and four, three and five, but not between four and five. The results suggest that four and five-year-olds perform significantly better than three-year-olds on representational change tasks, regardless of domain. However, there is evidence that at least four and five-year-olds do have some knowledge of human artifacts and natural kinds, though this knowledge is of little value in the successful completion of the representational change tasks.
Education, Faculty of
Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of
Graduate

The present research informs the social psychological literature on the construction of social identities by supporting and extending the literature that argues for the importance of considering content, processes and context in the development of European identities. It involved conducting three empirical studies. It involved conducting three empirical studies. The first study comprised a media analysis of the Cypriot press. The data for the second and third studies were collected from different cities. Study 1 used content and thematic analyses to analyse three different Cypriot newspaper . The findings showed that the EU/Europe category was portrayed in different dimensions and both across and within each representational dimension there were both positive and negative images projected.

Teaching algebra-based concepts to students with learning disabilities: The effects of preteaching using a gradual instructional sequence by Sarah Jean Watt An Abstract of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Teaching and Learning Special Education) in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa May 2013 Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor William J. Therrien Research to identify validated instructional approaches to teach math to students with LD and those at-risk for failure in both core and supplemental instructional settings is necessary to assist teachers in closing the achievement gaps that exist across the country. The concrete-to-representational-to-abstract instructional sequence (CRA) has been identified through the literature as a promising approach to teaching students with and without math difficulties (Butler, Miller, Crehan, Babbitt, & Pierce, 2003; Cass, Cates, Smith, & Jackson (e.g. CSA), 2003; Flores, 2010). The CRA sequence transitions students from the use of concrete manipulatives to abstract symbols through the use of explicit instruction to increase computational and conceptual understanding. The main purpose of this study was to assess the effects of preteaching essential pre-algebra skills on the overall algebra achievement scores for students with disabilities and those at-risk for failure in math. Specifically the study examined the following research questions: (1) What are the effects of preteaching math units using the CRA instructional sequence on the algebra achievement of students with LD and those at risk for math failure? (2) What are the effects of preteaching math units using the CRA instructional sequence on the transfer of algebra-based skills of students with LD and those at risk for math failure to the general education setting? (3) What are the effects of preteaching math units using the CRA instructional sequence on the maintenance of algebra-based skills for students with LD and those at risk for math failure? Summary of Study Design and Findings Thirty-two students enrolled in one of four 6th grade classrooms across two elementary schools participated in this study. Sixth grade students who currently receive tier 2 or tier 3 supplemental and intensive instruction in math; and those identified as having a math learning disability will be participants. A treatment and control, pre/post experimental design was used to examine the effect of the intervention on students' math achievement. The intervention was replicated across two math units related to teaching algebra-based concepts: Solving Equations and Fractions. The treatment condition consisted of a combination of preteaching and the use of the CRA instructional sequence. Prior to each unit, Solving Equations and Fractions, researchers pretaught students 3 essential prerequisite skills necessary for success in the upcoming unit, at the concrete, representational, and abstract levels of learning. Each preteaching session lasted for ten days, 30 minutes each day. Immediate, delayed, and follow-up measures were used to support the examination of the research questions and hypotheses. Overall findings indicate that the combination of preteaching using the CRA gradual sequence is effective at improving the overall algebra performance for students with disabilities.

A mobile application is typically divided into two sides that communicate with each other: the front-end (i.e. what the user can see and interact with on the phone) and the back-end (the hidden ”server” side, which processes requests from the front-end). Ways to improve their production cycle are constantly investigated by corporations such as Applidium, which is a French startup company specialized in mobile applications. For instance, the firm often has to deal with external back-ends that are not properly documented, which makes the development of products intricate. Furthermore, test and documentation files for certain parts of projects are manually written, which is time consuming, and are all largely based on the same information (back-end descriptions). Hence, this information frequently finds itself scattered in different files, sometimes in different versions. Having identified issues that most regularly disrupt the work of the company’s employees, a certain number of goals to solve these are set, such as, notably, centralizing all back-end-related information into one authoritative source, and automatizing the generation of test and documentation files. A tool (in the form of a web application) allowing users to describe back-ends, called Pericles, is then proposed as the outcome of the master thesis, to deal with the described problems and materialize the defined objectives. Finally, a qualitative evaluation is performed through a questionnaire designed to assess how users feel the tool helps them in their work, which constitutes the metric for this project. The evaluation suggests that the implemented tool is relevant with respect to the fixed goals, and allows to infer its propensity to help Applidium’s developers and project managers by making the development and validation of projects easier.

Interação homem-máquina, também difundida com o nome de Interface com o Usuário (ou simplesmente interface), é uma área de pesquisa relativamente recente e evidentemente multidisciplinar. Um importante critério para projeto de interfaces é a separação de um programa interativo em seu componente computacional (aplicação) e seu componente de diálogo (que implementa a interface) • Esta separação, denominada independência de diálogo, . cr1a o papel do projetista de interfaces separado do programador da aplicação e a necessidade de novas comunicações entre os componentes do programa e o usuário. O componente de diálogo é usualmente construído usando-se alguma Ferramenta para Desenvolvimento de Interfaces com o Usuário (abreviadas FIUs) para definição e manipulação de interfaces. As FIUs comercialmente disponíveis atualmente (na sua maioria "toolboxes" como MicroSoft Windows e Macintosh Toolbox, entre outras), no entanto, não são tão facilmente utilizáveis, contendo literalmente centenas de rotinas e confundindo freqüentemente os papéis do projetista de interfaces e do programador da aplicação. Isto acarreta prejuízos à almejada independência de diálogo .Além disto, devido às idiossincrasias de cada FIU, o p r ograma interativo é desenvolvido direcionado para o uso de uma FIU específica, necessitando de uma série de reformulações em caso de mudanças de FIU. O objetivo da dissertação é a proposta de uma FIU Canônica que permite: a) uma definição de interface de maneira mais adequada aos usuários projetistas, programador da aplicação; e mais notadamente ao b) a portabilidade de programas interativos entre diferentes FIUs. O componente principal da FIU Canônica é o seu modelo representacional orientado a objetos, o Canonicus, que contém as abstrações necessárias para o uso adequado dos usuários projetistas. A portabilidade vem do fato da FIU Canônica ser, na verdade, uma camada intermediária entre a aplicação e uma FIU. Sua implementação consiste na tradução de seus objetos e operações para objetos e operações de alguma FIU subjacente. Nesta dissertação sao apresentados a arquitetura da FIU Canônica e o seu modelo representacional Canonicus assim como a sua implementação sobre duas FIUs tipo "toolbox" comerciais, o MicroSoft Windows e o Macintosh Toolbox.
Human-computer interactionf interface f lS a mul tidisciplinary and research issue. also named use r relatively recent An important criteria to user interface design is the separation of interactive program in two components: computational component (application) and dialogue component (which implements the user interface). This separationf interface named dialogue independencef independent creates the user designer role of application programmer role and new components-user communications. The dialogue component is usually constructed by using some User Interface Development Tool (abreviated FIU) to both user interface definition and manipulation. The comercial FIUs available (most of them are toolboxes like MicroSoft Windows and Macintosh Toolbox) f howeverf are often not so easily usable, since they contain literally hundreds of procedures and they confuse the interface designer and application programmer roles. Thus the desirable dialogue independence is prejudiced. Furthermore, an one interactive program is developed directed to use only one specific FIU, since each FIU has its idiosycrasies. In case o f FIU change, several reformulations are needed. The dissertation goal is the purpose of the Canonical FIU. The Canonical FIU allows: a) an user interface definition in more adequate way to its designer-users, more notably the application programmer; and b) interactive programs portability between diferent FIUs. The Canonical FIU main component is its objectoriented representational model, the Canonicus, which contains the needed abstractions to user interface designers. Portability is obtained slnce the Canonical FIU lS an intermediate level between the application and a FIU. The Canonical FIU lS implemented by a translation mechanism, mapping its objects and operations to some subjacent FIU's objects and operations. In this dissertation, the Canonical FIU architecture, its representational model Canonicus and its implementations over two FIUs (MicroSoft Windows and Macintosh Toolbox) are presented.

Child maltreatment models view risk as a complex constellation of factors that emphasize parents’ trauma experiences and regulation processes. Attachment research has shown that mothers’ representations of childhood attachment and caregiving places their children at developmental risk. Studies to date have evaluated contributing factors separately, but little research considers mothers’ past and current experiences combined with relational trauma and familial regulation patterns. The current research adopted an integrated perspective using known maternal risk factors, and extended existing research in several unique ways by examining association with both adult trauma and childhood trauma; caregiving representations; pathological mourning; and capacity for emotion regulation. Seventy-five mothers with children between 19-74 months (40% boys) from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds completed assessments of maltreatment risk, adult attachment, caregiving, relational trauma, parenting stress, and emotion regulation. Maternal representations of attachment were significantly related to risk, with unresolved mothers demonstrating the highest risk. There were significant positive associations between risk and relational trauma – both frequency and subjective distress with parents and partners. Helpless and heightened caregiving representations, parenting stress, and emotion regulation were also all significantly related to risk. This is the first study to consider maltreatment in the context of relational trauma as defined by Bowlby’s (1980) model of pathological mourning. Risk scores were significantly greater for mothers classified in pathological mourning groups than other mothers. These findings punctuate the effects of problems associated with mourning attachment trauma on maternal regulatory capacities and parenting risk. Implications for infant mental health research and intervention are discussed.

Representational flexibility is usually assessed in the graphic domain by whether children can innovate canonical drawings. According to the Karmiloff-Smith’s RR Model (RRM 1990), flexibility is acquired with a marked discontinuity at 8-9 years, when routine drawings are overcome once and for all. RRM, though, is inherently recursive, implying that innovation entertains a continuous trade-off with graphic conservatism along development. In this regard, a less recent model by van Sommers (1984) suggests that pictorial conservatism coexist with flexibility, even in adulthood, and that continuity models fit better flexibility development. This study aims at comparing the two models and their ability to predict the relationship between conservatism and flexibility during development. 75 children (5, 7, 9, 11 year-olds) and 20 adults were asked to draw two similar and two different houses (administration order balanced across the sample). Drawings were coded with a 5 point scale for 6 aspects (e.g. house’s structure and details). Results show that linear trends fit flexibility development in all aspects. Adults draw canonical houses more than older children, although score highly in the differentiation task. Results suggest that flexibility coexist with some conservatism even in adults, lending support to van Sommers’s model, in these regards.

This thesis concerns the nature of representations, and the development of the associations that come to form between them. The first chapter introduces a number of theoretical approaches that have been postulated to explain associative learning in humans and other animals, and describes some of the evidence to which they have been applied. The picture that emerges highlights the proliferation of such theories, and their inadequacy in explaining disparate classes of phenomena. In Chapter 2, the effects of masked stimulus pre-exposure in humans are examined and it is concluded that, in the light of evidence from other studies, the effects are not comparable with those of non-masked pre-exposure in other animals. The results of masked pre-exposure in humans would seem to lie outside the scope of any associative theory, and may instead reflect the operation of strategic processes of attention, such as those of negative priming. In Chapter 3, the effects of non-masked pre-exposure to alternating compounds of stimuli are examined, and a probable explanation in terms of the inhibitory associations between these stimuli is favoured. This leads the way for Chapter 4, in which this explanation is developed and instantiated within a connectionist framework. This theoretical model is then further examined in relation to a broader range of phenomena that were considered in the Introduction. The thesis concludes with some comments on how the model might be extended to offer a fuller account of associative learning in both humans and other animals.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the relation between women’s representation and gender-sensitive development, or women-friendly issues. This is done through a case study of Rwanda, a country that has faced rapid development and increase in women representatives in parliament which makes the country unique and useful for this study. The thesis focuses on two things, establishing a correlation between female representation and gender-sensitive development, and examining the causality between the two as well as investigating other possible factors that may have contributed to the development in Rwanda. While previous research on Rwanda focus more on the relation between female representation and democracy this thesis will focus on female representation and development. The thesis finds that there is a correlation in time between the increase in women in parliament in Rwanda and gender-sensitive development. It also establishes that the progress in Rwanda is unique in relation to other countries in the region with lower numbers of female representation. Furthermore, the thesis finds that despite arguments of gender equality being used as a disguise for authoritarianism in Rwanda, gender equality may still lead to development even if it does not lead to democracy. The thesis comes to the conclusion that  two factors in particular have contributed to the progress on gender-sensitive development. First, the specific situation in post-genocide Rwanda where the population consisted of 70 percent women   and the fact that women took on traditionally male roles in politics and economics. They also created the Forum of Women Parliamentarians [Forum des Femmes Rwandaises Parlementaires] (FFRP) which focused on mainstreaming gender equality into Rwandan politics and promoting women’s rights. Second, the determination of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and President Paul Kagame to include women and promote women’s rights. These factors both play a part in the great progress Rwanda has faced when it comes to gender-sensitive development. While the thesis suggest that the political process and inclusion of women in the Rwandan parliament is an important part in this progress it does not fully isolate the causality nor ignore that other factors might also have affected the outcomes. Hence, further research would have to be made to identify the mechanisms which has had the most effect for the development in Rwanda.

Previous research has highlighted a different pattern in the use of grammatical forms to successfully maintain coherent discourse by individuals with Down's syndrome. To maintain coherent discourse both linguistic and non-linguistic information must be integrated and maintained in a mental representation of current discourse. The ability of children with Down's syndrome to use such a mental representation has been assessed in this study. The ability of adults with Down's syndrome to comprehend and produce a range of grammatical forms was initially assessed, using a grammaticality judgement task, an imitation task, and a spontaneous speech sample. Results indicated that the production and comprehension of pronouns was found moderately difficult. The successful use of a pronoun depends on the ability to use a mental representation to retain information about its antecedent in order to assist correct interpretation and avoid ambiguity. A narrative task was used to investigate the use of referential forms by children with Down's syndrome and typically developing children. The effects of certain contextual features on the use of referential forms were investigated: the status of each character and the number of characters in the story; the method of presenting the story; and the position of a listener while the story was narrated. When narrating a story typically developing children distinguished the status of characters in the stories by consistently using different referential forms for each. As age increased this strategy was used more successfully and flexibly. Children with Down's syndrome did not use referential forms in the same way as typically developing children. It is likely that this is a consequence of a difficulty in maintaining information about the whole story-where many sources of information must be accessed, integrated and maintained in a mental representation. At a local level within the story, children with Down's syndrome used referential strategies successfully, demonstrating an ability to integrate limited amounts of information about characters in a story. The inability to maintain information in a mental representation across longer periods of discourse indicates the importance of short term memory in language production.

The development of phonological representations remains a hot topic within both the developmental and neural network literature. Historically, theoretical accounts have fallen within one of two camps: the accessibility account which proposes that phonological representations are adult-like from infancy (Rozin & Gleitman, 1977; Liberman, Shankweiler & Liberman, 1989) and the emergent account which proposes that phonological representations become gradually restructured over development (Metsala & Walley, 1998; Ventura, Kolinsky, Fernandes, Querido & Morais, 2007; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). Within this thesis we tested predictions made by the accessibility account and key variants of the emergent account using data from both behavioural (Chapters 2, 3 and 4) and neural network studies (Chapter 5). The novel measures used within Chapters 2 to 4 were devised to allow us to contrast implicit measures of phonological representation (PR) which probe the segmentedness of the representations themselves, with explicit PR measures which tap into children’s conscious awareness of phonological segments. Within Chapter 2 we present evidence that while explicit awareness of phonological structure is dependent on letter-sound knowledge, implicit sensitivity to the segments within words emerges independent of literacy. Within Chapter 3 a longitudinal study investigated the segmentedness of children’s phonological representations at the rime and phoneme level. These results demonstrate that implicit sensitivity to both rime and phoneme segments is driven by vocabulary growth and is not dependent on letter-sound knowledge. The results within Chapter 3 also suggest that, while awareness of rime segments emerges naturally through oral language experience, explicit awareness of individual phonemes is related to letter-sound knowledge. In Chapter 4 we explored the idea of global versus phonemic representation using a mispronunciation reconstruction task. We found that sensitivity to both global and phonemic similarity increased over time, but with global sensitivity reaching adult levels early on in development. In Chapter 5 a neural network was trained on the mappings between real acoustic input and articulatory output data allowing us to simulate the development of phonological representations computationally. The simulation data provide further evidence of a developmental increase in sensitivity to both global and phonemic similarity within a preliterate model. Taken together, the results provide strong evidence that as children’s vocabularies grow they become increasingly sensitive to both the global properties and segmental structure of words, independent of literacy experience. Children’s explicit awareness of phonemes, on the other hand, seems to emerge as a consequence of learning the correspondence between letters and sounds. Within the context of the wider literature, the current results are most consistent with the PRIMIR framework which predicts early detailed phonetic representations alongside gradually emerging phonemic categories (Werker & Curtin, 2005). This thesis underlines the importance of using implicit measures when trying to probe the representations themselves rather than children’s conscious awareness of them. The thesis also represents an important step towards modelling the emergence of segmental representation computationally using real speech data.

How numerical information is represented? Recent studies have highlighted the prominent role of preverbal core knowledge systems for representing numerical quantities: the Object Tracking System (OTS) and the Approximate Number System (ANS; or analogue magnitude system). The former is general mechanism which allows individuals to track the spatio-temporal characteristics of the objects and its capacity is limited (3-4 items). The latter is a quantitative mechanism which entails the representation of each numerosity as a distribution of activation on the mental number line. In the present work we investigated several aspects of these two systems along with numerical and non-numerical estimation ability in typical and atypical development. In Study 1.1, we implemented an imitation task to investigate the spontaneous focusing on numerosity in 2 ½ year-old children. The results suggest that most of the children employed the analogue magnitude system when spontaneously encoding numerosity. The use of the analogue magnitude system may be related to both its low demanding of attentional resources and to the availability of other (non-numerical) quantitative cues which covariate with numerosity. In Study 1.2, 2 ½ year-old children completed a categorization task in order to investigate their ability in estimating numerical sets. Children’s estimations were independent from the visual characteristics of the stimuli (i.e. perimeter or density) within the OTS capacity. Conversely, the estimation of larger quantities (5-9 dots) was significantly affected by stimuli characteristics: in particular, the increase of perimeter with a constant density appears as the combination of visual characteristics which strongly increases the perceived numerosity. In Study 2, Preschoolers, Grade 1 and Grade 3 pupils had to map continuous, discrete and symbolic quantities. The results indicated that different mechanisms are involved in the estimation of continuous quantities with respect to numerical (discrete and symbolic) quantities. In Study 3, we devised a dual-task paradigm to investigate the relation between visual short term memory (VSTM) and subitizing. We found a striking correspondence between the number of elements retained in VSTM and the number of elements that can be subitized. In Study 4.1, children with developmental dyscalculia (DD) in comorbidity with a profile of Non-Verbal syndrome (NVS) and typically developing (TD) children completed a numerical comparison task. We found a specific deficit in the comparison of numerical quantities in DD-NVS children with respect to TD. In particular, the OTS capacity seems to be reduced in the DD-NVS group as compared to TD. In Study 4.2, children with developmental dyscalculia (DD) and typically developing (TD) children completed two number-line tasks. Children with DD displayed a less precise estimation of symbolic quantities, thereby suggesting a specific deficit in the number representation with respect to TD children. In Study 5, individuals with Down Syndrome (DS) and typically developing children matched for both mental (MA) and chronological age (CA) completed two numerical tasks in order to evaluate their ability to compare non-symbolic quantities (i.e. dots) and counting process. Kids with DS showed a specific deficit in comparing small quantities, within OTS capacity, with respect to both MA and CA matched kids. For the comparison of larger quantities, kids with DS displayed a performance similar to MA matched controls but lower as compared to CA matched controls. Finally, the counting ability appears similar between kids with DS and MA matched children.
Come viene rappresentata l’informazione numerica? Recenti ricerche hanno evidenziato il ruolo fondamentale dei sistemi cognitive preverbali nella rappresentazione numerica: l’Object Tracking System (OTS) e l’Approximate Number System (ANS; o Analogue Magnitude System). Il primo è un meccanismo generale che permette di conservare in memoria le caratteristiche spazio-temporali degli stimoli e la sua capacità è limitata (3-4 elementi). Il secondo è un meccanismo quantitativo che rappresenta ogni numerosità come una distribuzione d’attivazione su teorica linea numerica mentale. Nella presente lavoro di tesi, presenteremo diversi studi volti ad indagare il funzionamento di questi meccanismi in interazione con processi di stima numerica e non-numerica in contesto di sviluppo tipico ed atipico. Nello Studio 1.1, abbiamo utilizzato un compito di imitazione per indagare la capacità di concentrarsi spontaneamente sulla numerosità in bambini di 2 ½ anni. I risultati hanno evidenziato come la maggior parte dei bambini adotti un sistema analogico di quantità quando analizzano spontaneamente delle quantità numeriche. La selezione di questo meccanismo è probabilmente legata sia alla minor richiesta di risorse attentive, sia alla disponibilità di altri indizi quantitativi (non numerici) che covariano con la numerosità. Nello Studio 1.2, bambini di 2 ½ anni hanno svolto un compito di categorizzazione per investigare la loro capacità di stimare la grandezza numerica di insiemi. Le stime dei bambini erano indipendenti dalle caratteristiche visive degli elementi dell’insieme (i.e. perimetro o densità) per le quantità dentro il range di OTS (1-4 elementi). Le stime di quantità più grandi (5-9 elementi) erano invece influenzate dalle caratteristiche visive degli stimoli: in particolare, l’aumento del perimetro con densità costante sembra essere la combinazione di caratteristiche visive degli stimoli che fa aumentare maggiormente la percezione di numerosità. Nello Studio 2, bambini prescolari, di prima primaria e di terza primaria dovevano stimare quantità continue, discrete e simboliche. I risultati suggeriscono la presenza di differenti meccanismi coinvolti nella stima di quantità continue rispetto a quelle numeriche (discrete e simboliche). Nello Studio 3, abbiamo utilizzato il paradigma del doppio compito per studiare la relazione tra memoria visiva a breve termine e subitizing. Dai risultati emerge una marcata corrispondenza tra il numero di elementi memorizzati ed il numero di elementi che possono essere velocemente enumerati attraverso il subitizing. Nello Studio 4.1, bambini con diagnosi di Discalculia Evolutiva (DE) in comorbidità con sindrome non verbale (SNV) e bambini con sviluppo tipico hanno svolto un compito di confronto di quantità numeriche. Abbiamo riscontrato un deficit nella discriminazione di numerosità nel gruppo DE-SNV rispetto ai bambini a sviluppo tipico. In particolare, la capacità di OTS sembra essere ridotta nei bambini con DE-SNV rispetto ai bambini a sviluppo tipico. Nello Studio 4.2, bambini con diagnosi di Discalculia Evolutiva (DE) e bambini con sviluppo tipico hanno completato due compiti di stima sulla linea numerica. I bambini con DE hanno mostrato minor precisione nella stima di quantità simboliche suggerendo una rappresentazione numerica deficitaria rispetto al gruppo con sviluppo tipico. Nello Studio 5, ragazzi con sindrome di Down (SD) e bambini con sviluppo tipico pareggiati per età mentale (EM) ed età cronologica (EC) hanno svolto due compiti numerici per valutare le loro abilità di discriminazione numerica e di conteggio. I ragazzi con SD hanno mostrato un deficit nel discriminare piccole quantità, all’interno del range di OTS, rispetto ai bambini a sviluppo tipico pareggiati sia per EM che per EC. Nella comparazione di numerosità più grandi, i ragazzi con SD hanno ottenuto una performance simile ai bambini pareggiati per EM e minore rispetto ai ragazzi pareggiati per EC. Infine, l’abilità di conteggio appare simile tra i partecipanti con SD e i bambini pareggiati per EM.

This thesis proposes a theory for fundamental aspects of the evolution and development of the representational mind. Building on Perner's (1991) theory of representational development, it is suggested that mind evolved from the ability to represent current reality (primary mind) to further entertain secondary representations of hypothetical content (collating mind) to finally represent representational relations themselves (metamind). In child development these transitions can be observed by about 18 months and by about 42 to 48 months. In comparative analysis only the great apes show signs of a collating mind. Young children and great apes can, for example, pretend, consider a limited future and past, solve problems by insight, and consider others' basic mental states. By about age four children begin to show evidence for metarepresentation in their ability to pass theory-of-mind tasks. At about the same age they also gain considerable executive control which, together with metarepresentation, is the key cognitive advance of metamind. Empirical evidence suggests that various skills co-develop with metamind and the thesis includes four studies that investigate such associations. It was found that gestural representation with imaginary objects and the generation of creative problem solutions were robustly correlated with theory-of-mind measures. These results substantiate the claim for a domain-general change in cognitive ability by about age four. Understanding delayed video feedback, however, was not found to correlate with such measures and it is questioned whether delayed feedback tasks measure an extended sense of self as has been proposed (Povinelli, 1995; Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997). Great apes, while showing evidence for a collating mind, have not yet provided any convincing evidence for metamind. It is thus suggested that metamind developed after the split from the line that led to modern chimpanzees about five million years ago. Metamind, it is argued, was a prime mover in human phylogeny and is a crucial step in human ontogeny.
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Developmental dyslexia is a specific difficulty in acquiring literacy skills that manifests despite normal IQ, adequate educational opportunity and in the absence of any obvious sensory or neurological damage. According to the Phonological Representations Hypothesis a core deficit for individuals with dyslexia across languages is a brain-based difficulty in accurately storing the sound sequences that make up words, or 'phonological' representations. In this thesis the Phonological Representation Hypothesis (PRH) of dyslexia was tested and elaborated. Twenty-four dyslexic children alongside chronological age and reading age matched groups were assessed over a three-year period. Consistent with the PRH, associations were found between the quality of the dyslexic children's phonological representations, as indexed by picture naming, and their performance on related input and output phonological processing tasks based on the same lexical items. Possible reasons for the underspecificity of dyslexic phonological representations were also investigated at cognitive and perceptual levels. The sensitivity of dyslexic individuals to the presence of similar-sounding words within their mental lexicon, 'phonological neighbourhood density', was assessed. Across a range of phonological awareness tasks the dyslexic group were found to be as sensitive to this lexical factor as their age peers. Perception of amplitude envelope onsets (AEOs) was also investigated. AEOs are an auditory parameter associated with speech rhythm and were hypothesised here to be important for the establishment of well-specified phonological representations. Dyslexic insensitivity to AEO variation was seen longitudinally through both behavioural and neurophysiological assessment. These findings suggest that for some dyslexic children perception of basic rhythmic speech cues may play a role in their phonological representation deficit.

The first substantive chapter of this thesis studies the impact of a politician's gender on the educational achievements of a representative sample of Indian citizens aged 13-39 in 1999/2000. For this purpose I collected a unique and detailed dataset on politicians in India who contested in elections during 1967-2001 and I matched them to individuals by district of residence. These data allows me to identify close elections between women and men, which yield quasi-experimental election outcomes used to estimate the causal effect of a politician's gender. I find that increasing female political representation by 10 percentage points increases the probability that an individual attains primary education in urban areas by 6 percentage points, which is 21% of the difference in primary education attainment between the richest and the poorest Indian states. This framework is then applied in the second substantive chapter to analyze whether politicians in India favour individuals who share their same identity more than the rest in policy making. I do this by matching the politician's identity to the identity of the beneficiaries of educational policies. I focus on the two groups that have lower educational achievements in India: women and the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. I use reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST) and variation on female political representation in order to determine the politicians' identity. Results show that caste reservations only have a positive effect on the education received by SC/ST individuals when the proportion of SC/ST population in the district is high. Female politicians increase girls' education in urban areas. In addition when defining identity as gender and caste, results show that SC/ST female politicians increase women's and SC/ST's education while general female politicians increase women's and general individuals' education. Given that development policies are taken by the state governments, in the third substantive chapter I use panel data from the 16 main states in India during the period 1967-1999 to study the effects of having higher female representation in the State Legislatures on public goods provided, laws enacted and expenditure. I find that both the politicians' gender and caste matter for policy. Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe female legislators favour investments in primary education, and in beds in hospitals and dispensaries. They favour "women-friendly" laws, such as amendments to the Hindu Succession Act, proposed to give women the same inheritance rights as men and propoor redistributive policies such as land reforms. In contrast, general female legislators do not have any impact on "women-friendly" laws, oppose land reforms, invest in higher tiers of education and reduce social expenditure.

This thesis sought to conceptualise children’s spelling and reading representations in a novel way based upon the implicit-explicit framework proposed by the Representational-Redescription (RR) model (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). The children studied were aged 4-7 years. Existing models of spelling and reading (e.g. Frith, 1985, Ehri, 1998, 1999, 2002) describe the developmental process as a series of stages/phases. An alternative approach adopted here is derived from the author’s previous research (Critten et al. 2007). It employs a coding scheme that analyses children’s explanations of and performance on, recognition tasks that reveal varying levels of explicitness in understanding of spelling. In this thesis the levels are empirically validated for both spelling and reading. It begins with an attempt to show that young children represent spelling knowledge implicitly. A longitudinal study then elucidates the developmental trajectory of both spelling and reading over the course of a year demonstrating that changes occur in the explicitness of children’s underlying representations. By comparing the co-development of spelling and reading it was possible to demonstrate that phonological information is often explicitly used first in spelling before reading, lending support to Frith’s (1985) “pace maker” notions. The final study examined how context, previously known to facilitate children’s reading ability can also facilitate their spelling development. This effect occurs not just for reading and spelling performance but for explicit understanding, building on the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002) that proposes a role for semantic information in successful spelling and reading. These findings are integrated into a proposal for a new model of development: the Spelling and Reading Explicitation Model (SREM). This model postulates that children develop beyond implicit recognition to form “active” explicit representations, accounting for generalisation errors and characterised as being consciously accessible and verbalisable. It proposes that the development of reading and spelling skill is based upon processes of abstraction, interpretation and application of phonological and morphological knowledge.

Abstract The importance of product development in companies has increased, as competition in many industries has turned global and product life cycles have become shorter. Despite the rich literature and the significance of product development in businesses, many organisations still struggle to develop products that meet market and customer needs. Furthermore, product development for a large number of international customers involves various stakeholders with conflicting needs. Thus, product development is increasingly complex to manage. This doctoral dissertation aims to improve the outcome of product development by clarifying the factors that initiate product development in companies, the relations of different external and internal stakeholders to these drivers, and how the needs of key stakeholders are obtained. The study focuses on the early product development phases of new product development (NPD) intensive companies that are based in Finland, but have major international operations and large customer bases. The research was carried out by collecting and analysing data from companies representing product development practices in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) markets. The experiences of managers across different industries are utilised. This dissertation adopts a qualitative research approach, and surveys and interviews are utilised as the main data collection methods. This dissertation shows that many significant drivers for product development exist in companies. In addition, these drivers differ significantly between projects, companies, and even individuals. Based on the results, companies should clarify their product development drivers and align them among the relevant stakeholders to enhance the decision-making and focus of product development efforts. The study also reveals the relations between different external and internal stakeholders and the product development drivers, and the key stakeholders for the individual drivers. The results indicate that companies should identify the most important stakeholders based on the project drivers and allocate managerial attention appropriately. As expected, the research findings support previous studies by identifying customers as the most important external stakeholders in product development. On the other hand, the significance of product management among internal stakeholders is highlighted in the results. This dissertation indicates that companies should enable product management to lead collaboration with stakeholders close to customers in product development projects. The role of product management involves leading customer definition, representation, and customer needs identification for R&D. However, product management must also collaborate with many customer-related stakeholders in product development efforts. The main implication of this dissertation is a new managerial framework that, if successfully implemented, can significantly enhance product development outcomes by providing appropriate focus on customers and reducing unnecessary complexities through the clarification of the project drivers, the key stakeholders, and customer needs
Tiivistelmä Tuotekehityksen merkitys yrityksille on kasvanut globaalin kilpailun ja tuote-elinkaarien lyhentymisten myötä. Lukuisista tutkimuksista ja tuotekehitystoiminnan tärkeydestä liiketoiminnalle huolimatta useilla organisaatioilla on edelleen haasteita kehittää markkinoiden ja asiakkaiden tarpeita vastaavia tuotteita. Lisäksi tuotekehityksessä isolle, kansainväliselle, asiakaskunnalle on mukana useita erilaisia sidosryhmiä, joiden tarpeet ovat ristiriidassa keskenään. Tämän takia tuotekehityksen johtamisesta on tullut entistä monimutkaisempaa. Tämä väitöskirja pyrkii parantamaan tuotekehityksen tulosta selventämällä tekijät, jotka ovat syynä tuotekehityksen aloittamiseen yrityksissä, erilaisten ulkoisten ja sisäisten sidosryhmien suhteet näihin tuotekehitysajureihin sekä miten tärkeimpien sidosryhmien tarpeet selvitetään. Tutkimus keskittyy tuotekehityksen alkuvaiheisiin Suomessa toimivissa yrityksissä, joilla on voimakas panostus tuotekehitykseen ja lisäksi merkittävää kansainvälistä toimintaa sekä suuri määrä asiakkaita. Tutkimus tehtiin keräämällä ja analysoimalla tietoa yritysten tuotekehityskäytännöistä sekä tuotantohyödykemarkkinoilla että kuluttajamarkkinoilla. Tietoa kerättiin myös eri teollisuudenaloilta. Tämä väitöskirja perustuu laadulliseen tutkimukseen ja tutkimusaineiston keräämisessä on hyödynnetty kyselytutkimuksia sekä haastatteluita. Tämä väitöskirja osoittaa, että yritysten tuotekehitykseen löytyy useita merkittäviä ajureita. Tämän lisäksi nämä ajurit eroavat merkittävästi projektien, yritysten ja jopa yksittäisten henkilöiden välillä. Tulosten perusteella yritysten pitäisi selvittää, mitkä ajurit ovat niiden liiketoiminnan kannalta olennaisimpia ja tarkentaa niitä tuotekehityksen päätöksenteon ja painopisteen parantamiseksi. Tutkimus paljastaa myös ulkoisten ja sisäisten sidosryhmien suhteet tuotekehitysajureihin sekä tärkeimmät sidosryhmät yksittäisille ajureille. Tulokset osoittavat, että yritysten pitäisi tunnistaa tärkeimmät sidosryhmät projektien ajureiden perusteella ja ottaa ajurit huomioon sidosryhmäjohtamisessa. Tutkimuksen löydökset tukevat aikaisempia tutkimuksia osoittaen asiakkaiden olevan tärkein ulkoinen sidosryhmä tuotekehityksessä, kun taas sisäisistä sidosryhmistä nousee esille tuotehallinta. Tämä väitöskirja osoittaa, että yritysten tuotekehitysprojekteissa tuotehallinnan tulisi johtaa asiakkaita lähellä oleviin sidosryhmiin liittyvää sidosryhmäyhteistyötä. Tuotehallinnan tehtäviin kuuluu asiakkaan määrittely, edustus ja asiakastarpeiden tunnistaminen. Tuotehallinnan pitää myös tehdä yhteistyötä useiden asiakkaisiin liittyvien sidosryhmien kanssa tuotekehityksen aikana. Tämä väitöskirja tarjoaa uuden johtamisen viitekehityksen, joka oikein toteutettuna voi parantaa merkittävästi tuotekehityksen lopputulosta. Projektin ajurien, tärkeimpien sidosryhmien ja asiakastarpeiden selventäminen varmistaa oikeanlaisen keskittymisen asiakkaisiin ja vähentää tarpeettomia monimutkaisuuksia tuotekehityksessä

This thesis explores the relationship between development representations and diaspora audiences. It brings together literature on representations, with concepts of audience, diaspora and identity to provide an in-depth study of how and with what effects, visual representations of development in NGO fundraising campaigning that depict Africa, impact on Nigerian diaspora audiences. This study challenges the tendency in much of development literature in this field to homogenise British audiences of NGO communication. This has imagined audiences as some form of monocultural Western-situated community, coextensive with the 'general' British public. It further assumes audiences read, interpret and are impacted by NGO representations in very similar ways. This assumption precludes critical engagement with the complexities and particularities of audiences and is unable to reflect the multiple and differentiated ways in which audiences think, feel and behave in response to development representations. By using focus group discussions with UK Nigerian diaspora audiences, one-to-one interviews and online-ethnography as the methodological tool, and postcolonialism as an analytical framing, this thesis reveals the complex and contested ways that individual diaspora subjectivities, positionalities and life experiences are implicated in their construal of development representations and the perspicuity of their impact. One of the key findings of this study is that development representations impact African diaspora audiences in diverse and complicated ways, that both reproduce and contradict negative and, stereotypical 'ways of seeing' and knowing Africa. Furthermore, it highlights how diaspora ethno-racial/cultural identities affect, and are implicated in, the reading and interpretation of development representations of Africa. Indeed, diaspora audiences affirm and challenge their connections or, lack thereof, with their country of origin through these representations. Moreover, the study shows how NGO development representations provide symbolic spaces from which diaspora audiences can articulate their identities as well as, forge relationships among themselves and with their wider communities. This study builds on Stuart Hall's ([1973]1980) Encoding/Decoding theorisation on audiences, by demonstrating that Nigerian diaspora audiences of development representations are sophisticated, varied and paradoxical in how they interpret and decipher media representations. Indeed, their socio-cultural positioning, personal histories and lived-experiences inform and shape how they discursively construct perceptions and knowledge of their place of origin through representations. Furthermore, it contributes to postcolonial theorisations of hybridity in diaspora identities, by showing that Nigerians strategically adopt new and preferential ethnosymbolic identities, in response to representations. These re-configurations of the Diaspora 'Self' are neither stable or consistent but are nonetheless utilised by Nigerians to subvert development representations and harmful public perceptions and stereotypes about Africans that they shape.

In this thesis, I explore the ongoing development of symbol use in three domains: pretend play, speech and gestures. In chapter 1, the specific behavioural manifestations of symbol use in these domains are identified and previous literature that has explored the cognitive underpinnings of these abilities is discussed, with a particular focus on children's social cognition. In chapter 2, I review previous research that has sought pairwise relations between these abilities and the theoretical perspectives that have been utilised to explain these relations. In chapter 3, I introduce the four pertinent research questions that emerged from the previous review of the current literature, and provide an overview as to the methods adopted to address these issues. Chapters 4 to 6 constitute three papers designed to explore and evaluate children's symbol production in a sample of preschool children in pretend play speech and gestures. For the first paper, 38-40 month old children were given a battery of standardised measures to assess their symbolic capacities while controlling for non-verbal abilities. These data were analysed for concurrent relations between symbolic capacities. The second paper extends these concurrent relations longitudinally, by giving the children the same battery of measures six and twelve months after initial testing. Correlational and multiple regression analyses were used to assess the potential predictive relations between these measures, and whether there is a changing relation between these symbolic domains over developmental time. The third paper investigates children's iconic gesture production in further detail, by evaluating whether children aged 44-46 months incorporate the iconic gestures they observe an adult perform into their own descriptions of a novel object.Taken together, the results indicate a changing relation between the three symbolic measures of interest during the preschool years. The present findings suggest that both pretend play and gesture production are mediated by speech, but in different ways. It was also found that children appear to incorporate the gestures they observe into their own descriptions of objects but this uptake is dependent on the properties of the gesture itself. In the final chapter, these findings are discussed in relation to previous theoretical notions that place pretend play, speech and gestures as manifestations of an underlying symbolic system. I also discuss the enduring relation between these three abilities and how the pattern of predictive relations found in the present thesis can be explained. Furthermore, I discuss the ontogenesis of symbolic gesture production in children, specifically how children may use the gestures of others as a guide to their own gesture production. Finally I outline some limitations of the present research, and indicate potential avenues for future study.

Humans can recognize others’ emotions based on overt cues such as facial expressions, affective vocalizations, or body posture, or by recruiting an abstract, causal theory of the conditions that tend to elicit different emotions. Whereas previous research has investigated the recognition of emotion in specific perceptual modalities (e.g. facial expressions), this dissertation focuses on the abstract representations that relate observable reactions to their antecedent causes. A combination of neuroimaging, behavioral, and developmental methods are used to shed light on the mechanisms that support various forms of emotion attribution, and to elucidate the core features or dimensions that structure the space of emotions we represent. Chapter 1 identifies brain regions that contain information about emotional valence conveyed either via facial expressions and or via animations depicting abstract situational information. These data reveal regions with modality-specific representations of emotional valence (i.e. patterns of activity that discriminate only positive versus negative facial expressions), as well as modality-independent representations: in medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), the valence representation generalizes across stimuli, indicating a common neural code that abstracts away from specific perceptual features and is invariant to different forms of evidence. Building on evidence that young infants discriminate and respond to the emotional expressions of others, Chapter 2 investigates whether infants also represent these expressions in relation to the situations that elicit them. The results of several experiments demonstrate that infants within their first year of life have expectations about how facial and vocal displays of emotion relate to the valence of events that precede them. Whereas Chapters 1 and 2 focus on a simple binary distinction between positive and negative affect, Chapter 3 investigates a space of more fine-grained discriminations (e.g. someone feeling proud vs. grateful). A combination of multi- voxel pattern analyses and representational similarity analyses reveal brain regions containing abstract and high-dimensional representations of attributed emotion. Moreover, a set of causal features (encoding properties of eliciting events that vary between different emotions) outperforms more primitive dimensions in capturing neural similarities within these regions. Together, these studies provide a newly detailed characterization of the representations that structure emotion attribution, including their development and neural basis.
Psychology

Working memory, or the ability to maintain and manipulate information such that it can be used to guide behavior, is known to be severely capacity limited, in most circumstances, to about 3-4 objects. Both infants and adults have the ability to surpass these limits by encoding to-be-remembered items in groups or collections, exploiting statistical regularities or conceptual information to devise more efficient coding schema. Despite progress made toward understanding continuities in working memory, little is known about how changes over development interact with the ability to employ maximally efficient mnemonic data structures. Paper 1 demonstrates that although adults can encode at most three mutually exclusive collections that accrue sequentially over time, they can circumvent this limit when items overlap in features (e.g. red and blue circles and triangles) and statistical regularities are introduced among collections defined by a single visual feature (e.g. most red items are triangular and not circular). Adults' performance suggests they are able to encode items from intersecting collections hierarchically and exploit statistical regularities among collections to reconstruct the numerosities of up to six collections in parallel, exemplifying how efficient coding can radically enhance working memory. Paper 2 demonstrates that young preschoolers can also represent three mutually exclusive collections that accrue in an intermixed fashion over time. Results show that the ability to surpass this capacity limit by hierarchically reorganizing collections and exploiting statistical regularities among them develops between the ages of three and seven. These results are discussed in the context of executive function development. Paper 3 provides evidence that computations of average size and orientation rely on qualitatively different processes with distinct developmental trajectories. Experiment 1 demonstrates that while the presence of additional identical elements in an array detrimentally impacts 6-month-olds' representations of element size, it improves the precision with which infants represent orientation. Experiment 2 demonstrates that performance is not affected when infants' attention is cued to a single item within arrays. These results are discussed in the context of the development of controlled attention.
Psychology

The ability to develop operating routines through the support of information and communication technology (ICT) is being valued by the business community as a source of competitive advantage in the information economy; and research concerning the facilitating role of such technology in relation to organizational learning and development of routines is therefore required. In this thesis the focus is directed at the relationship between communication technology and the development of routines in an industrial organization leading to enhanced value creation. The impact computer-supported knowledge representation has on an organization’s ability to change through development of operating routines are addressed, and propositions concerning the effects on different aspects of communication technology (e.g. system structure and functionality) and organizational environment (e.g. organizational learning, empowerment, systemic innovation, and absorptive capacity) are developed. The moderating role (i.e. the learning mechanisms) of an organization’s ability to learn from, and share, experience within a multilevel nested organizational structure is also discussed and evaluated.

The main goal of this study has been to reveal and explain how operating routines are developed and learned through ICT-supported knowledge representation, and on this basis build concepts and methods that can be used to improve the development of operating routines in business organizations. In this context we have developed a deliberate organizational learning model (DOLM). The main contributions of this work are the following:

• Development of operating routines may be enhanced through computercommunication given a multilevel nested iterative organization structure applying an ICT-supported deliberate organizational learning model.

• Empowered employees are willing to participate in the development of routines through such communication by sharing experience that may impact on operative and strategic activities, resulting in enhance productivity.

• Employees participating directly, or indirectly, in the design of ICT systems are positive to applying computers for the purpose of organizational learning and development of routines.

• Because of their capacity to absorb new knowledge within a context specific domain, experienced operational personnel understand new routines presented through ICTsupported deliberate organizational learning structure.

Many people take it for granted that computers support organizational learning, yet to the best of our knowledge little empirical proof has been forthcoming through the literature. We will argue that the development of operating routines can be enhanced through the application of a computer-based deliberate organizational learning model. Furthermore, our case identifies a multilevel nested iterative organization structure as a contributing mechanism for such a model to succeed. The current theory on empowerment does not say anything about employees’ willingness to apply ICT, nor does it suggest that employees are willing to share experience through the application of ICT. Our findings clearly indicate that empowered employees are applying ICT in the pursuit of developing routines and are willing to share experience through computers. Furthermore, our findings suggest systemic innovation theory to include employees that are indirectly participating in the design of systems as being positive to using computers. Such indirect participation includes employees knowing of colleagues participating in system design. While some theories argue that employees learn new routines through story-telling within a community-of-practice (COP), our data indicate that new operating routines transferred to experienced operators through ICT can be learned. Experienced operators learn new routines through having an absorptive capacity because knowledge will diffuse more rapidly among employees who have prior experience.

Our case study shows that organizations can develop operating routines supported by knowledge represented in ICT. This research contributes to the understanding that development of routines can take place through an ICT-supported deliberate organizational learning model applied within an employee-empowered multilevel nested iterative organization structure.

A best practice knowledge management (KM) system representing the firm’s operating routines is studied over time as it is being implemented in the business units within a corporation. Our focus is on change processes through development of operating routines by studying how the organization can learn from its experience, share such experience and from accumulated experience develop new routines. This thesis is a longitudinal explorative case study, basing its findings on in-dept interviews at operator, middle and senior management levels. We are basing our observations primarily on the cognitive/behavioural organisational learning theory. Based on our observations we mapped and analyzed if, how and under which circumstances an organization, supported by ICT-represented knowledge, is able to develop operating routines and thus enhance the value creation in the company. On this basis we have developed a set of “within-case” propositions. These propositions predict how and under which circumstances organizations may learn through the support of ICT, leading to development of operating processes and routines for the purpose of enhancing value creation in business organizations.

Some literature argues that knowledge is tacit and organizations learn only through practice. Our findings cannot confirm this. We have through the application of the cognitive/behavioural theory tested out organizational learning. Our research indicates that in context specific situations experienced employees can learn new routines through computer systems support. However, in order for organizations to learn, it is not enough to just implement a computer system. Our findings suggest a need for the implementation of a strategic process where the development of an integrated DOLM is the objective. Furthermore, certain organizational structures need to be in place for such a system to be applied resulting in capturing and sharing accumulated experience. In this sense strategy, change processes, and KM systems are intrinsically linked.

This research is based on a case study of Hydro Aluminium’s BestPracticeSystem (BPS), a successful in-house developed enterprise KM system implemented in the period 2003/4. The case study demonstrates the usefulness of the model to support change processes through development of operating routines, and the improvement in productivity that can be achieved by implementing a deliberate organizational learning model in conjunction with a process oriented manufacturing practice. Knowledge represented through ICT can drive value creation.

Software as a service is an emerging but important aspect of the web. WebServices play a vital role in providing it. Web Services are commonly provided in one of two architectural styles: a "REpresentational State Transfer" (REST), or using the "Simple Object Access Protocol" (SOAP.) Originally most web content was text and small images. But more recent services involve complex data structures including text, images, audio, and video. The task of optimizing data to provide delivery of these structures is a complex one, involving both theoretical and practical aspects. In this thesis work, I have considered two architectures developed in the REST architectural style and tested them on mixes of data types (plain text, image, audio) being retrieved from a file system or database. The payload which carries the actual content of a data transmission process can either be in Extensible Markup Language (XML) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Both of these language notations are widely used. The two architectures used in this thesis work are titled as Scenario 1 and Scenario 2. Scenario 1 proposes two different cases for storing, retrieving and presenting the data via a REST web service. We investigate the question of what is the best way to provide different data types (image, audio) via REST Web Service. Payload size for JSON and XML are compared. Scenario 2 proposes an enhanced and optimized architecture which is derived from the pros of the first two cases in Scenario 1. The proposed architecture is best suited for retrieving and serving non-homogeneous data as a service in a homogenous environment. This thesis is composed of theoretical and practical parts. The theory part contains the design and principles of REST architecture. The practical part has a Web Service provider and consumer model developed in Java. The practical part is developed using the Spring MVC framework and Apache CXF, which provides an implementation using JAX-RS, the Java API for RESTful services. A glossary of acronyms used in this thesis appears in the appendix on page 101.

This work explores the connections between the constructed representations of places based on local histories, the processes of tradition reinvention and the strategies of regional development in two Russian regions. This analysis also outlines the context created by the external to the regions influences and the associated with them local conditions.

Fractions are very hard to learn. As the joke goes, “Three out of two people have trouble with fractions”. Yet the invention of a notation for fractions is very ancient, dating back to Babylonians and Egyptians. Moreover, it is thought that ratio representation is innate. And obviously, fractions are part of our everyday life. We read them in recipes, we need them to estimate distances on maps or rebates in shops. In addition, fractions play a key role in science and mathematics, in probabilities, proportions and algebraic reasoning. Then why is it so hard for pupils to understand and use them? What is so special about fractions? As in other areas of numerical cognition, a fast-developing field in cognitive science, we tackled this paradox through a multi-pronged approach, investigating both adults and children.

Based on some recent research questions and intense debates in the literature, a first behavioural study examined the mental representations of the magnitude of fractions in educated adults. Behavioural observations from adults can indeed provide a first clue to explain the paradox raised by fractions. Contrary perhaps to most educated adults’ intuition, finding the value of a given fraction is not an easy operation. Fractions are complex symbols, and there is an on-going debate in the literature about how their magnitude (i.e. value) is processed. In a first study, we asked adult volunteers to decide as quickly as possible whether two fractions represent the same magnitude or not. Equivalent fractions (e.g. 1/4 and 2/8) were identified as representing the same number only about half of the time. In another experiment, adults were also asked to decide which of two fractions was larger. This paradigm offered different results, suggesting that participants relied on both the global magnitude of the fraction and the magnitude of the components. Our results showed that fraction processing depends on experimental conditions. Adults appear to use the global magnitude only in restricted circumstances, mostly with easy and familiar fractions.

In another study, we investigated the development of the mental representations of the magnitude of fractions. Previous studies in adults showed that fraction processing can be either based on the magnitude of the numerators and denominators or based on the global magnitude of fractions and the magnitude of their components. The type of processing depends on experimental conditions. In this experiment, 5th, 6th, 7th-graders, and adults were tested with two paradigms. First, they performed a same/different task. Second, they carried out a numerical comparison task in which they had to decide which of two fractions was larger. Results showed that 5th-graders do not rely on the representations of the global magnitude of fractions in the Numerical Comparison task, but those representations develop from grade 6 until grade 7. In the Same/Different task, participants only relied on componential strategies. From grade 6 on, pupils apply the same heuristics as adults in fraction magnitude comparison tasks. Moreover, we have shown that correlations between global distance effect and children’s general fraction achievement were significant.

Fractions are well known to represent a stumbling block for primary school children. In a third study, we tried to identify the difficulties encountered by primary school pupils. We observed that most 4th and 5th-graders had only a very limited notion of the meaning of fractions, basically referring to pieces of cakes or pizzas. The fraction as a notation for numbers appeared particularly hard to grasp.

Building upon these results, we designed an intervention programme. The intervention “From Pies to Numbers” aimed at improving children’s understanding of fractions as numbers. The intervention was based on various games in which children had to estimate, compare, and combine fractions represented either symbolically or as figures. 20 game sessions distributed over 3 months led to 15-20% improvement in tests assessing children's capacity to estimate and compare fractions; conversely, children in the control group who received traditional lessons improved more in procedural skills such as simplification of fractions and arithmetic operations with fractions. Thus, a short classroom intervention inducing children to play with fractions improved their conceptual understanding.

The results are discussed in light of recent research on the mental representation of the magnitude of fractions and educational theories. The importance of multidisciplinary approaches in psychology and education was also discussed.

In sum, by combining behavioural experiments in adults and children, and intervention studies, we hoped to have improved the understanding how the brain processes mathematical symbols, while helping teachers get a better grasp of pupils’ difficulties and develop classroom activities that suit the needs of learners.

Doctorat en Sciences Psychologiques et de l'éducation
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished